sloping ceiling and shelves on one wall that served as a kind of pantry with lots of jars and tins and bottles. There was a bolt on the outside of the door and no light inside.
‘There’s a spider’s web in the corner.’ Mum pointed out. ‘I’m going to lock you in here for a while to keep you out of mischief, but you’d better stay very, very quiet and very still or the spiders are going to get you.’
I was shoved inside and the door slammed and bolted. I could just make out a thin outline of the light round the door through the musty darkness. I gulped back my sobs, trembling with fear, and felt that familiar trickle between my legs as I wet myself. I didn’t dare sit down or reach out my hands to touch the wall or make any movement or noise. I could barely breathe. I genuinely thought the spiders were going to eat me. How could I know otherwise?
Soon I became hysterical, banging and kicking the door as hard as I could and screaming at the top of my voice. I heard Mum’s footsteps come clicking down the hall. She opened the door and I reached up my arms to be lifted, hoping for a comforting hug, but instead she hit me across the head with a sharp admonition to ‘shut up!’ Then she slammed and bolted the door again. I was shocked into silence. My legs trembled and an occasional sob escaped me but otherwise I stood quietly, alert for the feel of a spider’s creepy feet on my skin or a nibble from their fangs. More than the physical fear, though, I felt the terror of being abandoned by the person who was supposed to take care of me. I was only three and I was bereft of adult protection.
At last, after an interminable period, Mum opened the door and yanked me out again. ‘How many spiders did you count? Did they bite your toes?’ There was a malicious glint of pleasure in her eyes as I shivered with fear, longing in vain for a kind word.
This is the first real punishment I remember Mum inflicting on me. Far from being a one-off, confinement in the spider cupboard became an almost daily occurrence. Young children don’t have much of a sense of time but I know that sometimes it was broad daylight when I was thrown in there and dark when I came out. I frequently missed meals and had to push my fists into my stomach to combat the rumblings of hunger. If he was feeling brave, Nigel would come and whisper to me through the crack of the door: ‘It’s all right, Nessa, I’m here – don’t be scared.’ But as soon as Mum heard him he would be dragged away.
It was hard to predict the crimes for which I would be locked in the cupboard. Picking flowers, scribbling in my Noddy book, spilling a little talcum powder on the bathroom rug, squealing, asking for a drink, not finishing my supper – any of these could result in a period in captivity.
Nigel and I had the natural liveliness you’d expect of any toddlers and we could be naughty with the best of them. One day we shook the petals off the rose bushes and laid them out all over the garden path in wavy patterns. Mum went absolutely berserk when she saw them because, she said, we had ‘stolen’ Dad’s flowers.
Another time a painter had left a ladder leaning against the wall at the back of the house and Nigel and I decided to climb it to see how high we could get. He went first and had almost reached the bedroom window when he fell to the ground below and his screams brought Mum rushing out. I remember that I was the one who was punished for that escapade, despite the fact that he was older and had been the ringleader.
‘I’m going to give you away to the ragamuffin man next time he comes,’ she’d taunt, a prospect I found very scary, although I didn’t have a clue what a ragamuffin man was.
‘No, Mummy, please,’ I’d beg tearfully, but she would maintain that next time he came she was definitely going to hand me over.
* * *
There were some mornings when Mum woke up in a foul mood with the world and couldn’t stand the sight of me so I’d be locked in the cupboard from breakfast onwards. My only respite was at weekends when Dad was around, or on the two mornings a week when Mrs Plant, our cleaner, came over.
Mrs Plant was a lovely, dark-haired lady with a lively imagination. She would lift me up to sit beside the sink while she washed dishes or peeled potatoes and made up lots of stories to tell me. She couldn’t understand why I started crying when she told me about Little Miss Muffet who sat on a tuffet. I was too young and too inarticulate to be able to put into words the chronic fear of spiders that had taken hold of me, so that even a mention of one in a nursery rhyme was distressing.
I wonder if she ever suspected what was going on in that household when she wasn’t around. Once, when she was cleaning the cupboard under the stairs, I said to her, ‘That’s my place for when I’m naughty.’
She looked aghast and turned to Mum, who had emerged from the kitchen.
‘What an imagination the child has!’ Mum smirked. ‘Have you ever heard the like?’
‘Mummy put me there,’ I protested.
She raised her eyebrows at Mrs Plant and winked. ‘Was that in one of your story-books, darling?’ she asked me.
Mrs Plant looked relieved and went back to work, obviously content with Mum’s explanation. I was to learn that this would always happen when I tried to tell other adults the truth about what went on in our house. Mum was the mistress of keeping up appearances and from the outside, we looked like a typical, middle-class family: two happily married, prosperous parents and their well-turned-out son and daughter. Neighbours in Bentley Road undoubtedly saw us as completely normal, if a little insular.
What they didn’t realize was that our father increasingly spent as much time as he could out of the house, leaving us at the mercy of a mother whose resentment of her two young children was growing, and with it, her desire to punish them.
One sunny afternoon when I was outside with Nigel in the garden, something terrifying happened. One moment we were playing happily, and the next he fell down and started rolling around on the patio. At first I thought it was a silly game and giggled, but then I saw that his face looked twisted and he was jerking and throwing his arms about in a very odd way.
‘Nigel?’ I tried to get his attention by pushing his shoulder but his writhing knocked me over on to my bottom. He was making an odd moaning sound as well and I got scared and called Mum. ‘Mummy, Nigel’s hurt!’
She came running out of the kitchen and when she saw Nigel, she exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, not again!’ She picked him up and carried him indoors to the sitting room.
I followed, very alarmed. ‘Is he all right? What’s the matter?’
She ignored me, kneeling on the floor beside him and doing something funny to his mouth.
‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’ I persisted.
‘Just shut up and go back out to the garden,’ she snapped. I obeyed, scared enough of her by now that I didn’t take any risks when she used that sharp tone of voice.
A few hours later, Nigel seemed better again, though he was pale and tired.
When I next saw Daddy, I told him what I’d witnessed and he listened gravely, then explained to me: ‘Your brother has an illness called epilepsy. Sometimes it makes him get funny turns called fits that make him roll around on the ground like you saw. If that ever happens again, you just have to run and get Mummy or me or any other grown-up so they can look after him.’
‘Will he get better?’ I asked.
He looked sad. ‘The doctors are trying to find some medicine that will help him. It’s nothing for you to worry about.’
I was still three and Nigel was four when his diagnosis was confirmed, and the fits started happening quite frequently. It must have been a huge strain on Mum, who had to make sure his airway was clear, that he wasn’t choking on his tongue, and that there was nothing nearby he could hurt himself on as he flailed around. It always made her very grumpy with me when he had a fit, and more than once she told me it was my fault, that I had made him ill. I wasn’t