Ugly author Constance Briscoe says that she will never forgive her mother for trying to destroy her

Published on Thursday 4 December 2008 20:00

THIS week, Constance Briscoe, a senior barrister and the author of the bestselling memoir Ugly, got her life back. Over the course of an extraordinary ten-day libel case brought by her 74-year-old mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, the very fabric and pattern of Briscoe's childhood memory has been examined and cross-examined in the high court. On Monday, the trial, over Briscoe's descriptions in Ugly of terrible child abuse, ended with victory for Constance.

"I'm feeling very, very relieved," she says, speaking from her chambers in Bell Yard near London's Royal Courts of Justice. "I didn't know whether I'd be packing my bags today or preparing my next case. Over the weekend, while we waited for the jury to return its verdict, I actually got terribly depressed. I couldn't get out of bed, and when I did, I hit the bottle." She laughs wryly. "Suddenly I realised just what it's like to be a defendant in that situation…"

It's no hyperbole to say that, over the past few weeks, 51-year-old Briscoe's high-flying career as a lawyer and judge, indeed, her very reputation, has been hanging perilously in the balance. "If I'd lost, I'd have had to leave the Bar – maybe not immediately, but in the end. My partner and I had a plan to go to France. I was thinking of becoming a gardener." She is not totally joking, I think.

The legal fees alone would have crippled her. She estimates the total bill of both sides' costs at more than 1 million. Her mother, a pensioner originally from Jamaica, who, it seems, has never had a paid job, had a "no win, no fee" arrangement with her own legal team, but must still pay her daughter's costs.

"She will certainly have to think about how she can pay it," says Briscoe, briskly. But I've made it clear that whatever happens, she should never be thrown out of her home. Maybe they can put a charge on the property, but I don't want her on the streets." There's an irony to this, of course, since Briscoe-Mitchell apparently thought nothing of abandoning several of her children, including Constance, and letting them fend for themselves without adult care, money or food.

The trial was a landmark case, centring not on individual details of cruelty contained in Ugly but on its fundamental premise: that Constance was abused as a child at the hands, primarily, of her mother. This was a trial questioning Briscoe's basic truthfulness. The abuse she describes in Ugly was sickening and frequent. Constance, called Clare by her mother (as well as "Ugly", "Black Bitch" and "Miss Pissabed"), was beaten with a piece of wood, cut on the arm and face, and humiliated verbally and physically. She was made to sleep in urine-soaked bed sheets and locked in a cellar. Briscoe-Mitchell twisted her nipples so hard that Constance had to have the resulting lumps removed from her breasts.

In the end, her mother simply left her 13-year-old daughter and two older sisters to look after themselves (Briscoe-Mitchell has 11 children in all), a move that the disoriented Briscoe greeted with joy, as if her life were starting again.

Her father, George, also from Jamaica, seems to have come and gone as he pleased; a stepfather called Garfield Eastman was also a cruel, violent man, who once put out a cigarette on her hand. Published in 2006, Ugly quickly became a UK bestseller, shifting more than 400,000 copies. It's widely regarded as the best British contribution to what's often called the "misery memoir" genre. Yet her mother called it a "piece of fiction" and Constance a "fantasist". What if it wasn't true? For the past month, the publishing industry has been holding its breath, too. Briscoe's vindication comes at a poignant moment, as child abuse dominates news agendas. "I got a pile of e-mails from children during the trial, telling me how I could get rid of my horrible mother," she says. Over the past two years, she says, she has received hundreds of letters and e-mails from victims of abuse and felt passionately that she "could not let them down".

"If I'd made this up, all those people would have felt horribly deceived by me. That's why I was never going to settle with my mother, why I was never going to write this book anonymously and why I had to identify people in it."

Throughout the trial, a group of 12 women sat in the gallery watching, she says. "At the end of the first week, they came up to me and said, 'We're here because you speak for us. You are our voice. We've been through your trauma and we'll come and support you every day.' One of the ladies showed me the scars on her legs where she'd been whipped as a child."

It's clear that the trial has completely demolished whatever affection Briscoe felt towards a number of her siblings, some of whom lined up with her mother to deny that abuse took place. She has never felt love for her mother, she says. Briscoe talks as eloquently and clearly as you'd expect from a senior barrister, yet a note of bitter outrage at her family's behaviour is never far from her voice.

Did she ever look at her mother in court and see not an abuser but a vulnerable old lady? Is forgiveness remotely possible? "Vulnerable?" she exclaims. "Hah! I looked at her in court and thought she was wicked. She had come to tell a pack of lies about me, and she had set up my brothers and sisters against me when I had no issue with them at all. That is unforgivable. I am sure she did it to destroy me and my career."

But I wonder whether the legal process, the questioning and cross-questioning, helped her gain an understanding of the reasons for her mother's cruelty all those years ago.

"In an odd sort of way I was looking forward to the trial," says Briscoe, "because, yes, I thought I might get answers.

"But in the end that didn't happen… I quite expected my mother to come to court and lie, that's what she's always done. I'm not surprised by that. But what I could not imagine was that sister after sister after sister after sister – and my brother – would also say in court that I was a fantasist. That was what made this really quite extraordinary for me."

This united front might have caused the case to go against Briscoe. Yet three days before proceedings began, she and her team were issued with archived social services files dealing with past incidents of abuse directed at other siblings by her mother – clearly disproving Briscoe-Mitchell's happy family claims.

"When I got those records, I thought, 'Oh my God! It wasn't just me,'" Briscoe says forcefully. It was a moment of clearly painful revelation. That she recovered from her childhood is testament to her strength of character. That she became so successful seems extraordinary. As a young teenager, she took several jobs alongside school to buy food and clothes, and to pay her (absent) mother rent.

On a school trip to Knightsbridge Crown Court, she buttonholed Michael Mansfield, the left-leaning QC, who, perhaps impressed by her chutzpah, told her to come back to him when she was ready to become a barrister.

Despite her mother's utter lack of sympathy ("only clever people go to university"), she secured a place studying law at Newcastle and was called to the Bar in 1983. Thirteen years later she became a part-time judge in the crown court, the eighth black judge to be appointed. She lives in London with the QC Anthony Arlidge, and has two children from a first marriage.

It's the memoir, though, that has made her famous. When Briscoe reads from Ugly, particularly at London events, it often seems to unleash a wave of emotion from the audience.

"At one reading a woman stood up and took her shoe off. She showed us where she'd had three toes amputated. This woman's mother twisted her toes until the circulation stopped and she had to have them amputated. Can you imagine?

"I still think I'm very blessed. I have a good job, a good partner, my children. I've got so much to be proud of."

Her voice hardens: "And I look at my mother and think, 'You are the sole cause of all the hurt and harm in our family. And you came to court and lied about it.'"

But does she ever think that the independence and perhaps the simple will to survive, forced upon her by her mother's cruelty, played a part in her later ambition? She pauses, thinking carefully. "If I'm honest? Probably it has. I'm the most successful of my siblings and, had I not had my past, I'd not have had my future. So yes, perhaps I do owe something to my mother." She laughs again.

But if Briscoe gains consolation from anything, I feel, it is from the revenge she has taken, both in print and in court. "It is so important to believe the victim," she says, "and then do something about it."

BACKGROUND: MISERY MEMOIRS

A Child Called It (1995)

THE first in a trilogy of harrowing memoirs by American author Dave Pelzer, who wrote of being starved, bullied and violently beaten by his alcoholic mother. One of Pelzer's four brothers also wrote a book supporting his story. Dave Pelzer now writes self-help books for teenagers and adults.

Don't Ever Tell (2005)

DUBLINER Kathy O'Beirne's story described how she was beaten by her father, raped by two of her brothers and then, pregnant at 13, was sent to the notorious Magdalene laundries. Five of her eight siblings accused her of lying. One brother stood by her claims, however, as did her publisher.

A Million Little Pieces (2003)

JAMES FREY incurred the wrath of Oprah Winfrey when it transpired in 2006, via the investigative website The Smoking Gun, that the bleak tale of his rehab for alcohol and drug addictions was much exaggerated. Winfrey had included the book in her influential Book Club and – such is her power – confronted Frey in person on her TV show.