The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [78]
‘That’s it,’ I thought, ‘this lot are loving it. They’re never happier than when they’re winding someone up. Any day without a good fight story to tell is a wasted day to them.’
In the background I heard my mother’s voice shouting over the rest. ‘What’s the matter with her then? Is she missing his cock?’
I hung up the phone. There was nothing left to say really.
The poor little journalist couldn’t get out of the house quick enough.
Now it’s all over and Steve and I can concentrate on bringing up the girls in a normal family atmosphere. I feel I’ve done what I had to. Now I’m Mrs Elliott, a normal wife and mum, taking my children back and forth to school, running the home and walking the dog, but there will always be a hole where my past should have been.
Some old schoolfriends contacted me through the Internet and invited me to a reunion in a pub near the old school. I wanted to see them all, but it was hard to travel back to the area where my family still lived. In the end I summoned all my courage – after all, Silly Git had been taken off the street and I reckoned I could deal with my brothers. I used to change their nappies, for God’s sake!
‘Oh my God!’ the girls shrieked when they saw me coming into the reunion. ‘It’s the nutter herself.’
I gave a joyful laugh at the sight of all their familiar faces.
‘Ah, you’ve still got that terrible laugh!’ they cried.
As we got talking they started to tease me about my accent. ‘You’ve started putting “t”s in the middle of words like water,’ they laughed. ‘You’re getting posh.’
‘That’s funny,’ I laughed, ‘because where I live now they think I’m dead common.’
When I finally decided to write this book and I told the children, Emma wanted to know why I wasn’t going to use our real names.
‘Well,’ I took a deep breath, ‘there may be people at school who will read about the horrible things that happened to me when I was young and will tease you about it, and I wouldn’t want that.’
‘Well, I would just tell them to shut up,’ she said, with a look of puzzlement, ‘and I would tell them my mum was really brave and I was really proud of you.’
Epilogue
Once Richard was behind bars I started to become more confident about going back to the area where the family used to live to visit a friend or go out. I always travelled with someone else and stressed that no one should tell anyone in my family that I was there, but I was beginning to feel safer. Even so, I was always anxious not to push my luck. Although things had gone well at the school reunion I’d attended, when I was told about another one I was reluctant to go. It seemed to me that I was tempting fate to go back for such a public event.
Several friends, however, who had found me through Friends Reunited, were bombarding me with e-mails saying that I had to come. The girls were telling me that everyone was going to be there and they all really wanted to see me, and the blokes told me not to worry because they wouldn’t let anything happen to me. It felt really nice to think that they all wanted to see me so much and since Steve was going to be away on business for a few nights anyway, I decided to take my courage in both hands and go.
I booked a train ticket and took a taxi to Tanya’s house. The plan was for us to meet at a pub and then go on to a club afterwards. It was a sunny summer’s evening and although I was nervous about being back in the area, I was looking forward to a good night out.
As we got out of the car outside the pub I saw a group of our friends already sitting at one of the tables and at the same moment I spotted some of my cousins coming out of the pub with drinks. One of them was Tracy, the girl that Silly Git had made me fight with all those years ago.
‘Janey!’ the table of old schoolfriends shouted at the tops of their voices. ‘Over here, Janey!’
The moment I saw the expressions on my cousins’ faces I knew that I was in danger. I remembered the phone call with all of them screaming abuse and telling me how I’d managed to unite the whole family against