Deliver Me From Evil (22 page)

Another incident stands out, only in this case it’s because it was one of the rare times that I did fight back. I was being punished – for a change – and Eunice was sitting across my chest. I was on the floor, with her thighs either side of me. She was pinning me down, her hands holding down my puny arms. I remember the strong stench of her armpits, which stank, as always (of course, she didn’t believe in using deodorants). She freed one hand to push my lower lip onto my lower teeth – as ever, it really hurt and I could taste the blood in my mouth. For some reason, on this day, I’d had enough, and with my free hand I clawed her bottom.

I could see from her eyes that she was shocked as she shouted, ‘How dare you?’ and started to clout me around the head and face. Soon I was a mass of bruises and cuts. But I really must have been angry that day because I didn’t care and just continued to claw and claw at her big, fat, wobbly bottom. She was going to hurt me anyway, so I thought I might as well do some damage. That must have been my logic.

We were never allowed to answer back, and certainly not allowed to fight back, so Eunice must have been outraged, which was why she lost it so completely. In the middle of it all she told me to hold still so she could clout me properly, so I wouldn’t bruise. But I was having none of it and continued to wriggle and claw. I didn’t care. At some point I bit her knuckle – or it got grazed on my teeth – and shortly after the cut got infected. I remember Eunice showing me the infection afterwards and saying she’d got it because I was diseased and that some people like me were born with evil in them, which you just couldn’t get rid of.

That beating must have been very tough because it put me off fighting back for nearly another two years. She had pummelled my head over and over and just kept hitting me until I was pulped. She’d actually lost her temper, which was unusual, as she was normally very cold and calculated. I felt I’d been knocked into place and that my spirit had been broken. But I think Eunice was shocked that I’d dared to claw her bum – I think we both were – and that she might have realized then, that as I got bigger, I would eventually be able to fight back properly.

Eunice obviously needed to shift her game a bit. Now I was a proper teenager, sex would come up occasionally and she would have to make her feelings known. The phone-lines bill at the farm was a big black mark against me and she still continually pressed me to pay her back. Then, one day, I was standing in the utility room by the washing machine, when Eunice came in. At my feet, among all the clutter, was a newspaper with a picture of a topless woman in it. Eunices eagle eye alighted on it and she picked it up. I thought,
Uh-oh, I’m in for it now,
even though I knew I hadn’t gone out and bought the newspaper. It might well have been a freebie. Later, I would understand that newspapers and magazines used images of naked women to sell all sorts of things, but at that time I’d been so isolated from the world I had no idea that this kind of image was on show absolutely everywhere, every day.

Well, Eunice lost it big time. She started kicking me over and over in my crotch. It hurt like hell – I was only wearing a thin shell suit (which I’d got secondhand from a charity shop, of course) – and I was pinned against the washing machine so I couldn’t move away. Eunice just kicked and kicked and kicked. I thought I would pass out from the pain. This was Eunice’s own original brand of sex education, for sure, although I’m not sure exactly what it was supposed to be teaching me.

However, Eunice did persist in trying to get me together with her friend Kevin. She would say things like, ‘Why don’t you go for a walk together with Kevin?’ I found out that originally he’d been a heavy drinker and that he’d recently started to drink again. Eunice hoped to straighten him out and somehow she saw me as the means to keep him under control.

Now that I was sixteen I think he saw me as fair game. He became progressively ruder and more suggestive with me. It was a real nightmare. If we went for a walk with the dog, he would try to hold my hand, or would grab at me in some way or say things like, ‘You look very sexy in those shorts today’ He’d be drooling over me and I’d think,
Yeah, to boys my age, but not to you, mate.

Once, he said (about another woman near by) ‘I bet she’s got a nice pussy’ I felt disgusted. Why was he talking this way to me? What did he expect me to do or say? ‘I don’t wanna know,’ I said. ‘You go and find out.’

‘No, she ain’t got big enough boobs,’ he said. Kevin really made my skin creep.

He grabbed my breasts once, and I was revolted by Kevin’s assault. It was a horrible moment as I struggled to get away from him. I was dishevelled and feeling sick. I went in search of Eunice who was sitting inside, peeling an apple. I wouldn’t usually say anything to her, or make a fuss about anything, but I was furious about being left with this pest. I went and stood in front of Eunice.

‘I don’t want to be on my own with him any more.’

Eunice didn’t stop peeling or look up at me. There was a moment’s pause.

‘Why not?’ She took a bite of her apple and looked out of the door to where Kevin was still standing. ‘I just don’t like him.’

‘Well, he really likes you; you make him feel better.’

I felt resentful and for once I spoke out. ‘I don’t want to be on my own with him, or sit next to him, or be put with him or be anywhere with him.’

Eunice glanced up at me, straight-faced, then bit into her apple again. She didn’t offer to do anything or to protect me from Kevin in any way. Later, when I was driven to distraction by his constant pawing, I told her blatantly what he was doing to me and she went berserk at him.

Once I made it very clear to him – and to Eunice – that his advances were absolutely not wanted (I thought I had made it clear all along, but he had continued to persist regardless) he finally got the message

Looking back, I realize that Eunice must have come into the rest of John Drake’s property when Charlotte died. As he had left the farm to Charlotte in a trust, her death must have meant the farm was passed on to her ‘next of kin – Eunice. I didn’t understand it properly at the time, but Eunice had big money to spend finally

I was sixteen when, one afternoon, we were driving in the Volvo and ended up down by the marina in Tewkesbury
.
We all sat in the car and waited while Eunice went down to see the boats. When she came back to the car she announced, ‘I’ve eyed up a boat; I might buy one.’ We were all astounded. Buy one? I kept my face blank, but inside I was thinking,
Buy a boat? How can you buy a boat? Where’d you get that amount of money from?
But I knew better than to ask.

A few days later Eunice picked up her father, who was in a wheelchair, and we all went to have a look at the boat together. We got to a mooring place and there was a barge with the name ‘Charlotte’ on the side. I realized immediately the significance for Eunice. The barge was 70-foot long, apparently the longest you could get. It had a wheelchair lift, which Eunice tried out with her father and Sarah. She seemed pleased that she could get the wheelchair users on and off the boat quite easily, although the barge itself was really quite massive. She kept saying, ‘I’m going to buy this boat’ over and over like a mantra. The barge was priced at £40,000 but I heard that in the end she’d haggled them down to £37,000. She seemed very pleased with herself, but I was still amazed that she could afford it. All these years we’d lived in penury, never having much food, no heating, few holidays, no new clothes, no trips out or any new toys. She had bullied me for months over my phone bill, but she really was rolling in it now. It seemed she was suddenly rich, if she could afford to buy a boat, for £37,000. Just like that.

Having bought the barge, Eunice decided we would go on a six-week holiday. First we had to clean it up – I was used to cleaning by then, so I had to roll up my sleeves and start scrubbing. Then Eunice had to organize someone to look after the farm animals while we were away, because we were now living half at the farm and half at George Dowty, going back and forth between the two. I felt sad saying goodbye to my chickens and pigs, cats and other farmyard pets, apart from Jet, who came with us, but I suppose I was a bit excited that we were doing something new. It’s hard to explain, but in a life like mine, where so much that was horrible happened all the time, on a daily basis, just a small change, a little bit of something nice or different, went a very long way indeed.

We set off on our barge holiday with Eunice, her mum and dad, us four children. We also took with us six rabbits and a goldfish called Marigold in a bowl (Eunice’s pet), so we must have looked like a band of gypsies. I was allowed to have a go at steering the barge at some point early on in our trip, and I bumped the goldfish out of the bowl when I knocked into the lock It was quite comic and I took some pleasure in the upset it gave Eunice, although I was sad about the fish. It was a lovely goldfish.

At this point Eunice was getting on better with me; she might have worried that I’d blow the whistle at some point or, at least, begin to fight back. Even though she had conditioned me to be terrified of her over the years, I’d got used to her by now, and I was managing to risk a bit of argy-bargy every so often. I was beginning gather the strength to be more assertive, to talk back and stand my ground. It was getting to the point where I would threaten her as she hit me, saying, ‘I’m an adult now, you can’t carry on doing this to me. I’m gonna tell on you.’ I was also much more snappy and moody in general and less co-operative when she wanted me to do something, and very fed up about not being allowed pocket money, music, radio, TV, magazines, make-up, new clothes or anything teenagers usually had. She wouldn’t let me have a life and I was becoming very resentful about it. It was only in small ways, but I had been so dominated by her for so long that even the smallest shifts really were mountainous.

We were heading up the Llangollen Canal in Wales very slowly and one day during the trip we were going over an incredibly narrow aqueduct, called Pontcysyllte. It was 305 metres long and 39 metres above the valley below with magnificent views over the surrounding countryside. I’d never seen anything like it, and you could walk along it on a narrow path beside the barge. I wanted to see the view, so I got off and walked. The scenery was really fantastic, although I’m petrified of heights and felt I might be swept off any minute by a gust of wind, or I might just fall if I looked too far over the side of the aqueduct.

The holiday ended up lasting from September 2001 until March 2002, and did give me a taste of real freedom. I was allowed to walk the dog alone, just the two of us on the tow-path. I could breathe the air, look at the sky, think my own thoughts and simply experience being solitary, without having someone’s gaze on me all the time. I only began to realize through these walks what it had been like to be watched constantly by Eunice, to have to be careful, accountable, all the time.

So my stolen moments of freedom, when I could stroll and look at a bird take flight, or watch the evening sky, helped a new feeling to form in my soul, and made a new idea crystallize in my mind. It felt scary to contemplate it, but also exciting to imagine. And I always had a very active imagination.

I was almost seventeen and beginning to feel the time had come for me to leave what passed for a home.

CHAPTER 18:

The months spent away had broken the bond with my old life, just as the deaths of Charlotte and Judith had somehow broken Eunice’s desire to keep us all cooped up, enslaved at her beck and call on the farm. I had no idea what lay ‘out there’ in the world beyond, because the Jehovah’s Witnesses, through Eunice, had always made sure that the outside environment would remain both hostile and dangerous. In addition to anything the Jehovah’s Witnesses believed, I’d been told by Eunice for years that I wouldn’t live past the age of ten (although I obviously did), that I was evil, unworthy and diseased, so I thought I wouldn’t live very long in the outside world anyway.

I had learned to skivvy, cook, clean, tend animals and be kicked around, but being able to talk to or trust people, make friends, work out finances or look after myself properly – this was completely foreign territory. Thus, the idea of launching myself into the unknown was totally daunting. Nevertheless, I had reached an emotional and psychological crossroads now and there was no real turning back. At sixteen going on seventeen, I’d got the whiff of freedom in my nostrils and wanted to explore it further.

I was impatient to get away and started to drop enormous hints to Eunice. I was even daring to badger her. I’d never asked for anything before, or expressed any desires, but the urge to leave got stronger and stronger as every day went by. I think Eunice could smell rebellion on me and she probably knew she’d have to do something about it soon.