Jane Elliott - The Little Prisoner

Meeting Jimmy again after so many years was a shock. I don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t what I found. Jimmy’s life experience since we had been parted couldn’t have been more different from mine. He had been adopted by some kind people who had enough money to indulge his every whim. He was their only child and seemed to have no problems in his life, but still he wasn’t happy and was having difficulty adapting to adulthood. I found I had little patience with him, and Steve had even less. It was disappointing after I had been carrying his memory around in my heart for so many years. Perhaps I was hoping that we would still be soulmates, as we had been when we were tiny and as we had remained in my mind all the years since. Maybe Jimmy was so damaged by his early years that no amount of love and security could overcome it, or maybe there was a genetic inheritance that he just couldn’t shake off. Yet despite all that has happened over the years and the different paths that we have followed, I still love the man who was once the little boy I was forced to leave behind at the foster home and used to talk to through the birthmark on my arm.

Although in some ways my life was getting better, the black clouds of depression that I had always feared would arrive one day were growing darker all the time. I was constantly thinking about how much better off everyone would be without me, especially Steve and the girls. I was always miserable and felt I was no use to them at all.

I was continuing to buy drink and tablets, getting ready to make myself do something that I didn’t really want to do. Eventually, having sat alone in the kitchen one morning screaming and crying, I drank enough to pluck up the courage to swallow a handful of powerful tranquillizers and anti-depressants. I’d already made arrangements for someone else to pick up the kids after school and keep them at their house until I came for them, believing I would be dead by then.

I don’t think I can have taken enough tablets, though, because I was still able to walk to the front door when someone refused to stop banging on it.

‘What have you done?’ my friend asked when I opened the door and she saw the state of me.

I crumpled onto the floor in the kitchen, crawling into a corner and bawling my eyes out, just wanting it all to be over. I couldn’t make my legs work any more. Every time I stood up, I fell down again. My friend went mad at me, shouting and screaming, and knowing what I had done because I’d been talking about it for so long. She called her mum, who was a nurse and lived just across the road, and the pair of them were shouting questions at me: ‘How many have you taken?’

I tried to reply, but I wasn’t making any sense, my words too slurred and my face numb.

My friend rang her husband, who came home from work and drove me up to the hospital. Once I got there I felt like a fool. I couldn’t have taken enough tablets at all because they didn’t even pump my stomach out, but they wouldn’t let me go until they’d done some tests. I just wanted to sleep, I was so tired, but they wouldn’t let me.

Steve came in later and wasn’t pleased. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you home.’

After this I realized I was going to have to get a real grip if I was going to beat my demons and be a decent mother to the girls.

One of my main tasks in the year until the case came to court was to find as many witnesses as possible who would come forward and support my story. I needed people to testify how violent and frightening Richard was and how easily he would have been able to intimidate and bully a child into doing as he wanted. In my naiveté I thought that once they saw that I wasn’t afraid to stand up to him, all the other members of the family would feel able to speak up too. He had beaten up, attacked and intimidated them over the years, so I actually thought they would be grateful to me for finally exposing him for the vicious, idle, cruel bully that he was. I remembered all the times Mum and the boys had said how much better life would be without him. Mum had always believed the boys would be the ones to save her from him when they were grown up, but maybe I would have to be the one to do it.

Unfortunately, I had underestimated Richard’s powers to intimidate. One or two of my girlfriends from the past took my calls and agreed to be witnesses for me, but all of them rang back after talking to their husbands and partners to withdraw their support. No one, it seemed, wanted to put their lives, their homes and their families at risk. It appeared that Richard had succeeded yet again in making an entire community too terrified to stand up to him, even when they were offered the chance, but I completely understood how they felt. Hadn’t he been able to keep me silent for twenty years?

There were also people I deliberately didn’t approach because I knew they were too vulnerable. I knew they would do it for me, but Richard would kill them. Cheryl, for instance, had done a lot to help me over the years and I couldn’t ask her to put herself in any more danger on my behalf.

I hadn’t seen Hayley for so long I was very hesitant to contact her now and ask such a big favour, but eventually I could see that I needed all the help I could get.

‘Of course I’ll help you,’ she said as soon as I asked, and I remembered how we had become blood sisters that day all those years ago. ‘You should have asked me ages ago,’ she went on. ‘Your mum has already been round asking my mum to be a witness for them.’

‘What did your mum say?’

‘She said no, but their solicitors keep knocking on the door.’

It was wonderful to find that there were some people who had found the strength to stand up for what they believed to be right.

The more I found out, the more my head was spinning. I was shocked by how many of the older neighbours said that they had always known what was going on between Richard and me, as if it was inevitable and there was nothing they could have done about it. Maybe there was nothing they could have done, but at least they could have tried. Perhaps they assumed I was a willing participant in the relationship. Was that really possible?

Uncle John, who had been my friend in the days when he lived next door to us, also agreed to stand up and speak out against Richard.

‘I know your granddad would never forgive me if I didn’t help you when I had the chance,’ he said. He would pay a terrible price later, branded a traitor to the family for siding with me against the precious patriarch.

Another of my uncles, who I knew had been beaten and bullied by Richard in the past, rang to tell me that Richard had asked him to be a witness for the defence and that he couldn’t get out of it. I checked with Marie and she assured me that he would be perfectly within his rights to say no. I rang him back and told him he didn’t have to do what Richard asked.

‘But you know, Janey,’ he whinged, ‘I used to go down the pub with him sometimes. He’s really just an ordinary bloke.’

As far as I knew Richard hardly ever went to the pub. The one occasion when he did go with this uncle he rolled back home blind drunk, having picked a fight on the way home then fallen over and dropped his Chinese all over the front garden. I think he knew that he couldn’t handle his drink, which was why most of the time he and Mum just drank endless cups of tea.

‘How can you be talking to me like that about a man who raped and abused me almost every day of my life for seventeen years?’ I demanded.

‘Oh, now hang on there, Janey,’ my uncle cautioned, as if he was some wise elder of the family. ‘We don’t know that for sure. Everyone’s innocent until they’re proven guilty.’