Cry Silent Tears: The heartbreaking survival story of a small mute boy who overcame unbearable suffering and found his voice again. Joe Peters

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СКАЧАТЬ She would tell them that she was just trying to teach them how to fight, toughening them up so they would be able to look after themselves in the outside world, but it seemed more like she did it to indulge her own blood¬ lust. The only person they really needed to protect themselves from was their own mother.

      Most of the violence in the house was inflicted directly by her. If any of us dared to disobey her, or even just looked at her in the wrong way, she would immediately lay into us in a blind rage. Sometimes she wouldn’t even need to have a reason; she would just become angry and take it out on whoever was nearest. She would grab Thomas and me by the hair and literally swing us round by it until our feet lifted off the ground, sending us hurtling into the walls. Her strength sometimes seemed superhuman. If she didn’t manage to get a satisfying liftoff first time she would repeat the manoeuvre until she got it right.

      As part of her hard-done-by widow act, Mum successfully sued the garage for several thousand pounds in compensation for Dad’s death, and Graeme closed the business down soon afterwards. Dad’s best friend Derek felt so guilty about not being able to save Dad when the flames were engulfing him that he wrote a suicide note and drove his car off the motorway, killing himself in the crash. It seemed as though the repercussions from that little gust of wind were going to go on forever, like ripples on a pond disturbed by a stone.

      Mum was determined to crush my spirit and put a stop to my disruptive behaviour once and for all and she beat me up so violently, so often, that I finally understood I must never question her or so much as look at her directly again. She was constantly warning me that next time I annoyed her she would kill me and as I lay on the floor in a battered heap I had no reason to doubt her. She made no effort to hold back the full force of her strength when she hit out; there was no self-control, no fear of causing damage, no worries about killing someone. It had become normal for me to be punched in the head or kicked over and over again for no reason at all. Even if I was behaving myself I still drove her mad, just because I was there and because I reminded her of the humiliation Dad and Marie had put her through.

      The fact that I was now virtually silent, making only little squeaking noises instead of speaking, seemed to fuel her annoyance even further. It was as if she believed I was mocking her with my whimpering, my pleading eyes and frantically shaking head as I tried to dissuade her from hitting me any more. As far she was concerned I was no longer a human being; I had degenerated into a hated animal to be kicked and punched and abused at every opportunity, like a beaten dog slinking around in the shadows with its head down and eyes to the floor.

      When I first lost my voice I found other ways to communicate. If I wanted something I would point at it and grunt and even that would drive her mad and so soon I stopped communicating at all. She made no secret of the fact that she detested me more and more every day; nothing I could have done would have made any difference by that stage.

      ‘Don’t fucking point,’ she would snarl, giving me such a hard slap I would be knocked off my feet.

      ‘Don’t fucking look at me!’

      ‘You smell fucking terrible!’

      Everything was an excuse to hit me. It went on and on and on. She channelled every ounce of anger and disappointment she felt towards the world in general and my father in particular, and took it out on me. She would encourage the others to do the same and Larry and Barry were happy to cooperate, delighted to have someone so much further down the family pecking order than themselves. They always wanted to do things to please her, and they soon learned that any humiliation they wanted to inflict on me would earn her approval as well as satisfying their own sadistic instincts.

      I was still sleeping on the floor in Larry and Barry’s room. Wally had his own room at the top of the house and Thomas and Ellie shared another room. I would have much preferred to have been in with them but I knew better than to argue with any decision Mum made. I had to stay in the bedroom all day long, except at mealtimes, but I wasn’t allowed to play with anything in there that belonged to my brothers. If I so much as touched one of their belongings I would be given a beating and I had nothing of my own to play with. The boredom of just sitting there all day long increased the feelings of isolation and frustration that were building up inside me, until I was just itching to break out into mischief or destruction but never daring to.

      At night I had no mattress or pillow, only a single blanket. Larry and Barry shared a double bed and resented having me in the house as much as Mum did. They bullied me at every opportunity and whenever they made a noise that disturbed Mum they would make sure I took the blame. She used to put us all to bed by six or seven in the evening so that she could have some solitary drinking time for herself. We would usually be awake again at four or four thirty, itching to get up and move about. Larry and Barry would start messing around together, fighting in bed and farting on each other, and if they woke Mum up she would shout through the wall.

      ‘Shut the fuck up!’

      ‘It’s Joe,’ they would yell back. I would open my mouth to protest my innocence, terrified of the punishment I would inevitably receive, but no sound would come out and Larry and Barry would giggle triumphantly as they waited for the entertainment that would follow.

      Furious at being woken and at the thought that I would dare to play up after all she had done to tame me, she would come storming in and give me another beating. The fact that I had no voice with which to plead my innocence was probably irrelevant as I doubt she would have believed me anyway.

      Larry and Barry were thick as thieves and they used to order me to do things that they knew would get me into trouble. Being five, brimming with repressed energy and boredom, and eager to please my big brothers to avoid getting a beating from them, I was easily influenced and always ended up being the one who got caught. Whenever there was any trouble Mum would blame me anyway, even if it was obvious it couldn’t have been anything to do with me.

      ‘None of this ever happened till you came on the scene,’ she’d say about some minor infringement of her rules, and then she’d give me another battering, dragging me around by the hair with my mouth stretched open but the screams refusing to form in my throat.

      One dark morning, just a few months after Dad died, Mum had finally had enough of me disturbing her sleep. She pulled me all the way down the stairs by my hair, shouting at the top of her voice.

      ‘This time you have gone too fucking far, you little bastard. You’ve pushed me too far. I’m finished with being patient with you. I’ve fucking had enough!’

      I really believed that she was finally going to kill me. She’d told me often enough that she would do it one day.

      There was a door under the stairs, which I had assumed led to a broom cupboard; I had never seen anyone opening it and no one had ever mentioned what lay behind it but I would be finding out soon enough. Dragging me behind her along the hall floor, Mum threw open the under-stairs door. I saw another staircase stretching down into the darkness below and I felt a terrible foreboding of what might be in store. Was this where she took people she was going to kill?

      She punched a light switch and I saw for the first time what I would later understand was a basement. This was nothing like the clean, orderly world of the rooms in the rest of the house. There was a smell of mustiness and damp rising up from the shadows thrown by the single light bulb. Thick cobwebs clung to the rough brick walls and bare wood. She hurled me down the stairs, kicking and punching as she followed me down. At the bottom there was another door, a big solid Victorian timber one, which she opened and threw me through with one last mighty slap, as if I was no more than a sack of straw. She turned on another light and I could see the full horror of where she was putting me.

      Inside was a cellar containing nothing but a filthy old mattress propped up against the СКАЧАТЬ