Freda grabbed me by the hair and threw me at the back door. She then opened the door and gave me a kick, which sent me tumbling down the steps. I gashed one of my knees against the step, and when I picked myself up at the bottom of the steps I couldn’t put any weight on it at first, it was so painful. Then I looked down and saw blood trickling down my leg. I gave a little whimper, but not because of the pain. My dress had got blood on it from the gash and I was suddenly sick to my stomach with terror, knowing that Freda would punish me for getting it dirty. I’d already been beaten by her for losing my bobble hat, and I knew that she’d seize any excuse to beat me.
I hobbled gingerly across the yard to the outside toilet, where I took a square of newspaper from the bundle that hung from a piece of string. Dipping it in the toilet pan, I tried desperately to scrub the blood off my dress with the sodden paper until my arm was shaking, but the blood wouldn’t come off.
When Freda let me in later, she looked at my tear-stained face and I knew it made her want to beat the hell out of me. When she saw the state of my dress, stained with blood and spotted with little bits of newspaper, she snatched up the cheese triangle that was sitting on the table and said, ‘Right, for that you won’t be having any tea, my girl.’ As I hadn’t been out of the yard that day, I hadn’t managed to scavenge anything from the bins, so I was sent to bed with hunger pains gnawing at my insides.
It was only two days later that I once again fell foul of Freda in a big way. It was a sunny day and I was playing in the yard, walking carefully on tiptoe from bar to bar of the iron grate that covered the cellar window. All of a sudden, I slipped and fell, saving myself with my arm. However, my foot had fallen between two of the bars and my leg was dangling in the gap between grate and window. When I tried to pull it out, my knee was in the way; so I tugged and tugged at it, trying to yank it free, becoming more and more panicked that Freda would find me wedged there later when she opened the door. But I couldn’t see how I was going to free myself. I was totally trapped and unable to work out why my knee wasn’t able to slip back through the way it had gone in. After several minutes of frenzied pulling, my knee got past the bars, but then I found out that my foot in its sandal couldn’t get through. I struggled with it until finally my foot came free, but by then my shoe had come off and fallen through the bars.
My leg was cut and bruised and very sore, but I was more worried about my sandal, which was lying below the iron grate, about three feet down. I knew I’d get into terrible trouble if I didn’t get it back, so I lay down on the grate and stretched my right arm through the bars. My fingertips didn’t even nearly touch it, but I wasn’t about to give up. Come on, you can reach it. Come on! I couldn’t bear to think about what Freda would do if she found I’d lost a shoe. So, again and again, I ground the side of my face down onto the bars in a frenzied attempt to reach my sandal.
When at last I stood up and looked down at my bare foot, I realized that my dress had got dirty from lying on the ground. There was nothing more I could do, so I went over and sat on the steps, where I remained for the next two hours, stiff with fear and awaiting my fate.
When I heard Freda unlock the door, I tried to creep in without catching her eye, but she saw the state of me at once.
‘What the hell have you been doing, and where’s your shoe?’
I just stared back at her, too terrified to say anything.
She grabbed my arm, pinching it viciously. ‘You answer me, damn it! Where’s your bloody shoe?’
She yanked my arm and pulled me outside and down the steps. I pointed at the iron grate.
‘You little swine. Didn’t I tell you not to move? What the hell were you doing throwing your shoe down there?’ She poked my forehead with a finger, jabbing it at me so hard my neck snapped back.
Then she went back inside and a minute later I heard her trying to open the cellar window. It was stuck. A moment later, she returned.
‘Right, Missie, you lie down and get it!’
I tried to tell her it was no use my trying, but she wasn’t listening.
She pushed me down and forced my arm between the bars, though she could see perfectly well that it wasn’t nearly long enough to reach the sandal. She put her foot down on my shoulder and pushed. The bars were crushing my chest, making it impossible to breathe.
After a while she dragged me back inside and looked around the room for something long enough to reach the shoe. Finally she stood on a chair, took down the curtain rod, and unhooked the curtain from it. ‘Don’t you dare move!’ she said, taking the rod outside.
A couple of minutes later she came back with the shoe in her left hand. In her right, she held the rod. She whacked me hard across the face with the shoe, making me reel back with the shock of it.
‘Get upstairs, damn you,’ she snarled. Her eyes were dark slits in her white face.
But as I turned to scramble up the stairs and out of her way, she went for me with the rod, savagely beating the back of my legs. I crumpled to the floor and continued up the stairs on my hands and knees. I felt her black snake-eyes on my back as I turned the corner to my room.
As Freda’s beatings grew worse, so did my health.
I was never warm, and felt like I was fighting an endless battle against the cold. Nor do I ever recall feeling full. After a few months, the cheese triangles and meagre scraps I’d taken from the bins took their toll on my body, which grew stick-thin and covered with sores. I slept badly as the abscesses on my back were oozing yellow pus, which made turning over agony.
I’d wake in the morning feeling the sharp pain of hunger, which would persist every minute of the day. Once I found a plug of gum that someone had chewed and stuck to a window sill. It was grey and hard but I was so desperate that I peeled it off and put it in my mouth. I chewed it for a bit but it tasted of nothing; then I swallowed it. Soon afterwards I overheard two boys talking in the street.
‘Did you know that if you swallow gum it gets tangled in your lungs?’ one of them said. ‘And then you can’t breathe and you die.’
I could almost feel the horrid, stringy stuff tightening in my chest and had to force myself to breathe in and out. I can’t tell anyone I’ve eaten it, so I’m going to die, I thought.
One Sunday evening, a few days after Freda had beaten me with the curtain rod, Dad was home and he and Freda were having a row downstairs. Freda always wanted me out of the way when my father was around, so she had sent me up to bed early without any tea. I could hear my dad’s voice booming under the floorboards of my room, and Freda’s tone was as bitter as an acid drop.
I wasn’t ready to go to sleep – my hunger pangs wouldn’t let me – so I sat on my bed feeling restless and ill. It occurred to me then that there might be some food I could steal in one of the boxes stacked up round the bed, so I started to rummage through them. Then I stood on one of the boxes to get a better look. It tipped a bit as I shifted my weight and suddenly I lost my balance. To stop myself falling, I grabbed instinctively at the pile of boxes next to me. At the top were stacked a few tins of ice-cream wafers and one of these toppled over and fell to the ground with a loud clatter.
My heart almost stopped. Then I heard the voices downstairs go quiet