Free Deliver Me From Evil by Alloma Gilbert

regular beatings.
    What was Eunice’s aim? To shut us up? To create total, instant obedience? I think it was to break our spirits, to tame us, as a ringmaster does with wild animals. Or maybe it was to stop us thinking at all. To prevent us from being individuals or from having any personal power.
    One of Eunice’s favourite things to do to all the ‘Bad’ children (Sarah, Thomas and I) was to press her heavy, adult hand on our lips so that our teeth cut our mouths on the inside. My lips would bleed and swell up, but it was a fairly effective way of shutting me up. She would also throw things at our faces – aiming particularly for our mouths – like cans of food, books or anything that came to hand. Eunice actually knocked out Sarah’s front teeth with a tin of baked beans, and then lied to the dentist, saying Sarah had fallen over.
    But more commonly she would just lash out, quickly and effectively with a smack across the mouth, splitting the skin. I have many little scars around the mouth from these everyday, common assaults and one particularly visible one from having a full tin of baked beans thrown at my face. I also have a kink in my nose (which looks as if it was probably broken at some point) sustained in one of Eunice’s heavy-handed clouts around the head. The first time this happened it hurt a lot and I obviously cried and protested. But I learned very quickly that the more I protested, the worse things got. She would double her efforts and hit you even harder to shut you up.
    Eunice spent years perfecting her means of shutting children up and trying to squeeze absolute obedience, literally, out of them, making them suffer in silence as much as she could. Even Judith was clearly cowed by Eunice, although she was a tall, grown woman. She once told me we had it easy as she’d been horsewhipped regularly when they had had ponies when she was little. This only goes to show how psychologically scarred and beaten Judith was. Yet she was no slouch either when it came to meting out corporal punishment. She made us drink washing-up liquid and clouted us just like her mother. Eunice often made Judith hold us when she beat us, too.
    Eunice would try to strangle me and the other Bad children. She would stride swiftly towards me, pinning me down with her beady grey eyes, then suddenly her large hand would be wrapped around my throat. She’d hold me tight by the neck and squeeze very hard, but not enough to stop me breathing entirely. She was clever and usually knew when to stop. I could still breathe, just, but only very raspingly
    My first reaction would be to try to fight her off. It’s natural – when someone is trying to stop you breathing, you struggle, you fight for air. But Eunice would rise to the challenge and scream at me, inches from my face, ‘Relax, relax, you can breathe.’ Relax! Was she joking? How can you relax when someone is trying to squeeze the life out of you? So, I would freak out, pushing against her, thrashing around while she held onto my throat, that hard, concentrated gleam in her eye. I’d think, She ’ s going to kill me or I’m dying. But the more I struggled the harder she squeezed. So, eventually, I learned to quieten down, hold still and accept what she was doing, allowing her to terrify me into compliance.
    The strangling was something she kept up her sleeve for when she really wanted to get my attention for something I’d obviously done wrong according to her Big Book of Misdemeanours. As with all her punishments, her objective was to break my spirit; once this was achieved she simply lost interest and stalked off, job done.
    Although the food at Eunice’s house had been seemingly plentiful at first, it became increasingly meagre once I lived there full-time. For instance, Eunice would allow us only four slices of processed bread a day. Flimsy white sliced bread. Four slices, no more, no less. It was yet another one of her arbitrary yet rigid rules. But children get hungry