They Stole My Innocence Read online

  Even Mrs Peacock’s dogs, two rather plump Labradors that I loved, would let any small pair of hands stroke them. So when those smiling couples came, I would will them to choose me. But they never did. What was wrong? I asked myself. Why did no one want me?

  A woman came every week to visit me. She had dark hair, red lipstick and always wanted to hug me. She told me she was my real mummy and that soon I was going to live with her, but first she had to find a home that was big enough for both of us. I didn’t believe her: there were no new clothes and Mrs Peacock hadn’t told me that I was going to live with a new mummy and daddy.

  I found out many years later that my mother had refused to sign the necessary release forms for adoption: she wanted her children back, according to the social workers.

  ‘So,’ said the policeman, ‘you admit you were happy there. While the state was ensuring you were cared for, your mother had five years to get her life back together. Do you want me to read what the social workers said?’

  I shook my head. I already knew what was in the report sitting in front of him and what was not. Unsuitable accommodation, drinking problems and an abusive marriage were the reasons given for the state’s refusal to return me to her. It did not say that soon after their arrest my father had left, that with no one to turn to my mother was almost destitute. After all, it was not she who was their concern. They had removed her last child.

  My mother had lost everyone she loved. But the people who removed me were not interested in that. Their concern was for the baby I was then.

  CHAPTER SIX

  2008 was the year my nightmares returned.

  Night after night I wake, my body soaked in perspiration, my mouth still open from the last scream, the sheets tangled around me — the past and present have collided.

  ‘What is it, Madeleine?’ my husband asks.

  ‘What is it, Mother?’ asks my son.

  ‘What’s happening to you?’ asks my bewildered thirteen-year-old daughter.

  I tell them little bits at a time.

  The anger they express at what happened is mixed with disillusion at my having excluded them from my secrets. I understand that, behind their rage, there is a sorrow so enervating it saps the concern from my husband and the love from my daughter.

  It is my son who holds my hand and takes me to the police station. My son, who has to hear every word that leaves my lips. The questions fired at me, not just from the police but from those who feel betrayed by my years of silence, hammer in my head. Now I cannot remember who asked which one.

  * * *

  The police asked enough to bring back the past but, even worse, they – as others had many years earlier – expressed doubt as to the accuracy of what I told them. They all demanded to know what had happened to me in Haut de la Garenne. I looked at my tormenters one by one until they faded away and the past became more vivid than the present.

  What none of them could visualise was what it was like for me on the day when I was taken to that terrible place.

  But I could.

  It had started as a day like any other. I was in the garden skipping with a rope and singing tunelessly to myself when Mrs Peacock appeared and asked me to come inside. She took me to her room and it was there, sitting in an armchair, impatient to return to my friends, that she told me it was time for me to leave the crèche. ‘Madeleine,’ she said gently, ‘it was your birthday this week. Which one was it?’

  ‘Five,’ I said, remembering the cake with its pink icing and the candles I had blown out in one big puff. And the present I was allowed to keep: a blonde-haired doll called Barbie.

  ‘Every little girl wants one of these,’ the woman who said to call her ‘Mummy’ had told me, when she placed it in my hands.

  ‘Five,’ Mrs Peacock repeated, ‘and what happens, Madeleine, once you are five?’

  ‘I go to school?’

  ‘Yes, you go to school, because you are no longer a little girl, are you?’

  ‘No. I’m a big girl now,’ I said proudly, drawing myself up as tall as I could.

  ‘Yes, you are, Madeleine, and this place, the crèche, is for small children. So we have found another place for you, another home, where you will be happy.’

  ‘With a new mummy and daddy?’ I asked excitedly.

  ‘No, Madeleine, not yet. It’s another place like this but for bigger children.’

  I stared at her, uncomprehending. This was my home. It was where my friends were. I knew the name of everyone who looked after us. And was I not Mrs Peacock’s favourite? I had overheard a nursery nurse say so. She had said it was no wonder when I had the same colour hair as hers, the strawberry blonde I had inherited from my father, and looked more like her than the woman who visited me.

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘I won’t go.’

  Of course I didn’t understand that there was nothing she could do. She told me I would make new friends and that I would like school, but nothing she said could pacify me.

  ‘I want to go and live with my other mummy,’ I shouted, ‘if you don’t want me.’ My face red with hurt and anger, tears streaming down shiny cheeks, I placed clenched fists on small hips and glared at her.

  Instead of being angry she reached for me, pulled me tight into her soft warmth and, while she held me, I cried and cried. Only when my sobs had reduced to snivels did she release me.

  ‘Your mummy cannot have you back yet,’ she said. ‘But she is looking for a bigger place to live. And she will still visit you every week.’ But, by then, neither of us believed that my mother would ever be able to provide a home for her children.

  The next day I was bundled into Mrs Peacock’s green Morris Minor. Clutching my new doll, I sat in the back. I was leaving everything and everyone I loved. I pressed my face to the window, just watching the countryside slide past. We slowed, turned into a driveway, and then I saw the place that was going to be my new home. A huge, forbidding granite building. The car stopped. I was lifted out.

  ‘Take my hand, Madeleine,’ Mrs Peacock told me and, trusting her, I curled my fingers around hers as we walked to the door.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A tall thin man carrying a clipboard ushered us in. Behind him was a warden, for that was what they were called, a slight woman, neither young nor old, with wispy, mousy hair caught back in a bun. He said she would look after me. I noticed a dark mole just under her nose and that her lipstick had leaked into the fine smoker’s lines around her mouth. I thought she looked like a witch and tried to move closer to Mrs Peacock.

  The man smiled, introduced himself as Mr Tilbrook’s deputy, and said that I was to be taken to meet him straight away.

  ‘This is Madeleine’s,’ said Mrs Peacock, placing a small case on the floor. I knew what was inside it for I had helped pack it. There were the clothes for me to wear to school, my favourite hair ribbons and my doll. I had held her on the journey but just before we had arrived Mrs Peacock had said that she would be safer packed away. ‘It’s just for a short time, Madeleine,’ she had added reassuringly. So I had wrapped her in my newest jumper, a pretty Fair Isle one, kissed the top of her head and told her that she would not be in that dark place for long.

  ‘I’ll take that. She can have it later,’ the man said, and beckoned to the woman with the dark mole. ‘Better that she gets into our routine straight away,’ he said to Mrs Peacock. ‘Miss Potts here will take her to meet the headmaster. Once Mr Tilbrook has seen her, she will be shown around before meeting some of the other children. I’m sure she’ll soon make friends. Now, Madeleine, say goodbye to Mrs Peacock.’

  With my mouth trembling, I looked up into the kind face I knew so well. Before I had a chance to cling to the woman who had brought me up since I was a baby and beg her not to leave me there, a firm hand grasped my shoulder and I was whisked away.

  The woman who walked me down the long, dark corridors, with grey slate floors and stark, bare walls steeped in the institutional smell I came to hate (that mixture of disinfectant, cheap s
oap, sweat and despair), informed me that, now I was five, I was no longer a baby. I had to learn that this place did not exist to pamper children. There were rules that to be obeyed and those I had to learn.

  The first one was that I was only to speak when spoken to.

  The female wardens were to be addressed as ‘miss’.

  I was to call Mr Tilbrook ‘sir’ at all times.

  ‘Do you understand, Madeleine?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered, feeling butterflies wriggling in my stomach.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ she corrected me.

  We reached a door. She knocked, a man’s voice bade us enter and I was in the headmaster’s office. It was a large, airy room with two windows overlooking the front of the house and a massive fireplace at the far end. Near the window was his large, wooden desk.

  Unlike Mrs Peacock’s, with its coloured files, framed photographs and a flowering potted plant, it was bare, except for a long, slender cane. I soon came to know why it was there. He sat behind the desk, unsmiling, a darkly bearded man, dressed in black. That first sight of Colin Tilbrook, whose name I would remember long after he was dead, is ingrained on my memory. He said little to me that day, just repeated what the warden had told me. With no smile or warmth, he stated that I was going to start school and I had to get used to discipline.

  This was my first step in growing up. He expected me to obey the rules. He also repeated the instruction that I must call him ‘sir’ and the female wardens ‘miss’. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I mumbled. As I looked into his eyes I saw a cold darkness in them that made me shudder.

  ‘Yes, what, Madeleine?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  That was my first lesson.

  He dismissed me then, saying he would see me on another day when I had settled in, and told the warden to show me where I had to go.

  I was marched down more dark corridors to a room, Miss Potts said, where all the stores were kept. Inside, shelves overflowed with clothes, towels and bedding. It was, she added, kept locked at all times. Only the wardens had the key.

  I was mystified as to why she had told me that, and why we were there. After all, I had everything I needed with me and I tried to tell her so. She ignored my stumbling words, told me to be quiet and that she was too busy to listen to a little girl’s prattle. Without another word, she pulled item after item off the shelves and piled them into my arms – a grey pinafore dress, grey underwear and two nightdresses. My arms ached as I followed her into the dormitory, with its two rows of metal-framed white beds and small, battered lockers.

  I was told to place a nightdress at the bottom of the bed and everything else in the locker.

  Next she showed me the bathrooms, with their rows of basins, gave me a toothbrush, a tin of pink paste, a flannel and a comb. I was too frightened by then to tell her I already had those things. Instead I obediently placed them in the drawstring bag she handed me and hung it on a hook.

  The rest of that day is a blur – the dining room with long tables and wooden benches where children sat in enforced silence, the greasy food that made me feel sick, but the very worst was bedtime, at which the mousy-haired woman officiated.

  ‘Where are my things? My case? My doll is in it!’

  ‘You will wear the clothes that are given to you,’ she snapped.

  ‘But my doll,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Dolls,’ she said firmly, ‘are for babies and you are no longer a baby.’

  With a sinking heart, I understood that I was not going to see my doll again, or wear my pretty Fair Isle jumper, or have my hair tied back in those bright ribbons. The case, with my precious things, was lost to me.

  In bed, I drew my knees to my chest, placed my thumb in my mouth and sobbed myself to sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was always a boy who came for me. ‘Mr Tilbrook wants to see you, Madeleine,’ was all he said each time.

  My throat would close with fear as I clenched my hands. I wanted to put my fingers in my ears, blocking out the boy’s voice. Each time those thoughts raced through my head, a warden would glance in my direction.

  ‘What are you sitting there for, Madeleine? You heard what was said to you so off you go. You mustn’t keep Sir waiting, must you?’

  I ignored the looks that came my way from the other children, some pitying, others relieved that this time it was me he had sent for, and a few gleeful, from those who took pleasure in seeing fear on small children’s faces.

  The first time he sent for me I was scared that I must have done something wrong and was going to be punished. To my surprise, when I went into his office, he did not look angry. The frown he wore when patrolling the corridors had been replaced with a smile.

  ‘That will be all,’ he said to my escort, and motioned me to come around the desk to where he was sitting. ‘Well, Madeleine, how are you settling in?’ he asked, the moment the door closed behind the boy.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the words stuck in my throat. My legs were shaking and the butterflies in my stomach were fluttering again.

  ‘Come now, Madeleine, look at me when I’m speaking to you, not at the floor.’ A finger went under my chin.

  I didn’t like his face: all that hair and eyes so dark they seemed like mirrors where I could see my reflection. His hand stroked my hair. A sweet appeared and some of my fear left me.

  ‘Come,’ he said and, sitting back, he lifted me up and sat me on his knee. ‘Now, Madeleine, we’re going to be friends, aren’t we?’

  I nodded. I wanted to please him.

  His hand started stroking my leg. Fingers slid around my ankle, then travelled upwards. Dark hair sprouted from them and, as I stared in horror, his hand seemed to become a huge spider, which was crawling over me.

  I wanted to leap off his lap and run to the door, but there was nowhere for me to go. No nice nursery nurse would comfort me and wrap her arms around me. There was just him and the hard-faced wardens.

  The spider climbed higher, went between my legs and one finger slipped under my knickers’ elastic. I might have been only five, but that place was private! It was for peeing and I didn’t want it touched. But fear made me sit completely still.

  Of course, as I grew from childhood to adulthood, I learnt that over the centuries there have always been men who have raped, tortured and murdered women and little girls because they were spoils of war, because they were their possessions or just because they could. And, as I was to discover, there were also women in the world who were the very opposite of the warm, caring mother figures I had encountered in my earlier years. But then I still believed that grown-ups were there to protect us, to bandage cut knees and read us bedtime stories.

  I had also been told, for as long as I could understand, that adults were to be obeyed. So when he moved me onto his chair and told me to close my eyes and not open them until he said I could, I obeyed him.

  When he forced my mouth open and pushed something hot and sour between my lips, I didn’t move.

  And when my face was covered in something hot and sticky, I still sat there rigidly.

  His voice, hoarser than before, told me I was a good girl and that I could open my eyes. He moved to wipe my face with his handkerchief, but the smell of something like bleach, combined with the fear that his action had generated, made my stomach churn and, without warning, I vomited. My fingers went up to my mouth as the hot stream spurted from it.

  With an exclamation of disgust he shoved the wastepaper bin towards me and told me not to miss. I was beyond caring about his annoyance as, eyes streaming, I bent double and retched and retched.

  I have no memory of how I got back to the room where the other children were.

  Much later, I lay in my cold, hard bed, my arms curled tightly around my knees, trying to make myself as small as possible, while tears trickled down my face.

  * * *

  The next day I started school.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A voice, loud and
harsh, entered my dreams, making my eyes spring open and my body clench with fear. Above me loomed the face of the warden who had opened the door the day I had arrived. The one who had taken my doll and all my pretty things. This time the conciliatory smile had been replaced by an expression that I saw, blinking with the residue of an uneasy sleep, was far from friendly.

  ‘Get out of bed now,’ she was saying. ‘Seven o’clock and still sleeping, Madeleine, on your first day at school, too.’ She threw my blankets and sheets onto the floor. I tried to say sorry, but before I was able to utter the word, her arm snaked out and she jerked me off the mattress to land in a heap on the floor by my bedding. ‘And here I was thinking you would be one of the first up. Surely this is an exciting day for you, isn’t it?’

  I didn’t feel excited, only scared. Those treacherous butterflies were swarming in my stomach, and my tongue felt as though it was glued to the roof of my mouth. I swallowed, then remembered what had been instilled in me and quickly muttered ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you know what it means when you start school, don’t you?’ Without waiting for a reply she gave me a mocking smile. ‘It means you’re a big girl, and what do big girls do, Madeleine?’

  Not knowing what answer she wanted I just gulped and stared at her.

  ‘They make their beds, Madeleine. And when it is done to my satisfaction, they get their breakfast. Now, I have already done half your work, stripped your bed for you, haven’t I? So what do you say?’

  I could feel the eyes of every girl in that dormitory looking at me. My legs shook, I wanted to wee and, more than anything, I wanted Mrs Peacock.

  ‘Thank you, miss,’ whispered a dark-haired girl, who looked about thirteen, standing at the foot of the bed next to me.

  ‘Thank you, miss,’ I repeated.

  The warden glared at my rescuer. ‘Well, Frances, since you’re so good at speaking for Madeleine, you can show her how to make her bed, as well as your own. You’ll have to be extra fast, mind. You know what happens to girls who are late for breakfast, don’t you?’