Deliver Me From Evil (6 page)

‘Oh, no you didn’t, they were
just friends
.’

Charlotte said nothing and looked down. She obviously knew not to quibble. But being headstrong back then, I opened my mouth. I didn’t know any better.

‘But we did,
we saw her brother and sister. We were in the shower together after swimming, at the pool.’

Eunice suddenly leant forwards and tapped me on the mouth quite sharply. I was taken aback, as it hurt; I thought,
Why is she doing that? What have I done wrong?
I couldn’t understand what the problem was, yet I also felt warned off, that I shouldn’t say anything more about the incident. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew I was stepping into dangerous territory. I was learning quickly that there were many things I had to keep quiet about.

Satisfied with having put down any whiff of rebellion, Eunice calmly went back to the sink and resumed her chores.

With hindsight I can see how Eunice had begun her mission to control everything that we did, thought and believed. That first sharp tap on the mouth to silence me was merely the mildest taster of what was to come.

CHAPTER 6:

As Eunice began to mistreat Sarah, Thomas and me on a more regular basis, starting with flicks and hits on the mouth and then clouts to the head, my parents, totally unaware of what was happening at George Dowty, moved into a flat in the same large Victorian house that my nan had gone to live in when she left us, way back, when I was about four
.
I only saw my parents a couple of times again and when I did, I knew better than to let on that anything was amiss for fear of being severely punished by Eunice. By then it had been driven into me that I had to be perfectly behaved and demure when I went out of the house, especially because Eunice went with us everywhere and would be watching every twitch and listening to every word, so that there would be hell to pay later if I put a foot out of line.

Eunice’s mindset and the evangelical language she used, her talk of the Devil and demons, were influenced by her own strange interpretation of the Jehovah’s Witness faith. Her faith was a big part of her life and soon became part of mine too because it wasn’t long after Thomas and I went to live with her that she started taking us to Jehovah’s Witness meetings. I already believed in Jesus, having been taught about him at my first school. As a little girl I really believed that I loved Jesus. This, however, was not enough for Eunice, who wanted all us children to share her own beliefs. Thomas and I were new to the religion and she would tell us we came from Satanists; we had to go with her to her religious meetings to try to save our evil souls.

Eunice went to Jehovah’s Witness meetings in Tewkesbury three or four times a week, taking us all with her. There was a Sunday meeting at the Kingdom Hall, when we would listen to a talk from an elder and have a
Watchtower
study. There were three other meetings during the week: one where the adults would be trained how to go door to door to teach about the religion; on Tuesdays Eunice would go round to a couple’s house where there were little groups studying religious books together; and on Thursdays she would go to the Kingdom Hall and listen to talks about public speaking.

At the meetings we children were always told to sit quietly and be well behaved while the adults studied their books and we pretended to study ours. I read in one book that Jesus wasn’t crucified, as I’d been told at school, but that he’d died on an upright pole, which I found both confusing and upsetting.

I would sometimes be given a picture book of Bible stories, although I could read quite well by then, but at least the pictures would entertain me for a while. However, I did eventually find the meetings quite boring, and I didn’t like it when I had to read a paragraph of a study book and then talk about it in front of everyone. This was called ‘Answers Up’. I really dreaded ‘answering up’ as it made me very self-conscious, especially with Eunice’s eagle eye trained on me all the time, waiting for me to make a mistake for which she could punish me later at home.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses taught us that Jesus was not to be worshipped or prayed to because he is God’s son but not equal to God, and was resurrected in spirit only. They don’t believe in hell, or that people have an immortal soul that goes to heaven when they die. But people can be resurrected by God. They talked a lot about the fact that we were in the End Times, that Armageddon was coming and when it did only 144,000 anointed would go to heaven. The rest of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (and other people as well) would live in paradise on earth.

The celebration of festive days, like Christmas, Easter, even birthdays, was forbidden because of their pagan origins. They taught us that as much as possible we should mix only with Jehovah’s Witnesses, keeping our ‘outside contact’ with other people to a minimum. All Jehovah’s Witnesses were to be called ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ even though they weren’t our real family.

Eunice’s bizarre twist on her religion gave her a plausible excuse for her constant abuse of us children. She explained, painstakingly, that discipline was part of religion. I think discipline
was
Eunice’s religion, in and for itself. Eunice said that I had to behave, I had to be honest and not lie or I would die. Her explanation of anything about the Jehovah’s Witnesses was always very dramatic and full of gore and nasty stuff. It wasn’t just that I would die, but that I would die in a really horrible, slow and painful way. She was all fire and brimstone and it made my flesh creep. Scared children would be obedient children: I guess that was the general idea.

She would tell us that we would die if we did not obey and fear God. But, she added, we would also die if we just obeyed God out of fear. So, she said we’d die anyway because we were scared and didn’t love God – it was all very confusing.

Eunice used to terrify us with stories of what would happen at Armageddon, when the soldiers came to get us and put us to the sword. Our eyes would melt, our skin would burn, and we would feel the most terrible, excruciating pain we could possibly imagine. I used to have nightmares thinking about it, and hated looking at the pictures of Armageddon in the magazines. Eunice made us watch horror films so that we would understand what Armageddon and hell would be like. The films were not age appropriate and were very upsetting, even traumatizing.

Thomas and I would often fight with each other terribly and on one occasion, when I bit him, Eunice told me he would die from the germs that I’d infected him with. She made me think I was diseased and that this one bite might kill him. For years I believed this, feeling bad about myself and guilty about him. The idea that blood carries not only bad character traits but also germs was central to Eunice’s whole mindset. She truly believed that I was the Devil’s child, rotten and evil through and through, because of my heritage, which she drummed into my brain over and over and over again. Therefore, my blood was dirty, evil, contaminated.

Eunice’s own parents, Katie and John, were also devout Jehovah’s Witnesses and she’d grown up in the faith. However, given that extramarital and premarital sex was forbidden, I did find something strange in a drawer in Eunice’s house once: a picture of her wearing skimpy underwear, with two men on a bed, obviously engaged in some type of sexual activity, doing a V-sign at the camera. I never asked her about it, as I couldn’t ask her about anything, and, anyway, I could hardly own up to having poked about in a drawer, or to having found such a picture. I certainly would have been punished. Nevertheless, it registered in my mind as being extremely out of character. Or was it? I later found out that she had been thrown out of the Jehovah’s Witnesses at one time – ‘disfellowshipped’ as they call it – for something or other, but that she had somehow wormed her way back in. Eunice could be very persuasive, very seductive. She had, after all, managed to seduce two husbands successfully before I met her.

Grandiosely, Eunice would tell me that she was the best Jehovah’s Witness around, the most devoted follower, as she did not spare the rod with children. She was often quite disparaging about the other Jehovah’s Witnesses we came into contact with, telling us they weren’t true believers, because they were too soft. Indeed, I would later find out that there were very good Jehovah’s Witnesses around, who didn’t advocate beating and abusing children. They believed in being firm, but not horribly violent and ritualistic, like Eunice was. But I would learn that only much later, once the damage was done. Ironically, I would ultimately be grateful to those Jehovah’s Witnesses that Eunice thought were ‘soft’.

I’m still trying to understand whether Eunice’s behaviour was born of a religious belief that she needed to ‘teach us a lesson or whether she sincerely felt that what she made us do, or what she did to us, was ‘improving’ to our characters, our health and was saving our evil souls. Either way, her outlook was punitive and extreme, with everything divided into black and white, good and evil. With Eunice as the judge. Most of the time we were in a no-win situation: if we owned up to a ‘Sin’, we’d get punished, but if we didn’t own up (also a Sin), we’d also get punished. We were damned if we did, and damned if we didn’t.

CHAPTER 7:

When I look back on living with Eunice’s regime I think of it as going down a flight of steps to a basement. On the first few steps, I had to get acclimatized to the drop in light and temperature. As I went on, it began to feel damp and uncomfortable, until finally, I descended into a cold, rat-infested, stinking cellar where I was tortured sadistically until I screamed for mercy. But no mercy came.

The first eighteen months in Eunices house gave me an idea of what life with her would be like: full of rules, bizarre rituals, a weird and idiosyncratic routine, with endless things we had to remember on pain of punishment.

Every morning we were subjected to a ritual toilet check We were made to eat All-Bran with a couple of tablespoons of linseeds sprinkled on top. I didn’t like it particularly, but as we were told, ‘You’ll eat what you’re given,’ there was no choice. There was no fruit or toast or other cereal and you simply couldn’t refuse. We were meant to feel grateful that we were getting food at all, given what we’d come from.

Eunice was particularly hard on Sarah. Every morning she would make Sarah go to the toilet and then follow her there to inspect what she had done. She would examine the toilet’s contents sternly through her glasses and Sarah would have to say to Eunice, ‘Mummy, I’ve done my poo,’ and be very obedient and demure about it.

One of the problems with having to poo to order every morning is that you can’t always do it – our bodies just don’t work that way. Still Eunice would make us sit there, straining away, and we couldn’t come off until we’d delivered. It was the rule. It was terrible and I was petrified. But the more anxious I got, the less I was able to poo, of course. And not only did I have to poo before I went to school, I was also forbidden to do one at any other time of day. If I did, I had to hide it.

I remember the panic I felt when Eunice started checking on me because I’d seen Sarah sent to her room as a punishment for not measuring up. Sarah was very withdrawn all the time, but especially during these morning checks. Everybody thought she was autistic but I think she was just utterly terrified – too afraid to speak, to show any feelings, even to move or breathe.

But the punishment didn’t end there. If we didn’t come up with the goods in the morning Eunice would administer an enema. The big syringe would come out filled with green washing-up liquid mixed with water to make it frothy. I would look at the huge pointed end of the syringe and the solution sloshing around and think,
No way is that going inside me.
But, as with everything in Eunice’s regime, it was impossible to escape. She would bark at me to pull my pants down and bend over and I would have to comply. Eunice would then shove the syringe up my backside, not caring that it was uncomfortable, snapping, ‘Relax, relax your bum muscles’ as she pushed it in hard. Next she’d push the plunger in and I’d fill right up with the soapy liquid which I had to hold in for half an hour, sometimes an hour, even two hours or more, depending on her mood. It created the most enormous pressure inside my body and I wanted to get it out of me as soon as I could, but she insisted that I held it in. Then, when I eventually let it all out, it squirted everywhere, causing a stinking mess.