Deliver Me From Evil (14 page)

‘Stop that. You’ll only make it worse for yourself

Then I felt the familiar, sickening thwack on the soles of my feet.
Oh no, I’d forgotten all about that
–
she was still going to beat my feet, too.
I could see the other stick in her right arm being raised over the end of my body. She motioned with her head for me to keep my leg up for her to aim at, so I strained to hold my wobbly leg up to receive the blows. But the pain in the feet somehow didn’t count today as my mind was entirely concentrated on trying to breathe with a long piece of hard wood shoved right down into the back of my throat.

Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.

Eunice launched a frenzied attack on my feet, but every time I tried to wriggle, scream out or protest, the wedge would be driven further down into my throat and all I could do was gag. I could taste the woody, varnished flavour of the stick, although my tongue was thrust back unnaturally and to the side. It was horrendous. I squirmed, but as I did so, I could feel the double pain of my feet being seared and my throat being pierced from within.
Please make it stop, someone. Please.

‘Relax.’

Relax! Are you crazy? How can I relax?

Eunice stood beside me, her arms out, in a weird crucifix-like stance, legs akimbo, a stick in each hand, as if she was conducting some kind of horrific orchestral piece. But I was the instrument being played, a small, innocent child, supposedly in her care. And what she was conducting was a terrible act of assault. All I had done was forget to buy some throat sweets, and now I was having my throat massacred from within and the soles of my feet destroyed with every lacerating blow.

Afterwards I lay on my side in a foetal position, shaking from the shock, moaning and weeping while holding my throat with both hands. I watched as Eunice put her sticks away in the dark corner with careful precision. I noticed a glint of red on the end of the wedged stick and indeed, my throat felt slashed and raw. I had the metallic taste of blood in my mouth and I lay there, feeling the world had come to an end.

‘You won’t forget those throat sweets now.’ And Eunice swept out of the room to get on with the rest of her day, satisfied with another sadistic, soul-saving job done.

Later, in court, I would hold one of the sticks she routinely used to thrust down our throats and examine the two inches of dried blood staining the end.

CHAPTER 13:

Although I was now about eleven I had never had any pocket money. None of us Bad children did, and therefore we had nothing to spend on ourselves. Of course, we never got paid for any chores we did, like mow the grass or feed the animals, as all of that was to earn our keep.

I know it was wrong, but sometimes we took money from Eunice’s purse and sneaked off to the post office to buy sweets or a treat. We didn’t mean to be bad, but we were hungry and we were desperate. We knew we were risking terrible punishments, of course, but in a way because we would be beaten for anything as trivial forgetting to buy throat sweets or looking at Eunice in a certain way, it almost felt like we were hung, drawn and quartered before we’d even committed a crime. If I was supposed to be bad, evil and terrible through and through then I might as well be bad, evil and terrible. Anyway, by then, as ghastly as the beatings were, I’d almost become inured to them. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, but I had found a way to cope with the attacks.

But also, we were moving towards being pubescent teenagers and there was a stirring of hormones in the house. We’d been needy, meek children when she met us, and we’d been brainwashed and beaten into submission for nearly five years. Whether there would ever be an all-out rebellion, where we stood together, locked arms and said ‘Enough!’ was yet to be seen. But Eunice was very careful to continue to divide and rule all of us, making sure we stayed enemies rather than friends. If we had got together and risen up against her, who knows what the consequences might have been.

Having been maltreated for as long as we had, we began to develop some hardened callouses, not just on our feet, but in our natures, even in our very souls. So, while we knew that stealing money was ‘wrong’, we also felt
‘So what?’
The stick down the throat would be just as horrible whether or not we’d enjoyed some sweeties, so I guess we must have thought it was worth the risk Of course, I don’t think any of this was consciously thought through because when it came down to it we acted quickly and spontaneously, probably desperate for a break from the boredom and monotony of our isolated and peculiar lives on the farm.

John Drake’s money finally arrived around now. Not that we were told about it, but Eunice started to enact some of her refurbishment plans at this time, so she must have received some big money from somewhere. This meant there was cash left lying around the house in drawers, sometimes two or three hundred, even a thousand pounds at a time, to pay workmen.

I remember one time an electrician came to do some repairs on the farm’s rickety old electrics. Eunice had stashed a large amount of cash in a drawer in the hall to pay him and Charlotte found it and suggested, wildly, that we take some. We were breathless and flushed with the very idea, but wed learned to keep our faces straight. Years of practice. Amazingly, Eunice was flirting with the electrician – it was so strange to see her being charming and laughing, almost looking attractive and feminine, so completely the opposite of her usual dreary self. So, while Eunice was busy chatting, we helped ourselves to some cash, our hearts in our mouths with a mixture of fear and excitement. I think it was quite a lot, around £200, which was a real fortune to us. Although it was Charlotte’s idea, we all joined in because, after all, there was enormous satisfaction in getting one over on Eunice while she was making eyes at the electrician in the kitchen like a total idiot.

We rushed to the post office and had the most fantastic time choosing chocolate bars, chewy sweets and dolly mixtures. It obviously seemed strange to the woman in there that the manky kids from the farm, who never went out, were suddenly loaded. We’d never had so much cash before and it must have seemed very suspicious indeed. Afterwards, triumphant, we ran over the back fields into the bushes behind the farm and gobbled down as many sweets as we could, almost making ourselves sick, while one of us kept a watchful eye out for you-know-who. Eventually, we wandered back home, our tummies full and our tastebuds satisfied. Eunice was waiting for us, po-faced, the flirty smiles all gone.

The woman from the post office had phoned Eunice and told her about us – she was surprised that wed had so much money and obviously thought Eunice should know. We were in big trouble. This time, in a new twist, Eunice said emphatically it was all my fault. I had turned Charlotte bad, infecting her with my evil. I wasn’t one to squeal so Charlotte got let off the beating (she never owned up to the fact it was her idea, of course, to save her own skin) and I took most of the brunt, including a particularly tough session with the wooden wedge rammed down my throat until it bled. Once again my throat was sore for days afterwards, really raspy and swollen, and my feet were black and blue.

In the end, we all learned to switch off emotionally when she beat us and we would end up having surreal conversations with each other, such as, ‘We’re so lucky cos she used the biggest stick on our feet today’ meaning it wasn’t as painful as it could have been had she used a smaller stick. The worst was a four-foot bamboo cane, which was so unbearable I couldn’t hold out against the stinging agony. I now understand why torturers use bamboo – it certainly does create intense pain. But when Eunice used a broom pole, which was more clunky, that was not so bad. I’m sure she must have got some of her ideas from some Japanese POW memoirs that she once read (hence the bamboo stick). How totally bizarre the world we were living in was: we were actually grateful for being beaten with a broom handle.

Worst of all was when she got us to hold each other down when she was beating us. Sometimes shed want to concentrate her effort on bashing our feet and needed two hands for the job, so she’d give the wedge over to one of us waiting obediently in the queue to be beaten. This was really warped. Holding the stick in Thomas or Sarah’s throat was horribly distressing and is the thing I feel worst about concerning my time at Eunice’s. Although I felt I could take her punishment, I didn’t want to be party to doling it out to another child because I knew what they would be suffering. I wished at the time that I was big enough to resist, but there was no place for resistance in Eunice’s world; we were utterly overpowered at every turn.

After the sweet-stealing incident we were more often in Eunice’s Bad Books than her Good Books, which meant more beatings, more punishments and more deprivation. Her mission was to diminish our poor lives further and further and my only weapon was to learn more and more ways to try and endure or outwit her. Sometimes, during beatings, I would bite my hands to stop crying out. Any noise would give Eunice an incentive to reach for her other stick and ram it down my throat. But there were even tougher testing times ahead, especially as Eunice always prided herself as being one step ahead of us all.

Food increasingly became the battleground between Eunice and us at that time. Even though she probably had more cash now than ever, she reduced our food rations. Thomas, Sarah and myself were obviously not worth feeding properly – at least that was the message we got loud and clear. We were already very skinny, while Charlotte was plump and Robert was growing into a sturdy little boy, so we looked very strange in comparison to each other. However, Eunice was always hovering over the food, counting the slices of bread in the packet, even measuring the Battenburg cake (when we had some, which was rare), to make sure nothing was taken without her knowledge and agreement.

I was supposedly in charge of food, so I was always the first one to be held responsible, although I had no power to dispense it as I saw fair. Not only were our food portions diminishing, but Eunice now began to add starvation to our punishment list.

I must have been about eleven when some food went missing – I cant even remember what it was or how much, but it probably was a slice of bread or a piece of cake or something trivial – and she told me to starve for a day. Now, I was already hungry, having done lots of physical work, like feeding the chickens, watching Robert, cleaning the farm and outbuildings and looking after the dog. I was in the kitchen alone so I opened the bread bin and took out a stale crust and slipped it under my shirt. Then I ran out to the chicken shed, crammed the bread into my mouth and ate it as fast as possible.

It was a freezing cold day, wet and windy outside, and the chickens were restless. I was sweeping up the shed when Eunice appeared at the door, looking angry and sour. ‘What have you done?’

I paused from sweeping and tried to make my face blank, hoping there were no crumbs around my mouth. I looked at Eunice, then at the floor. She stared at me, accusingly.

‘You’ve been sly, so you can starve for two days now.’

I opened my mouth to protest, but suddenly thought better of it as that was called ‘talking back and, in itself, was enough to set her off on a beating. Eunice watched my reaction, then turned and left the shed. I had a heavy sense of foreboding.
Starve for two days. Two days!
My mind was racing. I was always hungry. A few hours were OK – I’d missed many meals before – and I could probably even get through a day. But two?

I went back to sweeping, feeling very downhearted, listening to the chickens cluck away contentedly as they pecked the floor. I thought I could eat the chicken feed, or scavenge something out of the pig food. I’d have to be careful though.

Then Eunice appeared again, like a spectre of doom before me. I jumped. She liked to try to catch me out, catch me at something naughty.

‘You’ll get a beating. Later. It’s a sin to be sly.’

With that she went off, satisfied. Now I felt even worse as not only would I starve, but I’d have to go through a beating, too. And God knows what she had in mind for me this time. I looked out of the shed door at the rain slanting down from the sky and wondered if life would always be like this. Wasn’t there any help, anywhere? Who could I tell? Who could help? I’d tried running away, and I’d just been brought back and it had all carried on as before. My life felt hopeless.

Eunice didn’t relent, so I did really starve for those two whole days and it was terrible. I also got the beating for being ‘sly’, into the bargain, the usual soles of the feet routine with a bamboo rod, and I remember beginning to feel so weak that she had to hold my legs up for me so she could beat my feet properly. As I got weaker and weaker, I could hardly walk to the chicken shed – I still had to feed the chickens, if not myself. Not only were my feet battered and bruised, but I was also dragging the heavy hosepipe up to the shed so I could clean it, thinking,
I cant do this.
I know it sounds an absurd situation to be in but I just knew I had to be able to endure anything Eunice threw at me, otherwise I’d simply lie down and die.