Sleep did not always come so easily. For much of her south London childhood she lay awake listening for the creak of the stair that would herald the arrival of her mother. It was only the third step that creaked, part of the tread having been removed to fashion a sharp stick. To beat her with.
“She hit me when I wet the bed,” she says. “And sometimes when I didn’t.”
Now 48, Briscoe speaks in measured, almost flat, tones recalling her troubled childhood. As she rehearses the violence, starvation and deprivation she endured, she could be reciting a shopping list.
Ugly, her account of her upbringing, makes for harrowing reading. Her Jamaican mother’s vocabulary included “Black Bitch”, “Scarface” and “Miss Pissabed”. When she asked her mother why she treated her so badly, she replied: “Oh, just the fact that you breathe . . .”
Briscoe was sexually abused by her stepfather on one occasion, but the constant cruelty came from her mother, who not only beat and kicked her, but spat at her and deprived her of food. She would punch her adolescent bosom and pull her nipples to punish her. She inflicted such damage that doctors at first believed lumps in her breasts, discovered when she was 12, were the result of cancer, not cruelty.
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Her mother’s behaviour is a cancer that lives on to this day. In 1999 she tried to sabotage Briscoe’s career, writing to the Bar Council to allege that her daughter had hired a hitman to kill her. The council dismissed the claim as unsubstantiated. Briscoe’s response was to write the following to her mother: “You are a very sad and sick woman. My one regret is that you and I happened to be in the same room when I was born . . .” As a Catholic, she added, she knew that only the good die young. But “every day I pray the good Lord takes you sooner rather than later”.
Now a successful barrister who works as a part-time judge in the crown and county courts, Miss Recorder Briscoe often comes up against instances of child abuse. “I try to deal with such cases in an entirely professional way. I do not let my experiences colour my judgment.”
She has written the book to let her children, now teenagers, know “something about their mum”, and at the behest of her partner, Tony Arlidge, a writer and QC. Her daughter, studying at St Paul’s girls’ school, read it and was appalled. Her son, currently applying to Cambridge, is stuck in the middle of the story, too pained to continue.
The child of Jamaican parents who settled in Britain in the 1950s, she does not, however, see herself as a spokeswoman for the black middle class or immigrants. “I do not think what happened to me has anything to do with my race or colour.”
One of six children, only Constance was singled out for abuse. Her father walked out shortly after she was born and she was brought up by her mother and stepfather.
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“My mother’s behaviour was a combination of temperament and circumstances. But now that I am a mother, I think even more that her treatment was completely incomprehensible and unacceptable. I do not forgive her.”
Ugly certainly makes for uncomfortable reading. But what makes it all doubly distressing is not just the brutality of the mother but the apparent culpability of her older sisters. Although they stopped short of relishing her humiliation, they did not intervene. “They were frightened. Pauline, the eldest, should have done more. She says when she tried to step in, she was beaten. When that happens, you give up. They were always diving for cover.”
Today her mother lives in south London with a new husband and is not on speaking terms with any of her children. She has 11 in all, six by her first relationship, four by her second and one adopted. Briscoe has seen her perhaps four times in 20 years, the last being at her father’s funeral in 2003. “We did not acknowledge each other.”
With the precision of a legal mind, her words are careful and deliberate. Does she ever remember loving her mother? “Yes, in 1962.” That was the year before she was left alone in the house overnight, aged five, her mother taking the other children away without any explanation. That Christmas, as in all subsequent years, she received two presents. The same doll and spinning top were wrapped and rewrapped each year. The beatings began around the same time.
“I was difficult. I wet the bed. My mother had a lot to cope with. Every time I wet the bed, she had to wash the sheets.” Eventually her mother gave up, putting the wet, reeking sheets back on the bed, forcing her to sleep in them.
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Briscoe and her sisters took turns to cook all the meals and clean the house. She still found time for her homework, forging ahead at school. Despite her ability, her mother refused to allow her to try for grammar school. Briscoe was so desperate she walked into social services and asked them to take her into care. Assuming she had just had a tiff with her mother, she was told to “go home and think about it”. What she actually did was to go home and drink bleach. She vomited most of it before it could damage her.
In the event, Briscoe did not have to resort to self-harm — her mother did it for her. When a row ensued about cooking, she slashed her daughter’s arm with a kitchen knife. Later, she graduated to beating her with a leather strap. Petty cruelties followed, almost daily. When the time came for the first communion, Briscoe had to wear a soiled dress from a second-hand shop, instead of the pristine one in the attic her mother had used for the other sisters. Then one day, without explanation, her mother took her bed away, leaving her to sleep on the floor.
Her hair began to fall out because of stress. Eventually her mother attacked her so badly that her headmaster called her mother in. Briscoe refused to go back home with her but would not say why. A teacher, Miss K, agreed to take her in. Life proved sweet at Miss K’s flat in Streatham and her grades soared. She became prefect and captain of games. She did not once wet the bed.
She had long wanted to study for the bar. Recovering from surgery to repair her damaged breasts, she had watched Crown Court, a courtroom drama on daytime television, and been hooked. On a school trip to Knightsbridge crown court, she watched Michael Mansfield QC defend some black boys accused of theft. He was in the canteen at lunchtime and she was able to buttonhole him about her ambition. Whatever she said impressed him. “Stay in touch,” he told her without knowing anything about her, “and I’ll give you pupillage.” She was to hold him to that promise.
Just as her life was taking a turn for the better, however, Miss K was badly injured in a car crash and Briscoe had to return home. She was inconsolable — but not for long. On a whim her mother decided to move with some of the children to another house. Briscoe was free: “No more Mummy — hip, hip hooray!” she remembers. There was one drawback. There was no food and no money, and Briscoe was having to pay her mother £15 a week in rent. The other sisters paid nothing. Aged 14, she took a job as a Saturday girl and as an early morning office cleaner to find the money. With two jobs and no mother, she managed to pass 10 O-levels.
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Despite the horrific abuse, Briscoe’s memories do not make for unrelieved grimness. On the bus one morning she fell in love with a four-poster bed in a shop window. When she tried it out in the shop, it was so comfortable that she fell asleep. She awoke to a small crowd that had gathered round. It cost £150 and she would pay for it in instalments. To afford it, she took a third job as a weekend nursing auxiliary — yet she was still at school. “It was heavy going ”, she remembers.
At no point in her life, she says, was she ever downcast. Furious, aggrieved, ambitious, but never without hope. “I knew I could succeed and I knew I could go to university. I thought I was as good as the next person. I could not wait to reach my goal.”
Passing her A-levels, she won a place to read law at Newcastle University. Yet there remained one obstacle: her mother’s signature on the grant form. When it arrived Briscoe went to find her. Her reaction was to tear it up, saying: “Only clever people go to university . . . Now f*** off out of my sight, if you know what’s good for you.”
“I think the worst thing she ever did was to tear up my grant form,” Briscoe says. “She kicked away my chance to move on.”
Without parental consent, she had to prove she was self-sufficient. Luckily, she had only to work one more year and at 19 she went up to university. The summer she left school she took delivery of her bed. “It was heaven reading a book in bed with my curtains closed.”
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Before travelling to Newcastle she bade her mother farewell. “All I have ever wanted was a mum who loved me, not hated me, loved me . . . Mummy, I will never speak to you as long as I live, and I think you know why.”
Ugly by Constance Briscoe will be published tomorrow by Hodder & Stoughton at £12.99. Copies can be ordered for £11.69 with free delivery from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585