The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [19]
We stood at the window and watched them fighting until the police came to take them all away. It was like watching the Incredible Hulk at work. Richard was angry and when that happened he didn’t care who he took on or how bad the odds were. Displays like that made me all the more certain that he was capable of killing me and Mum if I ever disobeyed him.
He enjoyed making the rest of us fight as well, seeing it as a badge of honour for the family if we pulped someone else’s face. If Mum had made friends with another woman in the street he would tell her that she had been bad-mouthing her and would send her round to sort her out. I’m sure Mum must have known he was making it up, but she pretended to believe him in order to avoid a beating herself, I guess, and would go round to the woman’s house and beat her up instead.
Although Mum made it clear to me that she hated living with Richard, she seemed to have the same delusions about the need to be violent as he did. One day a boy from across the street got me in the eye with a pellet from a potato gun. I thought I was blinded and ran into the house crying. Mum sent me straight out to hit him back and show him the error of his ways. Knowing that I would be in big trouble if I lost the fight, I did as I was told and unleashed all the pent-up anger I could find, spurred on by the pain in my eye. The poor boy didn’t know what had hit him, and even though he was a pretty tough kid himself, his mum had to come running out of the house to separate us.
‘Your Janey’s a bleeding lunatic,’ another neighbour told Mum admiringly, which Mum seemed to take as a fine compliment. I felt proud of myself for upholding the family honour and doing my duty.
One summer holiday my cousin Tracy came to stay with us for a few weeks. I was so excited when I heard because no one ever came to stay with us and it would mean I had a girl I could play with instead of just my brothers. It also meant she would be staying in my room, which might mean Silly Git would have fewer opportunities to do things to me.
Although he still found ways of getting at me, even with Tracy there, she did obviously make it harder for him and he started to resent her presence around the house quite soon after she arrived. He began being unpleasant to her in the hope that she’d ask to go home, but she seemed not to take any notice, having no idea just how dangerous he was when he didn’t get things his own way.
One afternoon we were all playing in the garden and Richard and Mum were sitting on the patio watching us and drinking tea. Tracy and I were doing handstands on the grass and my brothers were running races. Silly Git must have been feeling left out and bored, or maybe plain mischievous. He wouldn’t have liked seeing me having fun like a normal little girl, not unless my happiness put me in his debt in some way.
‘Jane,’ he shouted. ‘Get over here.’
Tracy trotted innocently over with me.
‘Fuck off, Nosey,’ he snarled at her. ‘I weren’t calling you!’
Once she was out of earshot he beckoned me closer. ‘That Tracy’s being nasty to your brother,’ he told me. I knew it wasn’t true, but there was nothing I could say so I just looked at him, waiting to hear what would come next. ‘So what are you going to fucking do about it?’
‘Tracy and me were playing handstands,’ I said, trying not to sound as if I was arguing, a sick feeling of foreboding building in my stomach. ‘The boys were playing on their own.’
‘Don’t argue,’ he shouted. ‘You just go and hit her. Stick up for your brother.’
‘I don’t want to,’ I protested, knowing as I spoke that it was pointless to say anything now that he was getting angry.
‘We’re a fucking family,’ he snarled. ‘We fucking stick up for each other. You show some fucking loyalty and hit her for what she’s done to your brother.’
Not only did I not want to hit Tracy because she was my cousin and my friend, but she was also a lot bigger than me and would