I have just seen a photo of my mother on Facebook with my youngest sister’s children, she’s smiling and she look’s very happy. It breaks my heart seeing her so happy knowing that she has turned her back on my older sister and myself.
I have been through hell because of my mother leaving me with her cruel spiteful father on St. Helena. She knew that he was cruel and spiteful because he would beat her mother and children senseless.
I do try to overcome the feeling of absolute despair but everything gets too hard to bear at times. My grandmother tried her best to bring me up but I was pining for my mother. My grandmother always told me that I looked for my mother for six weeks after she left St. Helena.
I think back to a tiny child looking and crying for a mother that never came back. I am not blaming my mother for wanting a better life in England Because if she had stayed on St. Helena she probably would have had more illegitimate children as the rape culture was as bad in her day as mine.
Setting all of that aside for a moment, she has absolutely nothing to do with us or our children. The pain is huge and at the last session with the psychologist I told her about one point in my life where I was around ten years. My mother’s father was physically and mentally abusing me. He would tell me every day how much he hated me and he would throw heavy objects at me he. He would also tell me to fuck off out of his house. He would make sure that no one showed me any affection and he would tell everyone that I was a bad child.
He would throw any food that I touched away and I told the psychologist that he would have his other grandchildren on his lap while saying the most vile things to me. I so wanted poppa to love me the same as my cousins, but he never did.
I told the psychologist that I aways felt left out. I have so many hang ups even to this day. I also watched as he physically and mentally abused my grandmother. My life was hell.
My poppa would do and systematically say the most evil thing to us, but in the same breath he would say God have mercy on my soul. I was scared to death of poppa. He was always quoting verses from the bible. Poppa knew the bible from the begining to the end. This made me wonder why he was so wicked.
Poppa always made sure that I said my prayers before I went to bed this was very confusing for a child. At the same time the head teacher was hitting me with a large piece of stick because of my behavior. Back then they called it corporal punishment. I called it hell, as the whole class would watch, but no one laughed at me. I think that the children were scared.
At one point the teachers thought that I had learning difficulties because I wasn’t learning. We now know that unhappy children don’t learn.
The head teacher at Longwood infant and junior school would hit me most days. I feel so hurt as she knew full well that I didn’t have a mother or father. All the while this was happing those evil young men thought that it was their right to drag me into the woods and repeatly rape me. This was an ordeal that lasted from when I was ten years old till I was about fifteen years old.
I was tortured for five long years. They didn’t stop when my grandmother died and I was moved from Deadwood to Jamestown.
I told the psychologist that I was so happy that I had been moved away from abuse and torture, that i didn’t grieve for my grandmother. I was so happy to leave Deadwood and all the abuse and torture behind me.
I told the psychologist that freedom was indeed beautiful. I thank you God for my freedom. I did have a social worker but I never spoke to him on my own. Poppa would do all the talking while mumma whimpered while clutching my hand. In my day children didn’t see social workers on their own and my school didn’t report abuse as the head teacher was also abusing me.
I told the psychologist that the only way that I could deal with the abuse was to detach myself from the awful situation. I would stand and watch my self being abused. The psychologist would ask me what would make me the most happy and I thought for a short moment and replied that I would be happy to recieve a card from my mum or some flowers. That would really make me happy. It woul say that my mother loved me and it would make me feel wanted, because I really did go through hell because my mother had left me on St. Helena.
At the next session the psychologist is going to show me the best way to deal with the abuse that I endured.