They Stole My Innocence Read online

  ‘No wonder you changed,’ I said. ‘But I still don’t understand what brought you back here after you’d left the home and gone to England. I should have thought you would never have wanted to set foot on the island again.’

  ‘One of the boys in the home, Stephen Burns, left at almost the same time I did. We kept in touch, wrote letters, and then he came over to see me. We ended up living together for a bit. I thought then that, like you, we could put our past behind us and find some peace. We actually did get married. A register office, a couple of mates, and there we were, a married couple.’

  ‘And? I mean, did you separate? What happened?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said bleakly. ‘Drug overdose. He was such a sweet person, but he was never quite right. He should never have been in that home. He had never done anything wrong. It was just that his mother had left, run off with some man, and his dad couldn’t cope. He was cheeky once too often to the police. That was all but, no matter, into Haut de la Garenne he went. He was a pretty child, and being pretty in that place was a curse. Those rich men, who took the boys out in their yachts, bloody raped him. He was a messed-up kid when I knew him in the home and a messed-up adult when I married him.

  ‘Anyway, his dad died not long before that. He never knew what his son had been put through, and Steve never wanted him to. Anyhow, he had his own house and he left it to Steve, plus a bit of savings. Actually made a will so that wife of his never got a penny. And now it’s mine. That’s why I came back.’

  ‘You could sell and move,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not going to do that. Moving won’t help. Can’t escape from yourself, can you, Madeleine?’

  I had no answer to that.

  Weeks went by when I didn’t see Frances. I feel guilty about that now, but I had two small children and my days were full of washing, ironing, cooking and worrying about making ends meet. Then, when she entered my mind, she would suddenly appear at my door. It was maybe a couple of years after our first meeting that I noticed her growing not aloof exactly, but detached.

  ‘I saw him,’ she said one day, as though I would be immediately aware of whom she meant.

  ‘Saw who?’ I asked, thinking she meant Colin Tilbrook, then remembering that he was dead. A fact that had caused me no grief when I had heard.

  ‘One of the boys. The ringleader. He recognised me all right.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Just smirked.’

  ‘Are you sure it was him?’ I asked – he would look very different now. But she refused to accept it might have been just a man looking at a pretty woman.

  That was the beginning of her not wanting to leave her house alone. At first I thought nothing of her ringing me up asking when I was going shopping so she could come with me. It was when I sensed her nervousness, as she thought she had seen someone she knew, that I knew something was wrong. If she heard a burst of laughter, she clutched my arm while she glanced surreptitiously around to see where it had come from. She must have thought it was directed at her, that wherever she went, behind her back, people were pointing fingers.

  I persuaded her to go to her doctor. She was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. Drugs were prescribed. For a while I thought she was improving, but I was wrong. Her fear increased, until nearly every time we went out, she thought she saw someone from her past.

  I tried to tell her that her fear was irrational. So many from the home had left Jersey, while several of those who had stayed had buried their secrets in alcohol. It had killed some who had become addicted to it.

  The wardens who had abused us were now old and the worst of them was dead.

  Sometimes Frances would appear completely rational, but that didn’t last for long. She had therapy. I have no idea what was said in those sessions, but they seemed to help her. Until she said that cars were trying to mow her down. A short spell in hospital followed. ‘I know it’s all in my head, Madeleine,’ she told me, once she was released, ‘but knowing it doesn’t make it any easier when I open my door. It just feels so dangerous out there. I try to move my feet, make them cross the threshold, but they refuse to obey. I just can’t do it unless someone is with me.’

  A small group took her out. Until the day came when she refused to leave. That must have been ten years ago. Her garden, which she’d loved, became neglected. A neighbour’s son mows her small lawn. Her hair, once so thick and dark, has turned grey and her beauty faded. I think with sadness of the girl she was, so plucky when she stood up for me,

  I hear her voice, an echo of who she used to be: ‘As soon as I’m sixteen I’ll leave this place. I’ll make a new life. I’ll be free.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  She didn’t know, when my eyes rested on her, that I wanted to bring back images of events that had happened over forty years ago. Her flesh might have become slack, her bones more brittle and her face creased with a network of lines, but those eyes, with their malevolent stare, had remained the same. Just seeing her helped me search through my layers of buried memory and find the first ones of the couple we’d known as the Jordans. The first bad ones, I mean, the ones that told me just who they really were.

  Like shaking a kaleidoscope, picture after picture came into my mind’s eye. I could see her prowling the corridors and the dormitories, shining a circle of blazing light onto our beds, hoping to find one of us talking. Just the sound of those footsteps was enough to silence us and make us quake with fear.

  She had very quickly done more than just instill that emotion in us.

  Morag Kidd had submerged us in it, so much so that we never felt safe. Both she and her partner, Anthony Jordan, who soon became her husband, had innumerable ways of inflicting pain. A hard-bristled hairbrush thwacked harshly on the back of a head, a fragile arm twisted to breaking point, an ear pinched, a foot stamped on, a tiny finger being bent, a fist sinking into a stomach.

  Those were the acts that hurt us physically, but there are many different types of pain and she made sure we experienced them all. There is the pain of humiliation, and she was a master at inflicting that. In my mind, I saw again that child, whose fear had caused her to wet the bed, having her face rubbed in the urine. I heard her being called a stinking little girl, then being sent to the laundry to wash her sheets.

  I heard Morag’s harsh northern accent ridiculing children as they entered adolescence, calling them spotty, stupid and lazy. She had a knack of identifying exactly how to strip away their every shred of confidence.

  One girl, who had started her periods and was almost doubled up with stomach cramps, was told in front of the whole dormitory that she stank of blood, then two sanitary towels were thrown at her.

  That type of behaviour was far from unknown in the home, but the Jordans added another dimension to the cruelty so carelessly inflicted upon us. They planned meticulously how to make us suffer most. Morag, especially, could sense our weaknesses and fears and in a very short time had worked out what was important to each of us.

  The ones in the home who cared about nothing, or so they said, who were just counting the days, months or even years until they were free, and had no one outside to visit them, those who showed the sullen defiance of the unhappy, she made to feel even more unwanted and unloved. They were taught that they were without a future and life would never improve.

  In my case, though, there was someone I loved unconditionally, and that was my mother. I understood that life had damaged her, while alcohol had taken away her ability to look after me. But I was not in the home because she didn’t love me, which Morag tried her utmost to make me believe.

  ‘So your little brother is still with your mother, is he? Guess that step-father of yours didn’t want another man’s child under his feet,’ was one of her taunts.

  ‘No, he’s nice to me,’ I told her, thinking, the first time she said it, she felt sorry for me.

  ‘Well, maybe he’s a little too nice to you and perhaps it’s your mother who doesn’t want you at home. Doesn
’t want him to be tempted by the sight of a young girl wandering around the house while she’s getting older. Heard you all slept in the same room at their old place, too. Interesting!’

  The heat would come into my face as those mocking eyes met mine.

  ‘Why, I do believe you’re blushing, Madeleine,’ she said, chuckling.

  My hatred for her took root then. She was trying to take away my belief in Frank’s and my mother’s love. Did she know that it gave me the strength to deal with much of what happened to me in the home? I think somehow she did.

  Observing me almost shaking with the effort of controlling my impotent anger, and encouraged by my reaction, she poisoned her barbs with even more venom. ‘Heard your mother prefers drink to you, Madeleine,’ she would say, causing a tingle of rage to crawl up from my stomach and lodge in my throat. Each time I swallowed the words that threatened to burst out and used the only weapon I had: silence.

  ‘Hmm. Cat got your tongue?’

  I knew, by the way her lips tightened, that she was frustrated by my lack of response. She wanted me to lose my temper and answer her back so she could mete out a punishment far in excess of the one fitting the crime. I clenched my hands and lowered my head to escape looking at her. Each time she tried to chip away at my belief in my mother and Frank, I told myself that I was wanted. I knew I was. I must never let her succeed in making me think otherwise. I was in the home only because my mother was ill.

  However, I proved no match for the scheming and vindictive Morag Jordan. I grasped this on the day when, thrown into the detention cells, I saw the gleam of triumph and satisfaction in her eyes. She had closely studied me, as she had all the others. She had learned my weaknesses and what was important to me. The taunts that came in my direction had the same theme. I was unwanted.

  Finally, when she repeated yet again that my mother was a good-for-nothing drunk who didn’t want me at home near her husband, something inside me snapped. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer. With my shoulders back and my cheeks flushed, I glared at her. ‘That’s not true,’ I told her hotly. ‘My mother loves me. That’s why she takes the bus here and walks up the hill whether it’s raining or hot. I’m not with her and Frank because she’s ill.’

  I had made a mistake with that outburst; one that proved to have dire results. I had not worked out at that stage that feeding Morag any information gave her what she needed to select her weapons. Now she had a snippet of personal information to investigate and manipulate to her advantage.

  For a short time she appeared to have forgotten about my mother and I began to believe that she had accepted what I’d said. She was almost pleasant to me on a couple of occasions and, regrettably, my guard slipped. Lulled into a false sense of security, I had no inkling that she was just planning her next manoeuvre.

  For Morag, as I was to learn, did not take kindly to being thwarted. She was going to see to it that on my mother’s next visit I would, by my behaviour, let her down. I was going to regret that outburst, all right. Not only had I shown how protective I felt towards the woman who, because of circumstances and weakness, had been unable to have much to do with my upbringing, I had also uttered the word ‘ill’.

  Morag must have made it her business to find out what form that illness took and discovered that my mother was asthmatic. For her, the uphill walk to the home would be considerably more tiring than for others. And if, when she arrived, she was turned away because of my bad behaviour, she would have to face the walk back without the benefit of any recuperation time. Knowing that I was responsible for causing her distress would hurt me even more than it might affect my mother.

  Yes, Morag and I were in a battle: she was determined to break me and I was equally determined to protect the core of who I was.

  She won when she threw me into the detention cells.

  Once I was in that tiny room, where only she could say how long I would be left there, I was completely in her power, a fact of which we were both aware. It was there that I understood how cleverly Morag had orchestrated the events that had led to my punishment.

  She had executed a scheme that she and her thuggish husband had, most probably, spent an enjoyable hour or so planning. And, I thought angrily, I had played right into their hands, although it’s difficult to imagine even now what I could have done to make the outcome any different. At that age, for I was not quite eleven, I was no match for a woman like Morag. Once she had planned to make someone suffer, nothing was going to stop her.

  Over the time I knew her I watched her plot against and manipulate everyone. Like a spider, she spun her web, and waited for her prey to become ensnared in its almost undetectable strands. Then, when there was no way for her victim to escape, Morag would smile triumphantly. Waving her justification for their punishment in his or her face, she took obscene delight in informing the unfortunate child just what was in store for them.

  Locking the so-called culprit in the cells was a method she instigated and she took particular pleasure in handing out. It was also the one we dreaded most. Those bleak, small rooms were beneath the floors in what we called the cellars. I had heard other girls whisper that just a few days down there would turn even the bravest of us into a sobbing, shrieking mess. No other punishment was feared as much as being locked down there. Just allowing the memory of that day to surface was enough for me to travel back in time to when I was, as I said proudly then, nearly eleven. It is as though I’m looking into a mirror at the childhood me.

  My face is puffy with tears and I’m shivering with cold. The only furniture in the cell is a wooden box with just a wafer thin mattress on it. No bedding or pillows, just a worn blanket in which I’ve wrapped myself. My eyes are shut. I don’t want to look up at the large window, without curtains, which was at ground level. Through it, the outside world is visible, but so, of course, am I.

  I’m imagining that already people are staring in and I ask myself how long I’ll be left there, and fight the urge to pee. There’s a bucket in the corner. I saw it when I was put in here, but the thought of someone at street level watching me squatting on it is unbearable. I just want it to be dark so I can be invisible.

  If, when I had woken up, I had thought that this might happen to me, I would not have forgotten, just for a few moments, where I was and who controlled us but I had and here I was.

  It was a Saturday morning, which meant no school, something that always made me feel happier. Outside, the sun was shining and I, along with two friends, was desperate to go into the grounds to play hide and seek or jump over a skipping rope.

  As soon as breakfast was finished and our dishes cleared away, we caught each other’s eye and headed for the door. I was hoping my mother would come and take me out. She had told me she would try.

  ‘It isn’t that I don’t want to see you, Madeleine,’ she had said on her previous visit, curling her fingers round a lock of my hair. ‘It’s just that I’m not as well as I was.’

  Poverty and cigarettes had taken a toll on her, which even I could see. Winter and summer, she was plagued with a chesty cough, her ankles were swollen, and I knew they ached when she made the journey up the steep hill to visit me. But she always assured me it was worth it, just to see my face. During that visit, though, she had admitted that she might soon find coming to the home too difficult.

  I had felt a surge of fear. I asked her what was wrong and she explained about the asthma. She blamed the damp in some of the run-down places where she had lived. ‘I get so short of breath,’ she had told me. ‘I’ve good days and ones not so good. And walking up that hill can be difficult. The doctor has told me to give up smoking, but I can’t give everything up, can I, Madeleine? I mean, it’s my one bit of enjoyment.’

  She didn’t look well, and I could hear her wheeze with each breath she took. But still, with a child’s optimism, I hoped today was a good one for her and that she was still coming. Morag would know, for visitors had to have permission to come, but I didn’t want to ask her bec
ause I knew she would use it against me.

  All I could do was wait.

  I knew that if my mother was coming, it would not be until later in the day and I didn’t want to spend time in the common room, when the beams of sunlight were beckoning us to pick up a skipping rope and play on the grass.

  As one, without a word being spoken, my two friends and I made a beeline for the outside door. Just as we were in the long corridor leading to it, a harsh voice stopped us in our tracks. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  This was a question that my friends had the good sense to let me answer.

  ‘Outside, miss,’ I said, thus sealing my fate for what was to happen next.

  ‘Well, did any of you ask me? No, of course you didn’t, Madeleine.’

  My heart sank. She had just added another rule to her ever-growing list. In fact, I thought, she had probably only thought of that one when she had seen us heading towards the grounds.

  Those pale eyes, gleaming with malice, were now fixed on me, as she waited to hear what excuse I could think of. Standing up straight, I forced myself to meet them and not show how scared I was.

  ‘I didn’t know we needed to ask on a Saturday, miss,’ I said, as firmly as I could. That small act of bravery did me no good whatsoever.

  ‘Not even an apology, Madeleine? What an insolent girl you’re becoming. Now, do you know what the cure for insolence is, Madeleine?’

  ‘No, miss.’

  ‘It’s work, Madeleine. Work is character-building. It’s only in the dictionary that “success” comes before it. Not, of course, that you would understand that. Not with what I have been given to understand about your lack of reading skills. I hear a six-year-old can do better than you. Luckily, I’m not your teacher. But it is my job to help form your character. So I have a nice little chore for you. Follow me, your little friends, too – no doubt it was your idea, but they went along with it.’