If Constance Briscoe had lost the libel action pursued by her mother it would have swept away her entire life. Not only would she have faced an estimated £200,000 in damages but also an end to her legal career as a criminal barrister and judge. Moreover, it would have discredited Ugly, her bestselling childhood memoir in which she recounts the beatings, neglect and psychological cruelty at the hands of Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, now 74.
But on Monday she won the case, celebrating her victory with a steak at Joe Allen's. “I haven't eaten one for years, but I felt quite bloody!” she says with relish. Her plan in the event of defeat was to resign from the Bar (“the only honourable thing to do”), potter in the garden of her house in France and write crime fiction.
Before the trial, Constance, 51, expected to lose. Her mother had convinced many of her ten siblings to give evidence against her, saying that the maternal abuse that she catalogues in her book - beatings with a stick, damage to her breasts, which resulted in fibroid-like growths, denial of food and abandonment at 14 - were the lies of a wicked fantasist. Constance's own best witness, her sister Pauline, who had initially pledged support, had disappeared without trace.
Only when, four days before the trial, social services released files - vital evidence that showed official concern for how Briscoe-Mitchell was raising Constance's younger siblings - did she dare to hope that she might win.
We meet at Constance's chambers in Bell Yard, near the High Court, London, where she has made a speciality of difficult and upsetting criminal cases: her latest concerns an abused baby.
She says that her story, and those of the hundreds who have written to her, prove the impossibility of truly knowing what happens behind closed doors. Of the Baby P case she says: “In all the letters I have received there are so many people who have been missed by social services. Devastating cases. At the end of the day it is not social workers who are to blame, it is the parents.”
How did it feel then to face her mother across the courtroom? “Well, I've never seen so much of her in the last 35 years,” Constance says drily. “I saw her for 11 days! I've never seen her for 11 days since I was 18.” They did not acknowledge each other outside court, she avoided meeting her eyes except when her mother claimed in evidence that she was a liar and a thief. “She said: ‘Come on Clare [her family's name for her] tell the truth, God won't punish you. God will forgive you, it's not too late.' I thought for her still to be pursuing me was really quite tragic. But I thought she would come after me, she always does. She's been making her wicked allegations for some time. She wrote to the Bar Council in 1999 to try to expose me as a phoney barrister. She said that I'd hired hitmen to kill her.”
Constance, whose accent has the upper-class diction and “yahs” typical of a barrister, has put her two children through top London day schools, is in a relationship with a leading QC and has a large house in Clapham. But there is a twang, too, of the rougher side of South London, the Camberwell streets of her rackety childhood.
She was born to first-generation Jamaican immigrants. Her late father George won the football pools twice and invested his winnings in properties that he rented out. He drifted back and forth from the family home, sporadically impregnating her mother before going off again to live with girlfriends. Briscoe-Mitchell struggled to raise her six children by him, adopted another and later had four children by Constance's hated stepfather Eastman [as she refers to him in her book]. While to the others her mother was a strict disciplinarian, to Constance she was a tormentor.
Why did her mother pick on her? “I think it all comes down to bed-wetting,” Constance says. “That was the one area of my life my mother couldn't control, because I couldn't control it. It was a bit of a disgrace really aged 10 or 11, still wetting the bed. I think she thought a good beating would put a stop to it. And I was ugly with it. That was a double shame for my mother.”
In her memoir, Constance describes Briscoe-Mitchell bagging up her wet sheets and putting them back sodden on to the bed every night to punish her. She ridiculed her daughter's appearance - her flared nose, dark skin, “rubber” lips, thinning hair - refusing to buy her school photos because why would she want pictures of such an ugly child? As soon as she could afford it, Constance had plastic surgery to reduce her nose and lips. “I got rid of the ugliness,” she says. “But I'm not finished yet. I'm going to have these scars removed.” She gestures to two marks, almost invisible below make-up, where her mother deliberately flew her brother's toy remote-control plane into her cheeks.
When she was 14, her mother moved house, leaving Constance and several sisters to fend for themselves. Only through the help of a teacher whom she calls Miss K, to whom Ugly is dedicated, and her own cussed will to succeed did Constance power through her Alevels and into a law degree at Newcastle. Her mother having spitefully ripped up her grant application form, she had to support herself, working three jobs, including tending for the dying in a hospice.
In taking her daughter to court, her mother's first objective was humiliation, Constance believes - to avenge the books that exposed her as a monster. Her second was financial reward. But this has spectacularly backfired since Briscoe-Mitchell, who does not have legal insurance and sued on a no-win, no-fee basis, could be pursued by publishers Hodder for up to £500,000 in costs. Constance, however, does not wish for her to be hounded from her home, but allowed to live in it until she dies when the proceeds could pass to Hodder.
What has baffled Constance is the collaboration of her siblings, even in the face of official documentation about their own abuse. She was dismayed to see that her sister Denise, to whom she was previously on good terms, sat with her mother in court. She talks of the family's “collective denial”, which she puts down to their mother's residual power. “Or maybe they think it's better to suffer the indignities of the family silently than wash it in public and write books.” In court they refuted official records. A social worker had recorded that Briscoe-Mitchell, after throwing her daughter Cynthia out of the house at 14, remarked that if she was a dog she'd book her into Battersea Dogs Home. Yet Cynthia denied this.
“These files recorded my mother as saying that the trouble with this country is the leniency towards children as compared with the West Indies,” Constance says. “This is when social services was remonstrating with my mother saying: ‘You can't lock Carl [her brother] in a room and threaten to strip him naked and beat him, you'll be up for child cruelty.' And that is when my mother said, ‘For heaven's sake! The British!'”
Was she treating her children merely according to the Jamaican rigours in which she was raised? “My mother comes from a culture where you beat your children if they don't behave. End of story.”
Perhaps for this reason, Constance-Briscoe has turned her back on her Jamaican heritage. “I was born in this country. I'm British black. I don't want anyone to think for one moment that I'm Jamaican. I've never even been to Jamaica. I have no desire to go. I support the English cricket team, not the Jamaicans.”
She is proud to have transcended her race and class, elevating herself to the Establishment as one of only a handful of black judges. “I was determined to succeed,” she says. “I just couldn't afford to fail. That was the bottom line.” And all along it was white people, she points out, who believed in her: Miss K, Michael Mansfield, QC - who, meeting her as a 13-year-old schoolgirl, promised her a pupilage at his chambers and kept his word - the barrister father of her children, and her current partner, Tony Arlidge, QC.
“Yah, I always have white boyfriends and they are always 20 years older. Because they look after me. People of my age want to compete with you, want to show you how clever they are. All of that rubbish. I want a father figure.”
She is a loner, self-reliant, says that she has only two friends. She has never had therapy, has dealt with emotional fallout by simply shutting out everything that happened before she was 14. So why write the book? She explains that she wrote it very fast, by hand, had it typed up and sent to publishers without even correcting it. And it reads like that, being a string of gruesome episodes without reflection or analysis of why they happened.
Has she ever wondered if Briscoe-Mitchell was herself abused, and passed on that suffering? She says, with the tone of someone who has no interest, that she knows little about her mother, except she was orphaned at the age of 2 and raised in Jamaica by her extended family. “I can have some sympathy for her,” she says coolly. “I can see it was a struggle raising all those children. It could not have been easy for her. But it would have been better if she hadn't beaten me.”
She loathes the greater forgiveness afforded to an abused person who turns abuser. “I'm quite certain that if I did beat my child people would say, ‘What can you expect? It happened to her'. But I don't go along with this self-perpetuating theory. I think that it can be broken. And I think some parents make excuses. If you don't want to do it, just don't raise your hand to your child.”
Did she ever hit her children? (Her daughter, Francesca, is an English student at University College London, her son, Martin, is studying politics at Bristol.) “Seeing my children on their bed, I'd think ‘I could beat you'. Or, when they were naughty ‘I could punch you in the head'. But I decided not to. And actually my kids think I'm not a bad mum.” Her daughter supported her in court throughout the trial.
Instead, she tells me her way of punishing her own children, which is a measure of how far she has come, how utterly different her world is now. “I make them shop at Primark.” Really? “Yah, to my daughter who wants these designer outfits, it is more effective to punish her by making her shop somewhere that is completely unacceptable.”
Constance Briscoe laughs: “Yah, send them to rummage around in Woolies!”
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