The Step Child (13 page)

Even seemingly little acts twisted the knife still further.

‘You won’t need this,’ she’d laugh, and take the broken light bulb from its socket in my room, never to be replaced in all the years she was there.

‘And what would you need a door handle for? You’re not going anywhere,’ she’d cackle, removing the handle from my side of the door – my only independent means of getting out of the room.

Keeping me in my place. Control. Making sure I knew she was in charge. Always.

I don’t have dates for these constant cruelties. I didn’t have a
diary. I didn’t log it all. But I do know that the physical, mental and emotional abuse piled up from soon after we moved into Edina Place until the day she finally left.

Playing it back in my mind and talking about it as an adult, I can see my own past as flashes. I can picture scenes in my mind, and the recognition that this is my own history retains the power to shock and, indeed, to take me back there. The memories I have may be Easter Road, Edina Place, a school day, a weekend or a holiday, but there are unchanging elements – the cruelty, the baiting, the overriding need for control on Helen’s part, which allowed her to do those things to a child without ever flinching.

Food played such a big part in it all. Even now as an adult, I pay the price of those early years of forced starvation and torture. I have no idea what size child I would have been, how big I might have grown, but I know that, to this day, I can’t eat as other people do. When I make new relationships, potential friends probably think ‘eating disorder’ because I am thin, I have problems with food, and it’s obvious to anyone who spends time in my company. Sometimes it’s easier to let them think that way, because how else should I explain it? My stepmother starved me? She treated me worse than a dog? She fed me scraps at best, and I stole food wherever and whenever I could?

Food was a weapon for Helen, one of the many in her arsenal. It had started in Easter Road, but intensified in Edina Place. Most of the time, I’d either be standing still in my room, tracing wallpaper roses with my fingers, or in the bathroom standing equally still, cold, half-naked and terrified. I’d listen to the others having their tea. First of all, I’d smell the food cooking; then I’d hear the table being set. As the minutes dragged on, plates would be scraped, and the noises of normal family life would go on. The façade of normality – apart from the fact that one member was completely isolated. As the chairs were pushed back, I knew what was coming.

‘You!’ Helen would shout. ‘Get through here, now!’
Embarrassed by the fact that I was in vest and knickers, shivering and pathetic, I’d go through to where she was. ‘Well, then,’ she’d goad, ‘what should we do with you tonight? What do you think, Gordon? What does she deserve?’ Helen would then go through the charade of discussing with Gordon what I was entitled to. She knew, he knew, I knew that I had done nothing to ‘deserve’ punishment. I had certainly done nothing to deserve being starved. But this was a ritual just like all the others. My rations would be decided.

‘She’s been rotten today, Mum,’ Gordon would wheedle. ‘I don’t think she should get anything.’ They’d laugh and giggle to themselves, then the bargaining would begin. Did I deserve full rations? Rarely. Half-rations? Quarter-rations? Whatever I was going to get, I was grateful. If half- or quarter-rations were determined, I’d be sent back to my room, and Gordon would come along some time later, kick the door open and throw my food in. It would usually fall on the floor, but I didn’t care. Sometimes, he would spit in it for good measure. I still didn’t care. Half-rations meant one slice of spam, four chips and maybe a teaspoon of tinned spaghetti. Quarter-rations barely marked the plate. But even if I was on no rations at all, I would be ‘allowed’ to do the dishes while the rest of the family went about their lives. I managed to get something out of this, because at least I would be a little warmer while I worked, and, if Helen wasn’t being too vigilant, I could maybe steal a few scraps the others had left on their plates as I scraped them into the bin.

And that was my life. A room without a light in it. A door without a handle. A belly without food. Standing still for hours. No friends. No love. And a father conspicuous by his absence. I was never allowed out of my room unless expressly let out by her. I got no food unless it was given by her. She was my constant jailer and she would never let me forget that I was completely dependent on her. I tried to get out for food but I hardly knew where to start. She’d put a padlock on the pantry
door, the cupboard opposite the living room. Yet, despite the dangers, I devised a system of getting in, even if I rarely had the confidence to use it. I was so desperate for food that I had stolen a knife from the living room, a brown-handled steak knife. With this, I could poke the old brass fitting and turn the handle, opening my door. Then, standing on a chair, I could unscrew the hasp and staple, letting myself in to the pantry. I’d take a few biscuits or some bread, or sometimes just some dry cornflakes. I’d stash them on me, usually down my pants. Then I’d put everything back in place and get back to my bed where I’d devour whatever I’d pinched, under the blankets, as quietly as possible, my heart thumping in my chest. Despite the fear, I really felt I’d won at times like that. I’d beaten Helen at her own game – even if only for a few scraps that barely touched the hole of hunger at the centre of me.

If I wasn’t in my room, hungry or sore, I’d be at school. That should have been a release for me, a relief, but it wasn’t really. I was still an outsider. I didn’t really have friends, for lots of reasons. I wouldn’t be allowed to go back to anyone’s house to play. I certainly wouldn’t be given permission for another child to come back to our house.

But, more than that, I was excluded because of what Helen had turned me into. I stank. I constantly smelled of pee. When I stood in the bathroom for hours on end, I wasn’t allowed to use the toilet. If I needed to go, I had to wet myself. I wasn’t allowed to change my underwear after that. Helen took great delight in rubbing my face into my stinking pants, making sure that she held me tight and close into the stench until I was heaving. Then I had to put them back on again. The knickers which were rank with stale urine had to be worn the next day as a mark of shame. Sometimes, when I felt brave, I would sneak them off in the
middle of the night, turn the tap on as little as I was able and try to get the stench out. I’d leave them to dry overnight and hope for the best. It never worked. I was dirty and I smelled. Children prey on the weaknesses of their peers. I was the girl who smelled of pee. Others would hold their noses when I went past or complain if the teacher made me sit beside them. How were they to know? Teachers presumably thought I wet myself deliberately or that it was something of which Helen despaired – they didn’t know that she inflicted it on me, and they never seemed to care.

On non-school days I’d be at home, usually in the bathroom on a punishment for breaking an imaginary rule. Sometimes I’d be called through to the living room after hours had passed, but only to do chores – usually the ironing, or perhaps to collect washing that I had to lug back to my bathroom prison and trample in the bath until my legs ached. Everything that wasn’t punishment was based around cleaning. I’d be told to scrub floors with a nailbrush, scour windows until my hands were red raw, do the washing in cold water in the middle of winter in my vest and knickers – and I was so desperate to get out of the bathroom that it seemed like a liberation.

As soon as we moved to Edina Place, it became clear that Helen was going to use the bathroom for punishment just as much as she had in Easter Road. She was obsessed with that room and all that went on in it. I’ve obviously wondered, as an adult, what Helen was put through as a child herself to turn her into the monster who ruined my own childhood. In that one room, there must be a clue. Whatever was done to her, whatever abuses she must have suffered, must surely have taken place in a room where she, in turn, thought it necessary to inflict degradation upon me. I can remember just standing there for hours on end with my hands by my side. Those old houses were so cold, so unforgiving. Even when you were happy and just living a normal life, it was a case of running in and out of the freezing room as quickly as possible to ‘do your business’. But I
would be there for a lot longer – and I swear she’d forget I was even there.

As I’ve said, the irony was that I wasn’t even allowed to go to the toilet while I was trapped in there. Sometimes I would plead, shouting out that I really really needed to go and that I’d do anything if I could use the loo. I soon learned that this would annoy Helen even more, and that if I ever asked, I had absolutely no chance. I soon gave up. The humiliation, the next day stink, all became second nature. If I moved, she’d scream that she could hear me and that I’d ‘get it’. I believed she probably could hear me, because I could certainly hear everything from her part of the house. The sound of the television programmes continued, the background noise to my life, but I never saw any of them. Now, when the constant stream of reminiscence shows fills the weekend schedules, I see clips of programmes that are so familiar to my peers, but to me are the soundtrack of my mortification at the hands of my stepmother.

I thought I had it bad in Easter Road, but Helen’s hatred of me really came out in Edina Place. In the bathroom, she would push my face against the mirror. ‘Look at you,’ she’d hiss. ‘Look at your ugly, ugly face. You’re such a little witch, Donna. Such an ugly little witch, just like your mother. I don’t know how you can bear for anyone to ever look at you. You must turn their stomachs. That must be why you’re so useless and so evil and so rotten. It’s all because of this ugliness. It shows in your face and it comes out in everything you do.’

I believed her. I couldn’t look in the mirror when she shoved my face into it because I was scared of what I’d see. If you are so ugly that you can’t be loved by someone who everyone tells you is good and kind, then why would you want to look at that reflection? I was skinny Donna, the starved little girl. I was smelly Donna, the child who pissed her own pants and whom no one would sit next to. I was bad Donna, the child rescued from an orphanage but so naughty that she didn’t deserve any
kindness. And I was ugly, ugly, ugly Donna, the witch-girl so hideous that she couldn’t even look at her own image for fear of what it might show.

I couldn’t look in a mirror for many years after Helen left my life. And I didn’t even look at the photographs of me as a little girl until very recently. When I finally did open my eyes and face up to what was in those pictures, I was shocked. Shocked by what I really was. Normal. Appealing.
Pretty
.

Helen took all of that from me.

Edina Place wouldn’t be a new beginning – it would be nothing less than a new horror.

ELIZABETH EWART CHANGED ME
. To the rest of the world, this formidable retired headmistress who lived in Paties Road in Edinburgh’s upmarket Colinton area was probably a bit of a cliché. Unmarried, Auntie Nellie was very particular in her ways and manners, and always so certain of what was ‘the right thing’. I had known her at both my homes – Easter Road and Edina Place – but as I got older, I started to notice just how much she meant to me, and this coincided more with my life at Edina Place.

To me, Auntie Nellie was my only hope. She was my Dad’s auntie really – his mother’s sister – so she was, in effect, my great-aunt. Names didn’t matter – what did mean something was the fact that Nellie took a shine to me from the word go. No matter what was to happen to me, what was going to be done to me, it was Auntie Nellie who was the biggest influence on my life. It was Auntie Nellie who made me what I am, and it was Auntie Nellie who has always made me so certain that good does triumph.