As the endless beatings and humiliations escalated, my throat and tongue seemed to close down, with the result that I started to stutter and gulp more and more, until eventually I was unable to speak at all, or even to make any sounds beyond tiny squeaks. When I cried, my tears ran silently down my face and no sobs escaped from my heaving chest. I had been silenced by the shock of what I had witnessed and could no longer beg for mercy or hope that I would ever be able to tell anyone about what was being done to me by my own family. I was trapped inside my own head.
Everything I did seemed to anger and disgust my mother and brothers even further, and the violence and abuse escalated with every passing month. They were constantly telling me how worthless and vile I was, and it became harder and harder to remember that Dad used to praise me and tell me how much he loved me. As the weeks turned into months, I started to believe the things they were telling me about myself: that I was beneath contempt and deserved to be hurt and demeaned all the time.
Eventually Mum could no longer bear to have me in her beautiful clean house any longer and I was dragged away and thrown into the dark, damp Victorian cellar with nothing but an old mattress to lie on and a bucket for a toilet. I sat in the darkness, dreading the threatening sound of approaching footsteps on the stairs even more than I dreaded the loneliness and hunger. Sometimes I would be left there for days on end without food or water, unable to call for help or beg for mercy, trapped inside my own silence, not even able to scream when they came down to beat or taunt me. In my head I would talk to Dad; I was able to see him sitting next to me in the gloom and able to hear his voice. It was my only comfort.
Things grew a thousand times worse when Amani became my mother’s new lover. To me he seemed like a giant, ugly, alien figure. I heard that he came from Africa, but as far as I was concerned he could have come from another planet. My mother encouraged Amani to visit me in the cellar and relieve his sexual and sadistic needs whenever he chose. It started with him working off his sexual frustrations on me whenever he felt the urge, twisting my private parts painfully if I made any attempt to resist, and then he seemed to want to hurt me for the sheer pleasure of inflicting pain. He would rape me and then throw me aside, spitting on me and calling me names, as if it was all my fault and I was the dirty one. It seemed that to him I wasn’t even human. The violence of his attacks and the force of his contempt for me seemed to amuse Mum and my brothers, reinforcing their own ideas of my worthlessness.
Only my eldest brother, Wally, ever showed me any kindness, sneaking down to talk to me whenever everyone else was out of the house, bringing me small shreds of hope that one day my nightmare would be over and telling me that it was Mum and Amani who were the bad ones, not us; but even though he was a young man by then, he was still too frightened of Mum ever to do anything about rescuing me or even speaking up in my defence. When he told me he was escaping from home to live with his girlfriend, I was sure he would tip the authorities off about where I was, but he never did.
It seemed as if the outside world forgot that I existed during those three years. Thinking back now, it’s a miracle that I didn’t die in that damp, airless, underground cell. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I felt Dad was with me, willing me to keep going, I don’t think I could have survived.
It wasn’t until I was eight that the school authorities heard of my existence from my other brother, Thomas, and Mum was forced to bring me out of the cellar, still silent and frightened and struggling to cope with a world that seemed endlessly threatening and painful.
Even once I was attending school like a normal child, my lack of a voice and my fear of the violence that I knew Mum, Amani and my brothers were capable of meant that I was still not able to escape the horrors of my home. While I was actually at school I was bullied and teased by the other children for being mute and backward and different, but nothing they could do to me was ever as bad as the torture I had already grown used to at home.
I still had to spend much of my life in the cellar when I was back in the house and as well as abusing me themselves, Amani and Mum decided that they could earn some money from me.
Amani had a contact, a man I only ever knew as Uncle Douglas, a seedy, overweight, evil-smelling old man who ran an organized paedophile ring from his home. At first when he was brought to the house I thought he was going to be nice to me, because he gave me sweets and wanted to take my picture, but when he tried to get my clothes off I fought back, biting like the little wild animal I had become, and he called Amani in to help him. The two of them raped and beat me together with all their adult strength, so that I would know it was never going to be worth fighting against them again, and so that I would understand that they expected me to be totally obedient, no matter what they demanded of me.
To begin with Mum sent me off with Uncle Douglas on my own to be ‘groomed’, which meant being repeatedly raped and abused in a hotel room deep in the countryside. He would drive me there, locked in the car, telling me of all the things that were going to happen to me and what the punishment would be if I tried to escape. He locked me into the boot of the car while he organized the room, only letting me out once the coast was clear for him to take me into the secluded, cabin-style room. Once I was safely in the room, he was free to beat and rape me and force me to perform any sexual act or humiliation that occurred to him. He took his time over everything, savouring the moment, even leaving me in the room, naked and chained to the radiator, while he went to the bar for a drink. There was nothing I could do because I had only the strength of a small child and I had no voice with which to call out for help.
Then Mum told me I was going to be a ‘porn star’. Confident that he had broken my spirit and that I understood what I had to do, Douglas took me to his home. Children like me would be imprisoned there at weekends and during the school holidays, raped and defiled by a variety of men, every filthy act filmed and put on video. We were not allowed to speak to one another, or even allowed to make eye contact; we were treated just as slaves must have been 200 years ago.
The men who came to Douglas’s house were monsters of cruelty, but they often looked like normal members of the public. There was no way of distinguishing them from the decent, kind people you find on every street. It was impossible for me to know who to trust and who to fear because everyone, particularly men, held the potential to be my tormentor. None of the other children I met in that house during those years had been abducted or kidnapped: they had all been introduced or sold to Douglas by someone from their own families.
Over the coming years I would meet so many young people on the streets and in the psychiatric wards of different cities who all had the same stories to tell of violence and rape, cruelty and betrayal at the hands of the people who should have been the ones protecting them from danger. No child starts out in life wanting to live rough on the streets or to develop an addiction to drink or drugs. It is always because of what has been done to them by others in the early years.
At school kind, well-meaning teachers and specialists worked at coaxing my voice back. Gently and slowly it returned, but the damage had already been done. I had lost three years of my life, which left me hopelessly behind the other children of my age in everything, and by then I was too brainwashed and terrified to ever give anyone even a hint of the sort of agony my life was at home. It was as if I inhabited two different worlds, one of which was a hell that would have been unimaginable to most of the other children who sat around me in classrooms.
When I was finally able to make myself understood, I made my first friend. Pete was a kind, clever and popular boy who took the time to listen to me and understand what I was trying to say. He liked me for who I really was and even took me home to his posh house to