The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [39]
He also suggested that a girlfriend and I went down to Southend with a couple of boys to stay in my uncle’s caravan. In the end the boys weren’t able to get away from work, but my friend and I still went and met up with some other boys when we were down there. It was a brilliant holiday, except for one incident when one of the boys was messing about with a big pebble which my cousins must have brought in from the beach and varnished. He was chucking it from hand to hand while standing in front of the caravan window and catching it just in time. I was asking him not to and then he missed the catch and it hit the window. I went mental, imagining how much trouble I was going to get into for this, and I made the poor boy call out someone at Bank Holiday rates to replace the window.
It was a great holiday, but it left me puzzled as to why I had suddenly been allowed to do something so grown up. It gave me a shred of hope that maybe things were going to get better.
When I got back home one of the boys we had met sent me a love letter. Richard intercepted my post as always and read it out loud to the whole family while I sat there crying my eyes out, feeling humiliated and realizing I wasn’t free yet.
There was a boy called Nick living in our street who was a year older than me and had already left school to become a scaffolder, and I thought he was fantastic. All the girls fancied him. Hayley and I used to watch him walking past our houses from behind net curtains, giggling and sighing and fantasizing about him asking us out. I would never have let him know how I felt because I would have been too embarrassed and because I wouldn’t have wanted my stepdad to know that I fancied someone in case he turned nasty on them.
I was coming back from school as normal one afternoon and as I approached the house I knew the sitting room had been stripped out in order to be redecorated yet again. The giveaway sign was that the windows had been smeared with Windolene so that people couldn’t see in while the curtains were down. As I went in Richard greeted me in a particularly good mood. Decorating always seemed to make him happy.
The windows were open to let out the fumes from the paint and from inside the room I saw Nick coming down the street, going towards his house. Richard spotted him as well and must have seen something in my expression because he started singing, ‘Love is in the air! Janey’s in love with Nick.’
I could see that Nick could hear and just wanted to curl up and die. Then Richard started calling out to him like a stupid schoolkid: ‘Janey loves you, Nick!’
He wrote the same message in the Windolene with his finger for everyone, including Nick, to see. I had to laugh with him or I would have been in trouble for being a miserable cow, but actually I was just shrivelling up from embarrassment.
Richard wasn’t going to let it drop either. Every day Nick would walk past the house and Richard would shout at him again, until eventually he got a grinning response out of the boy and finally he was inviting him in for a cup of tea. Nick’s visits began to become a regular thing and I started to go out with him. Although I’d been so angry with Richard at the beginning, I had to admit that this was a bit of a result for me, as I’d fancied Nick for so long and would never have plucked up the courage to talk to him myself.
I began to think that maybe this would mark the end of the abuse. If Richard was matching me up with someone else, maybe he was planning to leave me alone himself. Perhaps now that I was no longer a child, he was finally losing interest in me and would be willing to let me step out from under his tyrannical rule.
I don’t know why I was so optimistic. There had already been so many times when I’d thought that maybe Richard would change his ways. I’d hoped he would stop when I reached puberty and with every birthday since I’d hoped that he would lose interest in me, but it never happened. Occasionally I would ask if we could stop doing things and he