Vanessa Steel - Punished

Once when she was in the dining room, I accidentally let out a nervous giggle and it came out much louder than it should have. Mum charged out and dragged me to the kitchen for a beating.

‘You disturbed God while I was talking to him and he’s very angry,’ she said, with a quiver of self-righteousness. ‘God said I have to punish you.’ And she started whacking me with the bean cane, which was now kept in the corner of the kitchen.

I always sobbed and cried with pain, telling her how sorry I was between gasps but nothing would make her stop. If anything, my tears and contrition fired her up even more, so that she sliced the cane even harder through the air. Nothing would mollify her.

While I was being punished, Nigel would do his best to protect me by shouting at Mum to stop, and afterwards he would comfort me, putting his arms round me to give me a hug if Mum wasn’t looking. I loved him to pieces. His presence obviously deterred Mum a bit – my punishments got much worse in the year when he, aged five, had started school but I, aged four, was still at home.

The garden was slightly safer than the house, because Mum tended to be working indoors and left me to my own devices, so I spent a lot of time there, keeping out of her way. I remember one time she came out, though, and saw me collecting worms and dropping them into a jam jar I’d found.

‘What are you doing, you nasty girl?’ she demanded. She picked up a worm, yanked my head to one side and dangled the worm so that it was wriggling inside my ear. ‘He’s nibbling your ear, and he’s going to get stuck right inside your head. Can you feel him wriggling?’

I was petrified of the worm getting stuck and screamed and screamed for her to stop. Where were the neighbours? I suppose they must have been out that day, and maybe Mum knew it. She hated me talking to our next-door neighbour, Edna Crisp, over the fence and would call me indoors if she was in the garden hanging out her washing.

Edna saved my life one day, though. I had refused to eat some carrot that Mum had served for tea and she grabbed a bit and forced it into my mouth, pushing it back until it got stuck in my throat. I gasped in panic and managed to inhale the carrot and soon I was choking and coughing, scarlet in the face and unable to breathe. I’m not sure what happened next because I was in such a state, but I think Nigel ran next door to get Edna. She hurried into the room and thumped me on the back repeatedly until I coughed up the carrot, then she took me on her lap and hugged me as I cried and shivered in shock. Mum turned her back on us and started washing the supper dishes.

‘That could have been nasty,’ Edna said to my mother’s back, obviously surprised at the lack of reaction to my nearly choking to death.

‘She’s all right now, isn’t she? You were here. It’ll teach her to eat more carefully in future,’ said my mother.

‘Well – if you say so.’ Edna was clearly taken aback by the cool response the whole event had got from my supposedly loving mother. When she left, it was with a suspicious air and I had the feeling she would be watching carefully from now on.

* * *

Mother must have guessed that she’d given away something of her callous attitude towards me. Most of my punishments took place inside the house so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear anything untoward, but one sunny afternoon when I was four, Nigel and I were playing in the garden. He was pedalling his red tricycle with me standing in the trailer behind it and holding on to his shoulders. I called for him to stop when I saw a pretty butterfly fluttering around the roses. I’d loved butterflies ever since Dad had told me that my name was the name of a type of butterfly.

I found a jam jar lying in the soil and unscrewed the lid to find some bits and pieces of garden twine inside. I emptied them out. Just then, Nigel spotted a bumblebee alighting on a pink rose and we decided to try and catch it. Carefully we crept up on it, put the jar over the top then slammed the lid and twisted it shut. Neither of us had any idea that bees could hurt you. I looked at it buzzing furiously inside the jar and I remember thinking that it had a friendly face, like a child. I wanted it to be my friend. We put the jar in the trailer of the tricycle and cycled off round the garden squealing with delight as we gave our new furry friend a ride.

The squeals soon brought Mum out from the kitchen, demanding to know what was going on.

‘We’ve got a new friend,’ I said nervously, suddenly unsure of myself. I picked up the jar to show her.

‘You cruel, horrible child,’ she hissed, and dragged me by the arm to the path along the side of the kitchen. ‘I’m very angry with you for doing something so cruel. God is angry and the bee is going to be angry with you as well. Just you wait and see.’

She unscrewed the lid of the jar and pressed the opening against my thigh. ‘Don’t move,’ she instructed. ‘You’ll make the bee even more angry.’ She tapped the bottom of the jar until the bee fell on to my skin, where I felt it crawling around, buzzing away. Suddenly there was a sharp jab that made me scream, and a throbbing pain unlike anything I’d ever felt before.

‘The bee’s going to die now,’ Mum told me, ‘and it’s all your fault. You killed him.’

She dragged me, sobbing uncontrollably, to the cupboard under the stairs and locked me in. ‘I’m going to get more bees to keep stinging you until you learn not to be cruel to poor defenceless creatures,’ she told me.

As I stood in the dark, scratching my sting in a futile attempt to relieve the pain, I felt desperately sad. Was it really my fault the bee had died?

That night Dad got home early and came up to tuck me into bed. I said to him ‘Mummy hurt me with a bee and made me cry’, but he didn’t believe me.

‘Your Mum says the bee stung you because you made it angry by shutting it in a jar. You have to be careful with bees, Lady Jane.’

‘But she did it!’ I protested.

He said, ‘If Mummy was angry with you today, it must have been because you’d done something naughty.’

I remember clearly how devastated I was that he didn’t believe me when I was telling the truth. I had thought I was ‘Daddy’s little girl’ but he was taking Mum’s side instead of mine. Children have an innate sense of justice and I felt strongly how unfair this was. It also meant I was powerless against my mother’s rage. I was a lot more vulnerable if I couldn’t get my Dad to take me seriously.

I suppose he went downstairs and told Mum about our conversation because the next morning she was livid.

‘How dare you tell tales to your father! You’re a devil child and I’m going to have to keep teaching you lesson after lesson until you learn to behave better.’

Straight after breakfast she went out to the garden with a jam jar and hunted around until she found another bee. I tried to run away and hide behind the sofa but she caught me and dragged me out. Knowing what was going to happen, this time I struggled like mad to get away from the bee in the jar but she held me in a grip of iron until it had delivered its sting. Once again, I was locked in the spider cupboard for the day as the poison raised another red, angry lump on my leg and the horrible, throbbing pain made me scream and cry. I clawed and clawed at the stings until the whole area was raw.

* * *

This happened a few more times, each occasion bringing me a fresh sting on my chubby thighs and a painful red lump afterwards. I knew better than to tell Dad, though. That’s one lesson I had learned. Mum had told him I was an unusually clumsy child, always tripping over and bumping into things, and he never seemed to question if I had a black eye or bruises on my arms and legs. He didn’t bath me so he never saw the sting marks under my dress, or the stripes from the cane on my bottom. Mum was in charge of our baths and I grew to fear hair-washing nights twice a week when she took great glee in getting soap in my eyes. If Nigel had already got out, she held my head under water as she rinsed off the shampoo until I was left gasping for breath and very scared.