The other thing is that this is the most complicated and distressing chapter in my life and it would be only too easy to omit things as there are complications at every turn, I have not deliberately omitted anything and will do my very best to give a clear account. But I am now at a deadline to finish this writing as it has been six months in being written and I cannot go on trying as it is depressing me and I have already had the entire lot of writing destroyed when the police set on me on behalf of the diocese and my computer was smashed, this current document is slightly muddled with dates and times as I grew a bit confused trying to write and edit it.
I am tired and I know that despite this document, the diocese, the Jersey wrongdoers, the Bishop, Jane Fisher are not going to be called to account, they can and have explained away and exonerated their treatment of me and made me out to be mentally ill and a troublemaker because I have sent a great deal of very traumatised and distressed emails to them in response to their handling of this matter, and left me with the weight of what has happened and the blame, which is too much for me, so I am simply going to let you have this document as it is and accept that I can do no more. What I have just decided to do is another document with a collection of statements and emails relating to the abuse and this matter, I have some but not all of the statements that I once wrote for Jane Fisher.
(14/01/14 actually I appear to have them all).
The ‘Old Boy’s Club’, abuse of power, and people with the right money getting what they want in Jersey is very real, very much there and very much hidden from England, some of it was brought to light through the Haute de la Garrennne matter getting into the press, but some people involved in that case have never and will never be brought to justice, just as my abuser was not, and the victims not only go on suffering because of the abuse, but as in my case, suffer for actually going to the police, I know that a counsellor I saw in Jersey was counselling victims of this matter and one was trying to decide if they dared to go to the police, I sadly dared to speak up about my abusers who had friends like the Dean and the Home Affairs Minister who was also a reader in the church and is also an ex-magistrate and is overseer of the police force in Jersey (14/01/14 referred to by my abuser as his friend), my abuser’s Brother is a longstanding member of the government as well as a chain-smoking atheist. And so along with the abusers connections and credentials, he is an old boy of the college and island and was on the Deanery synod with the Dean and helped to choose the Vicar of St. Pauls who now apparently ‘supervises’ him, so he can continue in authority in the church and condemn me.
Another thing to be warned, I interchange the term ‘abusers’ and ‘adoptive parents’ to mean the same couple. And I add old statements I made when reporting this matter, in order to try and speed things up. So it is a bit of a chopped about statement. But one thing I can tell you about these and my other statements is that I can swear by Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that what I am writing is to my knowledge correct as I see it and there are no deliberate omissions or additions in order to alter the story to my benefit.
I arrived in Jersey at after 10am, having boarded the ferry at 6am, and having been up since 4am and waiting at the ferry port from 5am, I was excited and exhausted, actually the times blur, I am not sure of them now. My memory is not so good now.
It had been a tremendous, tremendous step to take, leaving England all on my own, with no one to see me off, taking a tremendous risk in every way in committing to a future that I had no idea about, a future on a strange island where I only knew a few people, and some of those people were people I was unsure about anyway because of their family. In a way I wanted to be anonymous and alone, and in my first weeks in Jersey I would sit in the dark at my new home, listening to music or I would walk out into the pitch black lane at night and revel in the emptiness, I was hurting from George and Jill's 'friendship' still and recovering from a lot of stress (to do with college and finance)
On arriving in Jersey I carefully drove to my new lodgings, I was so apprehensive, going to live with an eccentric widower, though I was assured by my employers that he was harmless and having lived safely with Frank for all that time with no untoward behaviour from him, I expected this man could be the same.
I went into the church on the way from the ferry to the house, to offer a prayer of thankfulness for my safe and complete arrival in Jersey, then I got to the house, where my new landlord welcomed me with tea and cakes and talked about how he would spoil me and how having me there would be like having a daughter around, I took these statements with a 'pinch of salt'.
(14/01/14 regarding going into church, this is something I like to do during the week, and find that it is part of the Catholic way and am therefore glad to be a Catholic)
I was very very tired, I had been suffering exhaustion with my end of college stress anyway, and it got to a point where things were feeling unreal, so when my new landlord had showed me round, I asked if I could have a sleep.
My landlord was agreeable and understanding, he said he was going to do some gardening; he was a keen horticulturalist himself and part of the island’s horticultural society. I slept in my new room, which had very little storage space, so my things never really got unpacked. I was still a chaotic hoarder to a certain extent then, I carried a lot of baggage with me, in more ways than one, but I had left a lot of stuff behind in (the UK) that *****and ***** had agreed to dispose of for me.
When I woke up I went for a drive, I went down to St. Ouens Bay, the bay that I had fallen in love with on my first trip to Jersey, then I went to Beauport, back then my leg was so bad that the climb down to Beauport was a tremendous ordeal, but I managed it.
So here I was with pretty much no money and having to have absolute faith in God for things to work out now that I and all my possessions were here in Jersey.
I started work, and liked it, some elements of the job were stressful, for example having to work in the shop when coach loads of French tourists arrived, I had pretty much no French skills when I started, but I learned some necessary basics, my bosses were true Jerseymen, who spoke fluent French and Jersey french.
On the nursery site was a sand sculpture exhibition, created and run by a world famous award winning sand sculptor, he rented a greenhouse onsite and ran the exhibition which complemented the nursery as a tourist attraction and the two businesses were good for each other, the sculptor was a very interesting man, he smoked spice and was a bit wild, but he was nice to me, bringing me cups of tea and letting me mind his sculpture exhibition one day when he went and did a masterclass in sculpting on the beach one day. He and his equally wild fisherman pal ***** nicknamed me 'teabreak' to tease me, even though they were the ones sneaking me extra cuppas as I worked in the aviaries, I really liked them, they were rebels.
My landlord was recently widowed and still openly grieving his wife, he would frequently burst into tears and sob loudly, she had died suddenly beside him on the sofa, having suffered a brain haemorrhage. He was reputed to be an unpredictable man, but he was part of the islands horticultural society and was a Methodist. He talked to me about church and I told him I was Church of England, back then I would not have known how to go into a Methodist church, I was a one denomination person who knew nothing about any other denomination.
So he made suggestions about churches, 'there's the local one up the road, it's ok, a bit old fashioned' ( Parish Church), 'there's the one at First Tower, my friends go there', (and his friends were my abuser's friends and later turned him against me, which is one of Jane Fisher’s many denials and insinuations of me being paranoid, but people in that small cliquey island do things like that, Jane Fisher wasn’t the one on the receiving end of the shunning but judge she will and deny judging she also will and did.).
So off I trekked to the parish church for 8am communion before I went to work on Sunday, I found the service refreshing and the sermon excellent and memorable, and after work in the evening I joined the church at First Tower, only not at First Tower but at their joint service at St. M's, Millbrook.
St. M's Millbrook was overseen by the same vicar as the Parish church's, who was Jill and George's Son in law, so here I was in the same parish as them, but despite going to their church, I had no wish to become acquainted with them, I was still raw from my friendship with Jill and George, who I had asked to leave me alone. So I didn't make myself known to these people, despite Jill telling me to go and see them and have my post sent to their church, and when the priest spoke to me and asked my name I said it was '*****', which is what I was called by some Polish friends who found '*****' difficult to pronounce. ****** became a useful name to me for the migrant workers to call me and when I didn’t want to be instantly rejected later on by people who knew the abusers. For a very long time I actually tried to change my name to ******* but never quite had the money for the deed poll, my name in full would have been ****** ********, but I failed to get it changed in England and while in Jersey on a Jersey passport and licence it was almost impossible to deed poll change my name. I got a Jersey passport when I spotted an error on my English one which made people at St. A’s think I was lying about my age (they jumped to conclusions and made the churchwarden ask if I was lying), and because I was staying in Jersey I was allowed a Jersey passport.
The service at St. M's was very powerful, a God party, a mixture of praise worship, meditation and healing ministry. But it was very different to the kind of worship I was used to in Hampshire; this was my first taste of the Jersey style Americanized charismatic church. And though I am not comfortable with a lot of what that and other churches did and do, I continued to really find that service refreshing. Though things like Jill and George’s daughter going round telling people quietly what visions and words she wanted them to say they ‘got from God’ doesn’t seem right in any way shape or form, other things like the worship songs and music were very powerful and well done. A mixture of good and quite frightening in a way, and I was sad to see Bishop Trevor join in the ‘prophetic games’ when he came over to the Island, they got him to say that he knew that there was someone there ‘feeling afraid’.
(14/01/14, interestingly, Bishop Trevor has now been involved in the massive farce investigation despite his links with JM and also St. M's and his approval of the signs and wonders game, I gather he is also responsible for Peter Ould, which generally means he is conflicted)
People from my new church at First Tower greeted me, their church was St. A‘s, I felt that God was calling me to their church rather than St. M's or the Parish church, though I continued to go to 8am and evening services at these churches because I was working on Sundays and the evening service at St. A’s turned out to be of very poor quality, while the Parish church was handy for me for early communion before work, as was a church closer to work, and I liked the early communion congregation, they were quiet and gentle and nice.
Here goes the account of what happened (part 1):
I went to the evening service at St A's a week later, there were few people there, and immediately I felt I had stepped into a different world, a strange world where church had a different meaning to what it meant in the churches in Hampshire, there was a handful of people there, a table being used as an altar, a candle, a funny atmosphere, some badly sung repetitive songs and some people talking in a very odd way, this was my introduction to the cult style evangelical/charismatic church in Jersey, which has a very extreme lean to it and follows the example of American evangelistic churches despite being 'church of England' I was bewildered, having known nothing but the traditional churches in Hampshire, I remained at a loss to express what I saw in these churches in Jersey until in the final days of my life in Jersey, (name redacted, employee of the church of England) articulated it in agreement to what I told him I had seen in those churches.
Yes There is a lot I cannot ‘prove’, but I can tell you what I went through and what the atmosphere was and what was said to me, some of this is still so very traumatic that it is taking everything I have and am to put it down on paper and some things cannot be adequately verbalized by me in the state I am in.
Anyway, this evening service was the service where I met my abuser, he came in late, walked round the church shaking hands with the men and hugging the ladies tightly, (he later told me he did not like hugging men, but he loved hugging and touching ladies),
my abuser came to me, and told me that he had mistaken me for a boy (oh, thanks!), he asked if he could sit with me, I said ok, after all we were in church, he told me proudly that he was a church officer (churchwarden), and so I thought he must be ok, because so many of my friends were churchwardens or in positions in the church. He took me up for communion at the table, he seemed surprised that I knew how to take communion and also that I knew the Bible.
After the service the vicar’s wife came and sat behind us and spoke to us, she said God had told her that someone new to the church would be at the service, I assured her I wasn’t new to the church of England, just new to her church, the way she spoke about God speaking to her reminded me of my Mother. And someone else came over at some point and tried to give me a vision, but I politely refused to play, he was one of a little group of people who I named ‘the fanatics’, they acted like they are stoned, their eyes are empty and God is a kind of drug to them, they scared me.
The abuser later said something about the Vicar’s wife coming over to check that he was behaving himself or something, and I was puzzled. He looked vaguely like (name redacted), but I couldn’t imagine (name redacted) or any of the others in my old churches saying anything like that.
After the service he took me for a walk, we walked along the seafront, he proudly told me that he was a dinghy instructor and that he would take me sailing one day, he asked me a lot of questions, some of which were too personal, asking me about boyfriends and things, but because he was a churchwarden I trusted him.
When we parted company I was still intrigued by him, he was a really unusual man, but life went on and I puzzled about him during the week, I was still raw about George and Jill and I didn’t believe I was going to make friends in Jersey in what was meant to just be a summer there before I moved on.
The next evening service I went to there, he took me for a walk afterwards, as we walked away from the church he told me that he said that he knew that we hadn’t known each other long but he wanted to be my adoptive dad and he wanted me to be his adoptive daughter, he asked it as a question, and he wanted an answer so I said yes, he took my hand and walked holding my hand, we crossed the road and I cannot remember quite what was said but it was something about being hit by a car, he said he wanted my real dad’s phone number – in case something happened to me, I refused and was a bit put out both that he assumed I had a dad and that he would have a right to his number and that he assumed my dad was my next of kin, which he wasn’t, I refused him that number, he asked more personal questions about boyfriends and things, I cannot remember what. We walked along the seafront again and he held my hand, he snatched his hand away a few times when he was worried about people nearby seeing us.
We sat in a shelter on the seafront and the sun was glaring and setting, it was beautiful and I felt peaceful and bemused by all this. He told me about himself, his childhood in Havre de Pas, his dad leaving his mum for a mistress, his schooling at the private school and his work in England and wife and two sons, he told me he was a dinghy instructor and that he would teach me to sail, then he said that he had to get home or his wife would be angry, which sounded terrible, then he said he wanted to take me home to meet his wife.
We arrived at their house, he walked in ahead and said ‘I’m home ?darling? and I have ****** with me’.
We went into the front room and his wife was sitting there stripping heads off lavender to make lavender pillows, she looked up and tried to disguise her expression with a smile, but the first expression was not a smile, it was not a happy expression, and she had not met me before, I was briefly startled, she got up and went to the kitchen to put the kettle on and her husband sat down and started clumsily trying to strip the lavender heads, he looked comical, I joined in this game.
It ended up late when I left, his wife was tired, I was tired, but I was glowing from their company, I felt less alone having made such a connection with Island church people, he wanted to hug me but I wasn’t ready for hugs, so I let them hold onto my hands, they made friendly indications that we had a friendship.
And a friendship developed, it was always a slightly bizarre and confused one for me, but I fell for them, I loved them, I loved this bizarre crazy mannered man and his wife who varied between sad eyed Christian friendship and open unhappiness at the situation.
It was the next time I saw them that the wife said ‘You know we meant what my husband said about you being like a daughter don’t you?’ He actually always said ‘adoptive daughter’ or ‘daughter’ and she always said ‘Like a daughter’ she didn’t really like it at all from start to finish, but I was not ‘like a daughter to her’, it was her husband’s wish and she was going along with it, even as he said later ‘she is trying to be a good Christian’.
(14/01/14 This daughter thing was within a few weeks of meeting them, if I had been ‘normal’ I may have questioned this)
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