The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [32]
Now they were a new means of torture. As my arms began to shake, Richard would add another volume and then he would balance his brown glass Britvic pub ashtray on top. If my arms dropped at all, the ashtray would slide off and he would kick me in the back or the head, shouting at me like a sergeant major to keep my arms up. The agony was intense and when my arms would shake with the strain it would make him even angrier. He seemed to enjoy that sort of torture almost as much as the sexual ones.
When my real life became unbearable I used to retreat inside my head into a fantasy world. Sometimes I would imagine that I was Cinderella, slaving away for my evil stepfather rather than my evil stepmother, and that one day my Fairy Godmother would come and I would be taken to the ball to meet Prince Charming, who would whisk me away from home and marry me. If I could convince myself, even for a few minutes, that there was going to be a happy ending to my story, then I could keep going.
At other times I began to think I was Jesus and I had come back down to Earth to suffer some more in order to save people, just like he did in the Bible. If there was some point to my suffering, then it was easier to bear.
Many years later, when I told these fantasies to a psychologist, he said he thought they might have been what kept me sane through those years, life rafts which allowed me to believe that things would be better one day and that all the suffering wasn’t for nothing.
When I was at senior school a girl called Tanya came back to the school after being taken away because of being bullied. I happened to be outside the head of year’s study on the morning she arrived. I’d been caught smoking, which happened frequently and which the head of year had given up trying to do anything about, as he knew my parents encouraged me. Tanya was sitting beside me.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got to come back,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get into any other school.’
At that moment a group of the girls who had been bullying her came past, making threatening sucking noises with their teeth, and I could see she was really frightened. We were both called into the head of year’s study together. ‘Right, Jane,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put Tanya in your class and you’ve got to look after her.’ From that moment we became inseparable.
Right away I could see that we were going to have to face down the gang that was bullying Tanya. She was even frightened to go into the toilets because she knew they would follow her in and give her a hard time.
‘I’ll wait till I get home,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You go to the toilet when you want to. I’ll come in with you.’
Sure enough, they followed us in and started mixing it. I think my experiences with Silly Git had made me especially sensitive to bullying. I just couldn’t stand it. There was another girl in the year below us who was a bit of a pitiful figure, always smelling of wee and covered in nits. She used to be bullied so much she would have fits and I started sitting next to her on the bus so that I could protect her, but I would have to get off a few stops before her and the moment the bus pulled away I would see them all jumping on her. I really hated having to leave her with them every day.
Anyway, the gang never bothered Tanya again once I’d made it clear that if they did they would be bothering me as well. I daresay they were wary of me, aware that I came from a family that was known for its violence. The training in aggression that Richard and Mum had given me had actually come in useful for once. I think being well liked