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Wedding nights are often startling for inexperienced teenaged brides, but nothing could be more surprising than your knight in shining armour punching you in the face. Although they're 40 years in the past, memories of her wedding night and the ensuing 15 months of torturous abuse still freeze Nikola James's blood. They will freeze yours, too, as she relives them in her memoir, The Price of Love, an exploration of a relationship so toxic it's a wonder she survived.
Talking with James is mildly peculiar. Not only is the name a pseudonym, she's also wearing a wig and coloured contact lenses when we rendezvous in London. It's as if she, not the brutal ex-husband she calls Neil, had shameful secrets to hide. Before and after the interview she's charming - full of smiles and easy laughter. It's clear from the cuddling that she and Connor, her husband of more than 25 years, enjoy a true love match. But while the tape rolls she speaks in a voice so whispery and uninflected that I practically crawl into her lap in order to hear. Later she rings to say she felt intimidated, as if Neil were still watching and judging her.
It's a tremendous relief to witness her current happiness after reading about her unremittingly difficult beginning. Born in the late 1940s, James grew up in a small market town in a farming community. Her parents married hastily during the war and only really grew to know one another after peace was declared. Her paternal grandfather was an alcoholic and her father one of 13 children. Her mum was an only child who never really grew up. In fact, Connor tells me that the only way he found to get along with his mother-in-law was by treating her as one of the kids, including bringing her chocolate bars as treats.
Illness kept James's dad out of work for years so the family - James plus one older and one younger brother - often struggled. After her maternal grandmother moved in there was a little bit more money, but cash couldn't compensate for the incessant rows between her father and the mother-in-law who wound him up. It didn't help that both drank heavily.
Every so often, when he was drunk, James senior hit his wife, and sometimes Nana. Both parents hit their children, and after an incident involving the police, James's dad beat his eldest son with a riding crop every night after work for months. For a while he was softer on his daughter, taking her side in her frequent arguments with her mother. "I relied on my father to back me up with her. He'd protect me from her, and then that stopped."
Overnight, James's father frosted over, when she failed her 11-plus. She was doubly devastated, since failing also put paid to her secret dreams of escaping into a quiet, civilised world of books and learning. "It was incredibly traumatic for both my father and me. I thought I'd let him down," she explains. "He'd passed his equivalent of whatever that exam was, but hadn't been able to carry on because he had to leave school at 13. You know how a parent can pin their hopes on a kid, which isn't the right thing to do. My brother was older and had failed, so the hopes were fixed on the next child. I'd always been more academic and quieter, so he was very angry, very disappointed and I felt like I'd really let him down. Afterwards his attitude towards me was totally different."
James's self-esteem plummeted. "The change in my emotional chemistry had an immediate and lasting effect and made me a very easy target for the bullies at school, who tapped into this vulnerability when selecting their next victim." Puberty trapped the little girl of not quite 12 in a woman's shapely body and she attracted unwanted attention. After fleeing an attempted rape by boys from her school they spread rumours damaging her reputation. Months later they attacked again, this time brutally sodomising her. Typically, she thought the attack was her fault. "Did I do something? It must be the way I look." She was so ashamed that she kept the attack a secret from her family and carried on as normal. She held it together for a few years, then at 15 had a nervous breakdown, developing hysterical paralysis. She confided in a psychiatrist, who told her mum about the attack, but her mother went into denial, warning her daughter not to tell her dad. This reinforced the conviction that James was to blame for what had occurred. Unable to function at school she left and found a supermarket job. That's where she came to the attention of Neil, a handsome, well-dressed 19-year-old with penetrating blue eyes. He watched her intently for a week before disappearing for two years.
James embarked on a series of relationships and even, briefly, an engagement. But when Neil reappeared the two swiftly connected. She sensed trouble, but she was swept up in a powerful physical attraction.
"I remember an intense feeling of sensuality between us, and underneath a sparking electricity that felt dangerous and feral," she writes. Neil courted her for six weeks and never tried to make love to her, though James says he could bring her to a climax by talking about what he would do to her when they did, finally, go to bed together. And then he proposed.
"Women like me are damaged," she says. "We don't trust our own feelings and perceptions. When Neil insisted we get married right away I did resist it, but he overrode that. [With a different past] I think I could have been stronger, but I didn't trust my own feeling of wondering why he was in such a hurry. Maybe if I had, I would have been more aware that I didn't know anything about him, and I wouldn't have been in such a hurry to escape what was happening at home. I was more into how he made me feel than who he was. He was not into revealing who he was at all. I think he chose me carefully. I think he saw my vulnerability."
Neil's mother tried to warn her about him, but so obliquely that it was easy to ignore hints and carry on making wedding plans. The big day was enjoyable - James wasn't used to being the centre of attention and it felt good. She was also unaccustomed to drinking. So the couple of tipples she imbibed meant she mostly slept while Neil drove them to their honeymoon hotel. Sleeping Beauty awoke to find herself in the second circle of hell. He punched her on their wedding night for "disobeying" him and delivered an hour-long lecture on all the ways she displeased him. She was shocked and confused, and truly believed that if he had so many complaints she must be flawed and at fault.
So their life together began: a non-stop parade of emotional and physical abuse that makes for painful reading. The effect of her prose is visceral because James, now a hypnotherapist, regressed herself to age 18 to capture the events verbatim. "As a therapist I know how important the words are that are used to put women down in emotional abuse. It was important to put them down here so that other victims would be able to identify with them and so that others will understand what is said in these relationships." Neil emerges as a monster capable of the most astonishing evil; his wife more paralysed with each new insult.
Even though we now understand the psychology of abuse and why it's so difficult for a battered woman to break free, part of me still wondered how she could bear to stay. What kept her there? "Sometimes he took my clothes; sometimes he locked me in. I was told I wasn't allowed to go out and in the end he didn't have to lock me in or take my clothes. I was so conditioned and frightened. He would say, 'You wear that today' or 'You don't wear that'; 'Don't answer the door'; 'Don't go out' and that was enough. He'd say 'You eat this and you don't eat that, and you eat so much of that.' "
James was not allowed to get out of bed in the morning without Neil's permission, no matter how badly her bladder ached. He delivered endless diatribes - punctuated with violent beatings - detailing her shortcomings, explaining that he was only doing it because he loved her so very much and needed her to be perfect in order to make him happy. He burned her with cigarettes, tied her up and treated her like a sexual slave, only to return to bathe her wounds and murmur soothing platitudes in her swollen ears. The next minute he'd calmly threaten her with murder. It was more than her fragile psyche could handle.
Frightened as she was, she knew this was no kind of life. When she got pregnant she found the courage to write to a friend asking how she could terminate it. She went home and talked to her father, who spoke to Neil but also persuaded her to go back to him. He beat her more viciously than ever, pulling her to her feet by the throat, shaking her like a rag doll. "Grabbing me by my hair, he howled like a wild animal and headbutted me in the face. I was screaming with fear now. He was out of control." Ironically, his anger came too late: she'd already miscarried.
Leaving for work, he quietly informed her. "Your life is over when I get back tonight." All at once the fear of staying overwhelmed James's fear of going. With her face a mass of bruises, teeth askew, and still reeling from losing the baby, she fled. "I walked out of the flat without my handbag or coat, closing the door behind me. It locked, and I didn't have a key [she had never been allowed one]. I just ran!"
Where were your families, I ask; didn't anyone know what was happening? "We're talking 40 years ago. If there was help then for people like me I didn't know anything about it. The attitude of the police was totally different. Even up to about ten years ago they more or less just laughed. They are much different now and even in the last five years things have changed totally. Now they're setting up systems all over the country to fast-track women in domestic violence cases; they get into court in three months. When you think that there are two deaths from domestic violence every week, and a quarter of all cases of violence come from domestic violence - it's a big problem. In those days people were vaguely aware but didn't really talk about it. I was just so relieved that I had escaped, that I was still alive."
Astonishingly, Neil didn't come after her. "I think once I was out of his control and it was more or less out in the open, he thought it would be more difficult," she speculates. I ask whether she still watches over her shoulder. No, she says. But there is that disguise . . .
Her heartaches didn't end there. Years of destructive, even violent, relationships ensued. She moved from man to man, married and divorced, and had the first of her three children. Then, miraculously, she met Connor and found herself in a healthy, adult relationship. Yet for all their evident delight in one another, there was always a barrier of sorts. "I briefly told him my first marriage was very violent, that I'd had a miscarriage and that I didn't really want to talk about the ins and outs of what had happened," she says.
"It would be easy to dismiss those years of relationship addiction before I met Connor, because my healing process was very much one step forward, two back. I think it is important that women who are healing themselves do understand that you are addicted to these bad relationships. When you've had this kind of childhood stuff happen, you do need to have the angst in your life, to create this adrenalin thing. It's this need to have your low self-esteem reinforced. We feel we need to be punished because we don't deserve any better. We think if only we could 'fix' ourselves, the relationship would be better. If we change, he'll change. But he won't. One day I realised, 'I do deserve better than this. This can't be the rest of my life.' When you actually start sending out a different message, something different comes back."
When her youngest daughter was born with heart problems James found herself bargaining with God. Let her live and I'll sort myself out, she promised. "I had started the healing process but wasn't anywhere near finished. When she was OK I looked at myself and thought, 'Where should I start?' I figured I'd start with my weight. I had two years of therapy, because even I knew that if you have a weight problem it's there for a reason, for protection. I addressed my childhood and did lose some weight - mostly from inside!"
Even while laying the ghosts of her childhood to rest, James avoided discussing her first marriage with her therapist. Then she and Connor moved overseas and she found herself in circumstances that evoked her earlier experience. She felt isolated because she was unable to speak the language and had no friends nearby. For the first time in 40 years she was out of work. Out of nowhere, horrifying flashbacks arrived. Writing her thoughts in a diary wasn't purgative enough, and that's when James decided to hypnotise herself and give her pain a voice via this book.
Reading The Price of Love has been painful for her family, but it's brought them closer. "Connor got angry at Neil and thought about revenge, but he also blamed himself. He felt there'd always been something missing in our relationship because I hadn't confided in him. But that was me, not him. I wasn't ready to confront the past."
Every parent tries to undo the legacy of their own upbringing, and James is no different. "I've brought my daughters up to value themselves more than I did, and they've been very empathetic and supportive. My son read the book and it made him re-examine his own relationships, to ask himself if he'd ever been controlling and manipulative. I'm just so grateful that none of my children has ever had to wake up in the morning wondering if this is the last day we'll be alive."
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