Could YOU love the mother who made your childhood a living hell?
Louise’s mum beat her, tied her to the bed and once tried to abandon her in the woods. And yet she still tenderly nursed her in her old age ...
EVEN now, in moments of stress, Louise Allen finds herself counting to four, over and over in her head like an incantation, to calm herself.
She did it every night of her childhood as she waited, tense with apprehension, f or her adoptive mother Barbara’s bedtime ritual.
Louise would be pinned to her bed with straps to prevent her from moving. She would be forced to swallow two sedatives. Sometimes, arbitrarily, she would be hit across the face.
There were times when the little girl was so petrified she wet herself and had to lie all night in soiled sheets.
It was not, in fact, the violence she dreaded most, but the wild unpredictability of Barbara’s rages; the erratic swings of her implacable, brutal temper.
‘The worst thing was not the actual physical punishment but the state of constant hypervigilance I lived in,’ Louise recalls. ‘I remember feeling exhausted all the time.
‘The physical abuse I coped with — you just go through it — but strangely it was worse when it wasn’t happening. The terrifying bit was the anticipation; trying to read Barbara’s face, to gauge her mood. I’d look for clues in the sound she made as she walked upstairs; I’d watch every muscle of her body to try to predict whether I’ d be whacked or ignored.
‘And I remember being worn out by the sheer effort of trying to be happy, to please her and get her to like me. I was compliant, super-friendly; so polite and such a joy when we went out together because I wanted everyone to praise her for being a good mother — she lapped up compliments — and I desperately wanted her approbation.
‘But it never came. She used to call me a “worthless little bitch”. She said I’d been thrown away, that no one wanted me and t hat my mother was a whore.’
The cruelty Barbara inflicted on her adopted daughter feels, perhaps, even more monstrous when you consider this woman was supposed to have been Louise’s chance of a better life.
AdopTEdi n 1968 from an unmarried teenage mother, Louise was supposed to have found sanctuary, a family and a future in Barbara’s loving care.
Instead, her adopted mother turned out to be a deeply disturbed woman, with a horrific past herself, who never should have been allowed to care for children. Her husband, heating engineer Ian, was a weak and ineffectual man who constantly turned a blind eye to his wife’s rages.
You might i magine t hat such sustained cruelty would have made Louise a bitter, vengeful adult; perhaps even an abuser herself — often the destructive cycle is perpetuated through generations.
In fact, Louise’s story is a redemptive one of triumph over a level of adversity that would have destroyed a less determined and resilient soul.
For perhaps Louise’s most incredible quality is her capacity for love: despite her appalling cruelty, she cared for Barbara in her old age until her death, aged 86, in 2012. She learned to understand, and even to love her, although she admits she can never truly forgive.
And today, that love continues to infuse her happy life. Louise, 50, is married to Lloyd, 54, a graphic designer, and they live in a gloriously colour-filled home with their sons Jackson, 13 and Vincent, ten. Louise is also stepmother to Lloyd’s daughters poppy, 30, and Millie, 25, from an earlier marriage.
She also fosters children herself, for the simple reason: ‘I understand children who’ve been through trauma because I was one,’ she says. ‘I know how we survive.
‘I know, too, that every child has the possibility, the hope, of a good life and I get very frustrated when children are written off. It’s never too late,’ she adds. ‘I know that, too.’
Within the past two months she has also forged a relationship with her birth mother, Julie, 66, with whom she first made contact in adolescence, before losing touch.
‘I’ve stopped thinking of her as the mother who abandoned me,’ she says. ‘Now I realise she was caught up in a messy life herself. She was a young, vulnerable teenager when she had me, and my birth father was married with a family of his own.’
Instantly likeable and warm, Louise is dressed, when we meet in the Somerset town where she now lives, in a green velvet coat and red dress, her dark hair cut asymmetrically, a colourful rebellion against the frumpy, sludge-coloured handme-downs of her childhood. ‘I don’t want to live in an ugly world,’ she says. ‘I was born jolly, always looking for fun.’
Louise’s adopted home where she grew up was in neat, middleclass oxford suburbia, with a gravel drive, a well- tended garden, an orchard and a coop of chickens at the back. ‘You’d never have known from looking at this lovely, orderly little house what hell was going on inside,’ she says.
When Louise arrived as a newborn, Barbara and Ian already had a foster son, William, two years her senior.
While she and William were both tormented and controlled, a third child — Kevin, an older boy — informally fostered when his father, a neighbour who worked as long- distance lorry driver, was widowed, was indulged and encouraged to bully Louise and William on the grounds that they were inferior.
‘We were of less value because we were illegitimate and unwanted,’ she says.
Barbara would starve the younger children, too. ‘She’d count out five raisins, a dot of salad cream, half a tomato, half a slice of bread and some crisps onto two baby plates. That was it. our dinner. The same thing every single day.
‘We were constantly starving, so we learnt, quietly, to scavenge. We’d tiptoe into the garden shed and cram handfuls of chicken feed into our mouths to stop the hunger pangs.’
Barbara had a repertoire of punishments often administered without provocation. Louise was made to sit in an icy cold bath or to eat dirt.
William became her ally, her ‘brother in torment’, until one day, when she was five or six, he disappeared; sent to other foster parents because unlike Louise, he’d ceased to be compliant in the face of Barbara’s rages.
Louise sobbed uncontrollably when William went. In response, Barbara beat her — she kept the wooden rod from a towel rail or a rolled-up newspaper bound with rubber bands for the purpose — and told her ‘to stop bloody whining’ or she’d be sent away, too.
BArBArAdid, at times, do her best to abandon Louise. ‘She was sadistic. once when I was eight, she drove me to a wood and left me there at twilight. I was petrified,’ she remembers.
‘Three women who were out walking helped me get home. Barbara was good at pretending empathy with other adults and telling them how difficult it was dealing with children like me.
‘And in those days children didn’t have a voice. No one would have believed me if I’d complained.’
Barbara stamped out any spark of happiness that relieved the gloom of her daughter’s miserable life. Louise remembers the bond she formed with her Labrador dog, Blue.
one day, walking her in a park near oxford University in her early teens, Louise was attacked by a predatory would-be rapist who fled when Blue bit him.
returning home dishevelled and traumatised, she told Barbara about the assault. Louise recalls her mother’s vitriolic response.
‘ She spat: “What do you expect, going out looking like a slut ?” I’d just started to experiment with make- up. It was normal — my friends were doing it—but she told me I was a nasty, wicked whore like my mother. I was completely destroyed.’
The next day Barbara sent Louise to school — itself a rare treat for her — but when she returned, Blue, her beloved companion, had disappeared.
‘Barbara told me: “She’s gone. I took her to the vet and he put her to sleep. I don’t want to hear any more about it.” My knees gave way. I fell on the floor and howled. Barbara sent me to my room and I sobbed and sobbed.’
Her pet gone, her only solace was art, and when Barbara allowed her are mission from the household chores she escaped into creativity: painting, drawing, wandering round galleries.
But a lacerating anger was brewing: she began to resent her teachers for consigning her to the remedial classes. For the first time she rebelled, starting a fire in a cookery class, for which she was expelled. She fled, aged 16, to portsmouth with a boyfriend — who was about to start university there — and set up home with him in his student digs.
There followed years in which PRINTED AND DISTRIBUTED BY PRESSREADER PressReader.com +1 604 278 4604 . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY ORIGINAL COPY COPYRIGHT AND PROTECTED BY APPLICABLE LAW
she worked concurrently at numerous jobs — waitress, barmaid, skivvy — while scrimping and saving every penny, before winning a place at Portsmouth School of Art.
Yet she remained determined her harsh, love less childhood would not encumber her with bitterness or resentment. In fact, she says it actually made her kind and empathetic.
Just before her adoptive father Ian died of cancer 25 years ago, he apologised to her. ‘He said: “I’m so sorry” and he squeezed my hand, and for the first time, hugged me,’ she says. ‘I knew exactly what he meant. He was apologising for turning a blind eye to everything Barbara did.
‘I don’t like to see anyone in pain, emotional or physical. I said: “It’s OK. I’m fine.” ’
There was also a surprising rapprochement with Barbara. Actually — and this is perhaps the most astounding part of Louise's story — she grew to understand what made her tick; even to love her. Barbara, it emerges, had self-medicated with huge doses of the sedatives Librium and Valium —pills she also gave to Louise during her childhood — in a vain effort to blot out her own misery. 'She took handfuls of them at erratic times,' says Louise. 'It caused psychosis. It was as if she was trying to escape from herself. She had huge mental health prob-lems which were scarily obvious but never addressed. 'Yet even after I left home I was desperate for her to like me. I took her out to dinner. I courted her. Then, when she was very frail and elderly, I found assisted housing for her near where I lived.' 'What I found astonishing was her excitement that I'd look after her. I enjoyed the fact that she'd say "thank you" to me for the first time and she'd talk to me and we'd laugh. 'I took her out for drives in the Hampshire countryside. As she grew trailer, she chose her burial plot on the South Downs. I talked about her wishes. I didn't want her to suffer. What was the point?' Barbara, softened by her depend-ence, was no longer a tyrannical monster. She ceased to be a source of fear.
SHORTLY before she died, Barbara told her daughter about the horror of her own childhood. ‘ Her father had raped her and she’d become pregnant with his child at 12,’ she recalls. ‘She’d given birth to the baby in an outside toilet, and that child was passed off as her brother.
‘The family fell into poverty and had to go into the workhouse, and there she’d been strapped into bed at night, hit and put into a cold bath as a punishment.
‘Once I’d placed her in her time, as a victim of the war and poverty, I grew to like her; actually to love her. I was quite stunned that I did.’
I ask if she forgives Barbara. She says that her mother did not say sorry — there was no repentance so there can be no pardon. But, in telling her story, she allowed Louise to understand why she behaved as she did, ‘which was the most important thing’.
‘Towards the end, Barbara also said: “I’m very proud of you. You’ve achieved a lot.”
‘And one day, when I took her out to lunch at a country house hotel with Jackson, she said: “I think you’re a good mother,” which was the biggest compliment she ever paid me.’
Having worked as a lecturer at Portsmouth School of Art for more than 20 years, Louise has now given up teaching to paint and write. Her husband and children have, of course, contributed to her current happiness. ‘Lloyd is so calm and gentle, loyal and thoughtful,’ she says. ‘He has helped to soften me and give me my emotional intelligence.
‘And when Jackson was born I was excited because he could have everything I hadn’t had. He could have a childhood. Barbara couldn’t take that away from him — or me.’
Thrown Away Child by Louise Allen is published by Simon and Schuster at £7.99.