Mummy, Make It Stop (13 page)

One day they asked me to fill in a form that asked ‘What do you want in life?’ I wrote that I just wanted to go home, have long hair, get a Barbie and go to Disneyland. I may have been wearing make-up and trying to compete with the teenagers, but in reality I was still just a small girl who wanted the things most other small girls want.

We were already into the autumn term when we arrived there. Penny told me I would be going to St Mark’s Primary School, a ten-minute walk away. A couple of days after we arrived, Janice walked me into town to get my uniform. This time it was a grey skirt with a white shirt and red jumper and tie. I liked it, but I pretended I didn’t.

A few days later, I started school. Janice walked me there and took me in. It was an old Victorian building, a little like my first school back at home. To me it was just another school, with yet another teacher and another set of kids. They eyed me curiously when I was taken in, and at breaktime a few of them tried to talk to me, but I was too shy and overwhelmed to respond, and after a while they gave up.

The school wasn’t bad. Mostly no-one bullied me and I didn’t mind being there, though I was still very behind and struggled with lessons, especially anything involving writing. I bunked off a few times at first, because that’s what I was used to doing. I did a bit of shoplifting - nicking sweets and drinks. But apart from that, there wasn’t really anything to do, so after I’d spent a few days walking around, thoroughly bored, I decided I might as well go to school.

I used to watch the most popular girl, who was always surrounded by friends. She was called Karen, and she reminded me of Amber Smith. Just as I had with Amber, back at my first school, I wondered what it would be like to be so pretty and popular.

One Saturday I was in our bedroom when Tanya came in and said, ‘Karen’s come to call for you.’ I shot out of the door, wild with excitement. At last someone wanted to play with me, and not just someone, one of the most popular girls in the school. I raced to the front door, only to find there was no-one there. I turned to see Tanya laughing at me. ‘Idiot,’ she said. ‘Did you really think she would want to play with you?’ I was broken-hearted.

That wasn’t the only time Tanya played that trick on me. I fell for it two or three more times. I was really hurt, because I’d trusted Tanya. She hadn’t been mean to me in the past - apart from a few sisterly scraps - but at Cherry Road she became more distant, going off with her own friends and taking the mickey out of me. She didn’t seem to care about anything any more - including me.

I also found it difficult sharing a room with her. Tanya was incredibly messy and would throw her clothes, and everything else, on the floor, while I liked to tidy up and have things neat. We often bickered over it.

At other times, we still felt very close, and in the early days we would sometimes cry in one another’s arms, over how much we wanted to go home. We stuck up for one another too. One day, when one of the other girls punched Tanya over some argument, I stormed in, shouting at the girl to go away or I’d hit her.

Jamie seemed to settle in all right too. He didn’t mind his new school and made friends with a couple of the other boys. We got on OK, though sometimes he still blamed me and Tanya for landing us all in care by telling about Terry. ‘Why couldn’t you just have shut up?’ he’d say, before turning his back on us and walking off.

Cherry Road was situated on a really nice estate, much smarter than anything I had seen before. The houses looked prosperous and well tended - they reminded me of Amber Smith’s house back home. Some of them even had long drives, with smart cars parked on them. There was no litter anywhere. It was clean and peaceful and so very different from what I was used to.

I liked it, but I didn’t feel very comfortable. I didn’t feel I fitted into this posh area, or the clean, nicely kept children’s home. I wasn’t good enough. I felt like a visitor from another planet - the dirty, rough planet on the other side of the universe. And I didn’t know how to change or adapt.

For most of my first year there, I gave the staff a really hard time. I broke the rules, answered back, threw things and had tantrums. I was fine as long as one of the staff was giving me their full attention - in fact, I lapped it up. If Craig or Melanie played a game with me, or took me for a walk and talked to me, I loved it. But the minute they stopped, I began behaving badly. I didn’t care about the punishments - what was a bit of extra washing-up after the beatings I’d had in the past? I thought their punishments were daft.

Tanya was the same. She found it hard to fit in and made life difficult for the staff. But she had the ability to make friends, and once she got settled at the local high school, she had her own crowd of friends, both inside and outside the home, and spent her time with them.

Mum wasn’t allowed to visit us for a few weeks, to give us time to settle in. When she did come again her visits had to be supervised, as they had been at the beginning at Cranley. The staff at Cherry Road wanted to do their own assessment.

All three of us were thrilled to see her, and once again she was sweetness itself, telling us how much she’d missed us and that she was fighting to get us home. She said she knew she hadn’t taken care of us properly, but that she had changed and when we came back everything would be different. She stayed for an hour, and came back again two weeks later. After a few weeks, she was allowed unsupervised visits, and these were to be twice a week - Wednesdays after school and Saturdays.

We were really happy about it at first. But we were often disappointed. Mum was now a fifty-minute drive away, and she told us it was too difficult to come by bus, so she could only come when John was free to drive her. She often missed the Wednesday visit and sometimes Saturday too. It wasn’t unusual for her to stay away for three weeks before coming again.

Gradually, Tanya began to lose interest in Mum’s visits. She was absorbed with her friends, and perhaps she’d had enough of being let down by Mum. It was no fun waiting to see if she’d turn up or not, and so Tanya didn’t. She went out, and if Mum came, it was just me and Jamie waiting for her. I don’t know whether this hurt Mum; she never said much about it.

If John drove her, he and his kids would stay out in the car park while Mum came in to see us. At the end of the visit, she’d say, ‘Come out and say hello.’ We did, reluctantly, knowing that we’d have to watch them all drive away together. I hated that more than anything - seeing them together, like a family, and feeling that I wasn’t part of it any more. Afterwards, Jamie would be angry and I would be unsettled and distressed, and a staff member always spent the rest of the evening with me, trying to cheer me up.

Mum was incredibly insensitive about parading her new family before us. But despite this, she still seemed to be trying to win us back. She would tell us that she was going to all sorts of meetings and doing her best, but they still wouldn’t let us come home. The trouble was she made us feel that it wasn’t her fault - so it must be ours. We must be doing something bad to stop them from letting us go home.

Although she was trying, Mum made some silly mistakes. The first was when she bought me a video player and some videos for my first Christmas at Cherry Road. Penny and Melanie were horrified when they saw them - they were all 15- and 18-rated films. They took them away and I never got them back again, so that was my present from Mum gone. I did get little presents from the staff - and we all got some extra pocket money too. But I missed having a present from Mum.

Soon after this, Mum did something really strange. She’d been to visit, and was about to leave. She gave me a hug - and then suddenly turned her face and bit me on the cheek. It really hurt, and I began crying. Mum said she’d only been playing and hadn’t meant to do it, but when I looked in the mirror there were teeth marks in my cheek. The staff were shocked when they saw them - and Mum’s visits were stopped for several weeks. We were allowed to phone her during that time, but she never had much to say. She didn’t ask about us, and if she talked about anything it was her and John and the kids and how well they were all getting on. I would end the phone calls feeling unwanted and shut out of her life. Why would she want me when she had Shaun and Kelly living with her?

At Cherry Road the staff persevered with me. Melanie was my favourite. She often spent time with me, reading to me, making up poems and playing board games. She had grey hair, even though she wasn’t really very old, and she would tell me about her two children. Sometimes she gave me a pound to clean her car out on a Saturday, and then she’d walk to the park or the shops with me.

Ted was fun too. For some strange reason he was scared of monkeys - or at least he said he was. We kids used to love playing tricks on him - planting toy monkeys on his desk or in the loo. He would always yell at the top of his voice when he saw them, and we’d fall about laughing.

At weekends, the staff would organise things for us to do. We went swimming, roller-skating, to theme parks and on nature trails. We played games, went on outings and learned about the world outside, and I loved it. I had never done things like that before; my world had always been so confined and narrow. Now I was being offered the chance to explore and learn, and I soaked it up. Ted would shout, ‘Right, swimming, get your things,’ and I’d race round collecting my stuff and be first into the mini-bus we all went round in.

I was given £1.40 a week pocket money, and Melanie or Craig would walk me to the shops so that I could spend it. We also got a monthly clothing allowance of £17, which could be saved up for a big spending spree. I got some pretty clothes that were actually appropriate for a ten-year-old - another first.

I was still wearing make-up, including eye-liner, mascara and lurid-coloured eye-shadows. But when my eyes became infected and I got a couple of styes, Melanie came and talked to me and told me I needed to stop wearing make-up, especially on my eyes. I was still reluctant, because the older girls did, so she compromised, saying that I could put on a bit of blusher and lip gloss at the weekends, but strictly no eye make-up.

Gradually, I was learning how to be a child of ten, rather than an over-precocious doll. But I didn’t see it that way for a long time. I thought make-up and short skirts and cigarettes would make me feel grown-up, and I resented having them all taken away.

Anna still came to see the three of us every week. But I stayed angry with her for a long time, and refused to talk. As far as I was concerned, she had put me here, instead of sending me home, and I wasn’t going to forgive her. She tried hard and was always patient, but I wouldn’t give in. I told her I hated being in a home and wanted to be fostered. She came back and said she was trying to find me a foster family, but the authorities wanted us to stay together, and it was hard to find a family to take the three of us. She didn’t give up, but she never did find a family. If she had, I’m not sure whether I would really have been pleased or not. I told myself I hated Cherry Road, but though I refused to admit it for most of the first year, I actually liked it there. I felt safe and cared for. The rules made sense, and I knew where I was with them, and what would happen if I broke them. And we had a lot of fun. The meals were amazing. I couldn’t get over all the new dishes whose weird and wonderful names I had never heard before - beef stroganoff and kedgeree were regularly served up, and I loved them. And the staff sat down to eat with us and seemed to genuinely like us and enjoy our company. Even though there were so many of us, it felt like being part of a family.

Unlike Cranley, Cherry Road had no lock on the kitchen door, or on the cupboards and fridge. If we needed a drink or a snack, we could go and get one, though we were supposed to ask permission. The only problem with this was that I had no self-control and I couldn’t stop snacking. They say that over-eating can be brought on by a craving for love, and in my case I think it was true. I was always sneaking things from the fridge and stuffing my face, enjoying the comfort of it - until I felt sick. Of course I began to pile on weight. I had always been a little bit plump, but now I began to be quite tubby. The other kids in the home laughed and called me fat, and so did some of the kids at school. I hated that, but I couldn’t stop eating.

Every night one of the staff would write a short report on the day’s happenings, and then we would be asked if we agreed with it or wanted to write something ourselves. I liked this, as it gave us an opportunity to say things on paper that we normally wouldn’t have had the courage to say out loud. Most of the time I would just read what they had written and write nothing, but I gradually got braver about adding my own notes. When they had written that I had been naughty, I would often say I didn’t agree with them, even though I knew they were right. I liked being able to give my opinion, and disagree, without getting into trouble. I had never been able to do that before.

If the only influence on me had been the staff, I might have settled far more quickly and given up misbehaving, arguing and acting up. But, like many kids, I was very influenced by the other kids around me. And because they were all older, I wanted to be older too.

The girl I admired most was called Sandy, and she was fourteen. All the boys seemed to like her and she had lots of friends. She looked so grown-up, with her hair all done up nicely in a bun and a lot of carefully applied make-up. I wanted to look like her and be like her.

I did my best to get her attention, showing off and trying to copy her. And when she dared me to bunk off school and go and steal stuff from the local supermarket, I did - several times. For some reason, I stole loads of mouth-fresheners. Perhaps that’s why, when I gave her most of the stuff I took, it still didn’t impress her.