The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [72]
Chapter Eleven
On the morning of the trial we saw the girls off to school before setting out for the court, trying to pretend that it was a normal day, but I doubt if we fooled them. They must have been able to sense the tension in the air.
We’d arranged to meet Marie and her colleagues from the police in the car park behind the court building, so they could let us in through a back entrance.
‘They’ll be waiting for you at the front entrance, trying to intimidate you,’ Marie explained. ‘We don’t want you to have to meet up with them.’
Ushered quickly into the building, we were taken upstairs to a room that was set aside for witnesses waiting their turn in the box. None of us were allowed to talk to one another, even though Steve and I had been in a car together until a few minutes before. There were armchairs and we just had to sit and wait until we were called. There was no sign of my dad.
Nothing happened for hours, while the jury was being sworn in and other rituals that we knew nothing about were being gone through. We had assumed that they would call Steve first. He was looking forward to taking the stand. Richard had put him through a lot over the years and he relished the idea of putting things right at last.
‘Jane Elliott,’ an official called out. My heart lurched. I was going in first! I didn’t want to leave the room full of friendly, supportive faces, knowing that Silly Git was going to be waiting for me in the courtroom and that there were going to be people trying to prove I was a liar and making me talk about things I didn’t even want to think about any more. I walked out in a trance.
As I made my way into the courtroom one of my uncles and my brother Pete, whom I had more or less brought up as a little boy, were sitting by the door with their arms folded, just staring menacingly, trying to intimidate me, hoping to make me back down like every other person who had ever tried to put a stop to Silly Git’s reign of terror. That was the first time I noticed that my brother had a tattoo on his neck, just like his dad.
‘Don’t look at them,’ my officer instructed, trying to move me forward quickly. ‘Don’t look at them, they’re just trying to unnerve you.’
I was shaking with fear, but I stared back at them as if I didn’t care. The tension had been building towards this moment for a year, never mind the twenty or more years before that. I wasn’t going to back down now. I had no respect for any of the people who had caved in and refused to back me up. After all he’d done to them as well. I stared back defiantly at my brother and uncle and shook my head, as if telling them that I couldn’t believe what they were doing, that I was disappointed in them as men. I have no way of knowing whether they felt any shame or whether they had grown so used to obeying Richard that they actually believed it was right and normal. It certainly seemed he had been very successful in his campaign to convince them that ‘families must stick together no matter what’.
Once I was inside the courtroom I bent my head to let my hair fall forward across my eyes, curtaining out everything except what was directly in front of me. I didn’t want to see Silly Git’s face if I could help it. I didn’t want to imprint it afresh on my mind. I’d managed to put my memories into places where I could cope with them most of the time, I didn’t want any fresh images to haunt me in the small hours of the morning. To my relief I realized that as long as I kept the hair falling forward, he was going to be sitting outside my line of vision. I knew two of my friends were in the gallery, but I couldn’t see them either.
My first day in the witness box was hard,