Vanessa Steel - Punished

I remember once gazing at Mum’s engagement ring, a square-cut sapphire set in white gold and surrounded by little diamonds. I asked if I could try it on and she snapped, ‘No, you cannot. I had to work hard enough to get this ring and no one else is having it now.’

Who knows what kind of person Muriel pretended to be to enchant young Derrick Casey? The modelling shots she kept so carefully in the back of our albums show her statuesque and proud, her long neck and sculpted face a perfect foil for little pillbox hats with feathers on top, cartwheel straw hats or classic black toques. She’s slim as a gazelle but despite her beauty and elegance, she looks hard. You wouldn’t mess around with her.

No doubt she was sweetness itself in the run-up to her wedding and I suspect it was now that Muriel affected her act as a well-brought-up, church-going Christian girl. The Pittams weren’t religious at all, but the Caseys were staunch believers. It was important for Muriel to seem like the right sort of girl if she were going to be accepted as a member of the family and win Derrick’s affections. He was very devout, and often helped out at church fêtes and charitable events. No doubt Muriel seemed just as pious, although later, once she was safely married, she would dispense with formal religion and turn her own idea of God into a particularly dreadful weapon in her well-equipped arsenal.

Muriel and Derrick got married in 1941. The wedding photos are posed studio shots showing Mum with her hair swept up into a high style while she wears a dress of shimmering floor-length satin. She doesn’t smile in any of them but I can read a glint of triumph in her expression. She hadn’t just married into money; the Caseys were also very well connected socially. Now she could give up work and take her place in society as Mrs Derrick Casey, enjoying the dances and functions that they were invited to as a couple. The photos show her enjoying the fruits of her marriage: she’s never in the same outfit twice and the albums are full of pictures of my parents partying and socializing, relaxing on the beach, or standing in front of Dad’s brand new Ford motor car. Muriel, with her modelling background, is always camera-conscious, adopting a pose of some kind, with hair flicked back and lips pouting. They look like everyone’s idea of the glamour couple – young, attractive, well-off and in love.

* * *

In 1949, Muriel’s success seemed complete. She was blessed with the arrival of a baby, my brother Nigel. In the family photographs, he is an angelic-looking little thing, with white-blond hair and a shy smile. Mum holds him on her knee, looking at him and smiling, her attitude relaxed.

It’s a different story in the pictures that follow. In those, she holds a plump, ruddy-skinned, scowling baby. She never looks at it and there’s an obvious look of disgust on her face. She resembles one of those people who secretly loathe babies and who try to hide their dismay after someone has plonked one down on their lap. She is angry, tightlipped and bored. The baby she is holding is me.

I arrived in 1950, the year after my brother, and it seems that right from the start, my mother was displeased with me. In my baby pictures, even the earliest ones, I appear nervous and uncomfortable. I’m not smiling in any of the photos, except one where I’m being cuddled by Nan Casey, Dad’s mother. I look wary and uncomfortable and often on the point of tears. What had happened to make me like that?

‘You were such a cry-baby,’ I remember Mum saying. ‘Nothing I did was ever good enough for you.’

* * *

Any young mother who has had two babies in quick succession might feel stressed and possibly resentful. In Mum’s case, she claimed she had given up her dreams of success as a top model in exchange for two wriggling, crying babies. Her previously bright and buzzing social life was abruptly stopped – no more carefree evenings dancing and drinking with friends when there were two young children needing babysitters. Her whole life was now dominated by her routine at home with us. It must suddenly have seemed as though she’d picked a very short straw.

But thousands of young mothers had the same experience as they adapted to their new lives caring for children and a home. They didn’t become what my mother became, and their children didn’t suffer what I was to endure at the hands of the woman who was supposed to love me best in the world. Something in my mother was so bitter and resentful that she became evil. It’s a strong word, but I can’t think of any other way to describe what she did.

The danger signs were there from the very earliest days, when Nigel and I were still very young.

My first serious injury occurred when I was eighteen months old. Mum had left me on a bed and I rolled off on to the floor, breaking my leg. That was the story, anyhow. But although I have no memory of what happened, I do remember our house. The bedrooms were thickly carpeted and the beds not high off the floor. I was a plump, well- padded little thing. Would a roll from a low bed on to a soft carpet have been enough to break my leg? There were no witnesses, so I’ll never know.

There was a witness to another incident, though. Aunt Audrey told me that she glanced into the bedroom one night when Nigel was just one year old to see Mum holding a pillow over his face as he thrashed and writhed around.

‘Muriel, what on earth are you doing?’ she cried, rushing in to pull the pillow away.

Mum gave her a sharp look. ‘Sometimes it’s the only way to get him to stop crying,’ she said. ‘You know how I can’t stand listening to them cry.’

‘But he’s just a baby! You could kill him!’

Audrey said that Nigel’s breathing was very shallow and there was a blue tinge to his lips. Muriel shrugged and didn’t seem to take it seriously. Needless to say, Audrey made sure she never left any of her own children alone with Mum from that point on.

These things occurred before I was old enough to have any conscious memories. Once I do begin to remember, from around the time I was two years old, then the nightmare begins.

Chapter 2

I was a very timid child, shy around strangers and prone to creeping into my favourite little hidey-holes behind the settee or round the corner of Dad’s shed in the garden. I’d take Scruffy, a yellow-furred teddy bear, or Rosie, my rag doll, with me and could sit still for hours on end hugging them, out of sight of any adults.

I’m told I was very slow to talk. At two I’d hardly uttered a word and even at three I couldn’t manage more than a few incoherent phrases, so that Mum and Dad were beginning to worry that I was retarded in some way. Toilet training was also very traumatic for me. The slightest upset or fear could cause me to have an accident, which always enraged Mum. I was supposed to ask her permission when I wanted to go to the bathroom but she didn’t always grant it straight away, saying she was trying to train me to have more control. Several times when I asked to go, she made me squat down in the kitchen, bladder bursting and cheeks getting hotter, tiny fists clenched with the effort of trying to hold it in – and then there’d be the warm release of urine soaking my pants, that ammonia smell and a little puddle on the linoleum floor. Afterwards there was always the anger and the shouting, and my own sense of bewilderment at how I made her so cross.

The love of my life was Nigel, my big brother, much braver than me and always the ringleader in our games. He was a sweet-natured, affectionate child who had a bit of a temper when pushed. He never took it out on me, but injustice of any kind could make him see red. He wasn’t scared of things I was scared of, like dogs and noisy motorbikes and tradesmen who came to the door. I’d cower behind Mum’s skirt in the face of strangers, trying to avoid being noticed, while Nigel would stand his ground and ask questions like ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’ The roots of extreme shyness lie in a feeling that you are not quite good enough and you’re scared that other people will find out; I had that in spades as a toddler.