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think- ago

By the age of 11, she had been sent to The Cedars, a remand centre for troubled children.

There, she was told that a 'very important person' was coming to see her. Thus she found herself having an audience with a bespectacled, grey-haired man in a tweed jacket 'who looked more like a geography teacher than a doctor'.

Dr Milner took Barbara's hands in his as he introduced himself, then did something odd.

'He started to stroke them,' she says. 'I remember feeling embarrassed because it was odd, quite intimate.'

She was then taken to Aston Hall:

'My body ached as if it had been kicked all over. My wrists were sore. There was a pain searing up my body from between my legs. I felt damp below, as if I'd wet myself. Later I realised that I was bleeding from there.'

It was her first 'treatment', yet it came to be routine. Every day ('except for Sunday. Maybe he went to church on Sundays,' she says), she alleges Dr Milner would pick a different girl to have her treatment.

All the girls hated their 'treatments'; all the nurses reassured them that what they were experiencing was perfectly normal, and for their own good.