They Stole My Innocence Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Ninteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  At the tender age of five, Madeleine was living a daily nightmare. In a dark, grey building on Jersey, she was just another orphan, defenceless and alone. She was also an easy target.

  Unbeknownst to the outside world, the care home manager was abusing her, using her like she was his toy. “Say nothing, no one will believe a nasty little kid like you,” he’d whisper. Terrified, Madeleine would keep quiet. And, worse still, the home was selling the children to men who would inflict on them the worst possible abuse. No one cared.

  This is Madeleine’s heart-breaking story and her fight to survive.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Madeleine Vibert was taken into care when she was just a baby. She spent her early years in a crèche and her memories from that time are good ones. But that soon changed. At the tender age of five, Madeleine was transferred to Haut de La Garenne, the institution that made headlines just a few years ago. Madeleine was regularly abused under the home’s care. When she was finally able to escape, she overcame her demons and married the love of her life and had two children.

  INTRODUCTION

  There are reasons why my memories are jumbled, why when I try to put them in order it is the bad ones that come to me first. So, in what follows, a date may not be correct or the sequence of events may be the wrong way round. But everything happened as I say it did.

  My name is Madeleine. This is my story. A story I believed would never be told. For years I buried it deep, for it is not mine alone. There are others, who were part of the horrors that haunt me still, left on the island. But, by unspoken consent, we had all agreed that the truth of what happened was never to be revealed.

  Some, in their desire to eradicate their memories, have lost themselves. Alcohol, tranquillisers or whatever it took to see the past through a misty haze. And finally, when nothing proved enough, suicide has not been unknown. Of course, a lucky few have shut the door on that dark room where their memories are stored and left – but I am not one of them.

  For years, half a lifetime, I believed I was safe, that what was buried would remain so. Then the police found us. One by one we were questioned. They asked for names and dates. They wanted the truth, they said.

  I could start my story when I was three months old and taken into care. I could begin with my earliest memories of those happy times in my childhood when there were two women I called Mummy, or when I was five and went to live in the huge, bleak, grey building named Haut de la Garenne. Maybe it should start on the day Colin Tilbrook sent for me and fear entered my life, or when I first met the men who saw Haut de la Garenne as their private playground.

  But my story really began before I was born, when a young woman left Ireland to seek a better life and, in another small Irish town, a man bade farewell to his family and travelled to Jersey.

  My mother told me, years later, that she was listening to the new Doris Day song, ‘Que Sera Sera’ that day. Swaying to the music, she carefully placed her few clothes in a battered brown case, as she dreamt of the rosy future she was convinced would be her destiny. She smiled as she listened to the words of the hit record. Without having to ask her mother, she already knew that, with her generous curves, shoulder-length hair, black as a raven’s wing, and those thickly fringed blue eyes, she was more than just pretty. But, like the song, she also wanted to know whether she would, one day, be rich. Would she live in a big house and dress like the women she had seen in glossy magazines? Not if she remained in Ireland, she thought. It was Jersey she was going to, where she had been told that a young Irish girl’s dreams could come true.

  Of course she would miss her family. The day before, her aunts, uncles and cousins had squeezed themselves into the house to say their goodbyes. Her mother had cooked her favourite meal – a huge rabbit stew that had fed everyone. Its mouth-watering aroma, mixed with the tang of last night’s peat fire, still lingered in the room. It was nights like that she would miss most. But if she wanted a bright future, then leave she must.

  She was only too aware of what the future would hold, should she stay. She had known too many pretty girls who, seeing no deeper than the charm that made them feel special, ignored their mother’s advice and married good-looking rogues. Within a year they, like their mothers before them, had turned into pale-faced drudges who, except for attending church or fetching the groceries, barely left the house.

  No more dancing in the white marquees, erected in local farmers’ fields, on a Saturday night. Once a ring was on her finger, a woman’s life consisted of producing a squalling baby each year, washing stinking nappies from the never-empty bucket and working from dawn to dusk, cooking and cleaning. Then she no longer felt special. She was just a housewife with chapped hands, lank hair and a thickening waist.

  Marriage agreed with those men who wiled away time and the housekeeping money in Seamus’s bar. There, while their wives spent their evenings patching and darning, the men downed the pints of Guinness called, by my grandmother, ‘the curse of Ireland’. My mother could see why they were contented. No one told them what to do – for weren’t they the masters of their homes? Meals were always ready for them, their clothes washed and ironed, and their children never dared answer them back. Nothing more than men’s slaves: that was how my mother saw those women.

  It was not a life she wished for herself and, once away from her parents, who knew what might happen? Look at Marilyn Monroe. She had come from nothing, and hadn’t my mother been told by more than one boy that she was just as sexy as Marilyn, even though it was Elizabeth Taylor she resembled? Or so Patrick O’Malley had told her when he had taken her to see I Remember Paris at the Globe.

  No, she was going to the right place, a sunny island where there was plenty of work and people lived in nice houses with indoor bathrooms. Not like her parents’ small stone house, with its outside lavatory and tin bath. How she hated the weekly ritual of the family bathtime, when she helped her mother to lift pan after steaming pan to fill the tub. Never again would she have to immerse herself in water made grimy by sev
eral bodies before her. Soon she would have a hot bath every day, be able to buy nice clothes, and when eventually she did marry, it would be to a man of means, who would look after her every desire.

  Oh, yes, my mother was happy that day. I think it was the last time she was.

  When she left, her mother stood in the doorway, kissed her goodbye and, like all Irish mothers whose daughters were leaving the nest, told her to write every week, to be good, and ‘not to be going with any boys’.

  Her father carried her case to the bus stop. As the single decker came into view he said gruffly that she was to remember she always had a home there, should she ever want to come back. Then, with a lump in her throat, she was on the bus, staring out of the window as the village where she had been born grew smaller and smaller.

  It was the time of year when the winter months’ endless rain had cleared, leaving lush green hedgerows, the leaves gilded by sunlight, almost hiding the clumps of wild flowers that had pushed small yellow and pink faces through the soil. As the bus trundled along the windy road, she saw a group of freckle-faced boys, their shirts hanging out of their short trousers, fishing. They looked up as the bus passed and waved. My mother waved back. Then they, too, were out of sight.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a warm summer morning when my mother, with seven other women, arrived in Jersey. The sky was a milky blue. The sun, already high in the sky, shone on the rocky islet where the grey stone castle stands and turned the sparkling sea into a carpet of diamonds. The queasiness she had felt on the journey left her, to be replaced by a shivery excitement. Everything was too bright, too vivid to be real, but oh-so-beautiful.

  One of the women grabbed her arm. ‘Look, Maureen, look over there! Can you not see it? It’s France!’ One by one the rest of the women turned, shielded their eyes with their hands and, as they squinted against the sun’s brightness, their murmurs of excitement rose in the air.

  ‘Why, we could go to Paris on our day off!’ said my mother, not knowing that Paris was a very long way from the Normandy coastline.

  Then, with a final bump, the ship was moored and the ramp lowered. Carrying their cases, the women walked down it and, for the first time, stepped onto Jersey soil.

  Looking around, they searched for the people they had been told would meet them. They knew that their lodgings had been arranged for them and all they wanted was to be taken there. Once they arrived they could have hot baths and then, they had agreed, meet up and explore the town.

  Not only did they feel that this was a new beginning but, for the first time in their lives, they were free, for Ireland was strict with its daughters. No hard liquor and only a loose woman would venture into that male domain, the pub. Even the dances the girls were allowed to go to served only soft drinks. On those nights, one or both parents would be waiting up to ensure that their daughter had come straight home and that her breath was untainted by the men’s smuggled-in alcohol. Now they were free of those restrictions. No curfew, no parents watching the clock. It was, my mother had told me, an exhilarating feeling.

  As the chattering group waited, they saw two men walking towards them. One, somewhere in his thirties, was of stocky build, with a flushed, weather-beaten face and greasy dark hair. My mother hardly gave him a glance – she kept that for the second: taller than his friend by several inches, with the floppy light brown hair that gives even a thirty-year-old a boyish look, and a wide white smile. If Nature had been kind in giving him regular features, a cleft chin and warm brown eyes, the sun had been equally so. Instead of the ruddy skin of his friend, it had turned the visible parts of him – face, neck and forearms – a dark golden brown. He was, my mother told me many years later, simply the most handsome man she had ever seen.

  ‘You’ll be the ones from Ireland, then?’ he asked, and at their enthusiastic nods, the white smile flashed again. ‘Call me Jim,’ he said and, jerking his finger towards his more taciturn friend, he introduced him as Bob. Neither of the two men asked the women for their names.

  ‘Well, girls, it’s our job to take you to where you’re staying. I expect you’re all in a hurry to get there, so just follow us.’ And, with long strides, he led them to an open truck with a couple of wooden benches running along each side.

  ‘In you hop,’ he told them, then climbed in beside the older man who, still without speaking, started the engine. The last stage of their journey had started.

  I only have my mother’s memories as to how Jersey looked then, but I can picture that day almost as clearly as if I had been there. The harbour, very much a working one then, was very different from how it is now. I know it today, with its sleek yachts where, in the daytime, men in clean white jeans and T-shirts busy themselves coiling rope and greasing thick chains. The town of St Helier, too, must be very different, with its pavement cafés, brightly lit restaurants, designer boutiques and imposing hotels, from what it was when my mother arrived.

  Behind my eyes, I can see the blue of the sea reflected in the sky and the group of girls, wearing now rather creased clothes, hair blowing in the summer-scented breeze, faces alight with anticipation for what lay ahead. In the middle of them stands my mother who, with her gurgling laugh and sparkling eyes, was the brightest of them all.

  I can imagine those girls, for they were little more than that, throwing their cases into the truck, then giggling and joking as they clambered in. On the drive, inhaling diesel fumes and salt sea air, they would have seen, instead of the large pale houses with manicured lawns, tennis courts and swimming-pools that stand there now, green fields with fawn cows grazing on one side and long stretches of golden beaches on the other.

  The truck reached country lanes, and at the end of one, a large farmhouse came into view.

  ‘Nearly there,’ said the driver.

  ‘Nearly where?’ Marie muttered. ‘Sure, we can’t all be working in that house.’ She turned to my mother. ‘What did they tell you, Maureen? The people who got you the job?’

  ‘That I would start off working in the farmhouse and then, after a while, once my fare is paid back, I would be free to look for other work. As soon as I had a bit saved up for my own place, that is.’

  The driver, overhearing them, laughed. ‘My God, the stories they tell you girls,’ he said, over his shoulder.

  My mother chose to ignore him, for she was more concerned with where they were. ‘We wanted to look round the town once we’re settled,’ she said. ‘How far is it?’

  ‘There’s no distance too far to walk in Jersey,’ Jim said. ‘Why, the whole length of the island is only a few miles.’

  ‘And,’ his friend added. ‘Are you not all used to walking in Ireland? Anyhow, first you have to see your new homes, don’t you?’

  There was something in the men’s voices that made my mother feel uneasy. They had started talking to each other in a language she didn’t understand, but she sensed by the bursts of laughter and the glances over their shoulders that it was the women who were the source of their merriment. The others also seemed to suspect that they were being mocked and fell silent.

  Their uneasiness lifted when, with that smile, Jim turned and winked. ‘Now don’t start looking down, girls. Not on your first day here. We’re only teasing you. If you all cheer up, come the weekend, I might just be talked into giving you all a lift into town. I could show you St Helier’s sights.’

  A chorus of thanks greeted him, and a few minutes later the truck pulled up in front of a row of oblong huts. ‘Here you are, ladies, your new homes,’ said Bob, unsmiling, as he climbed out of the truck.

  My mother caught a sardonic gleam in his eyes when he noticed their expressions.

  With walls made of concrete and corrugated-iron roofs, they did not resemble any home my mother had seen. They were more like the outhouses where, in Ireland, the deep-litter chickens were kept.

  ‘Ach, they’re not so bad, girls,’ said Jim, seeing their dismay. ‘Come on, have a look inside. You’ll see they can be made right cosy. The
re’s food been got in for you, so you can make yourselves something to eat and rest a bit. Remember, you have to be up early.’

  ‘How early?’ asked Marie.

  ‘Six thirty sharp.’ Before he could hear the groans, Jim swung himself back into the truck and, with a roar, it was off.

  Inside, contrary to Jim’s reassurance, it was little better. The door opened straight into a gloomy room, painted what my mother called a ‘dull, dirty beige’. It was furnished sparsely with a dark wood table, four chairs and a sagging two-seater settee. Under the only window, which was hung with thin floral curtains, there was a cooker and sink. Two bedrooms led off it, so small that there was little space between the narrow single beds.

  The first of my mother’s dreams vanished, that of having her own room, as did the second, the one of luxuriating in a deep bath, when she saw what was under the ledge by the sink: a tin tub.

  The next morning they found out what they had left the poverty of Ireland for. They were all to work on the farm, not in the house. Depending on the season, they were either to plant potatoes, pick potatoes, scrub potatoes or pack potatoes. When winter came, bringing with it frozen pipes and frost that crackled beneath their feet, they dressed in as many clothes as they could find to work in unheated barns. Their cold-stiffened fingers packed potatoes into wooden boxes ready for planting when spring arrived.

  ‘Why,’ my mother had said, when she’d told me how it was then, ‘we’d left Ireland to get away from that. We were so gullible, believing we would be getting jobs in fancy shops and learning office work. But it wasn’t all our fault – we had been asked what skills we had and most of us had some. But, no, every one of us who came across that day was put to work from dawn to dusk tending their so-called ‘superior’ spuds.

  ‘The only thing we had to look forward to was going into town on payday. And that, Madeleine, was when we found out just what the locals thought of us. Scum, that’s what we were, dirty Irish scum. They pointed at us in the street, you know, all of us immigrant workers who dirtied our hands doing work they were too stuck up to do.’ Her eyes held a far-away dreamy look, as they always did when she talked about those early days.