A leading barrister and author of a bestselling autobiography described yesterday how her mother called her a “dirty little whore” as a child and left her scarred from beatings.

Constance Briscoe told a High Court jury that at her lowest ebb she tried to kill herself by drinking bleach because she was so used to being referred to as a “germ”. Death did not frighten her because she would be able to haunt her mother. “I was going to give her the same treatment she gave me,” she said.

Miss Briscoe's subsequent ascent from what she claimed to be lonely poverty to become a sought-after criminal lawyer and part-time judge was capped by the success of her autobiography, Ugly. It has sold more than 420,000 copies so far.

However, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, her mother, claims that the episodes of physical, sexual and mental abuse detailed in the book are “a piece of fiction”. She says that the young Constance had a happy childhood and is suing her daughter for libel, seeking damages and aggravated damages over the passages claiming that she beat and humiliated her child.

Miss Briscoe and Hodder & Stoughton, her publisher, stand by the allegations.

For three hours yesterday, Miss Briscoe, 51, explained how physical abuse by her mother had left her with scars on her face, breasts, hand and wrist.

On one occasion her mother had cut her with a knife until she bled as a punishment for missing eight feathers on a chicken that she was preparing; on another she deliberately flew a remote-controlled aeroplane, a birthday present for a brother, into Miss Briscoe's face, slicing her left cheek open. After that, she said, “she called me Scarface”. Her mother also called her “ugly”, “dirty little whore”, “potato head” and “Miss Piss-a-bed”, she said.

Miss Briscoe's “unmanageable” bedwetting turned her mother against her, she said. Her wet bedclothes were kept in a plastic bag “to keep them moist” and she would be forced to sleep in them because her mother believed that would teach her a lesson. On one particularly grim night, “she punched me; then I was stripped naked. She grabbed hold of my pubic hairs and pulled me towards her ... then she punched me in the breasts, then she twisted my nipples, then she punched me again.”

Miss Briscoe's composure wavered only twice. She bit her lip when describing her bedwetting and wiped away tears as she related her suicide attempt. That day she had tried to get herself taken into care (she was too young to apply without her mother's permission, she was told).

“I went back home and decided that the best way to deal with it was to drink some Domestos because my mother spent a lot of time telling me that I was a germ and I thought that if I drank it, that would be OK.”

She told the jury that she realised that, as a Roman Catholic, she would not go to Heaven if she died - “which I was quite happy to do” - so decided that before going to Purgatory she would spend time on the stairs at her home and and wait for her mother.

“I'd wait on the stairs while I was doing my time ... and, every time she went past me, I was going to punch her in the head and trip her up and pull the blankets off her when she was in bed, because that was about fair, I thought.”

The case continues.

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