Chapter Eight
Hell's Bells
My wife's poor health as a child meant that she was often unable to attend school regularly and she started a correspondence school curriculum instead. The school that she briefly attended was a refuge for dysfunctional teachers and children. Her schoolyard peers subjected her to abuse, alienation and ridicule. The children disliked her for a myriad of reasons – she was very shy, but highly intelligent, pretty and could see through their childish, bitchy games. Her poor health meant she struggled with sport activities and this was a major source of amusement and derision from the other children. Most hated, was the fact she was brighter than those around her were and could top the class easily in almost every subject, despite long periods of absence due to continual illness.
Her teachers were peculiar in the extreme and the senior school's headmaster would enjoy checking the girl's toilets, supposedly for girls smoking cigarettes and peer over the doors of every closed cubicle. The male sports teacher was equally as lecherous, claiming his need to go to the female sports teacher's office, which was at the rear of the girl's change rooms. Naturally, his checks involved naked or half-dressed adolescent girls being present. Drug sales were a secondary income for the teachers and the cold, ugly buildings were a breeding ground for anti-social behaviour. My wife told her mother of these disturbing incidents but the response was complete and utter indifference. Her mother obviously considered the overt sexual behaviour of the teachers as normal. Unfortunately, my wife, as a young girl found herself trapped between hades and hell.
Her poor health meant she was a frequent visitor to the specialist clinics in the city hospital, eighty kilometres away. Here, a bevy of uncaring, authoritarian nurses assaulted her with little regard for her feelings and needs. The staff subjected her to inhumane tests that would leave her begging the doctors and nurses to stop. They never did and the pain she suffered would be at the limits of her endurance. One test, performed twice, for cystic fibrosis required three staff to strap the struggling girl in a chair by her arms and upper body and then using varying levels of electric shocks on her wetted arms until she screamed with pain and begged them to stop. They refused and her mother sat calmly and quietly in the room watching, not uttering a word of protest.
On another occasion, the morning immediately following an umbilical hernia operation at the same hospital, she was forced to eat solid food by the head nurse, who threatened her with a needle if she refused to eat. Predictably, after eating the meal, she found herself vomiting uncontrollably. The pain from the recent abdominal surgery and having to call for assistance was unbearable and the staff refused to administer strong painkillers. They also refused to allow her a 'buzzer' to call for help in case she abused the privilege, instead leaving her to shout to the nursing station several rooms down the corridor. The pain was excruciating and she would cry herself to sleep. The nurses again threatened her with a needle if she complained or messed up the bed for any reason when the matron was due to visit.
Who were the people that could treat children so cruelly? Why couldn't they feel the pain and suffering of their vulnerable, young patients? What the hell was going on?
Fortunately, my wife survived the rigours of the hospitals and returned to the rigours of her abusive parents. Slowly but surely, her mother isolated her daughter completely from friends and relatives. Her mother was a consummate liar, she heaped derogation on her immediate relatives and her husband disassociated from his brothers and sisters to the point they didn't speak for many years, despite his brother living only a few kilometres away on the other side of the small town. The children were repeatedly told their aunt was inferior, dirty and they may catch diseases if they visited or ate there. As a result, the children rarely saw their cousins except for brief encounters on the town streets or the schoolyard. The cunningly manipulated children retreated into their own private world and my wife began reading voraciously. She read as many books as she could get her hands on, many of them well in advance of her age. They were books on everything from fluffy fiction to veterinary science, mathematics and romance. She learnt how to research material on any subject and it would prove a wonderful skill in later life.
Her mother had long ago given up caring for her children, she 'accumulated' strange and undiagnosed health conditions that allowed her to spend most of her day in bed moaning, groaning and sleeping. Her sleep patterns were irrational and she would be up at 2 A.M. in the morning and suddenly start the washing machine, walking around the house muttering and thumping her heels into the wooden floor, knowing she would awaken her school age children.
She established strange diets that she forced the whole family to follow and her own diet was that of a small child. No spices, white meat only, plenty of ice cream, sickly sweet buns and cakes, whipped cream by the litre. Her food consumption and rules was bizarre in the extreme. This child like diet continued for the rest of her adult life and her husband attempted to cook separate meals for himself or found himself eating meals similar to his wife. To avoid the wrath of Khan, he chose to eat the bland diet of his wife.
As a small child, my wife, was forced to take over many of the household chores like cooking, cleaning, ironing (from age five) and would be promptly abused if she made a mess. Her mother was a lazy leech, using her daughter like a modern-day version of Cinderella, but there was never a fairy godmother to come to the rescue. Not able to feel guilt, or have any notion of what guilt was, my wife's mother was able to use and abuse her daughter to the full extent of her fantasies. She literally had a slave to do with what she liked. Her mother was cunning enough to use verbal abuse, reinforced with violent physical demonstrations on third party objects such as table ornaments and glasses.
Her rare occasions of actual physical assault never left visible marks on her children. When, and if people suspected child abuse from the children's shy behaviour, no official records of abuse were registered. The children threatened to call the police after particularly outrageous behaviour, but both parents would respond, “Go ahead, no one will ever believe you.” Aged seven and nine, both children had plans to escape with food and tiny suitcases of clothes, stashed in a shed, ready to flee at the next demonic outburst. They never did, because they were more than 10 km from the nearest town and 30 km from their nearest relatives and the thought of returning to their mother's seething rage after their escape was more terrifying than staying. They knew she would kill them.
The frightening thought, was the fact that my wife could be murdered at any time, not only by physical violence, but also by a more insidious method involving death from 'natural causes.' The level of hatred this woman had for her child is beyond the understanding of a normal feeling human and there were times my wife was in life threatening situations due to her frail health. Bouts of pneumonia were untreated and could have easily resulted in a fatality. Nobody would have ever suspected murder, but the possibility of infanticide was very real and I believe attempted on several occasions. In fact, I would later witness an attempt on my wife's life many years later.
The extreme cunning of this woman to perpetrate cold-blooded murder on her child by devious means is almost beyond the comprehension of a normal, feeling human mother. If we hadn't personally witnessed this behaviour and documented the events with professionals, there is no way we could ever believe people without the full range of human feelings existed. We could never have believed the level of horrific emotional and physical abuse they could deliver and remain blameless for their actions. These unfortunate people actually saw themselves as perfect parents, brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts with often no personal discernment their abuse was abnormal.
The most insidious abuse was reserved for both my wife and I at our earliest stages. Our abusers would slowly, but cunningly, instil confusion in our lives and we lost trust in ourselves, our identity and even our environment. The abusers would undermine our self-confidence with lies about what other people were saying about us, our physical appearance, lies about what other people had discovered about us and the ability to twist an incident giving them the excuse to fly into a rage that was somehow our fault or their rage was caused by “our” paranoia or unstable emotions. The abusers would constantly interrupt our conversations with an unrelated topic and tell us to let them finish what they were saying while they would continue to be verbally and psychologically abusive. The abusers actually made us feel as if we deserved the terror they delivered and somehow it was our fault they acted the way they did – we had to be punished. As we matured, the abuse was elevated to trigger irrational behaviour based on the patterns they had implanted in our early development. They would use key words in their speech pattern to ensure we still knew the incredible scope of the assault they could and would deliver. We would later learn that abusers use these techniques and the colloquial label for their behaviour is called 'gas lighting.'
The term 'gas lighting' comes from a 1944 movie named Gaslight directed by George Cukor, with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, in which the central character continually changes the intensity of the gas lighting of a Victorian era house to induce uncertainty and confusion in his victim. Gas lighting is an incredibly effective way to allow the abuser to undermine an individual's perception of reality and permit them to continue their appalling behaviour or evil agenda. During our working lives, we would encounter numerous people who would use this technique in an attempt to be abusive, domineering and controlling in their race to climb the corporate ladder. They would contrive situations or stories that made us look like idiots or liars in an effort to get us removed from the company we were working for, especially if our efficiency threatened them. At the time, their behaviour completely overwhelmed us, with no idea what these people were or why they were behaving in such a devious manner.
The delivery of extreme examples of gas lighting occurs as described below -
Abuser: Does something atrocious.
Victim: Reprimands the abuser for their shocking behaviour.
Abuser: Instantly gets angry, accuses the victim of wrongdoing for reprimanding them and attacking them, and demands an apology for being accused. The bad behaviour will never be admitted or acknowledged and the poor behaviour carefully placed on the victim, never the abuser. The words they use are nearly always the same, “Don't you trust me?” or “How can you say that?” and sometimes they just plain lie and say, “I never did that.”
Victim: Is stunned and is required to defend himself or herself. If the victim refuses the gaslight attack and reminds the accuser of their original outburst, then the abuser will find as many past “transgressions” of the victim as necessary to distress the victim emotionally until the attack pattern is re-established.
Abuser: Takes the high moral ground since they were accused.
Victim: Must apologise for upsetting the abuser and “making” them upset. Their bad behaviour is now no longer the issue and rewarded. They have managed to get away with their appalling behaviour by accusing the victim of wrongdoing they never committed and forced to apologise for something they never did. It's the tried and trusted formula of ‘people’ using our emotions against us. If you ever find yourself in a situation of this nature, either at work or at home, seek professional advice immediately and carefully describe the abuse you have received. You will receive counselling and advise on the nature of the individual administering your abuse.
There was so much hatred and anger boiling below the surface of my mother in law, which would explode in a volcanic, Krakatoa eruption of frustration. This could be anywhere at any time, like a supermarket, a hotel, in a café or a street corner. The anger tantrums were childlike, complete with stamping feet and pumping arms. Real or imaginary frustrations triggered the outbursts, much to the amazement of bystanders. Again, the dissociated rage was never her fault; she always demanded the outburst was someone else’s fault and an apology from that person was required for causing her appalling behaviour.
Eventually my wife reached adolescence and blossomed into a truly beautiful, articulate woman. Her mother regularly called her a slut and a whore, which was so far from reality it was laughable. These abuses began long before the child had even gone out with a boy. Her brief sexual education lesson from her mother included the statement, “You are filthy and stop asking dirty questions.” Her mother would rifle through her personal possessions as if they were her own and one day found contraceptive pills carefully hidden, wrapped in a handkerchief in a zipped pocket of a handbag in the bottom of a drawer in her daughter's room. Her eighteen-year-old daughter, engaged to be married at that time felt violated once again. Her mother immediately launched into her well-rehearsed abuse and name-calling and ended by saying, “How could you do this to me? People will be laughing at me now. What will people think when I go to the chemist?” I guess the response should have been, “They will think of you now, just the same as they thought of you before!”
In an attempt to escape her mother's vile personality and get out of the house that held so much terror, my wife married her first husband when she was barely aged nineteen. The marriage was a disaster, my wife suffered regular sexually abuse and was savagely raped by her husband and they were divorced within twelve months. Her parents blamed her entirely for the rape, shunned her, offered no support to their only daughter and instead converted their shed for the rapist to live in. They bought him furniture, clothing, fed him, gave him large amounts of money and shortly after bought him a house in the nearby town! Meanwhile, their daughter was excommunicated from her family, destitute, emotionally shattered, living in fear and despair.
They gave the rapist many of the things belonging to their daughter, including a washing machine, given to her by her Grandmother as a birthday gift. My wife fought for years to have her personal belongings returned with limited results. My wife's parents forced her to pay $30 per month for cat food to feed her pet cats the rapist had stolen from her. Her parents told her she didn’t deserve to have anything, because she was the one who had left, She was continuously told by her adoptive parents she should return to her abusive ex-husband, as he would never have forced sex on her if she had loved him enough. She sought help from her recently discovered birth mother who whisked her away to another major city to her newly discovered sister to begin the recovery from her ordeal.
As a resident of the local town, I had heard about the divorce and the general population sided with the husband because his young wife had abandoned him. It was many years later that I discovered the hideous truth of the completely shameful business.
My wife's parents continued to support the rapist of their daughter with large amounts of cash, holidays and eventually, bought him a second house, close to their own house. They insisted he was present when my wife was finally able to return to the family farm and her mother would often spend large amounts of her time giggling on the phone to him and spend hours at a time visiting him alone. During these visits to her daughter's rapist, she stopped her husband from accompanying her. This bizarre behaviour went on for years, long after we had been married.
On my in-laws long visits with us in the tropics, my mother in law would lock herself in the bedroom and spend hours giggling like a teenager on the phone to my wife’s ex-husband, despite my wife insisting she was not to contact him while in our home. My mother in law blatantly ignored this request and when challenged, made the calls in secret, always inside our home, knowing it was deeply distressing my wife. She took care rarely to call when I was in the house, but showed total disregard for my wife's wishes if she was at the house.
It was sickening to consider my wife's mother was having sex with her daughter's ex-husband, but the prospect of that was very real. After discussions with numerous mental health professionals, we later learned that she was very likely having sex with him before he married her daughter. It truly beggared belief and if we hadn't personally witnessed, discussed and documented this behaviour in various formats with registered professionals, we would never have believed this sort of behaviour was possible.
Who were the people that would support the rapist of their only daughter and throw her out? Why couldn't they feel the pain and trauma she was going through? What the hell was going on? It just did not make sense.
I never doubted my wife's recollections. Her stories never varied and I never knew her to lie. I personally witnessed the continual mentioning of my wife's rapists name in front of her and the childish giggling when her mother locked herself in a room to make hour-long phone calls to him. I never witnessed the full fury of her mother's rages, but I did see the public and private childish tantrums, complete with stamping feet and pumping arms. Her behaviour during these episodes was emotionally immature and disturbing.
Many years later, I did see both of my in-laws standing over their daughter, who was unconscious and gasping for breath on our kitchen floor because of a severe panic attack during one of their assaults. Neither of them assisted a non-responsive, choking woman. They were still verbally abusing her when I rushed into the room from an outside, downstairs area. After I had made sure my wife was safe from them, I placed her in a recovery position, cleared her airway and made sure she was eventually able to breathe normally and regain consciousness. I was furious at what had transpired and promptly kicked her parents out the house, but not before my mother in law had turned her rage and vile mouth onto me, blaming me for my wife's current state even though I wasn't even in the house when she had been attacked and collapsed.
To this day, their hatred of me is intense for daring to question their behaviour. I have no doubt they would have let their daughter choke to death on that cold kitchen floor. During this episode, my wife's father stood passively and silently behind his wife, doing nothing. I can safely say, these people are very capable of cunningly contrived, cold-blooded murder, even murdering their only daughter.
In another episode of uncaring behaviour many years later, my wife slipped in her parent's shower and fell heavily on the floor. Fortunately, she didn't smash through the small glass cubicle and get sliced to pieces, but she did injure her hands and hip and dented a towel rail as the glass door of the shower crashed into the wall. The loud noise of the fall, alerted me to a problem and I rushed to help her. Her mother was in her bedroom at the time and heard the commotion, but stayed in bed for at least another five minutes, before casually wandering into the bathroom to see what furniture her daughter had damaged in the room after her fall.
Shortly after the shower cubicle incident, my wife's mother stole cash and medication from her daughter, perhaps as revenge for damaging the shower rail.
Sometime later, we were minding my in-laws dog while they went for a short holiday. We invited a friend over for evening dinner and after a beautiful meal, we went outside to look at the garden and play ball with the dog. As our friend bent down to pick up a retrieved ball from the dog, the dog lunged at her face and bit her lower lip. Our friend recoiled in horror as blood poured from the wound and we rushed to her aid to stem the blood flow and pacify the visibly distraught victim. We made an emergency dash to the nearest hospital, thirty minutes away. The duty doctor quickly sutured the gaping wound and our friend made a complete recovery.
When we told the story of the dog attack to my mother in-law on her return, the very first thing she said was, “How much is this going to cost?” There were no questions about the condition or recovery of our friend, only the concern about how much the incident might cost her. There was no interest in the person attacked by the dog, only the amount of money necessary to pay damages and doctors’ fees. At no time during the conversation about the dog attack did she ask about our friend's well-being! To this day, she has never asked how our friend coped with the vicious dog attack.