Deliver Me From Evil (26 page)

I had written a little about my time with Eunice, although they didn’t have the full picture by any means. Nan quickly wrote back: ‘I have never hated anyone, but I’m afraid my views have changed. Something should be done about her [Eunice] as she can’t go on telling such lies. Your mum and dad are the kindest people you could wish to meet and I think Eunice is wicked.’

It wasn’t long before I took Ivy over to meet them, with Braedon in tow, and we re-established some sort of relationship. Although it was a bit awkward at first, especially as there was so much to catch up on, they seemed genuinely happy to see me, and kept telling me how beautiful I was now and how glad they were that I had a man and a life of my own. They were absolutely delighted by Ivy. My mum couldn’t stop crying and hugging her and my dad looked pleased as punch.

After my first visit I received another letter from Nan, who seemed to be their scribe. She wrote: ‘I don’t think your mum has got over seeing you. They were thrilled after all this time.’ Indeed, my parents started sending Ivy cards from ‘Grandad Gilbert’ or ‘Grandma and Grandad’, saying things like, ‘Welcome to the world. We are so lucky you chose us as your grandparents’. From the little she wrote it was clear that my mum was wracked with guilt and my dad told me on later visits that she couldn’t sleep at night for feeling so bad about what had happened to me during all the years we were estranged.

Soon after I re-established contact with my parents I received a huge package from them. In it were masses of cards: they had gone out and bought a card for every birthday and Christmas that they had missed with me (to replace all those that Eunice had binned), as a way of saying sorry. Both of my parents had written little notes in the birthday cards, saying things like, ‘Happy Birthday, “Bright Eyes”’, marking special events like my eighteenth birthday. They still feel sad that they have missed so much of my life.

Finding my parents and Nan again was wonderful but they couldn’t help with my real problem: I felt trapped with a man who I didn’t love, and who didn’t love me, and who was becoming more and more nasty. Things had deteriorated between Braedon and me so that we were hardly talking. He would go out every day and only come back late, giving me no help with the baby. I was glad when he was out, but extremely tired – looking after a new baby single-handed was such a big job and one I wasn’t prepared for.

The last straw came when I found images of child pornography on Braedon’s computer. I found them by accident and was completely shocked and horrified. I knew somehow I had to get away for my precious new daughter’s sake. Once I confronted him the relationship got even more abusive and after a particularly vicious row one night, when he tried to kick in the doors, I had to call the police. He was arrested and taken away and charged. I knew I had to protect my child and even now he is not allowed to see her unsupervised, by court order.

Once Braedon was gone, I felt utter relief. It was just the baby and me now. My six-month tenancy at Kingswood was coming to an end and I’d been offered a flat in Knowle. On the day I had to leave I packed up my few belongings, which fitted into a couple of boxes, and Ivy’s toys. A friend came to pick me up and we bundled into her car. I was happy as we drove away from the cottage but apprehensive, too
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I had to make a new beginning for us, but how would I do that? I was signing on and I was just about managing on the money, but I knew no one where I was going. Still, when I looked at Ivy’s sweet little face as she lay cooing in her carrycot, I was determined to succeed. What I didn’t know, as we sped along the road and I gazed out at red-brick terraces and leafy pavements, was that I was going to one of the roughest council estates in Bristol.

At first it was it was great to have my own place, a two-bedroom flat in Knowle. Ivy was about six months when we went there and I was still nineteen. The estate looked OK when I moved in, but I soon realized that there were addicts everywhere: crack addicts four doors up, heroin addicts across the road. Everywhere you turned, there were addicts and people living a very tough, rough lifestyle.

There was one particular neighbour, Cathy, who used to shout at me every time I left the house so that I dreaded any encounter with her. One day I was wheeling the buggy past her, on the opposite site of the road, hoping she wouldn’t notice me. She was out on the front grass, her eyes glazed, dressed in a dirty sweatshirt and jeans.

‘Oy, fuckface.’

I kept my head down and just kept walking.

‘You’re a slut, ain’t you? How many men you had?’

I was terrified as Cathy swayed across the road towards me, puffing on a cigarette. I pulled the cover over Ivy protectively as Cathy blocked my path.

‘Going somewhere? You’re just a whore, ain’t you?’ Cathy spat and a huge gob of spittle landed on the buggy, which infuriated me.

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Oh, it speaks.’ Cathy looked pleased at getting me riled. ‘Off somewhere nice, are we?’ She was moving over towards my dustbin full of nappies.

‘Leave it alone.’

‘Oh yeah. Says who?’ With that Cathy tipped my dustbin over and the week’s supply of soiled nappies, baby food jars, and other household garbage spewed across my path.

Laughing raucously, Cathy turned and sashayed back across the road, leaving me shaking on the spot. Ivy started crying as I tried to clear up the mess all over my little patch of garden. I was seething and scared, but I wasn’t going to be beaten. Never again.

Every time I went out Cathy would be hovering, off her face. She’d call out things like ‘Whore’ whenever I went past. She just had it in for me. I was small and looked vulnerable with a baby in tow, so I think I was easy pickings. Other days she’d just spit and curse. She was always hanging around, looking out for punters, as I guess she was a prostitute. She also did drugs quite openly on the street, snorting lines of coke off the dustbins. I’d just keep my head down and hope she’d leave me alone. She was picking on me like a bully and I thought eventually she would give up and go away.

When I made friends with a nice man, Danny, from around the corner, who used to come and mow my grass for me, my crazy neighbour started abusing me again, shouting that I was sleeping with him. Then she threw a brick through my front window. I couldn’t believe it. She could have hurt my baby, or worse, killed her. Luckily we were not in the front room at the time. I had to get the council to board it up and it took ages to get it properly fixed. I retreated indoors and tried to keep a low profile.

I felt very much that I was under siege in Knowle. It wasn’t just Cathy; the other neighbours seemed to watch me all the time, and that reminded me of living with Eunice, being under her vigilant stare and constantly being judged. I found it very hard going, and I had help from no one other than Beany. She would babysit for me occasionally and I would go out to the club with another friend or two. But, after my earlier experience in clubs, I was now much more cautious.

I’d been alone for a while, learning how to be a young mum, when I saw someone I liked the look of on the dating channel on TV. He was called Colin and and he lived in Northern Ireland. Colin came over to see me for a week so we could decide whether we liked each other or not. I thought he was OK, but I wasn’t in love. I hadn’t yet fallen in love properly, and I wondered if I ever would. Perhaps the damage done to me as a child meant I could never give my heart?

Yet I had now bonded with my baby and my heart was fine when it came to her. Her golden hair, her little eyelashes, perfect fingers and toes brought up huge feelings of love and protectiveness in me. I’d had to learn fast how to look after her properly, which was difficult because I wasn’t very organized. But I soon had neatly pressed Babygros warming in the airing cupboard and clean toys for her to play with. I also decided to add some animals to my family, as I had really missed my pets since leaving the farm. I had started off with Pansy (a rescue kitten) when I was first homeless and went to the women’s hostel in Redcliffe; I now had five other cats, which, I think, provided me with the sense of home, of family and of belonging that I needed living in such an awful place.

Then Colin announced he was coming over to live with me. My first thought was
‘No’.
But I still had no idea how to manage my relationships in order to protect myself. So he moved in with me and stayed for a whole year. At first it seemed OK, and to some extent it was nice having a man around, although, very soon, his behaviour started to worry me. First of all, he drank all the time and ended up going out four or five nights a week to the pub. I guess that was what he had done in Ireland and he was continuing to do it with me. I would get really wound up waiting for him to come home, sometimes at four or five in the morning, sometimes even the next day. I would think the relationship was over, but he’d come back and we would start over and lurch onwards somehow. I felt exhausted looking after Ivy and holding myself together, while under the constant scrutiny of my aggressive neighbours.

Then Colin went too far. I borrowed his phone one day and found masses of texts from women, saying things like, ‘Hey babe, what’s up? I’m sure we’ll find something to do when you come up here’. I also found loads of photos of women’s private parts and captions reading ‘Sexy Jemma’ or ‘Dazzling Diane’. When I realized I’d been taken for a mug, yet again, I thought,
Right, that’s it.
I confronted him and he just said it was all his exes. I said he couldn’t have that many – there were about thirty women’s bodies on his phone. It was gruesome.

He left and went back to Ireland and then called saying I should send him a passport photo of himself for ID, which I did, although I think he wanted it for yet another website. When he returned we had a huge row. Although by then I thought I was in love with him, I knew I needed him to leave completely. I was a mother and Ivy had to come first now. I was still scared of being alone, but this relationship just wasn’t worth it.

When he finally left I got my life back. I had been very anxious in the run-up to Colin leaving, particularly because I was so vulnerable in Knowle, what with Cathy’s constant harassment, so it had been good to have a man around. Plus, my daughter had got used to him by then, although he wasn’t her father. But I knew it was a destructive relationship and it wasn’t going anywhere. All the time he was with me I think he was seeing other women and picking them up on his nights out in the bar. I was probably a useful stopgap for him, giving him somewhere to stay when he came to England. He certainly never played the father role and I never really expected him to.

Around this time Connexions helped me to get on a course at a Meridon College in St Philips, Bristol, especially for teen mums and their babies. I studied for my GCSEs in Maths and English and after a year I passed. This felt like a real achievement as I had missed out on so much education. I had come away from Eunices so-called ‘Home School’ with no qualifications at all, so I felt like I had finally accomplished something for myself. I knew that I would need to go further and do more in the future, but I had at least made a start. Plus, it made me feel that I wasn’t stupid, and certainly, not as dumb as Eunice had always claimed.

In the meantime there were increasingly rough times with my neighbours. They seemed to be getting more and more outrageous: people were smashing my windows and egging the place just to amuse themselves. It was as if I was living in yet another prison, like it had been on the farm. If anyone came round to see me, I would be heckled and called names. My dustbins would be kicked over and my cats intimidated.

I did see another man after Colin, called Darren, who was a bit geeky and funny. I was twenty-one now and I went out with him a few times. He broke his arm on our first date. He was trying to show off and he bounced down a cliff edge in Brean and snapped his arm. I thought he was an idiot, but also rather sweet. However, I got the feeling I was not getting the whole story and in the end I think he was cheating on his girlfriend seeing me, so I just let the relationship taper off naturally.

My focus now was on leaving Knowle as fast as I could and I put my house in the newspaper for a council transfer. Luckily, I found a nice woman who wanted to exchange with me. I went to see my new place in Lockleaze, a better part of the city and liked it immediately. It was a much calmer neighbourhood and although the house was a bit grotty I felt I could live there.

While I was waiting to move, my neighbours’ treatment of me back in Knowle hit a new low when one of them came in and stole my TV, trashed the place and then threatened to beat me up. I called the police and had one of them arrested, as I had no idea what else to do. I asked Beany to have Ivy for a week until I’d moved; I was also scared for the safety of my cats and rang round shelters asking if people could accommodate them. I found a lady who took them for me, but after a couple of days she left a window open and they all escaped. I was devastated, as things seemed to be getting worse and worse.

I moved to the new house but kept going back to find my cats. It took a month but I eventually found them all. So Ivy and I started a new life with all our animals: Missy, Tigerboo, Biggles, Wolf, Pansy and Tinkerbell.

After all the drama of getting out of Knowle, I needed to find some peace. I needed just to live, to do my place up, look after my toddler and find my feet. Something I had learned was that being a mother was an important job, and it was something I wanted to get right. It gave me great delight to paint my daughters little bedroom pink and make it as pretty as I could. I kept the place clean, and still do, as one thing I learned from Eunice was to hate dirt and clutter. If anything, I’m a real cleaning freak these days, up early with my rubber gloves and bucket. It’s almost as though I need to scrub away the squalor of my childhood and certainly want my daughter to grow up in a clean and fragrant environment, not in a cesspit like I did.