They Stole My Innocence Page 13

  ‘So do I, Mum. You were just trying to escape your nightmares. I think you’ve been pretty strong.’

  ‘Can you forgive me?’

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive, Mum. We love you.’

  I explained what I wanted to do while I was in prison. I’d eventually been diagnosed as dyslexic and found writing difficult so I asked my son to bring in a tape recorder. ‘If I give you the tapes will you type them up for me? Some of my memories are so muddled and I just want to get them down in order. It’s funny but the early ones seem clearer than the later ones.’

  ‘Do you think you’re up to this?’ he asked. ‘I mean, it won’t put too much pressure on you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it won’t. This time it will be therapeutic.’

  He smiled. ‘Good for you, Mum, and the answer’s yes.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It’s hard to talk into a machine, harder in many ways than speaking to a human. There are no questions to act as a prompt, no sound of paper being rustled, and no offers of tea or coffee. Neither was there the relief of lighting up a cigarette to give me thinking time. Smoking was restricted to the yard.

  One of the most difficult things was placing those memories in order. After all, the ones that have had the most impact on our lives are the easiest to recall.

  * * *

  A memory that never leaves me is of Frances, and how she was then. Frances, my bright, cheerful protector when I was five, the girl who had put herself in front of me and incurred more wrath than I was aware of. I never spoke to the police about her. She is on the island now, a prisoner of her memories. There are the bars on her windows and locks on her door, not to keep her in, for that would be futile – she never leaves the house – but to keep the world out.

  There are people who make sure she has food, shop for her, collect her social-security payments and deliver it to the ghost of the girl I had once known. When I had returned to the home the first time to discover she wasn’t there, I had asked and asked where she was, but no one wanted to tell me. ‘She’ll be back,’ was all I was told.

  She hadn’t run away. She’d been sent away.

  I never knew the reason for her absence.

  Would I have understood even if I had been told? I might have experienced sex but I had little knowledge of how babies were made. I was too young to have been in the classes where the facts of life were explained.

  Eventually, when she did return, the girl I rushed up to so eagerly was no longer the Frances I knew. Whatever had happened to her since I had seen her last had dulled her once sparkling eyes, rounded her shoulders and taken away her courage. All she wanted was to be left alone. I tried to talk to her, to tell her how I had missed her, only to receive a shadow of her former smile.

  It was as though our former closeness had never happened. For me, it was yet another loss. She was moved to a different dormitory and our paths seldom crossed. She was allowed to study in the evenings and at mealtimes she sat with the more senior inmates.

  When she turned sixteen she left, as she had told me she would. She came to say goodbye to me. She had a job, she told me, working in a hotel in England. ‘In the country,’ she had added. ‘I want to train as a receptionist,’ she told me. Then she was gone, with no address for me to write to.

  Twenty years passed before I saw her again. By that time I was married, my past buried and my life as content as I could make it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Haut de la Garenne was no longer a home for children. Instead, in 1986, it was being portrayed as a police station in the TV detective series Bergerac. I had been enlisted to work on the catering trucks.

  Starting early in the morning we prepared ongoing buffets – breakfast, then snacks, lunch, more snacks and dinner. If it was late shooting, we prepared even more. Food was what the cast wanted, and enormous mounds of it were what they got. At the end of the day our bags were full of leftovers: cold chicken, roast beef, rolls, cakes – there was enough for me to feed my family.

  At first, when I had been offered the job, I was reluctant to spend days in the vicinity of that grim, grey building, but the need for a second income outweighed my doubts. The pay was good and there was a certain excitement in seeing the stars close up, even sometimes exchanging a few words with them. The bustle of the film crews, the numerous extras waiting to be called, not to mention the groups of people waiting for John Nettles to appear, driving that vintage red Triumph convertible, combined to give the place a completely different atmosphere from the forbidding one I remembered.

  It was on one of those mornings when Jersey is at its most beautiful that I saw her. That day, the only wisps of white appearing on the cloudless sky came from planes carrying holiday-makers. They were, I was sure, peering out at the sparkling turquoise sea and planning their first evening’s entertainment. All around me I could heard the trill of small birds and the hum of bees, as they flew towards wild flowers. The air was heavy with the scent of summer and, feeling a wave of contentment, I closed my eyes.

  When I opened them, Frances was there. She was standing quite still, staring at the building where once we had been housed. From a distance of several yards I could see she looked older, no longer a girl. Of course she did, and of course she no longer was – two decades had passed – but I would have recognised her anywhere. My memories had never let go of her.

  I hesitated. After all, what would we talk about? Our shared experience had not been happy. Haut de la Garenne was no longer a place where children were sent to suffer. Did I want to delve into the past? What had gone on there was not a subject I wished to reminisce about. But I couldn’t turn away and, squashing my reluctance, I slowly walked towards her.

  She saw me and it was too late for any indecision. Had she, I wondered, been searching for faces in which, peeling back the years, she could see some of the children she had once known? I knew I had changed far more than she had. Who doesn’t when childhood is left behind? But my hair was still the same pale red blonde and I, who had been small as a child, was petite as an adult.

  Then I was in front of her and, as the years fell away, a lump came to my throat. ‘Frances, is it really you?’ I asked, although I had no need to. ‘It’s me, Madeleine. Do you remember me?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ Any doubt I had had as to whether she would be pleased to see me, after all this time, disappeared the moment she spoke. ‘How could I forget?’ Her arms stretched out to encircle me.

  I was briefly taken back to when I was a child and she had looked out for me. She had been so strong then. Now I held her at arms’ length and looked into her face. There was fragility in it, a sadness that showed even through her smile.

  ‘I was hoping I’d meet you,’ she said. ‘I wondered if you were still here or if you, too, had left.’

  ‘I never left,’ I said. ‘Are you no longer in England?’ That was all I could think to ask.

  ‘No, I’ve come back,’ she replied. Behind those few words I sensed there was a story, not a happy one, she wanted to tell me. I was right, but it was not that day we talked, or the next time we met.

  I understood that she wanted to get to know the adult me, to separate that person from the child, before deciding if she could trust in a friendship that had begun and faded so many years earlier.

  We met in coffee shops, on walks along the beach and at my home. She never invited me to hers. Neither did she take up my invitation for her to join all of us in a family meal.

  It was several weeks after that initial meeting that I learnt some of what had happened to her. Little by little, a few sentences at a time, she told me her story. It was as though travelling back in time exhausted her, but then, when I’d heard it all, I understood why.

  ‘You wanted so little to do with me when you came back to Haut de la Garenne,’ I told her one morning, when she was perched on a stool in my kitchen. I had tried not to mention our childhood, but that day, while we sat sipping coffee, I couldn’t stop myself.


  She glanced at me but said nothing. Remembering my childhood hurt, I blurted out, ‘You were the only person I wanted to see when I was sent back there. Those wardens wouldn’t tell me why you’d gone, only that you were returning.’

  ‘And I did.’

  ‘Yes. But you were so different and I was too young to understand that something must have happened to make you like that.’

  She said she was sorry, that she hadn’t wanted to hurt me. ‘I have to go, Madeleine,’ she said, tapping out her cigarette with quick, jerky movements.

  The expression on my face must have told her that I knew her departure was only an excuse to delay telling me why she had turned away from me. She paused by the door.

  ‘Madeleine,’ she said then, ‘I know that if we’re going to be friends I owe you an explanation. It’s just not something I can talk about easily. But the next time I’ll try to find the words, I promise. I owe it to you to make sure you understand it was nothing you had done.’

  We met again a couple of days later. I was due to work the morning shift at the film shoot and when I’d finished she was waiting for me. We took mugs of coffee and sat on a low wall.

  ‘Seems appropriate to tell you what happened here, where it all started,’ she said, with an ironic smile.

  ‘So why did they send you away?’ I asked.

  ‘I was pregnant,’ she answered.

  I’d been expecting that, but the facts of how it had happened were far worse than I had imagined. ‘Who was the father?’ I asked, expecting to hear the name of one of the men who had molested me.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Then a torrent of words burst out. She told me how she had been gang-raped, not by adults but by the boys she had thought were her friends. ‘They kept saying they knew about all the men Colin Tilbrook lined up for me, that I was nothing but a whore, and why could I not put out to them? Was it because all those rich men bought me presents? On and on they went, egging each other on. I knew I couldn’t get away from them, knew what they wanted. I was in the same class as the ringleader, had even helped him with homework, but that night, when he met my eye, there was no shame at what he planned on doing. “We know you give out to all those old men,” he said, his face flushed with a sort of savagery that I’d never seen on anyone before, not even those men Tilbrook gave me to. “It’s our time now.” I tried to tell them it wasn’t my fault, those men. I hadn’t wanted to go with any of them. I kept telling them I’d had no choice but they refused to listen.’

  As she recounted what had happened to her that night, I saw it all, like a reel of film playing in my head. She’d stood there, much like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights. Sense had told her to run, but also that there was no escape.

  The ringleader, the boy she’d thought of as her friend, had made the first move. His hand had shot out and, before she could utter another plea, grabbed her face. His fingers dug into her cheek so hard she couldn’t move, far less scream. His voice deepened, to a rough growl. He’d sounded more like a man than a boy. ‘Just shut the fuck up, whore.’

  Her ears rang with the shouts of the other boys.

  ‘Get her down, man,’ one said.

  ‘Down, down, down,’ chanted the other three.

  His knee pushed between her legs, his hand slid under her skirt and his fingernails scratched her skin. Then she was on the ground, her skirt hiked up to her waist, her blouse and bra pulled up to her neck. His mouth covered a nipple, nipped it hard between his teeth. A cry died in her throat as the hand holding her tightened until she thought he would break her neck.

  His leg forced hers apart, and she felt him fumbling for his zipper. He forced himself into her dryness, plunged hard and all the time he sucked and bit her breasts and her neck. With a juddering howl he finished, lifted his head, and she saw his triumphant smile.

  That smile made her want to curl up and die, she told me.

  ‘Hey! You next,’ he cried, to the next boy. ‘She’s nice and wet now, be an easy ride for you.’ He rolled off her and the next one climbed on. Her legs were pulled further apart and then he, too, bucked away while another round of applause filled her ears. The other two followed, one after the other, but by then she was too weak to fight them.

  Afterwards, when it was all over and they had disappeared into the shadows, she staggered to her feet. She wanted to get inside the building and hide where no one could see her. Somehow, with every part of her body aching, she straightened her clothes and walked to her dormitory.

  She risked going into the showers, although bathing at any other time than that which the rota showed was strictly forbidden. The only vestige of luck she had that night was that no one saw her. She leant against the shower’s wall and let the water cascade over her while she scrubbed away the smell of the boys. Then she crept into bed, pulled the blanket up to her chin and, with the boys’ faces printed on her retinas, lay staring blindly into darkness.

  The ache in her heart, she had told me, was even greater than the deep penetrating pain between her legs.

  Tears had trickled down her face when, with her arms wrapped round her body, she confided in me about that night. ‘So, Madeleine, now do you understand now why I have no idea who the father was? It could have been any of them. Or one of the men those boys taunted me with. Colin Tilbrook had quite a few men, who shared his interests, visiting. It was them he gave me to.’ She shuddered.

  Of course we both knew about men who liked their prey very young. Prepubescent children, in fact.

  ‘Oh, those evil bastards love fondling smooth little bodies. Get turned on by seeing numb fear on faces that are just about to say goodbye to their childhood, goodbye to innocence and goodbye to trust. Those bloody perverts love that power. You and I met them, didn’t we?’

  I gulped. I didn’t want to hear any more. Seeing me flinch, she laid her hand on my arm. ‘I know you’ve worked hard at putting what happened behind you, Madeleine,’ she said gently. ‘I can understand if you don’t want to hear any more. Maybe I’ve been selfish bringing up the past. I didn’t think how painful it might be for you.’

  ‘But you haven’t managed to put any of it behind you, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe after you tell me the rest you might be able to. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’ I waited for her to continue.

  ‘I was older than a lot of the children in the home when they were abused. I was thirteen when I was introduced to those men who arrogantly say that they never touch children. Yes, they do. Just not tiny ones. Girls of thirteen and fourteen, no matter how mature they look, are still children. They may have a woman’s body, but that doesn’t make it right to touch them, does it? They even have a name for their desires – nympholepsy. I was one of their nymphs. “Comes from Ancient Greek,” one man told me. “It means an unbridled desire for young, beautiful girls.” He seemed to think that by putting a name to it and using a word I had to look up in a dictionary made his acts excusable. Another one told me that what excited him – once he’d removed the clothes of a girl on the cusp of being a woman – was her small breasts, combined with narrow child’s shoulders. Whatever they called it, it was children they liked fucking,’ she said bitterly.

  I remembered then how she had looked at that age. As a child I had thought that any adult who was kind to me was beautiful, but when I pictured Frances at sixteen, she really had been. I had seen a collection of David Hamilton’s work, published as a book, in the seventies. As I saw photo after photo of semi-naked girls on the brink of womanhood, I saw something else. The collection was titled The Age of Innocence, but I would have retitled it The End of Innocence. One picture had reminded me of Frances. With her long legs and tiny waist, the model appeared to have been even younger than Frances had been when she’d left the home, but the resemblance was startling. They both had slender necks and smooth faces, framed by long dark hair. The girl’s face was pensive; I’d thought she didn’t seem happy.

  Frances’s voice broke into
my thoughts. ‘They sent me to England, but when I got there the doctor said it was too late for an abortion.’

  ‘What happened to the baby?’ I asked, realising that she must have carried a child to term.

  ‘I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me. I only know he went to a family, but I never knew anything about them. I was told he would be well looked after. That was the very worst, Madeleine, having him and losing him. I had held him, breastfed him for six weeks, and then they took him from me. My beautiful, perfect little boy, whom I loved from the moment he was placed in my arms. I watched as his tiny lungs made his chest flutter in and out, stroked every bit of him and inhaled that baby smell. He fitted in my arms, and when he slept, I was just content to gaze at him. Those perfect little hands, those unbelievably delicate eyelids, the pale down on his head . . . He was still part of me. And then they took him away from me for ever. I didn’t care who the father was. Not knowing made him just mine.

  ‘I begged and begged them not to take him, but they took no notice. The forms for adoption had been signed, they said, a suitable family found. It was too late. They locked the door of my room until he was out of the house. I banged and banged on the door. They gave me a sedative. When I woke it was to the realisation that he was gone and I would never find him.’

  As she came to the end of her story, her body crumpled with the anguish of a mother who has lost her child. I waited. There was more to come, I knew.

  ‘And then you came back to the home?’

  ‘Yes. They made me promise not to talk about it. If I kept quiet, I would be left alone. I was afraid of them. There were stories then of girls disappearing. Maybe they had run away or, like me, become pregnant and been sent away. As well as being scared, my hormones were all over the place. All I wanted was to be left alone. I didn’t want to answer questions, not then. I think if I had let myself cry I would never have stopped.’