Deliver Me From Evil (3 page)

The house was generally untidy but my parents would have huge clear-ups every so often and try to make things nice, especially at Christmas, after which it would almost immediately start to deteriorate again, getting increasingly messy.

Mum and Dad found it difficult to cope with running a house and looking after me. My mum’s fragile health was part of the reason our home life was sometimes chaotic. But also to blame was my parents’ teenage experimentation with drugs. They knew they had a problem and, bravely, sought help when I was very young. They would go daily to a local drug re-habilitation centre, often taking me with them. They’d manage to make it a fun outing, treating me to a hot lunch in the canteen and then going to the park on the way home.

As things got harder at home I began to retreat into myself, playing alone more and more. I spent a lot of the time in my bedroom or in the garden, making up stories, characters or songs in my head. With my vivid imagination I could be alone for hours, keeping myself amused. I’d hang out of the bathroom window upstairs and play with the wood lice that lived in the rotten window frame, chattering away to them as though they were my friends.

We had a cat at one time, called Smeagol (named after the character in
The Lord of the Rings).
I adored her and was so excited when she had kittens – until a lady came and took them away, saying they would go to a better home. Then someone else came along and took Smeagol away, saying she ought to go to a better home, too. I was so upset, but my parents just said, ‘Oh, the nice lady has taken them to a nicer house,’ and that was that.

Then, when I was about four, something happened that devastated me, and which I didn’t understand at all at the time.

One morning I saw my nan putting boxes and bags into her yellow convertible. When I asked her what she was doing, she didn’t really answer. Then, she gave me a gentle hug and said, ‘You be a good girl for your mum and dad.’

‘Nan, where are you going?’

But she still wouldn’t answer and I stood open-mouthed as my nan got in her car and drove away.

Nan had moved out. Just like that.

I have absolutely no idea what had happened or why she left that Saturday morning. I do remember running desperately up to her bedroom, throwing open the door and rinding all her things were gone. Where Nan had lived in our house, there now lay an empty room.

CHAPTER 3:

After Nan’s sudden departure, life for our little family seemed to get more and more chaotic as my parents struggled to manage. The electricity would go off from time to time, when we ran out of money for the meter, plunging the house into darkness. The gas was cut off periodically as bills were not always paid. I remember peering out of the living-room window to spot the gas man, then as he came up the overgrown path, Mum whispering ferociously in my ear, ‘Don’t let him in, don’t let him in.’ But eventually he did get in.

Nan would visit every Saturday and bring cakes from the bakery. Sometimes she would take me out to the shops and we’d go to Marks & Spencer, just to look around, or sometimes buy some food. Then we’d go back to her new flat, which she’d rented in a smarter part of Cheltenham. It was in a red-bricked Victorian house fringed by tall, dark trees and was owned by an old lady who lived downstairs in the garden flat, with loads of lodgers upstairs. Nan’s flat was very warm and cosy – I loved going there. She had a brownish-beige chintz sofa with a wooden frame and I would lie on it, like Princess Aurora, watching TV. If I stayed with her overnight, I would sleep on the sofa and shed bring me a cup of tea before bedtime, then shed tuck me up. She’s still got that sofa. It’s not so smart now, but it reminds me of a time when I felt snuggled up and safe.

Life certainly changed for the better when I was about four and a half and started to go to the local school, which was about a fifteen-minute walk from our house. Dad would take me to school and I’d walk beside him, holding his hand, dressed in my little green, grey and white school uniform and a pair of shoes my nan had bought especially for school – they were black patent with little diamanté butterflies on them. I guess my parents must have got the uniform secondhand through the school somehow.

Each classroom had a different pet and I loved to help look after them. I liked my teacher, too, who was very kind to me. She would let me play with Lego as much as I wanted – I was really quite obsessed with it. The other thing I loved about school was the books. I would pore over their pages endlessly in the book corner, taking in the pictures and beginning to make out the words. We were taught the
Letterland
alphabet, which was like a wonderland to me, spurring my imagination as I thought about all the characters that went with the letters.

However, although I was now surrounded by children of my own age, I didn’t find it that easy to make friends at school. I think I was just not used to socializing with other children and I didn’t really know what you had to do to become friends. In the end I gravitated towards shy loners. During this first year of school I remember being invited to my first (and probably only) birthday party for a pretty girl called Melanie. I didn’t really know what to do at the party and just sat in a corner watching. I couldn’t take my eyes off the table, which was almost groaning with the weight of the most amazing array of food. At the end of the party I was given a goodie bag, which I clasped in my tight little fist all the way home. Once in the house, I rushed upstairs to my bedroom, closed the door and gingerly opened the bag. There was a big slice of birthday cake and I remember stuffing it down as fast as I could. It was like finding a hoard of buried treasure in a pirate’s chest. Cake. All for me. Yummy.

Then my dad forgot to pick me up from school one day. It happened once, then again, then became a regular occurrence and I’d have to wait for ages until he eventually arrived. I didn’t mind that much – it meant I could carry on playing with Lego and reading books.

Because my parents had to go to the drug clinic at the hospital every day, they had to rush to get me out of the house and off to school before their appointment. By the time I was around five years old I think it was getting harder and harder for them to function properly and sometimes, when they couldn’t get me ready in time, I would miss school altogether. The teachers were starting to worry that now not only was my dad not always picking me up on time, but that I was also missing whole days of school and was beginning to fall behind. I guess they or the Head, must have reported this to the education authority and social services.

To make things worse, when I was about six my mum fell ill with a bout of meningitis. My father and nan were really struggling to look after my mum and myself and were not getting any help; they were desperately worried about what was going to happen to us all. Then Nan had a chance encounter, an innocent conversation that was to have terrible consequences for her beloved grandchild.

Nan was shopping in Cheltenham when she bumped into Eunice Spry’s daughter, Judith. They remembered each other from way back, when Eunice had taken care of me for a month. They started to chat and Nan asked Judith if Eunice was still fostering children. When Judith said she was, my nan felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, suddenly hopeful that there might be a way out of what had seemed an impossible situation. She asked if Judith could ask her mother to help my parents, who were sinking fast.

Nan only wanted to help her family out at a difficult time. Eunice had looked after me well before and proved she was trustworthy. Why should Nan think that anything had changed? She was not to know what would be unleashed by bringing Eunice back into our lives.

A few days later the doorbell rang. We didn’t have a phone at the time – only an old-fashioned handset in the living room with a dial that didn’t work – so we couldn’t have had any warning. I remember coming downstairs and climbing over the green sofa in the hall to peek at who my father was talking to through an open living-room window. I could just see someone, beyond his head, and the glint of the street light on glasses. As they talked I could see the steam rising from their breath, as it was deep in the winter, just before the new year of 1991.

Finally, Dad stepped back and signalled to the visitor to go round to the back of the house. From out of the gloom of the kitchen stepped a woman who seemed warm and friendly, dressed in a sensible red anorak and matching trousers. She was ushered into the living room, where she picked her way through the mess to sit down with my parents. I hovered in the doorway, filled with curiosity, unsure as to what I should do.

Then the woman summoned me over, delved into her huge handbag and brought out three balls of pale blue wool and some plastic knitting needles. She pulled me onto her lap and, holding my hands with the needles in them, began to show me how to knit, which fascinated me. It was lovely having someone unexpectedly bring me a present, and take the time to show me how to do something.

The woman chatted with my parents in a friendly, lively way, then asked if we would all like to go over to her house for a meal soon. A meal? At her house? Apart from going to Nans, we never visited other people so that sounded amazing to me
.
Shyly, I said that yes, we would like that very much.

The woman stood up, leaving me with the knitting needles and wool, and it was agreed that we would go over to her place the following weekend for dinner. Sunday dinner! As she left, and the back door closed behind her, I turned to my parents and asked who the kind lady was.

It was none other than Eunice Spry.

CHAPTER 4:

Looking back now I can see how I must have seemed like the sweetest little ripe cherry, ready for the picking. With her gimlet eyes, which missed nothing, Eunice must have entered our house and seen the disorder that pointed unmistakably to a family in trouble.

The next Sunday Eunice duly came to fetch us in her large mustard Volvo estate car and drove my mother and me over to her detached house at 24 George Dowty Drive in Northway, Tewkesbury. My father stayed at home; I don’t know why he didn’t come. At that point I don’t think I even knew that I had spent a month with Eunice when I was just a year and a half. I was only to understand this later, when my case was being prepared and we tried to work out how Eunice had come to have our family firmly within her over-controlling, greedy grasp.

But Eunice had obviously had a connection with me from my early life as she even had a photo of me as a sweet little baby. At that point nobody had any evidence to suggest that Eunice would be anything but good for our family. She was a registered childminder, looking after children aged between a few weeks and a few months. She had already adopted Charlotte and Sarah, so the idea of her befriending our family again, with a possible view to fostering, seemed the perfect solution.

Eunice’s home was an ex-council house, which she had bought on a government right-to-buy scheme. It was part of a modern housing estate in Northway on the rural outskirts of Tewkesbury and was situated in a cul-de-sac that looked a bit like Brookside Close, with neat sixties-style houses in the middle of fields and a primary school near by. There was a Co-op, a pub and a post office within walking distance, although the place had a fairly isolated, rural feel about it and was certainly different from the busy Cheltenham suburb I’d been used to.

My first impression of her house was ‘wow’. It seemed warm and cosy and it looked clean, at first glance anyway. Above all, it was full of toys: exciting things like Barbie dolls and Lego. I went into the living room, which was on the right of the hall from the front door. It was originally one long room but now it had a false wall, covered with rainforest paper, right down the middle of it. When I peeked through a small door cut into the wall I was utterly amazed: there was a whole room full of toys of all sorts, shapes and sizes. It was like a toy shop in there, and all I could think was,
Wow, wow, wow, I want to stay here and play.