by Jenny Molloy
NEGLECTED
Praise for Jenny’s other books, written under the name Hope Daniels
‘Hackney Child is a shocking reminder of what some children are subjected to as they grow up. The scars can last a lifetime and there is no certainty they will ever heal. The best way is always to fight back. Hope Daniels has done this and displayed great courage in reliving the events of her childhood through this manuscript. I wish her all the success in the world.’
Harry Keeble, bestselling author of Baby X
‘Hackney Child tells us the story of Hope as she grew up in the care system. It is a terrible indictment of our society that children should suffer such cruelty, especially when being “cared for” by people who should protect them. I pray, that by telling her story, Hope can find some peace because I believe this story needed to be told. Have a happy life Miss Daniels.’
Cassie Harte, Sunday Times number one bestselling author
‘An insightful look into one girl’s journey into the care system in the eighties, Hope’s story shows the maturity and opportunistic attitude some vulnerable children undertake in order to thrive, the powerful impact that small decisions can have on a child’s life and the on-going struggles care children face even as adults. As her name exemplifies, Hope’s compelling account fortifies that every marginalized child has a chance to overcome adversity.’
Ruth Stivey, The Who Cares? Trust
‘Daniels has cast herself as a powerful voice for the many successes produced by a system that is often associated with catastrophic failure . . . she burns with passion for a system she says does extraordinary work . . . Tainted Love digs deeper into her life story.’
Metro
This edition published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Jenny Molloy, 2015
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Jenny Molloy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-47114-077-8
ISBN (Ebook): 978-1-47114-078-5
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While this book gives a faithful account of the author’s experiences, some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
This book is dedicated to the very special people who made such a difference to my young life, my social workers Jeff, Ann, Jimmy, John and David.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Part One: The Wrong Side of Love
Part Two: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Part Three: The Other Side of Love
Epilogue
INTRODUCTION
Not long ago I started working for a homeless shelter founded by a friend of mine. It was in a church and I arrived one evening to find a nineteen-year-old girl waiting for me.
‘I can’t go home, can you help me?’
‘Have you tried the police?’
‘They sent me here.’
‘What happened?’
‘Some girls. They’re gonna mess me up, serious.’
I called the police.
‘She refused to go home,’ an officer said. ‘There’s nothing we can do. We kept her in a cell for a bit, but our hands are tied unless there’s a crime.’
I went back to the girl, whose name was Chloe. She had recently dyed her hair black, which may have been an attempt at disguise. She had a few small tattoos on her arms, and was nursing a cup of tea with shaking hands.
She reminded me of me.
I used to roam the streets at night after running from the children’s home, looking for I-don’t-know-what and ending up in Trafalgar Square. As Chloe talked, it was clear she was involved with some seriously nasty people – male and female. I could understand why she didn’t want to be out on the streets at night.
The other thing I noticed was that Chloe was angry. Her muscles were taut and she looked as though she could explode at any moment. I knew that Chloe was using that anger to hide her fear – and that her aggressive approach to life perhaps came from the lack of love she’d received as child.
Displays of anger in young people are one of the key reasons they don’t get the help they need. I had to go into hospital a few years ago and, when I saw my medical files on the table next to my bed, I picked them up and started reading. Apart from the many entries by midwives who’d written about me when I was pregnant, expressing concern and stating that, as I’d been in care and hadn’t been in contact with any doctor or hospital, I was ‘at risk’, I was completely bowled over by the entries from when I gave birth. The files said I was aggressive and hostile – and violent! In reality, I was so scared, so alone, and I was just reaching out to the nurses for help. I was probably a bit out of it because of the drugs they’d given me, but they’d made completely the wrong assumptions about me.
All too often, anger and fear go hand-in-hand.
Chloe had been part of a gang but something had made them turn against her. I didn’t ask what it was, I didn’t want to know; but she indicated that there had been a lot of ‘sleeping around’ with different boyfriends. She was beside herself. No teenager deserves to feel that kind of fear. We made her a bed in our section of the church, so she’d sleep with us. Chloe was so grateful and kept thanking us over and over.
The next morning was Saturday and Chloe wouldn’t leave the church. I called a contact at the local council to see if there was something they could do, but they were against us and, in so many words, said not to come knocking at their door, even though they knew the people she was scared of – and understood that she was right to be scared of them.
At last, we found a place of safety a long way out of the area, in a B&B. The local council for that area took our concerns seriously and they managed to get her housed.
As I left Chloe in the B&B, knowing she had a shot at a new start in a new town, I thought of the many dangers she was likely to face as a vulnerable, lonely young girl in need of love and support – from sexual predators to drug and alcohol addiction. The odds were stacked against her, like they had been for me, for all of the people in this book.
In my first book, Hackney Child, published in 2014, I told the story of how, as a nine-year-old child of alcoholic parents, I had walked into a police station with my brothers and asked to be taken into care. The follow-up, Tainted Love, told the stories of some of the kids whom I lived with in children’s homes.
Although I had a difficult time in care, care didn’t damage me, I was damaged by the time I ran to find help – by lack of love. I never had a cuddle from my parents, who were frozen in terms of physical contact (I never even saw them cuddle each other). The harm that the lack of love can do to a child is far greater than most people imagine. Neglected tells
my story and the stories of others I have met through my outreach work, of our search for love, as children and as adults.
We have shared our stories because we want more than anything to stop anyone else from having to endure what we did, as well as help those who are suffering to understand their behaviour and know that there is help out there. And to know, no matter how bad things are, there is always hope. And with hope, there is the possibility to heal and to build an entirely new and better kind of life.
That these courageous people, who are still fighting daily battles with addictions and their pasts, are able to tell their stories at all is thanks to the care workers who brought them back to an understanding of what love really means. While Parts One and Two tell the stories of people who, like myself, suffered from a lack of love, Part Three – The Other Side of Love – contains incredible stories told from the perspective of those unsung heroes, the care workers who fight every day to save and rebuild lives, the adopters, foster carers and social workers who go to extraordinary lengths to help the children in their care.
So many children have suffered for lack of love and have fought in different ways to replace that love as they became adults. They found artificial feelings of love in drugs, in alcohol, or through sex – they used them as a way to ‘feel’ love, and to feel as though they were wanted and that it was possible for them to be loved. The results are often disastrous – with huge costs to themselves, the people around them (in some cases their children) and to society.
Their shocking stories make for tough reading but, remember, they have come through their experiences and have changed – with help. It’s only through learning about the circumstances that drove them into these extraordinary states of mind that we can hope to understand and help them.
We should never forget that these people were once children who needed help and didn’t get it. And, as adults, they need our help more than ever.
When we encounter a girl like Chloe then we must think twice and see past the angry ‘problem child’ to the scared and lost little girl underneath, and we must do something positive to give her hope, before it’s too late.
Part One:
THE WRONG SIDE OF LOVE
HOPE
A cold room, light streaming in with the draught through un-curtained windows. Mattress on the hard floor; we’re surrounded on all sides by clothes, bags and my suitcase. This is so Lauren can’t climb out and crawl around the room in the morning. She’ll die if she eats the mould growing on the walls.
The only ‘furniture’ (apart from the mattress), is the large beanbag in the lounge.
The leaves are turning gold on the poorly-looking trees on the narrow street lined with cars, parked bumper to bumper. There is condensation on the windows, sparkling in the sunlight, but I don’t dare put the boiler on for hot water or heating because it floods the communal stairs and the flat below. I’ve picked the mushrooms that were growing in the gloom of the stairwell so that Lauren or some other child won’t die from eating or touching them.
No one knows I’m here. Everyone thinks I’m coping. Social services are one step behind me.
It’s 1994. I’m twenty years old and have been on the run with my baby for two years now.
I ran from the care system I needed so badly, from my abusive foster family, from Mum and Dad – my past, my life, my pain, my fear, so out of my control.
Two years earlier, I was dumped out of the care system because I turned eighteen. I made all the right sounds and did all the right things. I proved that I was bright and showed promise. I showed how the system could work well. I wanted to study law, to become a solicitor so I could help people like me.
I was also an emotional wreck and no one was close enough to me to know.
I’d hung on with my foster family placement, which is where I had been since I was seventeen.
Review of Placement Agreement 9th January 1991
Over-all aim of placement: For Hope to finish her education.
Relationship with foster family: Satisfactory relationships generally – very close with Pat. Very active family . . . Two other foster teenagers, and two teenagers and two little ones ‘home grown’ and one or two child-minded. Hope has her own room and enjoys having privacy into which to withdraw and study.
Yeah, right. No mention in that report of the nightmare of that family. My room was somewhere to hide. The two other teenagers she fostered for money. She never showed the social worker the part of the house where we had to live – separate from her family, in bare, unheated rooms. Our fridge was filled with her scraps – old meat and veg she would have otherwise thrown – and she baked it into inedible pies, while her family’s fridge had a lock on it. She put us to work babysitting and later used me to sort out her accounting – telling me to hide money off their books so the tax man wouldn’t find out. I couldn’t say anything. Otherwise they’d stick me in a hostel. At least at my foster home I’d been able to do part-time jobs, have a bed and roof.
Just keep it together, get through my exams, get a place at college – that had been my mantra. I kept everything to myself. I’m good at that. When Sharon, the social worker, came to visit (she was a trainee and not much older than me – but she was a lady I came to love dearly), my foster mum kept the doors to our section of the house closed.
My foster mum hid things, and so did I, but I think Sharon had a feeling something was wrong; that there was something I wasn’t telling her.
I survived, though, and then, a few weeks before I turned eighteen, I told Sharon what the foster family was really like. I showed her everything.
Sharon believed me.
An investigation took place.
But I was left homeless.
‘I have nowhere to stay,’ I told social services. ‘What am I supposed to do tonight?’
‘Stay at a friend’s house,’ was their advice.
If I’d been missing a few weeks earlier it would have been a big thing but now I was about to turn eighteen, it wasn’t. I refused point-blank. They had to do something. Legally, they had to, until I was eighteen, so they said I could live with some other foster carers, but only until my birthday.
I wasn’t ready.
They said I could still receive funding for college to study law and that if I found a private flat, I could receive housing benefit.
I couldn’t.
The pain and fear were there together, ever present. I couldn’t be on my own, not yet, I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t go from being in care to nothing, from one day to the next.
No one loves me. I’ve no one to love. They just want to get me out, so I’m not their burden any more.
I found a flat a few days after my eighteenth birthday. A few weeks after that I had a meeting with Sharon about funding for my college placement.
‘I’m not going to college,’ I told her. ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Then there is no more we can do for you but discharge you from care as of this moment.’
They were the words I was expecting. If I couldn’t be in care, then I’d make my own family.
They asked me what my plans were. They said I could have a hostel place but I would have to come back to Hackney.
No way.
‘I’m going to get married,’ I said.
So they paid the deposit on my studio flat and I was signed out of care.
If I was going to keep my baby – which is what I wanted, desperately – then I thought I needed to say I was getting married. Single mums my age who’d been in care and who got pregnant had their babies removed.
Such a surgical term. ‘Your baby will be removed.’ Like they’re taking out your appendix – more like ripping out your heart.
Another thing I had to do to keep my baby – and to survive – was to keep all of my problems and worries bottled up. By saying I was getting married I thought I’d come across as respectable in the eyes of social services.
The next stage of my plan was to disappear. This wasn’t as har
d as I thought. Social services offered no advice about being pregnant or being a mum. I didn’t register for antenatal. On the four occasions a letter from the midwife fell through the letterbox, I moved home. They couldn’t keep up.
I had no scans, no idea what I should be doing while I was pregnant. I just let time pass. I was scared, in emotional pain, and worrying about what would happen, whether they would take my baby. I wasn’t drinking, wasn’t taking drugs, I was just surviving each day, sure as one follows the next.
When I was eight months along, I got sick and had to go to the doctor. He commented that he wasn’t expecting me to be pregnant, let alone eight months pregnant.
He reached for pen and paper, asking me who I was seeing with regard to my pregnancy.
‘No one.’
He stopped, pen hanging over paper.
‘You haven’t seen anyone since you became pregnant? No health professional?’
I shook my head.
I jerk awake. It’s night-time, I’m in a hospital bed and terrified. And the pain. Oh my God. What is that?
Figures are around me, the room is dark, then flickers into light, sharp strip lights. I blink through a haze of tears and cry again as the wave of pain tears through my body. I reach out desperately, begging for help, and grab hold of someone. Why is there so much pain?
‘Stop that!’ a nurse shouts, pulling my hands away.
‘Someone please help me, I don’t understand what’s going on.’
‘Calm down! You’re having a baby; everything’s fine.’
‘But it hurts!’
‘It’s supposed to, now shut up!’
I pull myself up, so I am half-sitting, half-leaning over the side of the bed.
‘I – I haven’t been to antenatal. I don’t know . . . Don’t know what to expect.’
One of the nurses pushes me back on to the bed.
‘Well give you something for the pain, but just shut up and lie still!’
