Jane Elliott: The Little Prisoner

‘Why would I make stuff like that up?’ I yelled, beside myself with fury that I was hearing this from a man who had himself suffered at Richard’s hands. ‘How could I imagine seventeen years of terror and pain?’

In the end they nearly all caved in except Hayley, Uncle John, Paul and Steve. I asked my dad if he would be at the court and he promised me he would. Steve’s dad and two friends sat in for moral support.

Now that I was talking openly with so many people about what had happened in the past, things were beginning to click into place in my head and I was starting to feel better.

By now Steve was doing really well at work and had managed to buy us a better home in a nicer area which was even further from where my family was rooted. He had done brilliantly to earn enough to get a bigger mortgage and afford a nice house on a pleasant estate. The house was modern and nothing like the places I had lived in as a child. I should have felt that I was finally escaping my past. But I still found it impossible to enjoy anything good that happened to us. For so many years I had been conditioned to think that if something nice happened you would have to pay a penalty, do someone a favour or take a beating that I couldn’t now believe it was possible our lives might be getting better.

As the first day of the case loomed closer I became increasingly nervous. What if no one believed me and the jury let Richard off? What if the men in the jury were doing the same things to their children that he had done to me? What if the judge did those sorts of things, or the barristers? What if I had to live the rest of my life in fear of Richard coming back for revenge? What if I was never able to get any sort of acknowledgement of what he had put me through? What if his bullying tactics proved to be successful in the end? How would I live with any of that?

O n 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, as my barrister went over my childhood in every embarrassing detail. Everything had to be spelled out graphically, so that there could be no danger of any misunderstanding on the part of the judge or the jury and so that it could all be put down on the record. It was no good me referring coyly to ‘his thing’ if I meant ‘his penis’. Every sex act had to be described without any modesty. There was nowhere for me to hide.

Although I was embarrassed to be talking about such things in front of strangers, I knew that my barrister was doing the right thing. He’d told the police that he had never worked on any case before where he was so determined to get justice for his client and to ensure that the defendant was imprisoned for as long as possible.

I noticed that Richard’s defence lawyer was a striking-looking young black woman. She reminded me of the disco diva Grace Jones. I knew Richard wouldn’t like that, holding the racist views that he did. And the chances were that he would have made his views known to her.

All the time I was giving evidence I kept my hair down, screening out his face, and that also helped to cover my embarrassment a little. I didn’t want to see people pitying me in case I wasn’t able to keep control of my voice. I was determined not to choke up, to ensure that I did the job as well as I possibly could. Every so often Silly Git would let out a rasping warning cough to let me know that even if I couldn’t see him through my veil of hair he was just feet away from me, reminding me of all the threats he had made to me over the years about what would happen if I ever dared to tell anyone about our secrets, trying to bring me back down to the little girl he had pinned against the wall with a carving knife to her throat. He must have been able to see what agony I was in on that stand and he would have known he could have put a stop to it at any second if he had just decided he had done enough to me and had stood up and admitted it all. This was his one last chance to do something decent for the little girl he had taken responsibility for all those years ago, but he said nothing.

All I could see past my hair was the judge and one man sitting at the end of the jury. The juryman looked about forty years old and was wearing a leather jacket. As I told my story, he put his head in his hands several times and wept. I averted my eyes to cut the image out and just kept answering the questions. I felt bad for upsetting him.