While he raged, I’d lock myself inside the bathroom and sleep on the loor’ cold f

ful days because it was half his. He once tipped me off the wooden chair onto the floor while I worked there. The chair hit my head as I fell, and I sat on the floor stunned from the hard wooden back of it and touched the new, hot pain with the tips of my fingers. Blood.

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ he said then, slamming my laptop shut and pouring wine over it.

The mind is a powerful dam and outwardly, to friends, I managed to seem fine. In reality, I started to take the beta blocker propranolol to stop the panic attacks.

Everything blurs in those situations until you don’t know what you think any more, and amid wondering if I was weak for staying, or strong for putting up with it, I often found myself simply wanting to sleep.

Jack’s mood changed faster and faster, over nothing. He went from charm and affection to violently abusive with such speed, I walked on eggshells every second.

‘You’re just a s*** version of Phoebe Waller-Bridge,’ he screamed once, which was a great insult, but I bit my cheeks because I thought if I laughed, he’d punch me. In fact, he was always good at not punching me, as though he knew he couldn’t deny what was happening if I had a black eye.

He made sure the worst marks were on himself instead, telling the people he was closest to that he was the victim. That made me hysterical, knowing they’d never know the truth, and knowing they wouldn’t believe it anyway because families and friends have to side with the person they know out of loyalty.

He claimed he couldn’t see the bruises I often had on my arms in the exact shape of his fingerprints, or the purple marks from his feet when he kicked me out of bed.

It was over a couple of days in February 2020 that our relationship finally came to a head. From my bathroom sanctuary, after another night of being pushed around, I finally texted a nearby friend — ‘I need help’ — and she came quickly, with her boyfriend in case Jack tried to stop me. There was a scene on the doorstep as he screamed, and then backhanded me in the side of the head.

‘Pack a bag,’ said my friend. ‘Quickly, quickly.’ Jack had hidden my coat and my laptop charger, but we left anyway and they gave me a lift to the station so I could go to my brother’s house across town. As I shook in my seat, I tried not to look at the commuters, knowing I looked pale and scared, like a junkie.

My brother had gone to work but his girlfriend let me in and cooked me scrambled eggs. I slept for two hours but woke up alone, terrified. My brain was fried, my thoughts tangled.

On the calendar in my brother’s room, I saw a dinner reservation for two for a week’s time . . . it was all my panicked mind needed. Life without Jack was too empty to contemplate: I let myself out and practically ran back to the flat.

I find that unbelievable now. What the hell was wrong with me? Exhausted by his rollercoaster moods, I didn’t have the strength to fight any more. I just wanted him to tell me it would be OK, because he’d made me believe over time that he was the only person who could give me comfort, even if he was the only person who provided the pain I needed the comfort to fix.

Inside the flat was a terrible mess. Smashed glass and smears of blood everywhere. Bottles of half-drunk booze and cigarette butts. But Jack was in no mood to be placated and was quickly dragging me about and then throwing me out of the house altogether, tossing my stuff after me.

‘I don’t have any shoes,’ I called through the door, wondering if I could walk to the Tube and then get home to Bath in socks.

‘You can come in if you talk. Are you sorry?’ he said, and I said I was, desperately, without knowing what I was apologising for.

Then I was back inside and he was following me around while I looked for shoes with shaking hands — until he picked me up once more, dragged me to the door and threw me out again. That’s when I called the police.

I waited in the upstairs neighbour’s flat. He’d act as a witness for me, he said — they often heard Jack through the floorboards. ‘Can he hear us up here?’ I asked, eyes wide with fear.

When the police came, Jack was arrested and taken to a cell where he spent that night.

‘Why did you go back?’ asked the policeman who took my statement. That question again.

‘Love — and a laptop charger,’ I said, with a sound that was supposed to be a laugh of disbelief, but he gave me such a knowing look, I knew he’d seen it a hundred times before in a hundred smashed flats. Women going back to violent men because they’d confused love with fear and control.

Which is how I found myself less than four weeks later, on March 23, 2020, sitting on the sofa with Jack as lockdown was announced.

I felt panic washing through me — less about the virus, more about being trapped further with him.

After four days, I had to defy the Government’s instruction to stay at home in order to walk to the park to avoid him. On the way, I saw a new poster — ‘Abusers always work from home’ — raising awareness that, in the first lockdown, domestic violence was up by 40 per cent in London alone.

The next time it was the neighbours who called the police. We stood on the doorstep and said we were fine. Apologised. They said we seemed like nice people and were so different from the usual kind they had to see ‘for these sorts of things’.

To the police we didn’t look the ‘types’ to be in a domestically violent relationship, so no one was very concerned. Maybe we seemed too middle class or too wellspoken. Behind us was a beautiful flat on the posh side of the road. If they’d looked closer, they’d have seen blood smeared everywhere, as it often was when Jack was on a rampage of self-destruction.

Two weeks into lockdown, I finally left. And as Covid ravaged the country, I escaped to Bath and my parents, which is where I’ve been ever since, trying — and

Happiness comes when you value yourself

at last succeeding — to piece my life back together.

In the end I dropped the charges, not wanting to be dragged through court in a ‘he said, she said’ trial.

I am 31 now, but there is no new, redemptive love at the end of this tale. No Mr Nice Guy. No superneat ending. Life isn’t always like that. As readers we seek a bowtied finale because we want to assure ourselves there will be one for us, too.

But I am calmer and stronger than I have been for a decade. I looked for happiness in another person and instead I found fear. I thought I’d found my future but I found the opposite. Yet happiness, I realise now, lies not in one single person — it lies in friends who can anchor you and in valuing yourself and your own independence.

I took to running. Through country lanes and across the blankets of fields that surround my parents’ house. It’s a habit I credit with saving me in those first few weeks after Jack. It has made me physically and mentally strong. Not running to escape, but running to be free.

Some names and personal details have been changed.

Freephone 24-hour national Domestic Abuse helpline: 0808 2000 247 or visit nationaldahelpline.org.uk

ADApteD from Lucid: A memoir of An extreme Decade In An extreme Generation by Lucy holden, (£12.99, Simon & Schuster) out on February 3. © Lucy holden 2022. to order a copy for £11.69 (offer valid to 10.2.22; UK p&p free on orders over £20), visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 020 3176 2937.