They Stole My Innocence Page 12

  Comments were made about my daughter refusing to testify. No one said that maybe she was scared of the repercussions if she did, but I felt that opinion circling in the air.

  I cannot remember the magistrate’s summing-up of my offence, just that she called it common assault, made worse by the fact the victim was a minor. She sentenced me to a month in prison and, like the two people I had watched escorted out of the court room just a short time ago, I, too, was led away. Now I was going to be taken to the place where I would have to face my childhood tormentor.

  Before my transport arrived I was placed in a cubicle cell in the courthouse. It was so small I could hardly move. When I had been left in a cell the night before, alcohol had deadened my dread of being locked in. Without it, my fear of being confined in small places intensified. Beads of sweat trickled down my back and my heart pounded with what I knew was the beginning of a panic attack. I clenched my fists and closed my eyes, as I tried to ward off memories of the detention cells in Haut de la Garenne that were forcing their way into my mind.

  ‘Please just get me out of here,’ I kept whispering, fighting the urge to kick the walls and scream.

  Through my growing terror I heard a voice saying I had visitors. I opened my eyes and saw my son and daughter. Oh, thank God, I thought. Anything to take my mind off those images.

  The relief that they were allowed to see me before I was driven to the prison outweighed my shame at being there. My son, I could see, was shaken by the verdict. He, like me, had imagined us all leaving the court and going home.

  It was my daughter, though, for whom I felt the most concern. Her face was ashen, her eyes red from fresh tears. The last drop of my anger against her – I had found out that it was she, in a fit of pique, who had called the police – evaporated. She tried to tell me how sorry she was, that she’d never meant them to come, that she hadn’t understood what she was doing. She looked, I thought then, like she had as a little girl when she had turned to me trustingly to make better some little hurt. ‘Where has that trust gone?’ I asked myself, knowing that the answer was clear. ‘No, darling. None of this was your fault. It was mine,’ I told her, and the expression on her face was worth the effort it had taken for me to admit that.

  A flash of memory of just the two of us together came into my mind. She had been around five and I had taken her to the beach. There was a stall selling candy floss and, against my better judgement, I had bought her some. ‘Oh!’ she had exclaimed, as the first bite dissolved in her mouth. ‘It’s like eating clouds.’ Thinking of the sugar-induced hyperactivity that would follow, I just smiled at her happiness. For that is what mothers do: they put the happiness of their children first.

  ‘It was my drinking that caused it,’ I said. By that very admission I had started to acknowledge what I had denied before. Alcohol had ceased to be my friend and become my worst enemy. It was time to banish its control over me. ‘And I love you,’ I added.

  I felt tired then. Too much emotion had been released in one day. It was almost a relief to climb into the prison van that took me on the short journey to the prison. In it, my fingers plucked compulsively at my jeans as my imagination ran riot.

  The word ‘warden’ conjured up pictures of big-bosomed women with eyes as cold as flint stomping towards me, keys and truncheons dangling from thick belts and aggression spilling out of tight-lipped mouths. Other pictures were also pasted firmly in my mind. There would be a strip search the moment I arrived; a cold shower, when I would be forced to stand naked before them; I would be made to wear a scratchy grey uniform before being thrown into a dark cell and given foul slush to eat.

  I could not have been more wrong. There were no truncheons. Neither was there a cold shower or a strip search. No warden had a small, tight mouth or used words of aggression. Instead, with a smile bordering on friendly, they quietly explained the rules. I could wear my own clothes and change into fresh ones after I had had a warm shower, which had curtains. At visiting times, I was told, I had to wear a red sash around my shoulders, which stated that I was an inmate, not a visitor. I could exercise in the yard, where we were allowed to smoke. Provided we had behaved well, we could watch television. I could hug my children when they arrived and when they left.

  They took me to my cell and brought me a cup of tea. ‘Seeing as you missed the afternoon break,’ they said, as an explanation for their kindness.

  As I got to know the wardens, they became friendly, protective even. They knew who I was and where I had spent my childhood. They said it was wrong that I had been sent there, that my solicitor should have pointed out that I had been giving evidence about Haut de la Garenne.

  Although they could not discuss their feelings about Morag Jordan, they reassured me that they would do their best to keep us apart. I could, if I wished, eat in my cell and exercise separately from her in the yard.

  One warden told me that Morag was denying the charges against her. She justified her actions by saying she had only done her duty. She kept saying that the girls in her care were the children of problem families and had been placed in the home because they were uncontrollable, unruly, promiscuous thieves. The boys she denounced as delinquents. Very few of the inmates believed her, the warden added. But, still, it was better if I was prepared. I think she meant they didn’t want me to lose my temper, which would only have made my stay longer.

  Over the time I spent in the prison, I heard snatches of the stories that Morag had tried to put about. She dripped poison into the ears of her listeners as she whispered her versions of events. Her final tale, I was told, was that I was in prison for violently assaulting my daughter. That I had tried to strangle her, a fifteen-year-old-girl, and she couldn’t understand my being sentenced to just one month.

  Prison, though, is a hotbed of unreliable gossip – boredom is a great fertiliser. Take a minuscule kernel of truth and watch it grow into something far more interesting. When it has been repeated enough times, it has become almost unrecognisable from its original form. I was asked if it was true that the politicians wanted the Haut de la Garenne case to end. Whether there had been cover-ups by those in high office, desperate not to have Jersey’s good name tarnished. And were they going to deny much of what had been discovered? Would experts waive reports that discredited nearly everything Graham Power and many of us had stated?

  To all of that I shrugged. I didn’t have the answers.

  The next rumour I knew to be true: that Jimmy Savile, friend of prime ministers and royalty, had visited the home. Now, he supported numerous charities so that on its own was not alarming. The fact that he denied he had been to Haut de la Garenne was. Maybe he had forgotten the photograph in the local newspaper showing him sitting with a group. Had he, the man who had said, ‘I don’t touch children,’ done so?

  The answer to that question I kept to myself.

  Other rumours abounded to which the inmates thought I might have answers. That children had died there, and rich men had taken boys out on their yachts to have sex with them. Of course they wanted to know, too, what I had said in my interviews, which I had no interest in sharing.

  My fieriness and refusal to be quiet, my threats that I wouldn’t rest until justice was served, were the real reasons I was there, they said. It had been done to discredit me. It might be that I had annoyed the police, I admitted, but that was not why I had been sentenced. The judge clearly thought that I needed to be away from my daughter for a spell. After all, she was aware of who had made the phone call.

  I spent more time in my cell, as I didn’t want to be part of the gossip. I just wanted the truth to be disclosed and I began to make a plan. Somehow I was going to get the rest of my story down. I would draw with words the landscape that lived in my head. I had learnt how much the world had changed since I was a child and had tried to tell adults what was happening to us at Haut de la Garenne. I had felt the disbelief of some, and others had treated me as though I was making up wicked stories. Forty years later, victims of a
buse are no longer frightened to come forward. Shame is no longer heaped on their heads. Society has learnt that when a child is forced to perform unspeakable acts, it is not the child’s shame. That shame belongs to the perpetrators and the narrow-minded bigots who despise victims of abuse. I know there are people who think that today’s victims might turn into tomorrow’s monsters, but I also know that it rarely happens.

  Yes, I have come across those who have been damaged and progress from abused to abuser. Most of us, though, want to be part of a relationship, have children and make happy and secure lives.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  She was there when I was shown into the common room. Those pale, cold eyes met mine and for a second I froze. She knew who I was.

  She had been Morag Kidd when I’d first met her. With her dark blonde hair, plain features and trim figure, she was, I had thought then, ordinary. But I quickly learnt that that was one thing Morag Kidd was not. At first her mundane appearance had made us think she was no great threat. After all, she was not a big woman.

  Forty years later I have words to describe her. They are not the ones we used in our early teens – ‘fucking bitch’, ‘fucking cow’, ‘fucking evil monster’ – which showed little imagination but expressed our feelings. My adult self has learnt to use different words, like ‘sociopath’.

  Her antisocial behaviour took the form of enjoying others’ pain. She used her intelligence to devise different ways of inflicting it. And the tiny part of her that needed someone to grow old with found her soulmate when she met the thick-set, brutal Anthony Jordan.

  Was their pillow talk about whom they had beaten, humiliated and, in his case, touched? When they lay together in bed did they make sleepy plans of new horrors they could inflict on us? Did they whisper words that drew pictures of bruised and broken children? And when they crept out of bed at night, to shine circles of light on frightened children in bed, was the smell of fear a powerful aphrodisiac?

  I have sometimes wondered if it was she who thought of changing some of those so-called voids into cells. Cells she introduced me to within weeks of her arrival. It certainly took a warped imagination to design them so artfully.

  Now, as I hovered in the doorway, I heard the guard whisper, ‘Don’t worry about her – she has no friends among us.’ Those words sent a warm glow through me. I took a deep breath and willed the fear, which had been instilled in me as a child when even the sound of her footsteps caused me to quake, to disappear. What was important, I suddenly realised, was not that she knew who I was but that I knew who and what she was. I was no longer the frightened child she had done her best to destroy. I was now a person in my own right. One who had overcome so much. Hadn’t I managed to put the past behind me, married a man who loved me and brought up two bright, well-adjusted children? Children who, until the police interviews had begun, had felt safe and secure.

  I might be in prison for unruly, drink-induced behaviour, but it was not my name that was linked to the word ‘monster’ in the minds of Haut de la Garenne’s former inmates. Her name, unlike mine, was splashed across the internet, where her sentence, its leniency, was considered an outrage. The comments in various chatrooms made no bones about the fury the public felt towards her and her husband. Thanks to the twenty-first century, the world had seen their photographs. When they were released they would have no place to hide. Certainly their neighbours would see them through different eyes. Inside the prison, I registered that I was now the stronger of us. She was older, frailer, with no allies, and that man, her partner, protector and ally, was, for the first time since they had met, not by her side. Our roles were reversed. Why had I not seen that before? She ought to be scared of me now.

  Would I creep up in the showers and attack her when no one could see? Did the wardens dislike her enough to look the other way? Maybe I’d wait until we were in the yard, taking our daily exercise, then trip her up. The final power I had over her was words. I could tell the other women not just what she had been sentenced for but all the other details of her cruelty, which I had tucked away in my head. Most of the women in the prison had children and I had already learnt that some were not afraid of violence. I could raise their anger by uttering just a few sentences. Even incite them to take action, let them do my work for me.

  Would she believe I had done it? Would she feel the force of my hatred, and start to sense tension in the atmosphere? When she closed her eyes, would fear keep her awake, as it had me?

  I stared at her, curling my lip disdainfully, then smiled inwardly as she dropped her gaze. It was her turn now to fear a blow when she least expected it, or a foot slipping round her ankles causing a fall that could break elderly bones.

  She couldn’t guess that I would do nothing. Not because I was scared to but because my past had not turned me into a monster. Neither would I let it. But she wouldn’t know that for thirty days and thirty nights.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It was on my first night there that my determination strengthened to do more to raise awareness of what we had suffered. The police might not believe that much of what we had told them was true. They had suggested that stories had circulated and become imprinted on our minds as fact. People don’t care about what they can’t see. Make them believe, though, and it’s the person convincing them of the reality of the horror under their noses whom they begin to dislike. Yes, there were people such as the Jordans who had been unnecessarily cruel. They accepted that. As they accepted that Colin Tilbrook was a child molester – they could hardly avoid doing so since his own stepdaughter had spoken out – and that some inmates had abused younger children. I’m sure they were embarrassed to learn of the visits to the home of the man who, for at least a decade, had attacked and raped both women and children, and to be told that while they searched the island for the creature nicknamed the ‘Beast of Jersey’ he was playing Santa Claus at Haut de la Garenne. But stories of orgies in hidden rooms, rich men in yachts and a famous celebrity all taking their pick of the children? No. I had been told that while some politicians had instructed the police to wind this scandal up, others were still questioning whether or not it was true. If it was, they had stated that justice must be done. Even more people needed to come forward until so many voices were telling their stories that they could not be ignored.

  Problems faced those who wanted to help. Many of the people who had once been in the home were too damaged to relive past horrors, while others, with their drink, drug and mental-health problems, would never make credible witnesses. Some, I knew, had left the island and did not want to be reminded of it.

  ‘Talking about it, Madeleine, means reliving what happened and feeling my pain all over again,’ one friend had said, when I’d asked her if she was going to make a statement. ‘Nobody in England knows I was in that place and that is how it is going to stay. It’s been all over the news and we can hardly open a newspaper without seeing reports on how we were treated. Do you think I want my kids to know that their mother had been little more than a sex toy for some of those wardens? I’ve never even told my husband. He might not think he was the first but there’s a limit to how many he’d want to know about.’

  ‘But none of what happened was our fault.’

  ‘We know that, and decent men might feel sorry for people who have gone through what we have, but they can still be a bit funny when they find they’ve married one. No way am I going to tell him now. And our friends? You think I want to see pity on their faces? Well, I don’t. What good will it do?’ she continued. ‘Half of those bastards are dead or disappeared by now.’

  ‘It’s not just for us but for today’s children as well. The public might not like hearing what happened. Well, who would like to think they’d mixed with men who did those things? But it wasn’t just us, was it? It was also kids who came before us, the ones who came after us and those who’ll be placed in care in the future. There’s nothing new about child abuse. What is new, though, is talking about it. Bringing it out into th
e open and stopping the bastards getting away with it. If we get some sort of justice then people in power will try even harder to catch them, and no children’s home will exist without more regulations.’

  ‘Well, maybe I’m being selfish but I’m not doing it, Madeleine. No way am I going to talk to the police. Have you such a short memory that you’ve forgotten what happened when we did?’

  I had not but it wasn’t a subject I wanted to lin-

  ger on.

  That conversation depressed me and put questions into my head when I found she wasn’t alone in her reaction. Had I been selfish in agreeing to give evidence? I asked myself. Apart from the Jordans, what difference had it made? I hadn’t even been called as a witness in their trial – and there was no doubt that my family had suffered because of it.

  No, I told myself, it had been the right thing to do. There were still enough of us who thought like me, who wanted to scream out their anger at the murder of their childhood and demand to be heard. At some stage we would be listened to and believed. Of that I was sure.

  I had to spend a month in what had turned out to be a fairly sympathetic environment and now I decided how I was going to use that time. The interviews had unlocked too many vivid, unwelcome memories and I wanted somehow to put them down on paper.

  * * *

  My son came to visit the day after I had arrived in prison. There were, I noticed, fresh lines on his face – a face that was too young to have them. My behaviour had caused them and I felt a wave of sadness. My fingers itched to smooth them out, but although I could hug him on arrival and departure, no other touching was allowed.

  ‘How are they treating you, Mum?’ he asked, almost before he had sat down. From his tone, he was clearly expecting to hear the worst. I told him I was all right, that the wardens were kind to me. That I had had time to think. I promised him then that I would not drink again. Or, at least, that I would not drink enough to get drunk. ‘I’m not an alcoholic,’ I said. ‘I can handle this when I get out. I won’t have to join AA. I can do it without help. I know that.’