Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. Read Online Free PDF

hissed, and dragged me by the arm to the path along the side of the kitchen. ‘I’m very angry with you for doing something so cruel. God is angry and the bee is going to be angry with you as well. Just you wait and see.’
    She unscrewed the lid of the jar and pressed the opening against my thigh. ‘Don’t move,’ she instructed. ‘You’ll make the bee even more angry.’ She tapped the bottom of the jar until the bee fell on to my skin, where I felt it crawling around, buzzing away. Suddenly there was a sharp jab that made me scream, and a throbbing pain unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
    ‘The bee’s going to die now,’ Mum told me, ‘and it’s all your fault. You killed him.’
    She dragged me, sobbing uncontrollably, to the cupboard under the stairs and locked me in. ‘I’m going to get more bees to keep stinging you until you learn not to be cruel to poor defenceless creatures,’ she told me.
    As I stood in the dark, scratching my sting in a futile attempt to relieve the pain, I felt desperately sad. Was it really my fault the bee had died?
    That night Dad got home early and came up to tuck me into bed. I said to him ‘Mummy hurt me with a bee and made me cry’, but he didn’t believe me.
    ‘Your Mum says the bee stung you because you made it angry by shutting it in a jar. You have to be careful with bees, Lady Jane.’
    ‘But she did it!’ I protested.
    He said, ‘If Mummy was angry with you today, it must have been because you’d done something naughty.’
    I remember clearly how devastated I was that he didn’t believe me when I was telling the truth. I had thought I was ‘Daddy’s little girl’ but he was taking Mum’s side instead of mine. Children have an innate sense of justice and I felt strongly how unfair this was. It also meant I was powerless against my mother’s rage. I was a lot more vulnerable if I couldn’t get my Dad to take me seriously.
    I suppose he went downstairs and told Mum about our conversation because the next morning she was livid.
    ‘How dare you tell tales to your father! You’re a devil child and I’m going to have to keep teaching you lesson after lesson until you learn to behave better.’
    Straight after breakfast she went out to the garden with a jam jar and hunted around until she found another bee. I tried to run away and hide behind the sofa but she caught me and dragged me out. Knowing what was going to happen, this time I struggled like mad to get away from the bee in the jar but she held me in a grip of iron until it had delivered its sting. Once again, I was locked in the spider cupboard for the day as the poison raised another red, angry lump on my leg and the horrible, throbbing pain made me scream and cry. I clawed and clawed at the stings until the whole area was raw.
    * * *
    This happened a few more times, each occasion bringing me a fresh sting on my chubby thighs and a painful red lump afterwards. I knew better than to tell Dad, though. That’s one lesson I had learned. Mum had told him I was an unusually clumsy child, always tripping over and bumping into things, and he never seemed to question if I had a black eye or bruises on my arms and legs. He didn’t bath me so he never saw the sting marks under my dress, or the stripes from the cane on my bottom. Mum was in charge of our baths and I grew to fear hair-washing nights twice a week when she took great glee in getting soap in my eyes. If Nigel had already got out, she held my head under water as she rinsed off the shampoo until I was left gasping for breath and very scared.
    She brushed my teeth roughly then it was straight to bed with the door shut. If Dad was home, he’d come up to tuck me in but more often than not I got into bed on my own. I wasn’t allowed to bring Scruffy or Rosie with me – they stayed downstairs. I would say the prayers I’d been taught by rote – thank you for a good day, keep me safe in the night, bless my grandmas and grandpas – then lie in the