Celia Walden I know the horror of life with a stalker

‘On my occasional girls’ night out, he would be waiting outside the pub’

‘Sometimes I think I’d like you to be in an accident. For your face to get slashed up, so that nobody looks at you again.” We were curled up on my bed when my boyfriend said this – tenderly as he tucked my hair behind my ear – and I recall the immediate problem being how to disengage myself without him smelling the fear.

I didn’t know then that the man who would go on to stalk me for 10 months got off on fear. That if he couldn’t have me, making sure I woke up and fell asleep thinking of him – in fear, if not in love – was the next best thing.

Like Emily Maitlis, who was brave enough to speak out about her 27-year stalking ordeal, we met while I was at Cambridge. Unlike the Newsnight presenter, who has been subjected to decades of psychological torture by the man she befriended, I was involved romantically with my stalker. He was clever and witty, attractive and physically stronger than any man I’d ever been with before, thanks to a hardcore gym habit.

I should have spotted the signs earlier, but for the first few weeks, I found his madcap romantic behaviour charming. He once threw an expensive leather jacket over a puddle to save my shoes, wrote poetry and on the occasional girls’ night out (he wasn’t keen on me going out without him) would be waiting outside the pub to walk me home. “It’s not safe,” he’d say gravely, stepping out of the shadows.

Over time, it became clear that he was the one who wasn’t safe. And although I knew that breaking up with him wouldn’t be easy, I could never have anticipated what came next: the 10 to 20 phone calls a day; the vicious, barely legible poetry calling me a “slut” and a “bitch” slipped beneath my door at night with the sign-off “Sleep well, my love”; the “visits” male friends of mine received, and the verbal and physical assaults they suffered. The nights I found him sleeping outside my door, having somehow found a way in to my college, and the morning I opened a bedroom cupboard to find him in there. “Gotcha,” he said flatly, climbing out of a 4ft box where he’d spent the night.

Ten months of this affected me permanently. I was jumpy for months, I now find any excessive or persistent fervour spooky, and I am allergic to romantic surprises – his “speciality”. What nearly 30 years of stalking could do would be unimaginable, had Maitlis had not described it so eloquently to Emma Barnett on Radio 5 Live this week, after her tormentor, Edward Vines, was re-jailed for writing to her from prison. It was like “a chronic illness”, she said, in terms of the devastating effect it had on her life and family – one she expects to be battling forever. To hear a woman – a friend, whose sass and strength I’ve always been in awe of – talk with such poignant pragmatism about the nightmare she got used to living was shocking.

I remember feeling powerless when the police said: “Unless he actually threatens you, there’s little we can do.” They didn’t seem to understand then, when stalking was not yet a crime, that his daily behaviour was a threat. But when the Protections of Freedom Act 2012 made stalking an offence, and included bullying and unwanted attention in their description, I felt reassured that the government had finally understood the severity of it, as well as the impact it can have.

It hasn’t – not by a long shot. Vines may have been jailed for 45 months for breaching his restraining order, but he was first convicted of harassing Maitlis 16 years ago, and a restraining order breached in 2009 was breached again in 2016. How he was able to contact her from prison is something she says is “bizarre beyond belief ”. I would describe it as grotesque and shameful. And although she accepted the Ministry of Justice’s apology, she says that “it’s not just the odd breach or failure – it’s the sense that as a whole the system is a bit stuck.”

MP Sarah Wollaston’s Stalking Protection Bill is a start. Given a second reading in the Commons yesterday, it would provide the police with greater powers and stop stalkers contacting victims while evidence is gathered. But joined-up thinking is needed too, explains Maitlis. It’s taking too long for perpetrators to appear in court, there is no communication within the system or follow-through on cases, so that each time an injunction is broken, victims need to file new statements re-living past ordeals. Crucially, says Maitlis, “they haven’t found a way that is both a deterrent and helpful to the perpetrator in a way that would make him stop,” because “whatever sentence he’s given isn’t working as a deterrent, and whatever treatment he’s given isn’t working as a cure”.

For Maitlis to feel sympathy for a man who has terrorised her for decades is impressive. Stalking, she understands, isn’t an excess of romantic fervour but “a weirdly glamorised term for what is essentially ill health”. Vines isn’t getting the help he needs, neither is she, and I know that speaking out is a last resort. I’m also sure that when this ends – and it needs to end – she will, like me, imagine she sees him on the bus, in the street or across the room, mis-recognising a man’s nape, voice or gait as his and, for a minute, forgetting to breathe.

Three years after my ordeal ended, I received one last visit. When I opened the door of my room one day, there he was, leaning, arms crossed, against the wall. “Boo,” he said, and walked off.