Deliver Me From Evil (15 page)

Another time, around the same period, a block of cheese went missing from the larder. You’d think someone had stolen the crown jewels from the fuss Eunice made. She was absolutely convinced that I had taken it – and, if not me, it would have been Thomas or Sarah, of course. To this day I think Jet probably took it, as he was always nosing around the kitchen and would gobble up anything in his path, including its cellophane wrapping (he’d simply poo that out again). But because there was no cellophane on the floor or any other obvious evidence, such as crumbs of cheese in his basket, Eunice refused to believe that he was the guilty party. She was always like that – she would survey a crime scene with forensic precision, try to analyse what had happened, then pin it on someone. Of course, she was always convinced from the outset that the main culprits were the three Bad children. So much for innocent until proven guilty.

But with the cheese incident something snapped inside me. I don’t know whether I was outraged about being starved, or whether it was the effects of puberty and its associated rebellion, but I had just had enough of it all. I refused to admit that any of us had stolen the cheese – because we hadn’t – and for some reason I was totally stubborn over it. I could still be fiery sometimes and while I would usually give in, just to make things easier on us all, this time I couldn’t bear to. It seemed so utterly and completely unfair because it wasn’t true. Like so many of her crazy accusations. This may have been the beginning of my wanting to fight back in some way, albeit that I still got hurt as a consequence.

Eunice stood there, her arms by her sides, with Thomas, Sarah and myself lined up in front of her. It was like a scene out of
Oliver Twist.
Charlotte hovered around in the background, sniggering, as she frequently did. Robert was in the next room playing. He was often out of the room, or not around, and didn’t always see what was going on.

Eunice was staring at us, and at me in particular. ‘What have you done with it?’

I hadn’t taken the cheese and this time, I wasn’t going to take the heat for anyone else. It might be Jet, it might be Thomas or any one of us. I felt stubborn.

‘It wasn’t me.’

Eunice’s stare intensified as she came and bent over me. I could smell her horrible stench – her armpits and breath made me sick.

‘Answering back, are we? Well, you can starve.’

I wanted to say, ‘Fine!’ but I didn’t. I knew better than that. I knew when to stop. I just stared back at Eunice, making my eyes dead and blank She stared back and we were locked together like that for a few moments. Still I wouldn’t admit the crime (which I hadn’t committed in the first place) of stealing the cheese (a lump of Cheddar, after all).

Eunice seemed annoyed that I wouldn’t admit it, but I felt a secret satisfaction at holding out against her. If she wanted me to starve, I could starve. I could do that. I wouldn’t buckle.

This was the first moment I had ever really stood up to her and although it was only a small thing, and I knew I was going to be hungry afterwards, I still felt a tiny edge of triumph. After all, what could she do that was even worse? She could kill me. That would be the next step. And sometimes I thought it would be a happy relief to be dead rather than have to keep on enduring life with Eunice and all her bizarre and cruel rules.

So I starved. But I felt I was starving to prove a point. As each day passed, I continued to refuse to admit to the theft, and she responded with, ‘Starve again, then. I’d think,
OK, you old hateful cow, I’ll starve. I’ll show you.
It was a real battle of wills and mine was not going to be broken by hers. I was choosing to starve rather than give in and that felt almost powerful.

However, I wasn’t pinching any food to survive (she had probably locked all the food up, anyway), so I was really, really hungry. I was so weak and sick I was hallucinating, seeing things that were not there. Finally, desperate to eat something, I resorted to the pig bin and ate pig nuts. They had a bitter, gritty texture, like cardboard. I hated the taste, but just hoped they’d give me some energy to survive. The pigs also had mouldy boiled potatoes, rotten vegetable peel, manky chunks of carrot and cabbage (all the bits we didn’t want to eat). I took these and, when Eunice was out or busy elsewhere and I was out of her line of vision and earshot, I quickly boiled them up in a pan in the kitchen and took the unappetizing mess outside, wolfing it down while sitting with the pigs in the sty.

Eventually, maybe after a week, Eunice handed out some food at a mealtime to me, as well as the other children. There was no apology, no explanation, no making up. I was suddenly just included. I guess she felt she had to feed me something or I would die.

So, the rebellion had begun and battle lines had now been drawn. The starvation incident was a major turning point for me as from then on I would try and find other ways of getting round Eunices punishing edicts.

Eunice still watched us vigilantly, and made us watch and, especially, tell on each other. And since she was now quite busy overseeing the renovations on the farm, she would turn the task of spying over to us more often. So she might command Sarah, ‘You watch them and make sure they don’t eat anything’ (meaning Thomas and me). Sarah would nod meekly and feign total obedience to Eunice, but once she was out of sight, we would pretty much slip each other a slice of bread. As long as we didn’t do anything too stupid, we could help each other survive. We had to be careful, though, because Eunice’s beady eye would be on us in a trice and any minor gains we made could be snatched away very easily. And she could always make things worse.

Eunice’s daily mission seemed to be to make us as miserable as she possibly could by devising more and more unpleasant things for us to eat. If we had anything to eat, that is. For instance, she would delight in ruining something nice for me. On one rare occasion when I actually had a Marmite sandwich all to myself in a quiet moment in the chicken shed (I was probably eating over lunchtime while doing my chores), Eunice came in and claimed I had lied to her about something. I cant even remember what it was now, but it meant that yet again, I was in her Bad Books. She looked at me accusingly, then snatched my sandwich and stooped to wipe it in the chicken poo which was scattered on the floor. Handing me back the sandwich, studded with clumps of chicken poo, she commanded, ‘Eat it!’ I looked at the sandwich and thought,
No way am I eating that,
but Eunice stood over me and forced me to eat it, every last morsel. It was absolutely disgusting. The poo had stuck to the Marmite and felt and tasted revolting pushed between my teeth. I retched and wanted to be sick, but knew that if I was, she would make me eat that too. I had seen her do that to both Sarah and Thomas before now, and knew how she relished watching them eat something as utterly vile as their own vomit. I managed to keep it down. Just.

As well as the decorating going on around us, Eunice also decided to spend some of her money on throwing a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ party, a very rare event in our usually isolated household. I don’t remember what the point of the party was – I’m not even sure if she ever told us. Eunice ran a small dance class in the village appropriately called (given her high levels of aggression) ‘Hopping Mad’, and I suppose some of the village people came. I think some Jehovah’s Witnesses were invited too, something John Drake would have hated.

I can’t really remember exactly who was there but I do remember that for once we had lots of nice food in the house as Eunice had obviously shopped for the party. But the temptation was too great for Sarah and Thomas, who were utterly starving at the time. Recklessly, they stole the Beauty and the Beast theme cake, took it upstairs and ate loads of it. I went up and saw crumbs and icing everywhere and thought,
Oh no, they’ll be in for it now.

Then Eunice appeared with a face like thunder and stood in the doorway. ‘Well?’ she said. But their crime was obvious, there was no denying it, as only half the huge cake was left on the tray, and there was debris everywhere on the floor and bed
.
I thought Eunice would tear their heads off with her bare hands, but she went icy cold, which was not a good sign.

Eunice hadn’t been feeding them for ages – they were already in her Bad Books – but I was in her Good Books at the time, for some reason. The thing with her punishing regime was when you were in, you were in (fed and not beaten), but if you were out, then you were really out (and starved and beaten). Thomas and Sarah had been so hungry that seeing the party food was just too much for them. Who could blame them, really? The table in the kitchen had been laden with things we never, ever had in the house and the cake looked so delicious it was just too good to be true. They knew they were being naughty especially after years of living with Eunice and her rules, but their hunger had now placed them beyond reason.

Of course they both got beaten very badly, including the stick-down-the-throat treatment and a foot beating. That went without saying. But then Sarah was made to eat the whole of the rest of the cake. And I was told to watch her and make her do it. It was a massive, rich fruit cake and Sarah had already helped herself to a big portion. She was full but was being forced to eat more and more cake, until she started to throw it back up. Then Eunice made her eat the vomit. Which made her throw up even more, and then she was made to eat that. Then more cake. It was utterly horrendous. Sarah was crying and distressed and I was distraught having to watch her go through this. In the end, while Eunice wasn’t looking (for once), and although I was supposed to watch her finish it all, I managed to take the rest of the cursed cake and Sarahs vomit in a bowl and chuck it all over the back of the field, where nobody could see the evidence.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Eunice was convinced that Thomas had taken some chicken nuggets as well. Again, nobody would admit to the crime, even though both Sarah and Thomas were supposed to have been watching each other at the time. This stolen food saga was now reaching epic proportions and I imagined Eunice constructing a gallows on the back lawn. She knew she had to act swiftly and ‘teach them a lesson they would never forget’. What followed was so horrific it was, indeed, a lesson none of us would forget. Ever.

Eunice locked both Sarah and Thomas in an upstairs bedroom for a whole month – totally naked – and starved them, with only some water to drink. It was dreadful. She took away their bedding and anything of comfort and a couple of times a day, like a prison warden, she would unlock the door and take them along to the loo and back.

I got very scared thinking about what was going on in there and at night I would lie awake on my cushion on the floor and listen out. It was horribly quiet. I wanted to take them some food up, but Eunice sensed I would and was more vigilant than ever, doling out the food herself and keeping a tight rein on everything in the kitchen. She would push the occasional sandwich under the door for them, but this was not much for two starving children.

One day I heard Eunice’s voice raised and I crept upstairs. The door was open and I could see in to where she was standing, legs apart, hands on hips. Beyond her, I could see Thomas’s face, pale and thin. Then Eunice pointed to something on the floor – a puddle where Thomas had urinated out of desperation. She made him kneel down and lap up the urine, like a dog. I heard afterwards that Sarah had done a poo in the room and had hidden it under one of the loose floorboards. But at other times she was forced to eat her poo, as was Thomas. It was worse than any punishment I had thought Eunice capable of creating. I remembered having my face pushed into Jets poo and Roberts nappy so I knew a bit about how revolting that could be. But to eat it?

But worse – if I’m honest, I was just glad it wasn’t me up there and that made me feel horribly guilty. Eunice did lock me in the room at one point for half an hour to ‘teach me a lesson for something and it was appalling to see how they were living. It was a total unsanitary mess and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Thomas and Sarah were thin and pale and very shocked at what was happening to them. They just lay prone and naked on the floorboards, not moving or saying anything, waiting passively for time to pass. They really were starving to death. It was without doubt the worst, most terrifying punishment any of us had ever had.

I wondered if she’d really let them die of starvation and what
I
would do if it went that far. I think she did want to kill us, the lowest of the low in her mind. This month of punishment made us all feel that Eunice could do absolutely anything she wanted with us, even destroy us. She had us totally in her power.

Although I wasn’t locked in the room with the other two, I wasn’t to escape Eunice’s daily punishing whims. I might have started off this period in her Good Books, but at some point during that very gloomy time, I descended into her Bad Books, with horrible consequences.

One morning, I went to make breakfast and there she was, by the counter in the kitchen, looking incandescent. She was holding up the porridge oats bag and looking at me with her piercing gaze.

‘What’s this?’

I felt like saying, ‘A porridge oats bag’, but I knew better. There was obviously something seriously wrong.

‘You left it out.’

Eunice tipped the contents of the bag onto the side and the oats spilled out. I could see little brown lumps in the mixture: mouse or even rat droppings. There had been some rats around the garden recently and the outbuildings, as the farm was falling into terrible disrepair – since John Drake had died there was rubbish and clutter everywhere. I had obviously left the porridge bag out after using it the day before and some droppings had got into the bag.