Mirror Image Shattered: A Twin’s True Story

By Madeleine Watson

“Episodes of a sick terror used to afflict my deepest childhood. I clung to Mum for a portion of her sanity, obsessed by the notion of being stifled and tortured. My brain yielded nothing but impressions of empty rooms and dust-motes glimmering against the window with only the hissing of the water-tank in the loft to make a sound.”

For fifty years, I had believed my intrusive thoughts were attributed to a chaotic, dysfunctional family of warring parents and mental illness. In fact, something bizarre and horrific has happened to me of which I had remained unaware for almost five decades. I wish to share my incredible true story in the hope of offering some insight into how trauma has impacted upon the psychology of a young child.

This is not a biography or a family chronicle, but describes a gash running through the heart of my life. A page-a-day diary I kept in the seventies and eighties has been used as part of this account.

The subject of this book has been described accurately. Names of people, places and certain details have been changed in order to protect identities and I am writing under a pseudonym.

Contains adult content. Certain readers may find some of the content unsettling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Madeleine Watson
• Release date: Jul 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370680689

Madeleine Watson

Madeleine Watson lives in the UK and writes under a pseudonym.At the age of 51, she discovered she had been repeatedly raped at the age of 3 by an uncle who shared her toddlerhood home.During oblivion, she kept a diary, wrote children’s mysteries, novels and short stories. She also went to art school for 5 years. Unbeknown to her, clues to her horrific toddlerhood had seeped into her creations.How she finally learned the truth is described in her books along with further revelations. Having lived through this experience, she is able to describe what life has been like for someone whose toddlerhood has been brutalised prior to the dawning of her conscious awareness.

Book preview

22

Madeleine Watson

To my twin Eve

2nd Edition published 1 Jan 2019

First Published © 2017 by Madeleine Watson. All rights reserved. The Right of Madeleine Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 Section 77 and 78.

No part of this publication may be republished, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Introduction

Part 1 Secret World

Part 2 Momentum

Part 3 Broken Glass

Part 4 Slumber

Part 5 Awakening

Part 6 An Alien Commission

Part 7 Pushchair Chronicles

Part 8 Jigsaw Pieces

Part 9 Shattered

Glossary

Reference

Introduction

This is a true story.

The subject of this book has been described accurately. Names of people, places and certain details have been changed in order to protect identities and I am writing under a pseudonym.

Something horrific yet bizarre has happened to me. This is not a pretty story and has not turned out the way I had planned, but my account could offer some insight on how the mind works under extreme conditions. Those who have experienced life’s most difficult trials might also find hope.

This is not a biography or a family chronicle, but follows a fissure that runs deep through the heart of my life.

This is my story spanning almost fifty years, fuelled by events that are unique and horrifying. A page-a-day diary I kept between 1977 and 1988 has been used as part of this account.

Certain readers may find some of the content unsettling.

Part 1: Secret World

1 Floats to the Surface

At the time of writing this, I am fifty-one years old and am coming to terms with a traumatic event that occurred in the August of 1969 – a month after Neil Armstrong had set foot on the moon. I had been four then and blessed with an identical twin, Eve. We are mirror image twins, meaning that she is right handed and I am left. When I look at her, I see myself, but I also see differences. She had a kink in her fringe; I don’t. My eyes are narrower than hers and I have a firmer jaw. Her smile is a little crooked and she has a wider gaze. I grew up to be more of a tomboy, always in jeans. She wears skirts and frilly blouses. We are both green-eyed and possess hair of blonde ringlets. Everyone except our siblings and my parents have trouble telling us apart. Born ten minutes before her and over a pound heavier, I had transfused some of her blood. I therefore have an edge on her, being more vocal and boisterous. I also had become her caretaker, her interpreter of the world, her entertainer, adviser and a bit of a parent. But she is also my tailor-made soul-mate and my resilience.

Being a caretaking twin has defined me. Sharing a twin-world full of fantasy, curiosity and made-up words, I had believed this explained our woeful lack of cognitive development upon starting school the following Easter. But years later, after encountering other twins, I have discovered this had never been the case, because our history had set us apart from most other twins.

Forty-seven years later, I am sitting on Colwyn Bay’s sandy beach on the north coast of Wales with my daughters, Grace and Alexia. My partner could not accompany due to work commitments and my son, Adam, was doing work experience, but I was happy with just the three of us. It was a hot August day and my children had badgered me into buying a couple of ring floats that they could take out into the Irish Sea. The beach had been crowded and the sky streaked with cirrus clouds. A perfect day and I was content.

From the rocks off the quayside, I watched them drag their rings across the sand, blissfully chatting about kids’ stuff, probably not unlike my own twin stuff of forty-seven years ago. I had instructed them not to go further out than the other swimmers and promptly began snapping them on my camera as they launched themselves into the blue.

I had made the decision not to exhibit the fretfulness of my mother – with tight apron strings, over-vigilant and obsessive about every possible danger to foster anxieties. My mother had kept us on reins until the age of about four because of our love of climbing and running off in different directions. Our hyperactivity had not suited her sedentary tastes, it seemed. Still, I wanted to give my children the freedom I had craved.

I remained attentive as they floated out, being the heedful mother I felt I should be. But slowly, the figures of my children kept diminishing. I put my camera down thinking, now’s the time to paddle the other way. Having no one with me, I would have to leave my belongings unattended. There was a drunk-threesome nearby as well as a beach full of strangers harbouring a possible opportunist for pilfering unattended belongings.

A few moments became four and then five until I could no longer make out their faces.

And that’s when it dawned on me.

Were they in fact calling me but I could not hear them? Had an undercurrent caught them and they could no longer paddle against it? Were they crying? Was I just sitting here, unaware that they were in fact in serious trouble and could not communicate this to me?

Suddenly, they seemed so very, very far away; small pale dots, barely discernible against the wavelets upon the sea’s rolling surface. A vast blue divided them from the nearest bather.

A thunderous dread slammed into my chest and I felt sick. I shot up but my legs could not move immediately. The sound of my voice unleashed from my throat mutated my sick fear into a feral panic.

‘Come back! Come back!’

God, I sounded frenzied, not like me at all.

People on the beach looked my way, but I barely noticed and didn’t care about the fuss I was about to unleash. My shouts became a scream. ‘Come back! Come back!’ I dashed from the rocks towards the water’s edge. A woman came to my side. She tried to assure me that the sea is shallow here for quite a distance. But this offered no comfort. These were not her children. They were mine.

My voice by now was shaking, as I said to her. ‘They seem so far away!’ The woman had no answer, seeing that my desperation had crushed all logical thought. ‘Is there a coastguard here?’ I demanded. ‘Where is the coastguard!’

But there was no coastguard.

Seeing no other option, I launched myself at the sea. The entire section of the beach had become spectators, watching this frenzied mother dash into the waves. The woman had been right, the sea was just thigh deep for a long way out, but my children remained small dots and a strong undercurrent could still sweep them away. The distance between us diminished agonisingly slowly, but I kept on calling, waving my arms wildly and screaming, ‘Come back! Come back!’ I was aghast at how our communication had been severed by the expanse between us. My windmills failed to draw their attention and neither did my calls for seemingly an eternity. A few hundred metres or so seemed more like ten thousand. But this did not stop me from running against the sea, shouting, waving and making the biggest fuss Colwyn Bay’s beach-lovers had probably ever witnessed.

And as I ran, I started to have the eerie sensation that another ‘me’ was running inside of me. My subconscious thought had been: I’ve been here before. I’ve done this before.

My dip into the Irish Sea had been the first in my life, but the running, the terror and the sun on my back had been my second.

When the children finally looked my way, they appeared shocked and surprised. I kept calling them and slowly, they picked up their floats. It was then I noticed other bathers behind an outcrop not far away. They weren’t in any immediate danger. Thankfully. But knowing nothing of Colwyn Bay’s coastline, I had believed a strong undercurrent could really have claimed my children.

Slowly, the children followed me back to the beach, their rings dangling from their elbows. The entire beach watched our return. I cared little for the spectacle I had caused. I cared little for the embarrassment I had inflicted upon my children. I simply dished up a few words about keeping close by.

When I was done, they wandered off towards the quayside.

Gosh, I sounded like my mother, I thought with regret. I had gone all hysterical over nothing and causing a massive fuss. It was a beautiful day, the sea calm and dotted with bathers. There was no danger.

Later, Alexia told me she had truthfully been unaware of the distance they had drifted. The beach from her perspective seemed big and therefore closer than what it really was, whereas to me, my children had diminished to small dots. I could see her point and we had discussed the incident back at the hotel. My children were safe. However, the drowning of five young men on East Sussex’s Camber Sands a week later would haunt me. A riptide and sandbanks had claimed their lives in spite of the shallow waters.

The following day, the children enjoyed a day at the beach. I hoped yesterday hadn’t cast a shadow over our holiday. I still wanted them to explore the world, to grow in confidence. But during the remainder of that day, I had been visited by a mysterious and crushing depression. Yes, I had experienced a mother’s ultimate fear of losing her children, but there was something else bothering me – a separate force drip-feeding nausea into my gut.

It had to do with my sense of my other self running inside of me, terrorised with the sun on my back. It was a feeling I had never experienced in my adult life before.

And that’s when the truth of my past began to open up to me.

2 Somebody Else

Six weeks prior to the incident on Colwyn Bay, I’d had a disagreement with my brother, Nicholas. It was a family matter about our ailing mother’s care. Disagreements within families are common, but I am averse to confrontation and for this reason, avoid it whenever I can. But there is a big reason for this. I seem to have this crippling condition that can only be described as this sullied black-blame. Even if the other person might be in unreasonable or I might be right, I end up feeling this awful black-guilt. Such a sensation, I believed, is not unusual and forms part of being human. But over the years, I have come to realise that this sensation is something more than routine. Bouts would last weeks, sometimes months after an event or at times come on like a migraine or a depression. It’s a feeling of wishing to be someone else; an animal, a bird, an insect; wishing to be anyone else but me.

A horrible mark had been imprinted upon my being. A small but explicit trickle of pollution would seep into my bones for weeks at a time. It has got so bad that I wished I had cerebral off-switch that could conjure up oblivion. Occasionally I have found comfort in the idea that one day I will no longer be here to carry this terrible sensation.

Logic told me I couldn’t have suffered sex abuse as a child. Dad was ‘safe’ and the remaining occupants of my childhood home are honourable siblings with stalwart values. Such a sensation seemed odd under the circumstances.

This horrible feeling has been the driving force of engrossing myself within projects: art exhibitions, record-keeping, writing, researching, blogging and other pursuits described within this book, filling my day to the brim. It was like trying to get comfortable sitting on a pin, only to keep squirming around. Distraction had been my motivation for escaping this uncomfortable feeling. Others saw me as simply having nervous energy, as had I. To me, sitting still had never been an option.

Long ago, I had made a logical assumption of where this feeling came. Of course, it was childhood and black-blame as I call it, was already afflicting me by the time I was six. Only years later, did I realise that none of my siblings share the depth of this awful feeling. Not even my twin, Eve.

I have four sisters and a brother, all sharing the same upbringing as I do. Contributions about them have been kept to a minimum, respecting their privacy and retaining the focus of this book. However, I shall explain how I came to believe this black-blame feeling was exclusive to me.

I’m going to get this bit out of the way. My early childhood has been to say the least...difficult. I am not judging my parents, for circumstances beyond their control were largely to blame. Furthermore, invoking pity or compassion is the last reason for writing this book. It’s simply fact and is relevant to this account.

Eve and I were born at the worst possible time within a troubled and overburdened family. Mum had a difficult pregnancy, carrying twins to full term and suffering all sorts of complications along the way. A few weeks after our birth, she almost died from a haemorrhage and was never quite the same.

Soon after marrying, my parents lodged in a caravan on Granddad’s grounds with their first child. Until then, Dad worked hard to get the cottage they had bought into a liveable state. It was a two-up two-down affair with spacious gardens that looked over fields with a clear view of the village church. He built a side-extension with a scullery and bathroom with stairs leading up to a guestroom where my Nan used to sleep. My dad was good with his hands. The cottage back door became an internal sliding door, which would lead from the kitchen into the scullery. This sliding door would soon represent a split within the household.

Dad was working in a family plumbing business at the time which didn’t pay much. Dad reminisces on those times, as they were quite contented. Dad used to keep pigs and chickens in a pen and grow his own vegetables. Out-houses, sheds, coal-bunkers and a garage provided countless places to play and hide. Dad’s carpenter brother had made a caravan fashioned out of plywood with windows and a porch, which was installed on the northern limb of the garden. Dad built a garage, play area and swimming pool – a rectangular trench painted blue. My older siblings used to play in the caravan and, weather permitting, have a splash in the pool years later. Family photos show a garden full of children. Indeed, my family did look happy then; Mum and Dad, a normal couple.

A combination of circumstances caused Dad to jump ship from the business. A dispute between Granddad’s brothers created a rift which I don’t know the details of. Mum also had to find the money to buy school uniforms. The last straw came in the form of Eve and I, baby twins – two more mouths to feed. By this time, my parents already had three children.

To make ends meet, Dad began working nights assembling parts for an electrical company. The money was fantastic but it came at a huge price. The pressures and the brutal hours did not suit Dad’s nature and he became bad-tempered and obsessed with getting his sleep. We all had to creep around the house when he was in bed. The atmosphere grew oppressive and rows would flare up. Dad’s migraines grew relentless and he took painkillers and sleeping pills to keep him functioning. Eventually, the night work proved too much and Dad went on permanent sick. He moved out of the main bedroom and into the guestroom where Nan used to sleep. We were plunged into abject poverty.

The gardens may have been idyllic in the summer, but the little cottage remained run-down, cramped and cold in the winter. Dad stayed in bed and his personality changed. Being the seventies, drugs and anti-psychotics were dished out like sweets. Dad ended up with a full-blown drug addiction. I think the doctors were stupid for prescribing such a concoction of pills knowing Dad had young children living with him. Years later, Dad admitted that breaking his dependency had been the hardest thing he has ever had to do. It took five years for Dad to get clean without any supervision from the hospital at all, slicing the daily dose into smaller portions over months on end.

I was told he had been a wonderful dad before then. I wasn’t to know this because I never saw the real dad until I had a family of my own years later. I feel robbed of the dad I should have had as a child.

By the time I was four, Dad was gripped by a full-blown mental illness that I have never really got to the bottom of, but shortly after quitting the company, he was struck by a severe fever that lasted three days accompanied by bizarre cravings and hallucinations. He refused a doctor and remained cooped up in the guestroom for days on end so Nan could no longer live with us. We all had to keep quiet when he was around. Dripping taps had to be switched off and running baths had to wait until he was out of the way. Rustling papers and a ticking clock would be a source of irritation. He used to sit rock-still in the centre of the room staring murderously into space and daring anyone to latch eyes with him. If they did, God help them.

The atmosphere became a knife-edge of keeping this capricious man-child allayed. I can see now it wasn’t his fault, but at the time, I didn’t understand. Life in the cottage became hell, his mental illness causing severe mood swings, lack of reason and violent outbursts. Naturally, I felt sorry for Mum and wished Dad would live somewhere else.

When I was five, I had made too much noise at the wrong time and Dad came out of nowhere and grabbed me by the ankles, pulled me upside down and wacked my thighs until I couldn’t breathe. To this day, I can picture the beetroot flush of his face against the ceiling, his mouth bunching up with grim intent. Once, he beat both Eve and I in quick succession before he disappeared into the guestroom dogged with wretched remorse. For a second, I felt sorry for him.

In an age when corporal punishment was seen to be an acceptable means of correction, I had naively believed Dad was simply exercising his father-role and had dished out the same to my other siblings. But have bitterly learned he had saved his upside-down beatings for Eve and me alone. By the age of six, my respect for Dad amounted to zero seeing only a wretched, twitching ogre we had to accommodate. Eventually, Dad was offered a stay in hospital with enforced coma from an insulin injection. He refused but considered a rehab stay in Exeter before refusing that as well. Mum resented him for not going and never forgave him. To this day, I have an incomplete picture of what was really going on with Dad. Eve and I, so disturbed by Dad’s episodes, seldom discussed these episodes until we were in our early twenties.

Everything seemed fine during a remission and Dad’s nice side would emerge. He took up his old pursuit of sculpting and used the garret at the west side of the cottage which had a disused larder at one end. He became obsessed with recreating primitive art. He would rise at the crack of dawn and whittle basswood and pine. I can still remember the large panes of glass he used as mixing palettes for sketches when he was conceiving ideas. During the darkest hours, he sketched harrowing images of eyeballs, blood, gore and veins. They so disturbed me, I would take another route through the house to avoid encountering them. They never came to fruition and Mum made him burn the sketches in the end, but I can see now that Dad had become seriously ill and intervention was needed. Sadly, nothing like that existed in the seventies.

From the turn of the 1970s until the late 1980s, Dad experienced some success with his installations, exhibiting in major city galleries. But he went through a second bout of psychosis during this time, bringing on further outbursts and paranoia.

And now I am getting to the part of where this horrible black-blame sensation came. Of all my siblings, I resemble my dad the most, even more so than my twin. I am the only child who pursued art into adulthood. But because of Dad’s mental illness, I valued my ‘gift’ little and never shared my pursuit with him, trying to make my style and subject matter as different to his as possible. Dad’s Aunt Phyllis suffered manic depression and received electroconvulsive therapy which would suggest this trait ran in his side of the family. I wanted none of it and wished I was like Mum.

A newspaper clipping informing of Dad’s one-man show says it all. The photograph shows Dad, Eve and I holding Dad’s figurines. I can be seen standing furthest from him, looking sheepishly down. Yes, I’m arty, like him, but wished I was good at something else. Sadly, I couldn’t separate Dad from the mental illness.

I looked up to and revered Mum. She appeared the survivor under adversity. She was a fierce, matriarchal, overprotective woman who upheld routine such as school, church and doing charity work. On a severe budget, she made her purse-strings go for miles and performed miracles at Christmases and birthdays. She kept a constant radar for danger, particularly strange men or ‘weirdoes’ who could pose potential threat to her children. She even vocalised her aversion to men who impose physical strength and authority like Dad. This might explain Nicholas’s sensitive and diffident nature, as he was a bit of a mummy’s boy. I, too, bought into this idea because of the way Dad behaved.

People didn’t warm to Mum easily. She could appear stern without trying, and she could maintain a silent grudge for days to put you out in the cold. Once she had not spoken to Eve for two weeks because she had visited Mum’s sister, Aunt Maud against Mum’s wishes. But I felt this trait gave Mum a bad press; people simply misunderstood her.