The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [14]
Lighting those cigarettes gave me a taste for smoking by the time I was eleven or twelve, but I knew that if Richard found out I’d taken up the habit he would find some way to turn it into a torture, so I tried to keep it secret for as long as I could.
When I was thirteen I went on a school trip to Belgium that my granddad had paid for. I must have stunk of fags when I got back. The following evening Mum went out to have a cup of tea with a friend across the road, leaving me with Richard.
‘You’re smoking, aren’t you?’ he said as soon as we were alone.
‘No.’ I wondered what was coming next.
‘You are,’ he said, overruling my protests. ‘Here’s a fag. You either smoke it or you eat it, unless you tell me the truth.’
I took the cigarette, lit it up and smoked it in front of him.
‘Inhale it properly,’ he ordered. ‘I ain’t wasting my money buying you fucking fags if you ain’t gonna smoke them properly.’
Once I’d proved to his satisfaction that I was able to smoke properly he gave me a pack of ten, which I took straight up to my bedroom. By the time Mum came back across the road I was leaning out of my bedroom window puffing away happily.
‘Alright, Mum?’ I said cheerfully.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, obviously horrified at the thought of what would happen if Richard saw me.
‘I smoke now. It’s alright, Dad says I can.’
I guess it didn’t bother them because they worked out that if I was a smoker they would soon be able to cadge cigarettes off me when they ran short.
To start with Richard offered me a choice: I could have money for sweets each day or I could have fags. I chose the fags and for the next few mornings there would be a pack of ten waiting for me in a brass horsecart on the mantelpiece. It soon dwindled down to one or two loose ones, which I would use to refill my packet.
There was an awful lot of brass around the house – horse brasses on the wall, brass ornaments on every surface – all of which had to be polished regularly. Mum and Richard did have two big heavy brass soldiers as well, but he got rid of them because Mum kept using them to defend herself when he attacked her.
‘You’re gonna fucking kill me!’ he’d protest whenever she laid into him while fighting back.
As well as cleaning the house from top to bottom several times every day, we had to clean all our boots and shoes, and it had to be done properly, melting the polish into the leather in front of the fire before brushing it in. Everything had to be spotless and shiny, right down to the toilet seat, which was polished so often it was hard not to slide off it. Richard would insist that I made my bed with hospital corners that were exactly ninety degrees. I had no idea what ninety degrees meant, but he still warned me he would be checking them. If ever I complained to Mum, he would tell her he was just joking and that I was a stupid cow to take him seriously, but when we were alone he was deadly serious. If I did anything wrong I would be hit or have to pay a penance.
Every little task that he set me I did to the very best of my ability, but it was never enough. If anything, it seemed that the more I tried to please him, the further he wanted to push me, just to show that he could, just to inflict pain, just to show me that I was only allowed to live because he chose not to kill me.
The idea of hurting me must have been playing on his mind all the time, the urge to prove his power over me too delicious to resist. One of his favourite tortures, which started almost as soon as I came home from care, was to suffocate me in bed with my pillow, or with one he brought into the bedroom with him, pressing it down onto my face so hard that I was sure he was sitting on it with all his weight, although he was probably just using his hands. He was very strong when he was excited or angry.
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