Deliver Me From Evil (10 page)

That sunny spring day he gave us all little cardboard punnets and we ran off down the field. John Drake grew raspberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, broad beans, corn and he had an orchard loaded with apples in the autumn. That first day we picked raspberries, which was a real treat, especially because when we picked the fruit, we could eat it. It felt like the most fantastic freedom in our heavily constrained lives. I’d never seen fruit growing before and it was wonderful to pluck the red berries from the bush and cram the sweet, juicy fruit into my mouth. We had more fun than I could remember, and even Charlotte seemed nice that sunny afternoon. We even laughed and skipped around, just like ordinary kids would do.

After that we went on several more trips to the farm and we got to know John, as Eunice began to familiarize him with us all. I remember we had dinner there a few times, cooked entirely by John (which made a change from Eunices cooking). He made delicious food like roast lamb with all the trimmings and although he was a fairly grumpy individual, I felt he was being generous towards us. Especially when he made us kids a blancmange or jelly and ice cream served up with some of his home-grown fruit.

Soon we were swinging back and forth regularly between George Dowty and the farm, sometimes staying overnight, just sleeping on cushions pulled off the sofa onto the floor in the living room. Eunice told us firmly to be very quiet. Again, another place where we couldn’t make any noise.

John Drake was a typical, hard-working bachelor farmer, who had lived with his mother on the family farm until she’d died a few years earlier. He kept a shrine to her, so I guess they were very close and he’d nursed her when she was sick until her death. Eckington Bank Farm had been John’s life’s work and had probably been in his family for at least two generations. I got the feeling that he had worked from dawn till dusk, constantly outside in all weathers, but that now his mother was gone, he was leading a fairly lonely existence. That was, until Eunice came along, with her gaggle of assorted waifs and strays in tow.

The massive house, with all its rambling rooms, had an old mans smell. It wasn’t heated, but had a big, black Raeburn in the kitchen, used for the hot water as well as the cooking.

We usually entered the house through the back door, into a washroom. From there you could go into a large, chilly sun lounge to the left or the huge kitchen to the right. I noticed John only had a tiny fridge, and there wasn’t a freezer. Instead, there was an old-fashioned larder off the kitchen, which he used to store cans of baked beans and stewing steak, instant coffee, hot chocolate and tins of biscuits.

The house was very rundown with a generally threadbare look about it. Overall, it was pretty dirty and John didn’t do much to clean it up. There was a long strip of tatty greenish carpet running through the hall, which was huge. The living room, off the hall, had a dingy old, leafy green fitted carpet in it and a Welsh dresser. Another reception room, which he used as a lounge, had a wooden floor and a dusty old scatter rug.

In contrast with the inside of the house, the outside was John’s pride and joy. Outside the back door there was an old table with a Formica covering, a grubby chequered white and blue tablecloth, and a big old-fashioned set of scales where he used to weigh the fruit. Beyond the table was a big, flat acre of green lawn, a pond in a corner with ducks and geese swimming about and, beyond that, an enormous corrugated iron barn which had a strange, old-fashioned potato-sorting machine in it. There were brick and wooden outhouses to the left, including a black chicken shed and old cars in the grounds to the left of the main lawn: Johns was an old yellow Ford Escort with two doors. Beyond the big barn with the potato sorter were fields stretching way into the distance. To the right of the farm was another huge, well-kept lawn, hidden behind trees and hedges and the local churchyard beyond, full of gravestones.

One bizarre aspect of Eunices ‘friendship’ with John Drake was that he hated Jehovah’s Witnesses. He utterly despised them. Eunice would exhort us not to mention them – on pain of punishment of course – which seemed weird to me. If she was such a strong believer, why would she be such good friends with a man who hated Jehovah’s Witnesses? The answer was pretty clear. Eunice had attached herself to a man who was lonely and, as we soon found out, terminally sick. It turned out he had lung cancer and needed a major operation. Eunice must have found this out pretty quickly and offered, selfless angel of mercy that she was, to help him out. I can imagine her wooing him: ‘It’s all right, John. I’ll come over and look after you. The kids will love helping out on the farm.’ Indeed, not only would we help, but soon wed be doing every aspect of hard labour possible, as part of Eunices grand scheme to inherit the farm from poor, unsuspecting John Drake.

There was a transitional period of several months during which we were living between George Dowty Drive – which Eunice still owned and never sold – and Eckington Bank. I think it was early autumn when, without explaining anything to us, Eunice took us to the farm to stay full-time. Just like that. Judith was left at George Dowty a lot of the time, along with the baby, and there was still a lot of swinging back and forth between the two houses, which were only about a half an hour or forty minutes’ drive apart, depending on the traffic. But Charlotte, Sarah, Thomas and I were deposited on the farm and a new life began.

When we first went over to live at the farm John Drake had just come out of hospital, following major surgery for his lung cancer. Eunice was there, I suppose, to look after him. She’d probably persuaded him she was a nurse – of sorts – and she even slept in his room with him. I don’t think there was any hanky panky going on; I think she was simply trying to woo him, to make him feel cared for, and then, obviously, indebted. She had her eye set on the ultimate prize: ownership of the farm.

In the daytime, John would sit in the lounge in an electric chair that tipped backwards at the press of a button, so he could rest. Eunice told us to be quiet as church mice, as he was sick and recovering, so we would go outside and wander about.

At first it seemed the move might even improve things for us. We had a slight whiff of freedom, being allowed to explore the fields, the trees and the woods beyond. I liked looking at the little graveyard over the low drystone wall, peering at the inscriptions on all the wonky headstones. There were mini-tractors, as I called them (they were really lawnmowers), which we had fun playing on. I would spend hours on them, pretending I was riding a beautiful pony or dreaming about going on a sunny holiday. I was always fantasizing. John was nice enough to let us play on them and although he was grumpy, he never harmed us – unlike our so-called foster mother.

At the bottom of the field there were a couple of small black sheds in which, we were told, a hermit had lived at one time. That seemed quite magical and although they were out of bounds, I would imagine who had lived there and what magical powers he might have had.

The other good thing about the farm, for me, was the animals. There were ducks, geese, chickens, cats and later black pigs and a dog, which would become my friends, in time. I was very happy having animals to talk to, especially when things got tough.

The pecking order among us children remained the same as it had been at George Dowty. Charlotte, who was always Eunice’s favourite, was given a bed upstairs, in a room of her own. She was treated like a little princess and although she did endure some of the same punishments as us, they were not as severe. I remember Eunice slapping her leg or taking away her pocket money (the rest of us didn’t have any to start with), but she always had some privileges, too, like her own bed or toys, which made me dislike her a lot. We three – Sarah, Thomas and I – were the ‘Baddies’ and had to sleep on the draughty wooden floor, on smelly old cushions pulled off the sofa, in the living room. We didn’t have bedding but would grab an old blanket or eiderdown and wrap it around ourselves. I thought this was temporary, at first, but it became a way of life for a very long time.

Although many things were now different, the bizarre regime of daily rituals and punishments established at George Dowty went on as usual. The compulsory breakfast of All-Bran and linseeds followed by toilet inspections (now in an outhouse, away from John Drake’s view) and enemas if we didn’t perform adequately were still enforced. Washing-up liquid down the throat for lying or backchatting, strangleholds to teach us a lesson and daily clouts around the head, slaps on the mouth and punches for any minor misdemeanour continued as before. There were still Good Books and Bad Books, depending on which way the wind was blowing, and the prospect of a ‘proper beaten-style’ beating if we were in Eunice’s Bad Books. Plus, we were still made to stand up all night if we didn’t go to sleep on time. However, Eunice did stop us walking up and down stairs at this time, for a while at least, as the stairs creaked and I don’t think she wanted to alert John to her bizarre and cruel treatment. It was certainly not a case of her softening towards us; quite the opposite.

At first, Eunice had to be fairly quiet and our punishments were meted out once John was fast asleep in the lounge. He was on medication, I guess morphine for pain, so Eunice knew full well when to exact her punishments out of earshot. Also, with plenty of outhouses, Eunice had other places she could take us to, where, if we made a noise, we were too far away for John, or anyone else for that matter, to hear.

As for school, it soon became clear that my school back in Tewkesbury was too far away for us to commute daily. I was doing well at school and really loved it. I remember saying to my friends and teacher just before half term, ‘See you next week, after the break, as I was always keen to return. I thought I’d be back like everyone else. Instead I was taken out of school abruptly. Although I could have transferred to another school near by, Eunice could not be bothered with any of that. It didn’t suit her plan at all. Instead Eunice applied to be the home tutor for Thomas and me (and later Robert), which, I eventually discovered, involved nothing more than her writing a letter to the local education authority. As she was already home tutoring Charlotte and Sarah, it was probably easy for her to argue that she could run a little home school for all the children in her care.

Now we were living in Pershore we came under Worcestershire County Council and whenever an inspector visited, Eunice was able to put on a show worthy of Mary Poppins. She’d always receive warning that he was coming and would get us all cleaning. For once shed be tidy and things would shine. Shed buy us new books and wed be sitting at the table, writing, with clean hair and scrubbed faces, when the inspector called. Once they were gone, things returned to normal, of course.

By tutoring us at home she succeeded in removing me from any sort of normal life and contact with the outside world. We slowly but surely became trapped on the farm, our only outings being to Jehovah’s Witness meetings to which Eunice still dragged us regularly (if not quite as often as at George Dowty), usually under cover of darkness and without John knowing. Again we were sworn to silence, on pain of something horrible happening to us.

We were isolated and shut off and although, at first, it seemed to some extent that living on the farm would be a little like going on holiday, we hadn’t banked on how having total control over us would gradually intensify Eunice’s warped behaviour. Having effectively cut me off from the outside world it would no longer matter so much where my bruises or cuts were, how shabbily I would be dressed or whether I got enough to eat.

About this time Eunice decided to get a dog. He was a lovely, black Labrador puppy called Jet and, of course, it fell to me to train him. I like animals, but I didn’t really know much about dogs, and I’d certainly never trained one, so it was yet another duty I had to do on top of everything else. However, I was happy to give it a go, as a dog was a companion of sorts. He was also to be some kind of guard-dog, as the farm was pretty exposed, being by the side of the road on the outskirts of the village, and people knew John Drake was very poorly by then and couldn’t protect the farm like he used to.

The puppy would sleep in a basket under the kitchen table and Eunice would often tell me to sleep with him. I would curl up on the floor, under the table, on a cushion, with a blanket over me – just like a dog, too. I’m sure she wanted me to sleep with him to stop him crying as puppies always whine when they’re left alone at night. Again, it was all about Eunice and her comfort, as she hated to be disturbed and disliked noise. It was draughty and uncomfortable on the cold red and white quarry tiles of the kitchen floor, but in a way it was quite nice to sleep with the dog. I guess I felt I could relate to him.

I knew nothing about housetraining a puppy and, of course, at first he would wee and poo all over the place. One morning Eunice came into the kitchen and found that Jet had done his business in the night by the back door while I was asleep. Eunice was furious.

‘Get up,’ she snapped. I crawled out from under the table, tired and dishevelled. Eunice’s jaw was set, which meant trouble.

‘What’s this?’

Eunice pointed to a little puddle by the back door with a small brown sausage of dog poo beside it. She marched over and stared down at it accusingly. Jet sat, wagging his tail, tongue out, panting, oblivious, looking pleased with himself. I tried to disappear into the shadows of the kitchen, not knowing what Eunice might do next.

‘Come here!’

It was me, not the dog, she was commanding. Eunice was glaring at me with her dead, grey eyes, her thin mouth clamped in a mask of disapproval. I crept over to stand next to her, head down, my legs feeling weak.
What was she going to do now?
Suddenly she grabbed me by the back of my hair and forced me to my knees, which hurt as they hit the unforgiving tiled floor. Inches from my face were the pile of dog poo and the pool of wee, glistening in the morning light. Slowly, Eunice pushed my head further down. The stench of the poo entered my nostrils, turning my stomach and then, with a sudden further push, my face was in it. The wet, stinky mass was squishing up my nostrils, over my cheeks and eyelids and I had to fight it from going into the corners of my mouth. Eunice pushed my face into the mess and rubbed it back and forth, round and round. I desperately squeezed my eyes and mouth shut, although I could feel the poo oozing up my nostrils. I couldn’t breathe as I couldn’t open my mouth and my nose was full of lumpy globs of dog mess. Finally, after a good minute, she stopped and I was released. I stood up, spluttering, my face covered with poo. I automatically put my hands up to wipe my mouth and nose but Eunice swatted my hand away.