Escape From Evil (3 page)

According to the letter, Mum, Dad and both their sets of parents were strongly advised that the best course of action would be to have me adopted. But they’d refused.
Mum
had refused.

They’d stood up to officialdom and hung on to me. This silly young schoolgirl and her older boyfriend, probably without a penny between them, had decided, ‘No, you’re not taking our baby!’

It’s incredible how much power that tiny scrap of paper held over me. Now I knew the truth, I could relax. In the space of a few minutes I’d felt the bottom fall out of my world and then discovered it was all a mistake. A few minutes and two tiny pieces of correspondence from the past. No wonder I’d ignored that box for so long.

Gradually, I pieced together the true story. With a baby on the way and having pledged that they would be married as soon as legally possible, Mum and Dad moved in together. If they hadn’t, then it wasn’t just my future that was hanging in the balance. According to Grandpa’s correspondence, there was talk of a criminal prosecution of my father because he’d had intercourse with a minor. Like a lot of cases today, though, the authorities took a view that Mum and Dad were in a relationship. Yes, at fifteen she was too young, but they loved each other. At that age you think you’ll spend the rest of your life together.

Even though I’d discovered that Mum had fought to keep me, I still couldn’t stem the tears. She must have felt so vulnerable. Granny and Grandpa were obviously not her biggest fans at that moment, her boyfriend had his own problems with the possible police action and here was some outside agency, some stranger, deciding whether Mum could keep her baby or not. Just thinking of her going through all that on her own made me feel awful. Mum must have felt so alone. Unfortunately, not for the last time.

Her problems didn’t end there. Another note revealed that I wasn’t the only one the authorities had their eye on. Mum herself was considered as a potential victim in all this. I’ve actually read, in black and white, how some stranger had judged her poorly brought up by Granny and Grandpa, to the extent that they considered making her a ward of court. Only once I’d read further did the ramifications of this sink in. Becoming a ward of court essentially means handing over control of your life to the state. You become their responsibility, their child almost. If you can’t make the right decisions yourself, they seem to be saying, we’ll make them for you.

So not only was Mum fighting for me, she was fighting for her own freedom as well. Knowing that just made me feel even worse for judging her.

Even without the letters, I should have known the truth. At fourteen I knew, in my heart, that my mum would have done anything to keep me. In the short time we were together I saw some of the things she would do to shield me, the vile tortures she put herself through to keep me out of harm’s way. This wasn’t a woman who would give her child up.

How dare I even think it! I’m sorry, Mum, for doubting you.

The pressure on her must have been immense. Still, if there is one memory of my mother that I have above all others, it’s that she was a fighter. She never gave in. No matter what the cost. Something I saw again and again and again . . .

TWO

One of my earliest memories is of performing for the mayor of Brighton. I sang and I played and at the end he applauded loudly. Not bad, considering my start in life . . .

Unfortunately, it wasn’t as grand as it sounds. Fisher-Price was launching a new range of musical goodies at the local toy fair and they ran a competition at my nursery school to find children to bash out a tune for the press. I was one of the lucky six chosen to pitch up at Brighton’s Metropole Hotel and hammer out a few bars on a little wooden glockenspiel in front of an audience of the great and the good.

Half a dozen four-year-olds singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ while attempting a loose interpretation of the tune is not everyone’s cup of tea, but the mayor, bless him, led the whooping and clapping like it was the Last Night of the Proms.

The fun didn’t stop there. Of the six, I was then asked if I’d mind having my picture taken for the local rag down on the beach. ‘Of course,’ I replied, convinced my musical prowess had set me apart, and off we went. Sadly, there was no glockenspiel this time. Instead I was handed a chunky plastic airport, aimed at cashing in on the new craze of foreign holidays, and asked to play with it in the sand for a few minutes while photographers snapped away. Mum or Granny kept a clipping from the newspaper, which I found in my box of memories.

It’s not bad as earliest reminiscences go, is it? Quite memorable, in fact. Pictures in the local press and hobnobbing with do-gooders and dignitaries. Unfortunately, that wasn’t my daily routine. Away from the spotlight, life was very different.

I don’t know if they were running away from their problems, following my father’s work or just trying to prove that they didn’t need anyone else, but shortly after their wedding my parents moved up to Stockport. Years later, I would let myself be persuaded to do something similar. For me, it was a disaster; for Mum, it wouldn’t turn out well either. But right then, at the start, they had me and they had each other. I’m sure they thought they could take on the world. Then reality caught up with them.

At first it was the perfect set-up: Dad worked and Mum looked after me. As the weeks turned into months, however, being cut off from her friends and family began to take its toll. The new home that had been an escape from the nagging of their families now became a prison. The more she was left on her own, the more trapped Jenny felt.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Mum had had a baby at fifteen followed by a shotgun wedding, breaking it to my grandparents that she and my father were going to separate didn’t exactly get the bunting hung in the streets. As far as they were concerned, things were going from bad to worse. At least Jenny being so far away spared them the initial public embarrassment.

Even so, I know that Mum only had to ask and they would have welcomed her back to live with them. Even with a toddler in tow. But she was too proud to ask and Grandpa was too stubborn to suggest it. He wanted her to admit she’d made mistakes. Mum refused. What had happened, had happened. To confess to mistakes was to admit she was unhappy with the way her life had turned out. It would have been an insult to her beautiful baby. To me.

I’m sure, however, that if Mum had gone cap in hand to Grandpa he would have helped out financially. As disappointed and angry as he was, she was still his daughter. She was still the mother of his granddaughter. All Mum had to do was ask and he would have put his hand in his pocket. But that was the last thing she would have done. That would be like admitting defeat. During the adoption discussions, she had argued that she would be able to take care of her own baby. Now she had to prove it.

But talk about the blind leading the blind! Jenny Beavis was eighteen years old when her husband packed his bags. No one had told her how to be a mum. It wasn’t that long ago that she was still playing with her own dolls. Yet there she was, alone in a flat in Stockport with a two-year-old, trying to put food on the table on a non-existent income and wondering when her luck was going to change.

And while she was confined to chasing a toddler around, her friends down south were out partying, working or going on to university. They were the ones with choices; Jenny didn’t have that privilege. But she didn’t mind. She was blessed in another way. She had her daughter.

It sounds a bit weird – a bit vain even – saying that, but from everything I can remember, everything I’ve read and everything other people have told me, my mother would have done anything for me. Yes, I’m sure she’d had the stuffing knocked out of her when she realized I was on my way, and yes, given the choice, she probably would have done things differently. But from the moment she discovered she was pregnant, that was it. She was going to be a mum. She really did think she was blessed. Her baby was a gift. Unfortunately, a child was all she had.

Even after relocating to Peacehaven, just along the coast from Brighton, Mum couldn’t easily work with a child to look after, so we existed mainly on state benefits. It’s possible my father also paid some support. A few pounds here and there doesn’t go far, though. We really had nothing.

Home was a series of cheap apartments, each as sparsely furnished as the last. By the time I was eight I was telling people I’d lived in eighteen different places. A lot of my early memories are of us unpacking or packing and waking up somewhere new. Most of the properties were very similar. There were few home comforts to speak of, rarely a stick of furniture and no toys. We had a gorgeous tri-coloured cat called Mushka and a guitar. Apart from a suitcase of clothes, that was pretty much all we turned up with at each new flat.

Granny told me how hard Mum fought to make it work. How she devoted herself to looking after me and doing as much as she could on her limited budget, with trips to parks and zoos. Sometimes it was just a case of letting me play with friends. Because we were constantly moving, our different flats are blurred together in my memory. The earliest one I remember, as a four-year-old, was pretty indistinct inside. I just recall it had a wooden verandah – the only one on the street – which I thought was terribly exotic. Mum would let the other kids on the street come up and play there. Whole days would whizz by and we never tired of it. It was our little kingdom.

‘She did her best,’ Granny told me, absolutely no judgement in her voice. You don’t need money to be a good parent, she understood that. You just need to want to do your best – and we both knew Mum did.

Even so, staring at four walls all day couldn’t have been easy for such a free spirit and she was happy when Granny offered to babysit. I’ve seen wonderful photos of me pottering around in Granny’s garden or playing in their house. I obviously spent a fair bit of time there when I was young.

The only downside was having to conform to Granny’s fashion sense. Two years of hairdressing hadn’t just given her a hairstyle for life – if Granny had had her way I’d still have my hair the same today as she used to style it then, with a tuft of hair pulled through a little cotton toggle on the top of my head. Any other style and Granny thought I looked scruffy. At two I looked quite cute with a little curl looping down across the middle of my forehead. At four I still looked sweet, if unimaginative. By ten, though, I was thoroughly embarrassed about it. But that didn’t matter. That’s how little girls wore their hair, Granny said, and all the while she was teasing the strands into place she’d sing, ‘There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead . . .’ That was me, she said. I never really thought about it at the time, but did she really think I was horrid when I was bad?

For the first few years I lived in blissful ignorance of our impoverished state. I knew all the flats were cold, but I never realized it was because Mum was too poor to afford heating. I knew I moved house a lot more than other children, but I never appreciated it was because we hadn’t paid the rent on the last place. Not even when Mum made me tiptoe down the stairs, our meagre belongings dragged behind us, did I question anything. Why would I? Children just get on with things. Their whole view of the world comes from their parents. As far as I was concerned, moonlight flits were normal. That’s how everyone moved house.

The first inkling I got that all was not well came when I was four. A friend of Mum’s had come round – this was rare – and she’d commented on how cold the flat was.

‘It’s the power cuts,’ Mum said. ‘They’re playing havoc with the gas.’

The friend nodded sympathetically. This was 1973 and power cuts were the scourge of the western world, thanks to the oil crisis. Obviously I didn’t know any of that – but I did know that whatever these ‘power cuts’ were, they had nothing to do with our heating. We hadn’t had any for as long as I could remember.

Mum’s not telling her friend the truth,
I realized.
I wonder why?

To her credit, Mum was always looking for enterprising ways of making money and I loved helping – even if it did sometimes mean getting up at the crack of dawn. We were going out to a park one Sunday morning and happened to walk past the local pub. I was yapping away when suddenly Mum darted over to the kerb. There in the gutter was a screwed-up pound note. Mum whooped as she put it into her purse and I remember thinking how nice it was to see her so happy. I certainly didn’t think any more of it, but obviously Mum did. The following Sunday she had me up and dressed at six o’clock. I could hear rain on the windows.

‘We’ll get wet,’ I moaned.

Mum was excited. ‘Stop grumbling,’ she said. ‘It’s perfect weather.’

I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about or why she was so cheerful when we were obviously in for a soaking. But I followed her out without another word. I don’t know where I expected to end up, but it certainly wasn’t outside the pub where we’d found the pound note the previous week.

‘Why are we here?’

‘To look for more of these,’ Mum replied, then, right on cue, bent down to rescue another note from the road. It was soggy, but still in one piece. Mum had such a smile on her face, it almost made the early, wet start worthwhile.

When she explained her plan, I got excited too. We were there to find as many pound notes as possible.

‘See if you can find more than me,’ she suggested.

‘I’m going to win!’ I declared and ran off to hunt.