The mother of Constance Briscoe broke down in tears at the High Court yesterday as she denied allegations set out by her daughter in a bestselling memoir.

Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, whose daughter rose from poverty to become a barrister and part-time judge, wept repeatedly as she gave evidence against her child.

Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell, 74, has brought a libel action against Miss Briscoe, 50, after the publication of Ugly, an autobiographical account containing allegations of physical and emotional abuse. Dressed smartly in a pinstriped jacket, black hat and pearls, she looked across at her daughter in the courtroom as she denied an incident that inspired the title of the book.

The jury were read a passage in which Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell is quoted as saying that she is ashamed of her daughter’s looks: “Lord, sweet Lord, how come she so ugly . . . Heavenly Jesus sweet and kind, why have You given me this swine?”

Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell said that she would never have made such a comment. “I don’t use those words at all. I don’t know what you call ugly or pretty, but my children is not ugly.”

She denied one of the most potent allegations, that she held a knife to her daughter’s wrist so hard that the blade drew blood. Miss Briscoe wrote that her blood dripped down the side of her arm after she was punished for failing to pluck a chicken correctly. “This incident never happened,” Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell said. “I don’t think [even] a mad person would have done this, and I am not a mad woman.”

She added that she stopped her young children going into the kitchen after an accident involving her son, Martin, who once mistook a bucket filled with scalding water for a bath.

Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell, who has 11 children, began to cry when she was read descriptions of cruelty allegedly carried out by Garfield Eastman, Miss Briscoe’s stepfather. She said that he was caring and helpful. “My God, why do I have to go through this? My heart is breaking.”

Miss Briscoe wrote in Ugly that Mr Eastman sexually abused her. Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell said that this seemed impossible to her. “It is a disgrace to my family . . . Mr Eastman is a gentleman and he’ll always be a gentleman to me anyway.” She admitted that she had been involved in an incident in which she accidentally stabbed Miss Briscoe’s father with a pair of scissors, but said that her daughter could not have seen it because she had not yet been born.

Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell said that her children had a happy childhood. “I never had any problem with my children. My boys could be mischievous, but my girls, they were excellent. My children are my pride and joy.”

Asked to describe her daughter as a baby, she said: “She was a pretty girl because she had a fat and round face. She was a beautiful girl. She still is.”

The book suggests that Miss Briscoe was picked on by her mother because she wet the bed until a late age. Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell said that all her children wet the bed until a certain age.

Earlier, Andrew Caldicott, QC, acting for Miss Briscoe, told the court that his client admitted making small mistakes in her memoir but stood by her allegations of abuse. “If this is from pillar to post a work of fiction, it is an extraordinarily wicked thing to do, or a mad thing to do,” he said.

Mr Caldicott said that Miss Briscoe admitted that she got dates wrong but could not forget the horror of the abuse that she suffered. “We remember events themselves . . . but what we don’t really remember are the dates of those events.” He added that the detailed conversations in the book were not intended to be word-for-word recollections of actual events. “Nobody in their right mind would think that Constance Briscoe has a tape recorder in her head.”

Mr Caldicott asked the jury to consider the character of his client: “Is Constance Briscoe a fantasist or a malicious inventor, or has she done her best to recall her childhood?”

The case continues.

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