The Odd Holiday: Turkey
I used to call it “the odd holiday”. Now I know what it was: my mother taking me out of the usual chaos, away from my brother, to a beach town in Turkey where I would be sized up, drugged and handed over.
At the time, it was sold to me as something special, just for the two of us. That is how it works. You think you are the chosen one, when in reality you are just the merchandise.
The “special” trip
I would have been around eleven. I was living with my brother, my mother and her partner, Brian, in Kettering, Northamptonshire. My mother decided we were going on holiday. Not “we” as in the family. Just me and her.
That should have been strange. It was strange. But my mother despised my brother, Daniel. That hatred was standard. He was always described as stupid, gormless, all the usual words, and that sank into both of us. So it did not feel shocking that she only wanted to take me. Upsetting, yes, but not shocking.
We were going to Kusadasi in Turkey. I was obsessed. I went up and down Kettering High Street collecting every travel brochure I could get my hands on. Thomas Cook, Going Places, all of them. I cut out every bit of information about where we were going, then turned it into my own home-made guidebook. I pasted the pictures into a new photo album that looked like a proper book and wrote my own notes about the destination.
It took me ages. I loved it. I loved the idea of travel and flying. Now, looking back, it is heartbreaking. That kid who was so excited, who thought this trip was about beaches and planes and discovery That kid was me.
We went. And almost as soon as we arrived, the real purpose of that holiday started to show itself.
The liquid in the bottle caps
Early in the holiday my mother announced that we “needed” a pipette. The one we had did not have markings on it and she insisted we had to get one that did.
I remember going from pharmacy to pharmacy late at night, her waiting outside while I went in. I was a shy child and the staff often spoke limited English. I had to stand there and try to describe this very specific thing we were supposedly desperate for. It was humiliating and stressful. We argued when I refused to go into one of them. In the end we never found a pipette.
The explanation I was given was that it was for a device on the wall in our room, something that was meant to stop bugs and mosquitoes and the other things I was frightened of crawling over the walls. To “make it work”, she said we needed to put a precise amount of a liquid into a small compartment inside it.
We never got the pipette, so we adapted. She collected the metal bottle caps from the glass bottles of Coke, Sprite and Fanta we were drinking. My job was to pour the liquid into each cap and make sure the level was exactly the same in every one. I remember six or seven caps laid out, each filled to the same height. As I write this now, I can remember the exact amount I was supposed to measure. I will not publish that figure for obvious reasons, but with what I now know about the drug, I am shocked. I could have died. Then again, I could have contracted HIV during any number of the countless rapes throughout my childhood. The shocking aspect is the level of malice and abuse from my mother.
At the time I believed we were dealing with some kind of homemade mosquito repellent. Now I know that liquid had nothing to do with insects.
Decades later, in 2023, everything collapsed at once. I had left a toxic relationship and ended up homeless. My father died. I was in the middle of suing the boarding school where I was abused. It became impossible to cope and I turned to a drug called G. One night I took too much. As I lay there my perception began to twist: walls stretching, distances shifting, objects changing size and shape in ways that felt completely wrong. It was a very particular sensation.
I had felt it before.
It was identical to Turkey.
That was when the pieces finally locked together. The “bug liquid” she was so determined to have measured out, the liquid she had her own child portion into equal amounts, was not there to protect me from anything. It was a drug.
Putting it plainly: my mother had her son preparing measured doses of a drug that would be used on him so that he could be raped.
Being offered up
Another early memory from that holiday is a restaurant. We were sitting outside in a booth area and there were three men at the table. They were looking at me. One of them said I looked a bit like a girl.
That made me happy. I thought I was a girl, or wanted to be one. Up to that point, my entire life had involved rape, and I think that being penetrated made me believe that meant I was supposed to be female. That was my child logic.
My mother is deeply homophobic and generally hostile to anything outside a narrow idea of “normal”. When I was younger, at my first school, Terranova, there was a choir concert. The pupils were walking past and one of the boys was extremely pretty. I remember saying, “I love him.” I had never seen him before. She slapped me hard across the face in front of everyone. The sound cut through the room. You could have heard a pin drop. After that, she made it about her embarrassment, about how I had made her hit me.
That was the emotional weather I grew up in. I adored her. I thought I would die without her. She was everything.
So when, in Turkey, those men said I looked like a girl and my mother responded by saying that on this holiday I could be a girl if I wanted, I was ecstatic. We had spent time choosing what I would wear. I ended up in dungarees, fairly neutral, could be boy or girl. I felt chosen, seen, allowed something I was usually punished for even hinting at.
Looking back now, I see it for what it was. They were not seeing me. They were inspecting me. Those men were looking at me like a piece of meat. This was a transaction. It had all been arranged.
Everywhere we went, they offered us apple tea. I became obsessed with it. One time, I was given a very sweet apple tea and then a woman ushered me into a different room to finish it while my mother “went shopping”. I was led down a cold corridor, all white tile, while outside it was boiling hot. I remember thinking, how much shopping can she possibly be doing, while I was sitting alone in this separate space.
That happened more than once. My mother out there “shopping”. Me being taken elsewhere, being watched, being prepared.
Sex, drugs and a child in the bathroom
At night, back in the room, my body went into overdrive. Almost every night, lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, I would suddenly feel an overwhelming urge to masturbate. It came out of nowhere, urgent and physical. I would get up and go to the bathroom and do it. Sometimes my mother would call out through the door, asking if I was all right. I would say I was fine.
One time I was in the bed, trying to touch myself discreetly, and I realised she was doing the same. She was masturbating too, behind me, on her own bed, assuming I could not see. She assumed wrong. I am hypervigilant. I always have been. I see everything, even when I am not looking straight at it. It is exhausting, but it is how I survived.
So there we were. A child who had been dosed with something he did not understand, driven into constant sexual agitation, and a mother lying nearby, masturbating.
Then I got very ill. I started vomiting and could not stop. Water came straight back up. I felt horrific. I remember being sick in the street and people staring. We went to see a doctor. He told me to drink flat Coca-Cola and eat a banana, two things I hate, so that stuck in my mind. My mother said it was food poisoning. She was absolutely fine.
I lay in bed and tried to explain to her how strange I felt. The walls changing size, shapes shifting, that warped sense of perspective. The same feeling I would recognise decades later on too much G.
At the time it was indescribable. Now I can describe it. Now I know exactly what it was.
Flashbacks, hair and jewellery
Ever since that trip, there are things I cannot tolerate. Body hair, especially on men’s forearms where it gathers, repulses me. It is not mild discomfort, it is visceral disgust. Jewellery too. Rings and watches especially. When I was married, my wife could not wear jewellery around me, not even a wedding ring. I could not bear to touch it or be near it.
Only recently have I connected that back to Turkey, to fingers with rings being forced into my mouth, and to hair on bodies pressed against mine.
For a long time I dismissed the word “flashback”. I thought it was a bit dramatic. Then I started having them. They are exactly what people say. For two or three seconds I am not in my current flat or my current year. I am back there. I can taste, smell, hear. My body reacts. Two or three seconds sounds short. It is not. It is far too long when you are trapped in a memory of men on top of you.
That is the legacy of that “holiday”.
What came after
When I think about that trip now, I also think about what followed.
I reconnected with my brother fairly recently. We have never really had a relationship. I have tried, but he has kept his distance. That distance was encouraged, orchestrated. Keeping me as the problem, the one outside the family. I contacted him because I wanted to ask about the holiday. I had always called it the odd holiday.
I asked him whether he had thought it was strange that he did not come with us, whether he had ever asked to see photos or asked how it went. He said he did find it odd but left it at that. While I was in Turkey, he had gone to Gibraltar with our grandfather. Parallel trips, different purposes.
Not long after the holiday, I went back to boarding school, Malsis in North Yorkshire. I have since seen a letter I wrote to my mother from there, just after that summer. The school had inserted a printed notice into it about parents coming to pick us up for a Christmas concert at the end of term. In the letter I wrote about looking forward to coming home. I mentioned going to stay with my grandparents, another place where I was raped. I even asked her about a particular sweet drink we used to have there.
She never came to pick me up.
That was the last time I properly saw her as my mother. After that, there were only two brief sightings. Once at my grandmother’s funeral. Once years later, when she saw me through the window of the place I worked at in Piccadilly Circus. She walked in, said something small, and walked out again. That was it.
So when I say the holiday to Turkey was not a holiday, this is what I mean. It sits there as a hinge point: a manufactured “special trip” that was actually about access, drugs, and disposal.
Why this is here, now
I am putting this online now because I finally understand the pattern. I know what that liquid was. I know what those men were doing in that restaurant. I know those nights of frantic masturbation and violent sickness were not random.
This is not a quirky childhood travel story. It is evidence.
It is evidence of a mother who could sit outside a pharmacy while her child begged strangers for measuring equipment, not for school science experiments, but for a drug that was to be used to facilitate his own rape. Evidence of a woman who let men examine her child, who treated her son as something to be handed over, then left him at school and simply did not come back.
If you are reading this as someone who wants to understand how abuse hides inside “normal” family stories, this is one of them. A summer holiday to Turkey. A special mother–child trip. Apple tea, dungarees, beach brochures. And underneath that, the truth.
That is why it is here. So it cannot just sit in my head as “the odd holiday” any more. It has a shape, a name, and a place in the record. And a woman who needs to be held accountable for her actions and her name is Ann Julie Edwards, who lives in Kettering, Northamptonshire.