Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. by Vanessa Steel Page B

there.’
    Dad took me by the hand into the kitchen, saying, ‘Muriel, what’s this about locking Lady Jane in a cupboard?’
    I hung my head, afraid to meet her eye.
    Mum let out a gay peal of laughter. ‘Now I’ve heard everything,’ she said. ‘I suppose there are dragons and witches and a wicked wolf in there, and you prick your finger on a spindle and fall asleep for a hundred years?’
    Mum was wearing a scarlet cocktail dress with a full skirt and she had on matching nail polish and high-heeled mules. She always got changed into something special on the evenings when Dad came home. She’d style her hair and retouch her makeup and slip on her high heels just before he walked through the door. I gazed at her. Shelooked so beautiful and her laugh was so pretty that of course Dad was going to believe her and not me. At that instant, I disliked him for being taken in by her. Why couldn’t he see the truth?
    ‘You mustn’t tell lies, Lady Jane,’ he admonished. ‘It’s not very nice. Don’t you know the story of the little boy who cried wolf?’
    I did know that story but the point was that no one had come running the first time I cried wolf. Even after my hands were burned, and at last they seemed to realize that I wasn’t safe at home, I was sent straight back out to the same field again where the wolf was prowling. I didn’t understand it. What would it take for everyone to open their eyes and see what Mum was doing?
    * * *
    Round about this time our class had some homework to do. We’d started writing a story at school and mine was about a little girl who had an imaginary friend. The task was to finish the story and bring it in to the teacher the next day. We hadn’t had much homework before – just the occasional Janet and John reading book – so Mum asked what I was doing.
    ‘Writing a story,’ I told her.
    ‘What’s it about?’ she asked, peering over my shoulder. A sentence caught her attention and she grabbed the jotter from me. My story was about a little girl whose Mummy was always cross. The Mummy used to beat the little girl with a stick and lock her up in a cupboard but even though it hurt, the little girl didn’t mind so muchbecause she had an imaginary friend who whispered comforting words and cheered her up.
    ‘This is a terrible story!’ Mum cried. ‘You can’t hand this in.’ She ripped the offending pages clean out of the jotter and started tearing them to pieces.
    I gasped and tried to grab them back. ‘Mummy, the teacher will be cross with me. You’ve spoiled my jotter.’
    ‘Nonsense. It just needs the torn bits trimmed off. Sit right there and don’t move. Did the teacher look at it before you came home?’
    ‘No,’ I admitted.
    She got some scrap paper from the kitchen cupboard, sat down and drafted out another story about a little girl who was very lonely so she invented an imaginary friend. Her mummy used to set out a plate of food and a glass of juice for the friend at dinner times and she’d always give the little girl two sweeties, so there was one for her friend. Then one day a new family moved in next-door and the little girl got friendly with the daughter and she forgot all about her imaginary friend.
    When she’d finished, Mum handed it to me. ‘Copy that in your homework jotter,’ she demanded. ‘I can’t believe you’ve forgotten everything I’ve told you about not letting anyone at school find out how naughty you really are. They’ll all hate you if they realize.’
    ‘But the story wasn’t about me,’ I protested. ‘It was about a little girl I made up.’
    ‘Your story was totally wrong and you would have got into big trouble with the teacher if you had handed it in. Don’t do it again!’
    I sat and copied out the replacement story and Mum used her dressmaking scissors to tidy up the torn bits inmy jotter. I thought at the time, although I didn’t say so, that her story was much more boring than mine.
    But my mother’s next