My life aged 7-9 years old

I remember lying in bed reading a book about a girl my age, her life seemed so different to mine, so much nicer, and it was then that I started realising that our lifestyle was not normal.

I forgot. My parents made some friends the other side of the estate and I don’t know why but something about going to their house, and something that happened there scared me, I remember nothing of the details.

I remember someone being angry. But they were still our friends when we left the district.

I must have been aged 7 when we moved from the house where we had lived since I was 3 years old. I don't remember being 7 but I undoubtedly was.
I remember the bookshelves being empty and the books being in boxes and I tried to sit under the book shelves.
I remember my dad packing things and sorting out the books and his desk. I don't remember my mum at this time.
I remember being told where we were moving to, hundreds of miles away.
I remember packing my things in boxes. I didn't have any pockets and I put the remains of my pocket money in a box and I never saw it again.
Most of our possessions went into storage, aged 7 I didn't really know what storage was or where my books were. It was a bit of a bereavement. I don't think I got all my things back, and I certainly never got my missing money back.
We moved, some friends drove the van, to where? And I think we went in several cars rather than a minibus, but I am not sure.

We stopped on the way to have some lunch and my mum was upset about something, I think she thought we were lost, but we weren't. Years later my brother and I used to stop at this same place where we had lunch. It must have been summer, or even late spring and we had lunch by a duck pond.

We arrived in the new town to the news that the house we were supposed to rent had been let to someone else, my mum had hysterics.
I do not remember exactly what happened next.
We were homeless, we were the unloved people that my mum had spoken about.

We ended up in a bed and breakfast, I don't know the details of how.
It was ok as bed and breakfasts that take homeless go, it was also frightening and strange, because we were sharing a house with strangers, I do not know of any incidents really, I shared a bed with my sister/s and going to the toilet was scary because there were strangers in the house.
I think my brother had a mishap, maybe he cut himself or fell.

I remember a lovely breakfast in the morning, toast with little butters and marmalades, very posh and I was very happy and grateful for such a nice breakfast, the only time I had had toast for breakfast was soggy egg and toast on a sunday or 'French toast' on Christmas day. But my parents seemed less than happy with the people running the bed and breakfast and were not getting on with them.
We got to know some people there, we played with other children there, and our parents expressed their usual disapproval.

We spent the days wandering round town, tired with the unique homeless tiredness of nowhere to stop and rest, no home to go to, we ate some burgers from a takeaway, and I had never had food like this and had not had a say in what was in my burger and it had relish and gerkins in it so I spent the time trying to throw bits of burger in the bin when my parents weren't looking, as they had ordered me to eat it when I recoiled from the taste.

After two nights at the bed and breakfast we left. We went to a place called the 'Students Union', as it turned out that my dad was going to go to university in this town and we needed somewhere to live.

I remember how I was childishly trying to write a diary, and I was writing about us being at the Student's Union, my siblings, especially three of my brothers, were tormenting me and making my life miserable, they kept taking my diary off me and laughing and throwing it around, I was very upset, they were laughing and saying I had called the place the 'Students onion'.
Funny to look back on but they were being very unkind at the time and I was unsettled and upset.

After a long time of my parents talking to the Students Union, we were allowed to stay in the halls of residence, I still wonder why we couldn't get a house to rent at that time when the students were out of town for the summer and there must have been lots of short term lets.

We spent a few days or was it just a night? In a halls of residence block. I had my own room for the first time, and it was clean and peaceful and comfortable, I woke up in the morning feeling peaceful and it was a nice sunny day. I was not sure where all the family were in this big block, and I had no idea about student halls, but there were a few other people in the block apart from my family, and when I went to the toilet a naked lady jumped out of the shower, obviously not expecting me to be there, I don't know who was more shocked, me or her.
My parents were against any sort of showing off of bodies, we all had to be modest, so I was not sure if this naked lady was being terribly bad by being naked in the shower and toilet room without locking the door.

Anyway, my mum found me wandering around and told me and my toddler sister to come and have breakfast, my memory is of the sun shining and us having a nice breakfast.

I remember being in the hall of the halls of residence while my dad was making phone calls, I saw someone get a can of coke from the machine, I don't think I had ever had a can of coke, but I really wanted one and I kept asking my dad if I could have a can of coke, but he said it was a waste of money.
Then we moved to another hall of residence on the same campus.

The halls of residence that we moved to was a different layout, we got a 'house' to ourselves and we all got a single bedroom each, it was nice to have peace and quiet, but it was the start of a time of great stress for the family.

This house was a three storey house. The twin brothers were on the top floor. I think my year older sister and the brother who abused me was as well, my younger sister and my other older sister were on the same floor as me with my baby sister, the middle floor, I think my parents were on the middle floor, and my other brothers were downstairs where the kitchen and dining room were.

Dad was going to start at university in the Autumn, but I think in the meantime he started work as a telecanvasser in the city, it must have been very stressful for him because he was not a sociable man and that is a tough job with lots of rejections.

I do not know the full story, but I do not think the university were expecting us to stay long, I think they expected us to find a home. But we didn't, the university staff were obviously unhappy and things became tense.

In the meantime we were there in the summer when the campus was partly occupied by holiday makers from other countries and language students, we made some friends but there were also people there with bad motives, and as before, us children were a bit too innocent.

I do not know about anything that happened to my brothers and sisters in detail, I only remember that my sister was assaulted, someone said she was raped, but I don't know this for sure, only that the atmosphere was grave and worrying, and at the same time a foreign student got very angry with my brother for riding his bike round and round near his ground floor room and distracting him from study, I think.

A man took me and my sister to the shops for sweets, he didn't speak good english but we went with him because he insisted and I thought that we had to do what adults said when they told us to.
He didn't do anything to us, but my parents were talking when we got back, obviously about the situation of us children and these adults. My mum commented about me having sweets, obviously people had been giving sweets to my siblings as well, but I don't remember anything happening to them or any change to the situation.

My sister who had been assaulted used to look out her window and play music at night, she was obviously upset. I had the room next to hers and she used to get angry if I looked out my window when she was at her window.
My parents became very angry and irritable, and my mum was unreasonable, she rarely hit us normally, but at this time she did hit us more, and she tried to get us to eat bread and milk, which we hated and wouldn't eat.

It was a stressful time and I didn't understand it, my mum would go house hunting, I think, but she was pregnant, I am sure that at the time I didn't know this, and it may have been why she was so irritable. She must have been pregnant when we left the house that we lived in from when I was three years old. And there we were in halls of residence, homeless. I can't understand why we weren't housed by the council because of my mum's pregnancy, but I don't know what the rules were back then.

Anyway, the situation got desperate, obviously the university needed the house we were in for individual students and we were living there as if it was a house and it must have been term time or nearly term time. The staff were not happy about a big unruly family being there, we were making the place look bad, and it was no place for children, and possibly the assault on my sister, if it was known about, and the fact that my mum was pregnant and my parents didn't get on with the staff also played a factor in the university threatening us with eviction, and somehow the press got involved.

I honestly cannot recount exactly what happened, but for some reason my parents agreed to some of the press photo'ing and interviewing us, but the press were not kind to us. They came up with headlines along the lines of 'family from hell squatting in university halls'. I do not know why my parents tried to be friendly with the press at first, why when the university set the press after us, as far as I know.
But my parents quickly realised that the press were not our friends, and we were treated very badly by other people on the campus and the area when they saw the cruel press reports with pictures of the whole family - mum and dad and all the children except the two who had left home. We started getting hate mail, this came from all around the country, people sent condoms and graphic suggestions and threats and insults and menacing phonecalls, at the time I only knew some of this, and certainly never knew the extent of it, mainly I know more about it now from what my brothers have said.

We fled from the halls of residence and my mum was hysterical and talking about death and saying we were being persecuted, again I didn't understand.

Our things were still in storage.

We arrived at a hostel in the same town, it was a rough hostel, as they all are, where people from the streets and prison go. And when we arrived there the television news was full of the story of my family. So it was not a good time.

In a hostel they don't put families together, usually they can't. So my brothers were the other side of this hostel that was made up of several old houses and an old hotel, which I think was bad for them as they were alone among drinkers and addicts.

 My older sister, the one who was assaulted shared a room with me and my three sisters, it was crowded, it was noisy, I didn't get peace or sleep and my younger sister was ill a lot, I remember having an ear ache and not being allowed to rest of get any peace, and my older sister tipping me out of bed when I was in agony, she said we had to change the beds and I had to get up, but I felt so ill.

I think my younger brothers had a room one side of our room, and my parents had a room the other side, but apart from that we were surrounded by older men who had problems.

The hostel was dusty and musty and things were broken, I remember trying to close the toilet door when I went to the toilet, I kept banging the door to try to close it, but it wouldn't close.

 We shared a kitchen with the odd men, and we shared bathrooms with them, most of us children were still very innocent, and the men and their drinking and behaviour when they were drunk was very strange to us.

I remember a drunk man in the same part of the house as us calling me over and talking to me, I couldn't understand him and I still didn't really know what drunk meant, and eventually my brothers and sisters came over too. This drunk man kept offering me a banana but he was confused and silly, my brother later said he was a pervert. And there were endless incidents with him and other drunk and drugged men in the hostel, some more serious than others. Aggression and threats and arguments, mainly between these people and my elder siblings or parents.

I remember one of the men, either on drugs or schitzophrenic, decided he was a vampire and that he could fly, he leaped downstairs and injured himself and had to go to hospital.

It was now autumn and winter, and at the beginning of December my mum went into labour, the police and midwives seiged the room where my parents had locked themselves in, this was because it was illegal for my mum to have a baby with no midwife present if she wasn't in hospital, but us children didn't know this, and we were scared, we locked ourselves in the sitting room downstairs, and as far as I know the police didn't try to get us, and eventually they left our parents and the new baby, our new baby brother, alone. (20 years later I met the midwife who was involved in this, but that is a different story).

The hostel managers obviously weren't happy about all this upset, they were used to drunks and down and outs but not a big unruly religeous family who attracted press reporters and police and things, so there were tensions.

My brother and I (not the one who abused me) became close during this time, and conspired to make christmas special for the other children by saving up for sweets and presents for Christmas and making paper decorations. Christmas was a matter of making do and making the best of things, we didn't have much but we made an effort to enjoy it.

Tensions built up, not surprising considering the contreversial nature of my family and the way that other residents of the hostel were.
and there were rows.

But we used to play out the back of the hostel in the yard and there were rubbish dumps, we used to look for copper wire among the dumped televisions, the men in the hostel wanted this copper wire to sell it.
We got to know other children in the hostel, including two Nigerian childern, I had no idea but apparently my brother, the one who abused me, who was 16 at the time, developed a relationship with the mother of these two children and continued this relationship for years, despite her being much older and having another boyfriend? I knew nothing of this, my other brother told me of this more recently, but this was the reason for my brother leaving us a while later, which I will explain later, and he then decided that he was Nigerian himself, one of the first signs maybe that he was not well. He kept this belief up for many years, and still occasionally claims to be in Nigeria when he isn't.

My family also became friends with an eccentric family related to one of the reporters who had covered the story of us in the paper, my sister remained friends with them for years.

Things came to a head in the hostel in March, three months after my brother's birth. The addicts were playing very very loud music and my parents argued with them over this, as far as I remember, and I gather that my sister's friend threw a brick at the stereo playing the music when the stereo was in the yard.
There were confrontations and my sister was assaulted (again), and someone attempted to strangle my brother.
The police were called, and it was a very tense time, my mum was crying and hysterical.
One of the policemen took pity on us and told us he had a house we could rent in a city 16 miles away.

The house was a teeny three bedroomed house, infested with fleas and cockroaches, but at least it was out of the hostel.
Us children were sad about the move, because we had developed a liking for the city itself, we had taken to going for walks while our dad worked as a telecanvasser and our mum was occupied with the baby and the youngest children. We found magic in the city's docks and railways, we viewed the ships with awe and it was our first experience of the sea, so we were awed by it, there was no beach for us to play on and we couldn't swim in the sea but we were amazed by the sea and the waves, and by the boats, and also by the railway and the trains, this is where my lifelong love of trains and boats come from. And my love for being out in the dark of winter evenings.

So we moved to the new house, my mum said the new house was my 8th Birthday present, but it was not a present I wanted at the time, I wanted to stay in the old town where us children had been happy despite our living circumstances. The new town was not very nice.

I think that we finally got our things out of storage here, but I am not sure.

In the new house the first thing that happened was that my little sister went missing, we searched frantically, but she turned up safe and sound in some bedding or something, fast asleep.

For some reason our parents suddenly decided to send us to school now, after the Easter holidays, I was 8 years old and our parents had kept us away from school and often away from other children, so this was going to be a difficult time.
But I think that there was no other option, my dad was surprisingly continuing university and also continuing to work as a telecanvasser, my mum was ill, I do not know how or why, but I think she may have had a miscarriage. And we were living in this teeny house where there were fleas and cockroaches, there was no room for all of us, so I think my parents decided that there was no option than to send us to school.

School was a confusing nightmare. I was put in the final year at first school, with my younger brothers a year or two behind, my older sister was in the first year of middle school, and my brother was a year or two ahead of her, my elder brother and sister went to high school briefly and had such a terrible time that they stopped going and taught themselves in the library instead.

 My eldest brother went to college, but he ran away, I always only knew that he had run away from college to get a job, but my brother told me more recently he ran away to be with the woman he had started an affair with when we were in the hostel. My parents and my brother fell out, as they did with my eldest sister, and this meant we weren't allowed to talk to our brother or sisters at all.
It still puzzles me that my parents' version of Christianity didn't include forgiveness and reconciliation, and that their very strict treatment of us actually seemed to cause bad and inappropriate behaviour in us rather than make us spotlessly good. For example my brother may have abused me because he simply wasn't allowed to mix with females outside the family, and then he ran off with that woman when he was 16. And my other brothers spent years committing minor offences without being caught, and the rest of us ended up with mood and behaviour disorders as well.

My younger brothers and I were bullied in middle school, but we took to fighting back, and even got in trouble over it.
My older sister struggled, and was teased, but her teacher befriended her and I think that helped her. My older brother got a place at grammar school in our old town and he started spending a lot of time in that town.

It was a strange time in our lives, struggling with school and interaction with other children. We didn't have the proper lunch boxes and drinks bottles and we got laughed at, but it was worse for me the following term when  I started middle school and didn't have the proper school tie.

My brother and sister started delivering newspapers, they got into a lot of fights with kids on the streets who were jealous or resentful of them.

I struggled to comprehend lessons in school and what people were saying and doing and what was expected of me. The teacher seemed worried once and she said she wanted to talk to me, but she never did. I could spell and read long words because my dad had taught me to, and that is what seemed to matter in the end.
I was bullied by three boys when I went to middle school, but one of them was sent away to special school because his behaviour was so bad, and the other two left me alone in the end, and there were a few girls who I got on ok with in the end.
We must have been in this house for 9 months, because we arrived at Easter and left in December. I had been in school for two terms.
It was a highly stressful time, I never really got used to school and I remained quite isolated and unsure of myself and very nervous of other children, and never really understanding or grasping the social rules and ways of doing things. There were days when I was scared to go to school because I wasn't sure where I was to go or how to cope with the practical and crafts side of things.

At home Mum was unhappy and ill, I remember trying to wash the dishes and dry them and she just told me she had to do them all over again, she wasn't very friendly.
Dad was away a lot, and when he was there he decided that the schools weren't teaching us enough, so he made us do extra lessonwork, which was hard on us.
I lived in a room with my sisters, it was not a proper room, it was a walk-through space with access to another bedroom through it, so there was no privacy. I think my brothers must have had the room that was accessed through our room, and my elder brothers had a sitting room downstairs as a bedroom, and my parents had a room upstairs.
The only bathroom was a tiny shower room, and we were used to baths, not showers, I was scared of the shower and couldn't control the water temperature, so I tried to avoid showering.

The teeny house was stressful on all of us, and we also all picked up and shared diseases and parasites that went round in school, which we also were not used to. Conjunctivitis, head lice, and my mum said we had polio at one point, but it was years later that I realised that maybe that wasn't true, though at the time I developed problems walking, which reinforced my belief in what she said, though my parents did nothing about this and left me struggling with walking.
When we had conjunctivitis we were kept off school, but my parents didn't tell the teachers, so when the teachers saw us out of school they asked us why, in front of all the other school children, and we were too scared to answer.

We had the police and social services coming round, I do not know if it was the schools or the neighbours who called them. My parents were out one evening, I think they went to a meeting at the school. Social services came round with the police. My sister was in charge of us, she must have been 15  
at the time. She refused to let social services and the police in, there was a fight and from what I heard, the policeman hit my sister, I do not know the full story or what happened about all that, but we remained there and with our parents.
That same sister was very tough and hard and strong, she was the one who was sexually assaulted previously, and she had been assaulted again in this town and had become very fierce and angry and the neighbourhood youths who used to bully her were afraid of her and afraid of the beating she would give them if they got in her way. But she was unhappy, and she would listen to sad music. She wasn't always nice to us either.
My sister used to make me carry her coat when we were out on walks, and when the money fell out of the pocket as we walked and I didn't notice, she made me pay her back out of my pocket money. The world was unfair.

Some of the neighbours were very unhappy at having such a big noisy family there, so there were rows, and more rows about us playing with neighbours' children.
We also had a bad experience when the front wall on the teeny front yard of the teeny house fell down, a builder came to mend it but he was a rogue and nasty with it, I don't remember what happened but I remember something bad did.

The good side of living here, if there was one, was that we could go down to the sea sometimes, it was a bit of a walk, but we would go to the sea sometimes and that was a relief. The only other open space in this crowded city of small terraced houses was the cemetery across the road from us, we used to play in there, it was kind of sad and spooky, and our parents made death such a taboo that I was a bit scared of the cemetery. My sister found some peace in making friends with the cemetery wardens.

The city was crowded and full of litter and dog poo and people with nothing to do. It was depressing, but we were grateful for the sea. Life was constant stress and as ever I really didn't understand a lot of what went on and why.

My older brothers took to doing things like raiding local garages, I didn't know about this until they told me later. People in the little terraced houses stored their spare posessions in these garages. At school we learned about bad language and bad behaviour from other children, but our dad soon beat any bad habits out of us. He really hit us a lot, and my brother took to calling dad 'The stranger' behind his back, because we wanted to shut him out and ignore him, so we called him the stranger, and I got into big trouble over a diary I was writing because my dad used to take my diary and read it without me knowing, and I had written in it 'stranger slapped my face', one day when my dad slapped me round the face over something trivial, which often happened. The family struggled to get on well and we all had times of ignoring each other or fighting.

My sister also used to take my diary and write comments in it about things I had written, one day she wrote something mildly obscene because I wrote something about her, and my dad saw what had been written and I nearly got into very big trouble, ie being beaten with something, but somehow I was able to stand up for myself and say it wasn't my writing, which was true, so I didn't get into trouble, but they shouldn't have been messing with my diary. I used to hide it under my bed, but there really was no privacy or safe space. I used to hide under the bed as well, just to get some space, but I was scared of getting trapped there, and my hair used to get caught in the bedsprings.

My brother who I had become close to used to take me out for walks and we spent a lot of time together, I used to go with him when he went delivering newspapers.

In the autumn my brother and I couldn't wait to start preparing for Christmas, and then we found out that we were going to move house again.
We moved house as term ended, and that was the end of school. I had been at school for two terms, and my parents decided that that was the end of school for us, they were going to keep teaching us at home from then on.

The new house was a luxurious place compared to the old one, it was about five or six miles away and was situated right by the sea, though the sea was simply a shingle beach of a large bay, there was also woodland and meadows there, and it was altogether a better situation than the little terrace in the city.

The house had four reasonable sized bedrooms, a good bathroom, a large open plan downstairs, dad used  one end of this room for a study and the other end was a sitting and dining room, there was also a good kitchen and a utility room and garage, and a fair sized garden, so we had more space.

Dad stayed at home to do telecanvassing and to teach us, but he was so busy telecanvassing that we spent a lot of time on the nearby meadows and by the sea, we built rafts and played on the bits of wrecked ships that were washed up on the shore.

There was more space and peace and comfort in this new house.
My eldest brother came to visit and was reconciled with my parents, and as he was working as a chef, he and my mum worked in the kitchen together and baked delicious bread and cakes. It is the first time I remember my mum cooking again in a long time. I think my brother and my parents then fell out again, I don't remember seeing my brother again for a long time.

Dad was a shy and nervous man when dealing with strangers on the phone, and telecanvassing must have been very hard for him, he used to do a little song and dance whenever he managed to make an appointment, and we used to imitate him, which annoyed him.

We had Christmas in this house, and again my brother and I tried to make it a special Christmas. I managed to 'find' a Christmas tree on a pavement, at the time I was completely innocent and had no idea that maybe the tree belonged to someone and maybe they had left it there for a minute or two and would come back to find it gone :( I truly didn't comprehend, I just brought this tree home, otherwise we wouldn't have had a tree, and we had a nice Christmas.

In the winter by the sea there are usually strong winds and high tides, but my mum didn't know this, so when the spring tide and high winds caused floods and storms she got hysterical and scared us into thinking that the house was going to be damaged or flooded or swept away, I just thought the winds and tides were magnificent despite this.

My little sister choked one day, and my older sister somehow stopped her from choking, it was always my older sister, not my parents who seemed to deal with these emergencies. My older sister was very depressed and didn't like to be near people, this impacted on me, I felt depressed when she was around.
She insisted on changing her name and my Dad was angry about this and he severely punished us for calling her by the new name that she gave herself.

My mum ran away, I still have no idea why, she ran off and was heading for her Mum's home I think, I do not know if the police were called because mum just suddenly vanished, it was a bit shocking, because she had never done that before. She came back though. She was pregnant, maybe she ran off because she realised that she had too many children already. I think she and my dad had had a row, they did have rows.

My sister was taken to casualty because she cut her head on a curtain pole or something. She had stitches.

There was resentment and rivalry among us siblings, plenty of insults and fights, we were too many and too crowded even in this house. I am not innocent of irritability and fighting with the others, it all got too much sometimes. Our dad often called us stupid and idiot, so we called each other those things as well.
One of dad's ways of punishing us was to make us stay in the house, it was an individual punishment where we were not allowed out at all, no matter what the weather, not even in the garden, and so we were trapped in the noisy house with no respite, no school to go to, nothing, an extreme form of grounding, and he did this a lot.

I think my brother stayed in grammar school while we were at this house, but he had to leave when we moved.

We were allowed to listen to music and we listened to music a lot. My life has a kind of sound track to it.

My other brother and sister delivered newspapers as before, and I helped my brother with his newspapers.

I had my 9th Birthday, and to celebrate, my brother and I went back to the town where we used to live in the halls of residence and the hostel, we had a nice day even though it rained a bit. We had a picnic and watched a ship leaving dock, we took photos and ate chocolate, it was a nice Birthday.

The house was carpeted throughout in luxurious pink carpet, it got dirty with all us children running on it, and one day my parents got a carpet shampoo machine because they wanted to keep the tenancy, so the whole downstairs was shampooed, but it didn't dry out properly, so we were stranded outdoors and in the kitchen.

The neighbours resented us, and the usual fights between my parents and the neighbours broke out.
My mum got a local councillor involved in something, he came round to talk to her, my mum had a thing about getting local politics and people involved, I don't understand it.

In the end we were going to have to move, we were sad because we liked this house and this area, it was the nicest house and area we had ever been in, and we loved spending our time by the sea and in the meadow and woods.
We had made friends with the milkman, and we would get bottles of pop and biscuits from him, so life wasn't all bad, and we made friends with a single mum and her young boy, so as usual we knew a few friendly faces among the hostile ones.

It had been nice living in that house but there were the usual tensions, my parents falling out with the neighbours and the usual problems of a large family in a small house, the usual tenancy and repairs issues and the baby on the way etc.

Surprisingly my mum got herself a job as a proofreader with a publishing firm hundreds of miles away, so we prepared to move there.
Then the police came after my dad for something trivial, and undoubtedly made it bigger because of the tensions my family were causing in the neighbourhood. But we left just as the policeman arrived to talk to  
or arrest my dad.

So off we went in a minibus to the new home, my mum got hysterical and said that the driver didn't know where he was going.

We arrived at the new house, us children didn't like it, we had been happy in the old house and district, it had been an oasis of fun and happiness in some ways, and the new house and village were not so nice.

The neighbours took a dislike to us, apart from a learned old chap up the road who liked to chat with us in a soft learned voice, he had an unusual name and a big lime tree in his garden.

The good thing about the village was apple trees everywhere and plenty of unwanted windfalls, it was a bumper year for apples and we ate apples until we were sick, there was also an abandoned orchard with strawberries in and we ate those as well.

The other neighbours hated us, the next door neighbours had a cat that we loved to stroke, the neighbours resented us petting the cat and giving it the margarine tubs to lick. But we loved cats.
The neighbours behind us hated us and called us gyppos (a derogatory name for gypsies), a name we were getting called a lot now.

It was a ferociously hot summer, bad drought.

It was the first village we had lived in, and the first in a series of villages. And despite the towns we had lived in being rough, the villages had their own roughness, gangs of bored youths, these youths saw us as a threat for some reason, and they were aggressive to us, my sister started getting into real fights with these youths, and she ended up injured and screaming in her sleep, she shared a room with me and my year older sister, so this affected us. She just had a mattress on the floor and we had bunk beds.

One day my sister had gone, she left me all her photo albums, she was 16, she had left home and gone back to the town where we had lived in the hostel and the halls of residence. She had gone to stay with her old friend there.

She told me that she had realised that my parents didn't want her. She told me she had seen an adder in the dirt track and that she had been listening to 'when all is said and done' by Abba, when she realised she wasn't wanted, and she went back to the county where we had been happier, this new county was alien to us.

so now there were 9 of us children and one on the way.

The house wasn't too bad spacewise, it had four bedrooms and a bathroom, downstairs had a reasonable sized kitchen and sitting/dining room. Dad used a corner of the dining room for his study.

There was a big garden and a big double garage. We spent a lot of time in the garden and doing 'gardening'.  As with everything my year older sister made me feel small about my gardening skills, but in the end I am a better gardener that her!

The village was a bit rough, and one day some strange children kidnapped me and kept me prisoner in a hedge, it sounds strange but it's true, for a long time they kept me captive, spitting on me and hitting me and calling me names, and I escaped.
When I got home my mum said it was my own fault, she said she had warned us when we got there that it was a rough place. But I don't recall being warned anything, and I had only gone up the road to the shop. My mum didn't care what had happened, she said it was my fault, my dad simply told me to go and have a bath. I knew what my sister meant about not being wanted.

My mum went into labour, and as before, the police and social services seiged us. Us children were scared, scared by Mum's screams and by the police and social services. My mum had the baby,it was another boy, and my parents managed to keep the police and social services out somehow, and my parents circumcised the baby and then my mum went to live with her mum and the baby, to get away from social services and to get out of the oppresive heat, it was nearly 100 degrees where we were, and it was cooler where her mum was.
so our mum and the baby were gone for a while, it seemed odd without them. But social services then persisted in coming after us, writing to my dad and demanding evidence of us childrens' education.

The hot weather went on and on, and we had waterfights on the driveway in order to keep cool. Then it started raining again.

The landlady was a smart young businesswoman, I think she was the first landlady we had had. She soon got annoyed at the state of the house and the problems that were occuring, she kept sending her agent round, and I gather that we were not paying the rent, which was undoubtedly because housing benefit had not sorted the rent claim out properly, which is what happens a lot.
So anyway, things got tense, and we were asked to leave, and I think moving meant we got away from social services as well, as we were moving to another side of the county.

So it was autumn and winter by the time we moved, we had been there six months or less, the same as at the last house.

We moved to a house a few miles from the main city in that rural county, we were on a busy main road and our house was behind a building site. We were in one of a terrace of two houses that stood on their own. Our new neighbour was extremely eccentric and rather fond of a drink, he soon got very angry about all the noise from our house as he was used to peace and quiet. He shouted and raged at my parents and my parents got my brother to tape all the of it as 'evidence'.

The house itself was in poor repair, the boiler didn't work properly and was dangerous, the walls were crumbling in places, there was rising damp and mould and all sorts of repair problems.
But for the first time since the hostel when I was 7 we had a television, this was a luxury, we had not had a television before the hostel or since, apart from my brother's illegal black and white tv that he had taken with him when he left home I think? I don't know what happened to it, that is a guess.

Anyway, my parents became hooked on this tv, they had it on all the time, watching the news and politics, most news and politics at the time was about the gulf war and they were very into that.

The baby used to cry in it's cot upstairs and I used to worry about him, my mum used to be watching television and she used to tell me to ignore the baby.
Mum used to cycle into town a lot, one time she took me and my sister, when my sister's bike got a puncture my mum didn't know what to do, so I said I would wait with my sister while mum went home and mum could get one of my brothers to bring a repair kit and pump to mend the bike, my mum went home, but for some reason she was hysterical and siad she thought we were dead, my alarmed dad and brother came tearing out to us and got us home just as it was getting dark, which was tricky with a motorway junction to cross and no lights on our bikes.

The struggles with lessonwork and the harsh punishments continued.

My mum injured her toe and spent a lot of time off her feet. She was quite irritable and angry anyway.

My eldest brother came to visit us, and my older sister came back to us for a while, she must have been really struggling, she talked about walking on the railway line and wanting to be killed by a train because she was so depressed, this shocked me.

us children, me and my sister and maybe my brothers, had to prepare bottles and baby food for the baby, I didn't mind this. But we also had to carry on making breakfast, lunch and jam sandwiches, which was not so much fun, and we had to make tea with a faulty kettle which gave electric shocks. I was scared of making tea.

The religeous side of things continued, reading with headscarves and the other things, the rest of us children were never baptised, and my parents continued to talk of spirits and curse spirits, and demons and gremlins, we had gremlins in the faulty boiler apparently.

One day the police turned up with a warrant for Dad's arrest, I do not know why or what happened, but Dad obviously didn't go away to prison or anything.
My dad worked telecanvassing, but we didn't get enough money to pay all the rent and the house was falling apart.
Again we had a mixture of friends and enemies in the village, rather eccentic friends, and some people who despised us.
My parents became friends with the manager of the village shop, who gave us credit, which my brother ruined by always getting chocolate on credit without permission. But my brother got on well with the shop manager in the end and used to walk his dog.
The postwoman was ecentric and not nice, she told em I could go in the orchard and pick up windfall apples, then she told us off one day when we went to get windfalls, she said we were stealing.

We were crowded in this house. My older brothers shared a small room and owned one of the first ever personal computers though where they got it from was a mystery and it was limited in what it could be used for; my younger brothers shared a small room, I shared a room with my sisters, but I found it very noisy and no privacy and the younger sisters wouldn't leave my things alone or let me have any peace, which made me very irritable.
My parents shared a room with the baby. The baby gave up crying, I worried about him because his skin was grey, no one else worried about that.

We had Christmas in this house, it was a reasonably good christmas, which my brother and I worked hard to prepare, my sister and I got identical clockwork dogs, my sister kept her toy dog in a box, nice and clean, while I played with mine all the time and it got ragged and dirty and my sister sneered about that, but looking back I am glad I played with my toy dog rather than kept it in a box, I loved dogs by then and wished I could have a dog.

In the end, the house was in a mess and we were facing eviction. I had my 10th Birthday at this house, and then we moved house again.

more of my life up to age 7

Some of this is just remembering and isn't all very relevant.

When I look back on my life during that time the images seem blurred, I cannot remember many conversations.

I remember my mum telling my dad that my brother couldn't go out for a walk with us because of the bruises on his legs where my dad had whacked him.

I remember our friends from my birth town coming to see us and the girl who was the same age as me kept calling my mum by her first name, which startled me, we didn't really know that our parents had first names, and we wouldn't have boldly called any adult by their first name and asked for things like that little girl was doing.

When we went to their house once, it was when that girl, who was my 'friend' and I were four years old or a bit older, her mother was still breastfeeding her sometimes, which seemed odd.
I remember I wet myself while we were there, and my mum told me off and made me feel small, I think she made an example and used my friend or my sister and said they didn't wet themselves.
The friends didn't have a lock on their bathroom door, and I was scared and embarrased when one of their older children came into the bathroom when I was on the toilet, so I ended up leaving the toilet and wetting myself.
It was good to have even one friend during that time between 3 and 7 years old, but she was much more mature and realistic than me, and I was left feeling silly sometimes, especially when she went off with my older sister a lot and ignored me, this was my sister who was maybe 10 years old then, and my mum used to keep on and on about another friend that my friend had, I do not know why, but sometimes my mum was unkind.

But it wasn't all bad, sometimes we wrote letters or played a game called 'The bird and the butterfly' where we made our arms into wings and imitated the way birds and butterflies flew. My friend's family were eccentric and unusual, but not to the extremes that my family were. My friend and her family lived in a big old house that they lived in for many years, just round the corner from the house where I was born. Their house was relaxed a homely and they kept animals, a goat, hens, gerbils, a cat, even a dog at one point. I wished we could have animals, we had a cat until it died, and my sister had goldfish at one point, but her goldfish were hers, not shared.

I remember being scared of my friend's dog, my brother was bitten by an alsatian, which left him with a scar for life. And I was scared. But I overcame that fear and ended up loving dogs and wishing we could own one, but my dad was scared of dogs and made out that he just disliked them.

We used to climb on the waste mounds near the house, but they got flattened into tarmac as a new pavement was built. I remember vaguely my brothers saying that a neighbouring dog that was straying there was dangerous, but the dog seemed more dopey than scary.
The edge of the county that we lived in was hilly and rocky progressing into rocky hills and heights that the next county was known for, when dad took us for walks we would walk up to the hills and rocks and up to the quarry.
I remember grey rocks and lots of bracken, and my brother falling in a hidden pond.  I remember losing one of my toys on walk and feeling sad about it for a long time.
And I remember when I was very young and me and my sister a year older were sharing a small room, my parents suddenly changed the room around and put us in another room with our brothers and our parents had the small room. My sister and I and our brothers were joined by the two baby sisters in turn after their birth, until there were six of us in that room. There must have been three older brothers in another room and three older sisters in the fourth bedroom.

My mum used to get the summer clothes out of the loft in the spring, and the winter clothes out of the loft in the autumn, and we changed our wardrobes over. I remember that my sister and I used to wear clumpy brown shoes, year in year out, the same pairs, one year my sister got new shoes, nice shoes, and I wanted new shoes, but my mum said that I didn't need new shoes. The she decided to tie my hair up in bunches, which I hated, I was crying and trying to tear the bunches out, but she insisted, she didn't tie my sister's hair in bunches, or the baby sisters, just mine, and I was very unhappy, but that didn't seem to matter.
My older sisters had the task of brushing my hair, they resented that and used to tear the brush through my hair, I tried to get away one time and said I would do my own hair, but I couldn't, I was too young.

It was my dad who made sure we had enough food and that we washed and bathed properly, and when I had nightmares and wet myself he was the one who talked to me or came to stop me screaming.
My mum just wasn't there.

It was only when my dad died not so long ago that I realised just how much he did for us. He was the one to do the shopping, he would lug heavy bagloads and trolleyloads of shopping home to feed us, he was the one who got us to do chores, and he was the one to care for our welfare and safety, and he undoubtedly had Asperger Syndrome, so what he did was pretty amazing, but really the whole situation of our upbringing was all wrong, and our parents believed it to be right and other people to be wrong.

We never had a lawnmower for the big lawns of the house, and they grew naturally and got patches in from us playing on them.
At the Jewish feast of succoth my family would have a big tent in the back garden, this would be decorated inside with tree branches and twigs, we would eat in the tent and do most things in the tent during succoth, surprisingly I don't remember the tents ever being attacked by the neighbours or anyone in the neighbourhood.

We also celebrated Shavuot with things like strawberries. Hannukkah with donuts, Purim was celabrated with a party with 'Haman's Ears' and the purim story; and passover was a big event in our house. But our lifestyle and beliefs were far from Orthodox Jewish. The best description for my parents beliefs, which they firmly impressed upon us, was a cross between Jewish and Christian, with my parents' own extremes of beliefs influencing this. we celebrated Christmas, but my parents firmly made it clear that this was NOT Jesus' Birthday, it was just a time to have parties and presents. We did not celebrate Easter and I grew up not knowing what Easter was. My parents said it was a pagan event worshipping Eostra the God of fertility, and the Easter eggs were a symbol of that, so we had no easter eggs.

I remember the first Passover that I remember. I didn't understand it at first. My older sisters helped to bathe me and my sister and after we had bathed, instead of getting into pyjamas and bed, we were dressed up in white dresses, it was terribly exciting getting dressed again after bathtime, and we were told it was passover, that is all I remember of that passover. But passover was a big day, on passover lunchtime we always had lots and lots of salad and a kind of bread that I think is called Challah. The lunch was always special but the really special time was the evening, when we would scrub up and dress up and the solemn evening meal was had. The evening meal was the traditional lamb and bitter herbs, with wine and grape juice. The story of Exodus was usually started a few days before passover, and finished on passover by my dad, at one point he had a version of the story that he adapted himself to tell us.

Sundays were about worship, we all gathered round the table and read the Bible, us girls wore headscarfs, this time was called 'reading round', then after that, my parents had a private ceremony, sometimes with the oldest children, they called this 'breaking bread', and this is when they took bread and wine, the oldest two or three children were included because our dad had baptised them by full immersion in a river in the next county, for some reason Dad never Baptised the rest of us or talked about it.

Our parents used a cream cracker or a Riveta for the breaking bread, and us children were allowed to eat the remains of the cracker when they had finished, but not drink the leftover wine. They had a special goblet and plate for this ceremony.  This was all secret, not for outsiders. and our dad also used to tell us things that he told us not to tell outsiders. He told us about spirits, he told us about different spirits that he said were in the world, he said there were spirits called Hermes, Bacchus, Arash?, Zeus, and Satan, he said there were lots of smaller spirits as well. Satan was the most powerful spirit, and Zeus was a powerful spirit, Dad said that Bacchus was served by people who smoked tobacco.

I was scared because my dad said there were spirits everywhere, and he used to tell us these things at bedtime with the bedtime stories, so that would leave me frightened at night. He connected spirits and ghosts together, telling us that what people see as ghosts are spirits with enough power to frighten people but not much else.  I was scared that the spirits would harm me at night.

I do not know how much of  all this my siblings took in, or how it affected them.

At one point another family joined with us, this remains an eternal mystery to me, they were some sort of religeon, they had children with religeous names, and we went to a strange place full of books, a house? And the adults talked, and argued? and then they were gone.

The family from my Birth town were our friends but not necessarily in agreement with everything that my parents said, but my dad and the man of that family used to have philosophical debates, they would stand each side of the sofa and shake hands over the sofa and start debating from each side of the sofa, which was funny.

We were a big family but we were isolated, it was just us, no friends or visitors once people had abandoned us, but back then in the beginning we had some 'normality', we had milk delivered by the milkman, we had a paper delivered by the paperboy, we knew the names of some non-hostile neighbours.

The paper that we had delivered was one of the 'rag' papers, and I was puzzled by it, I am still puzzled as to why my dad would have a paper like that delivered, in all the rest of my life he only read the telegraph. Anyway, I used to try and read the rag paper, and I would get scared by the gory stories in it and the abuse stories with graphic details, I asked my mum why there was scary things in the paper and if it was real and she said that most of it was made up to shock people, so it was a puzzle as to why we got that paper day after day, especially considering how conservative my parents were, in the end there was a fall out with the paperboy and my dad cancelled the paper.

I still remember the names of people on that rough estate, though I cannot mention them here, our next door neighbours who our parents told us never to mention again when we moved, our parents appeared almost fearful of these neighbours. The neighbour round the back used to give us toys, and he seemed ok, I was envious of his daughter and her 'normal' life. My brother told me last time I saw him that this neighbour was a drug dealer.

The other neighbours: There was a very rough family on the corner of the street behind us, they and my family were fierce enemies, and they used to ride illegal motorbikes and things. Then there were two houses with neutral people who were ok. Then there was a house with several changes of tenant, we never got on well with any of them. Across the road also had a series of unhappy families, I do not remember clearly but I think there was something about abuse there, but I do remember my dad being angry about one family there leaving a little girl near a running lawnmower.

There were neighbours down the road who we intermittently got on well with, and there was a doctor down the road for a while, my mum asked his advice one time and then my parents fell out with the doctor.
There were lots of hostile youths and children on the estate and we got into fights and had to run away sometimes as well.

I used to think we had been in this house and on this estate for much longer than four years, but that is all it could possibly have been.  We moved there when I was three and left when I was seven.

Lunchtime was all about lessons, it was a time when Dad taught all of us children at once and we all had to understand and know the answers. Sometimes I think he taught us things that just weren't age appropriate, we had to understand physics and history and languages and geography, but though some of it was just too complex for a 3-7 year old and I couldn't take it in, Dad expected me to understand everything, and he was impatient if I didn't, and the same with my siblings.

My parents, especially my dad, spoke to us in Hebrew and expected us to answer in Hebrew, dad taught us to read and write Hebrew and speak Hebrew, we used to spend hours repeating hebrew verbs and things, and reciting the Bible in Hebrew.
We weren't supposed to let outsiders know that we spoke Hebrew.
My mum used to go on about the passage in the Bible where it say that a man would take his family back to Israel one day, she expected us to emigrate.

There was no privacy or peace and quiet in all this time.

My mum used to go on about a local MP, I do not fully understand but she had a hate for him and accused him of things, I remember on odds and ends of things but I remember her talking about another town that my family had lived in before I was born, and something to do with this MP, and something to do with my mum having cigarette burns from an attack, I truly know no more than that. This saga with the MPs continued later in my childhood when we returned to this county when I was 11 or 12.
It was a confusing world to grow up in. A frightening world, all the ups and downs caused emotional reactions from my parents, sometimes my mum would scream, sometimes they had rows, sometimes no matter what us children did, we did something wrong.

I think we survived a lot on child benefit and housing benefit, though my parents had problems with paperwork and incorrect payments, which is not unusual.

My mum used to do sewing somtimes, she had a nice button tin, she used to send me to get her button tin and her face cream, she told me that ladies didn't wash their face with soap and water, they used face cream, I was worried because I didn't know why and I didn't know when I would be a lady and not be allowed to wash my face with soap and water and where would I get face cream. I actually have never washed my face with face cream, I tend to just have a shower and it doesn't seem to harm my face.

So that is my childhood aged 3-7, some very normal things and some very bizarre things.

memories of my childhood aged up to 7 years old.

My earliest memories were worry and anxiety. My parents weren't really there in my first memories. The first thing I remember about my parents was that I was looking out the window with my siblings and we hid when my parents came back from wherever they had been, probably shopping.
I remember my dad had a brown hat and coat.

I remember when we moved house, I must have been three, we moved in a green minibus, and the cat was walking round the minibus.
I remember my mum changing my younger brothers' nappies at the new house, they were year younger than me, and my sister who was a year older than me was falling asleep.
I didn't know then or until I was an adult, maybe only in the last few years, that people don't tend to have four children within three years etc.

The new house was 5 miles from the old one, but when I was little I thought it was further, my Birth certificate says I was born in the new town for some reason, and this cannot be due to lack of registrars in the old town, it remains a puzzle, and I only ever saw a short copy of my Birth Certificate.

We lived in this new house when I was between 3 and 7 years old, as far as I remember.
And during the time at this house I began to be conscious of my life and self and surroundings, but not understanding them.

We were a big family living on a rough estate, and it was a stressful from all directions.
Outside the house the estate was rough and dirty and illegal activity was rife, and my parents aroused anger by reporting people for illegal activity and for cursing spirits and demons that they believed that these people had.

I remember people standing outside the house shouting, thankfully us children didn't know what they were saying, we led a sheltered life, my parents didn't allow us to learn any bad words or to know about sexuality or even to mingle with other people, and we didn't go to school, so we were very innocent and very unsocialised. We innocently used a jumble of the words that were shouted at us one time, and thankfully our parents didn't know what we were saying as we had obviously not understood what had been said to us and repeated it in a distorted way. It was only as an adult I realised that what these estate youths were saying was that incest was going on in our family.

There is a very American image of unsocialised peasent farmers who homeschool their large family of children and are religeous to extremes, my family were a lot like this apart from the fact we were not farmers.
Outsiders used to call us 'The Waltons' after a television family who we never saw as we had no television most of the time, and being called the Waltons was always an insult.

Throughout our childhood and everywhere we went we were referred to as the Waltons, and 'The family from hell'. Can you imagine what it does to a child live under such a brand because of the family you are born into.

This estate where I spent years 3-7 hasn't changed much, I went back there as an adult to see if it still existed, and it does, there is rubbish everywhere and boarded up houses. I went down to the pub and I remembered when I was little, my mum saying something about homeless people sleeping outside the pub, I asked her what homeless people were, and she said that they were people who no-one loved. Not long after that my family were homeless.

A few years ago an area nearby to that estate was in the news when a gang of youths drove a mother to kill herself and her disabled teenage daughter after they hounded them constantly, in a similar way to the way my family were hounded. Police intervention seemed ineffective, and my mum was very triumphant when this was headline news, and said that now the policing and council policy in that area would have to change, but I don't know if she was right, that area is a rough place in a county full of rough places.

It was a mining town, and we were there probably in the mine's last years. My dad worked for the mine in some capacity at one point.
There was also quarrying in the area, and I remember being scared because we used to walk up near the quarry when they were blasting, and I was never sure if we were safe. I also have a funny memory of my parents and their friends from my birth town getting us children to climb up a scree on the side of the quarry, and again I didn't feel safe doing this but I was told off when I chickened out.

Some aspects of our childhood may have been ordinary and unremarkable, we played with toys, we played games, though we got a lot of toys confiscated and we were banned from playing a lot of games. Our dad didn't like noise, and sometimes it seemed he didn't like us being creative, for example when we made model airoplanes or kites or toy boats. so sometimes it was as if when we found something fun to do, dad would ban it, and we had no scope to do good things away from home at school as we didn't go to school. Dad taught us, and he taught us with a rod of iron, we didn't have schooldays and school hours and weekends off, we were at school in the home 7 days a week and with no boundaries about what hours we did school work, so we could be working at 7 or 8pm in the evening and getting punished for not being able to focus, it was undoubtedly stressful.
I think it was a potentially damaging way of being brought up.

For me it was really hard because I had cognitive problems and learning difficulties, and my dad didn't believe in such things and believed me to be being awkward, so he used to punish me a lot, and he used to get my little sister to do the maths problems I couldn't do, and I was left feeling very small.

The family didn't go on holiday, well we were a huge family with pretty much no money, and I think we would have returned to find the house burned down if we had gone away.
We had days out. We went to our friends in the town where I was born. We didn't have many days out, they were more used to days out than we were and they could drive.
I remember maybe three days out and a number of days at our friends' house. Usually these days out happened suddenly, we didn't know about them beforehand.

I remember a day out when my sister fell in the water near  a weir, she was struggling in the water and my brother dived in and got her, and there was an argument with some other people, I don't know why.
A recent accident where some people were drowned at a weir reminded me of this.

We went to a popular walking spot on another day out, I remember getting lost and separated from my family at one point, but I got back to them safe and sound.

In the mornings us children would make the breakfast and the morning cup of tea for everyone.
This was quite a task, making breakfast for all the other children or tea for all the family, and it was often done in bad humour, we would have turns at making breakfast and turns during the day of making tea for everyone, it was a lot of tea.

I remember one day my breakfast was put on a faulty table flap and was spilt on the floor, I didn't get any more breakfast, as far as I knew I wasn't allowed any more, and my parents weren't up at that time of morning. My older brother used to make my dad's breakfast and take it up to him, dad had toast and bacon and coffee, us children had tea and cereal, we used to eat dad's toast crusts and bacon rinds when he had finished his breakfast.

During the day there was no real structure, no school, and dad was sometimes working and sometimes not, so we either had lesson work to do on our own or lessonwork supervised by dad, or nothing in the bad times. We had our turns at making trays of tea at certain times, but that was pretty much the only time-related structure in the day. Trays of 10 or 12 cups of tea at a time was hard work, and we had faulty kettles that gave electric shocks, and faulty teapots with broken handles.
We went for walks with dad, usually he was teaching us as we walked, and I remember when I asked him what a monastry was he said it was a place where Monks lived, I asked what a monk was and he said something like a monk was a bad person who thought they were doing good things.

If dad was working then it often meant that we were doing lessonwork until late in the evening, but he did read us bedtime stories at bedtime, sometimes the stories were a bit deep for children - 'Lord of the Rings', 'Pilgrim's Progress', 'Out of the silent planet' and other mythical and religeous stories.

Life was a constant stream of stress, but at the time I didn't know that at all, I just lived in this world, I didn't understand it, and it took until adulthood to even start to remember my childhood and begin to understand it.

Both my younger sisters were born during this time of 3-7 years old. I remember as usual I didn't really know what was going on and being frightened. They were both born at home with no midwife, just my dad there.
My mum was unwell and in hospital for some time after the younger sister's birth, for me I was just confused because I did not know what was wrong with my mum or where she was, my sister was feeding the baby from a bottle at least some of the time. My mum came home eventually, but she always rested a lot after that.

When we were out for walks there was a constant threat of estate gangs attacking us and a constant fear of being charged by people on illegal motorbikes.

There were incidents of physical violence, confrontations in front of the house, a firework through the letterbox. I don't know all of what happened and I only have memories of my parents' descriptions of things, which as an adult I know may be incorrect.
There were incidents where the police were called, physical fights, the firework through the letterbox, people used to leap up at the wall and torment my older siblings, who would retaliate by turning the garden hose on them, the next door neighbours were enemies from early on, my parents called them witches and lesbians, though I don't know if they were witches, and they certainly did their share of deliberate provoking of my parents. They would shout things and look through the fence and argue with my parents, my parents hated any sort of invasion of our property and would get angry. My parents would even be angry if water came over our side of the fence when the neighbours watered the garden. My parents kept a record of everything, they taped things and got my brother to photo things.

There was nothing settled about the lifestyle. And not a lot of god in it, it was constant stress, but we got fed, every day. Often, especially after my mum had the baby and was ill, us children would take part in cooking simple meals- pressure cooked soggy potatos every day, cooked peas or mixed veg from a packet, and something like sausages or fish fingers, similar meals day after day, very little variation, sometimes we had spaggheti or macaroni instead.
In the evening we had sandwiches, jam sandwiches every evening for years, and again, us children made the sandwiches, and we hated them, and we had to eat them, we became good at leaving the crusts on the underside of the table or in other hiding places.
We also helped with the housework, sweeping the stairs, washing and drying the dishes, tidying. after trying to tidy a house that looks almost like the ones on the hoarders programmes any housework feels surprisingly easy to me.

My lest sisters left home aged 16 and 15, I never really knew the one who left aged 15, she was very quiet, she left the family permenantly really but the eldest who was 16 was always very lively (and still is), she always seemed to get what she wanted, goldfish, a cat, nice things, but when I met with her more recently she told me that dad had beaten her so badly that she was scarred for life, she showed me the scars, she never really forgave him.

There were too many of us, all enclosed in that house and living there full time, it was not fun, the older children took to hitting the younger of us, very much imitating dad in hitting us randomly for things they thought we did wrong, or just for the sake of it.

My eldest brother also sexually abused me, and when my mum found out about this when I was a teenager she claimed that he was incited to do so by neighbours and that I was four years old at the time. I don't know the truth of that, I do know that I got very distressed and incontinent and was afraid to go to the loo, I was also afraid of the loo because the same brother shouted down the pipe that led into the loo one time and I thought the loo was haunted, my siblings said that the house was haunted and that they had seen ghosts, I never saw a ghost but I lived in fear of seeing one and I was scared of the dark and would wet myself at night.

It was harsh, my twin younger brothers took my things, they smashed my dolls house that my other brother who abused me made for me, they threw it down stairs, and one of them took money one time and somehow the blame was on me because I found it under his bed, I have never forgotten that, being accused and my dad being so angry and me trying to explain where I had found the money while he accused me of taking it.
It was a constant environment of fights and insults and tensions, dad would freely call us stupid and idiots and so us kids used these words too.

I remember being slapped and not knowing what I had done wrong, and I remember being called stupid a lot by my dad for not being able to learn my lessons or comprehend things. I was easy to bash into the ground, I felt stupid, I did struggle to comprehend things and get things right.

I remember one night us children were playing upstairs and my parents and the older children were downstairs, I was pretending to be a horse and giving my younger sister horse rides round the room, my dad came up and told me to go to bed and left the other children to play, no explanation, I was in bed in the dark while the others were playing, and later when all the others were in bed my dad told me I could get up, I still don't understand.

So many things were never explained, why my parents considered carnivals evil, well, carnivals were something to do with spirits, and why girls had to wear headcoverings on sundays and why we weren't allowed to tell outsiders about our worship and why we were 'special' and set apart from the world and why doctors were warlocks and so many whys.

I remember going to the shops with my dad, there was an old lady hunched over with arthritis and I asked my dad why she was hunched, he said it was because she didn't turn to God. I don't know if he changed that opinion when he was older, but if you can imagine, some children would take that literally, and I was someone who took a lot of what my parents said literally, but I didn't really understand that so I never took it to heart.

We used to have relatives over, my mum's family, but I think they got a bit freaked, especially after my two sisters were born, I know nothing of anything that was said, only that they stopped coming.
My mum had siblings and a mum and an aunt, my dad had virtually no family, his dad, who he wasn't close to died during this time, we didn't know his dad, so we didn't know what was going on, my dad went to the funeral, he wasn't close to his mum, but his mum used to send us money at christmas.

One good thing was that dad did give us pocket money and sweets. He meant well, I don't think he realised that the world we were growing up in was unsettling for us.

my mum used to wear saris and make chapatis and Indian food sometimes, this was because she used to have an Indian friend. We had parties sometimes, but that often caused upsets, especially with my mum, and when my sister came home with her new friends for a party after she left home my parents took a dislike to them and there were big rows and my sister stopped coming home.

Things got broken, it was a crowded houseful of children, but my parents reacted to breakages as if the world was ended, when parts of the house or the utility got broken it was a disaster, it was a council/housing association house, and there was a firm that used to come and repair things and my parents kept up a heated battle with these repair people, what and why I do not know, it was just a typical run down council house.

I wonder if you can imagine from this rather scrabbled account how enormously stressful my childhood at this point was, and it didn't get any better. I want people to understand why I struggle so much with life and people, I want people to really understand that I am not mad and bad, I love people and I love helping people and volunteering, it is my life, but my upbringing and Asperger Syndrome/autism violently interact to leave me fighting and running and in distress and it makes it hard for me to get help and build relationships.

I live my life subconsciously back in that family and always under stress and on edge, anxious, expecting trouble and too sensetive, ready to run and overreacting.

Starting again from the beginning

I have written my story in this blog, but it has been sketchy in some places and scattered and vague in some places.
Remember you have to read this blog from the beginning in order to understand it, and I know how hard it is to read from the beginning.
One of the readers used to print it off and put it in order as I wrote it so that she could undertstand it :)

I am going to try to rewrite some of the blog and add the missing memories now.

2am and bad memories and distress keep me awake, I wish things could be different, get better, and I hope I am not keeping anyone awake by being on the computer.

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2012/04/voice_of_the_victims_sex_abuse_1.html

An interesting article

Hash cake.

When I was a teenager my brother got married.
A register office wedding, my brother wore a white suit and his bride wore a black dress that she had made.
My brother's wife was black. Not sure if that explains the black dress and white suit.

The reception was held in a pub, there was a cake, I didn't have cake or much else because I had to get back to work.
My younger brothers had put drugs in the cake apparently, and it caused my dad to act in a strange embarrassing way according to what I have been told.

My family are and always have been unsafe.

I am on my own now.

No family.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQpsXA36uq4&feature=related

This is how I feel.

• I have a male friend who collects 'My Little Pony' ponies, and I don't think he's gay.
• A friend of mine overheard someone discussing her with her husband, the person said to him 'your wife is an excellent cook', he replied 'thats because she has big pots' ! He is a bit Aspie.
• The staff at McD's near the summerhouse are very nice and kind.
• I need a scan on my stomach, but I cannot get a scan locally, which is one of the reasons I am moving.
• I once saw a small dagger on the ground on the hospital road early one morning, it was covered in blood and there was a trail of bloody footprints leading from it towards the hospital, I did nothing because of my fear of the police.
• I co-piloted a cessna over fjordland once
• I got up at 3am this morning and I am tired
• I once had a my tyres checked at a garage before a lot of fast long distance driving and was told the tyres were fine, when I got home after hundreds of miles of motorway one of my tyres blew up.
• As described in my day to day blog, I have had a rat right by my head trying to get into my backpack that I was using as a pillow.
• I have helmed everything from a pico to a tall ship
• I have slept rough in London alone for months without being sexually assaulted
• I have died twice from head injuries
• I am extremely, extremely suicidal and have been for several years but I neither commit suicide nor find a way to get the help that I need, every struggle for help ends in futility, I simply stay alive day after day and avoid thoughts of suicide or what has happened to me, which is also why I cannot write this blog properly, because I cannot get the terrible things out onto paper properly, I focus on one thing at a time day to day, wash, breakfast, things that need doing, seeing my friends, writing what I can. I believe by now that I am not going to recover and be ok.
• I love to talk to animals but not people
• I have swum with dolphins
• I have been on the radio and on television
• The thing that devastates me most is that I cannot work or even do volunteer work, and also that I am a fugitive and have to be very careful to keep myself hidden and healthy and away from trouble.
• I cant resist soft blankets and duvets and cushions, I always want to snuggle into them and doze
• I want to be who I was and be strong and fit again. I want to do a handstand and climb a tree and roll helplessly down a steep hill.
• I am night blind in one eye, that eye sees less colour as well, if I close the other eye the world is grey and white during the day and black during the night.
• If someone snaps or shouts at me I stop trusting them instantly and cannot find a way round that
• I have worked for a variety of famous people
• The bets moment of my life was when I won all firsts in the show and the best in show cup and was in the paper, but the best thing about that weekend was the three days of hard work helping with the setting up and running of the show.

It is exceptionally hard to write anything in this blog or do anything about this blog since that stupid woman told me I was special needs and that my blog is rubbish. And now with this level of depression it is harder to write.

I thought I would do what my friend did on facebook and do some confessions in order to start 'talking again'.

1. I hate noise first thing in the morning, any noise, especially crashes, bangs, barks, people talking, I also don't like to talk in the early morning, I like silence or quiet music. Until at least 9am.

2. I like bad weather.

3. I suffer from such severe social phobia/fear of people that if I was anyone else I would never leave the house, I cannot bear people near me, and in this town people make a point of getting too close, you can walk through Birmingham and London crowds and they give you space but in this town they pointedly try to get close or bump into you, and I hate this town for that and will be relieved to leave it behind.

4. I have forgotten the order of service in church, which I used to know by heart, I seem to have forgotten it rapidly due to trauma.

5. I whimper when I am distressed or have flashbacks, even in public.

6. I suck my thumb to help me fall asleep and when I feel tired or distressed, though not usually in public.

7. I need music to help me get through each day.

8. I don't remember any hugs or kindness in the first 17 years of my life.

9. I like banana milkshake, but no one in the world knows it because I never drink it.

10. I like Irish music.

11. I like boring you by writing this.

ok, I am going to keep most of the blog and edit it, but I am also going to start again, from today and tomorrow and retell the story as best I can.

google has got so messed up and hard to access that I may have to move my blogs soon,
I will let you know where the blog will be relocated, or you can ask me.

The blog statistics have gone mad.
Loads of genuine views of the blog, not russian spambots.
It makes me want to sort myself out and sort the blog out.
Welcome to all new blog readers, sorry if the blog is a bit scrambled,
it's aim is to tell you my story and to bring comfort to other victims of church abuse, brutality, legalism, corruption and cover ups. You are not alone.

I am recovering from a breakdown and I am short of food and essentials but I will blog on and sort the messy blog out when I can.

Jayne :)

ooh, I have an Australian statistic, hello Australia! And hello English blog reader, I will be back to normal soon hopefully.

http://voicelessvictim.wordpress.com/

This is another person who is speaking up in a slightly similar and maybe much more effective way than my blog.

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2011/03_04/2011_03_11_TheConger_DioceseChided.htm

what on earth would posess church officials and leaders not only to allow a person who has allegedly abused to go on serving and furthermore not tell the diocese that he is moving to that he has been in this trouble?

It is so utterly incomprehensible and echoes what happened to me, both my abusers in the church had allegedly abused before and remained in positions of authority.

I apologise again that this blog is in a mess. I am also in a mess, I am in a minor collapse, and though I am looking intelligently at things I would have difficulty in adjusting things. This is going to be a tough week, so bear with me on this.

This is an excellent little article that tells about the pattern of being abused, my pattern, that the church refutes as me being a serial troublemaker.

http://fountainsoflife.org/blog/the-preabuse-setup/

http://www.newnation.co/forums/showthread.php?t=175614

The church has a pattern of feeling that they can judge other organizations and individuals, despite what Jesus teaching was. And yet, they have no interest in criticizing and changing their own very wrong and unchristian ways.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1566826/C-of-E-child-abuse-was-ignored-for-decades.html

http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/Church-cover-challenged-sake-abuse-victims/story-15121603-detail/story.html

the last paragraph specifically

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23912601-gay-priest-sacked-for-lurid-conduct.do

I am adding this only because I was intrigued by some of the comments.

vital links

http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/5475.htm

http://tessera2009.blogspot.com/2010/03/sexual-abuse-of-women-in-church.html

 

These are two exellent descriptive articles to help you understand what I have been through, what many women go through at the hands of the church.

 

The church would rather make me insane than take responsibility,

that brute of a safeguarding official who pretended to care would rather have me in prison than be wrong for the way she treated me.

 

please do read these two links

The church are supposed to be there for my spiritual salvation and saving,
instead they hav left me lost and sickened when I enter a church.

The way the church have treated me, judged me and damned me is nothing to do with God.
I cannot begin to imagine how these people who falsely called me mad and who lie, even to a court, and excuse themselves on the grounds of mental illness that I do not have, can still claim to be to do with God.

welcome back Canada, I have missed you.

From the journal

Do I have a personality? What is it like? well I don't know, I am me, but I am sure the Hometown diocese would make me out to have a personality disorder if they could, in order to plant the blame for everything on me.

It is difficult to know who I am since the church branded me. I seem to be who they say I am, and yet I am not who they say I am.

I have a sense of humour, they haven't changed that.

It is hard not to write about myself in the past tense because I have felt like who I am and was has been blotted out by the church and diocese, so excuse the past tense in my writing.

I believed in good, in honesty and celibacy and refraining from using drugs, alcohol or cigarettes, I believed in returning lost items to their owners and having integrity, I believed in not being scared by media hysteria, I believed in lots of things, but my fragile world and beliefs are invalid because of the church being untruthful and condemning me.
The church have condemned me as wicked and a liar and a troublemaker, and they have broken me.

I have to stop writing now because it is too much for me.

From the journal

I am copying my old journal again in order to get rid of the paper copy and have it on here instead.
I was writing about myself again here, in the hope of letting my family know something about me for when I died, as they know as little about me as I know about them.

I am apparently 5ft7, I cannot do measurements due to my learning difficulties, I am average height. My shoe size is also average, 7.
I wish that the rest of me was average. I have trouble telling my weight, it varies rapidly and startlingly, I am usually overweight, sometimes slightly sometimes by quite a bit.
I have a learning difficulty to do with maths that caused me to be called stupid just about every day of my childhood.
I also have receptive dysphasia or a slow processing speed that is linked to autism, it is very variable in intensity but has improved dramatically from the severity it was when I was a teenager. It still affects my ability to use a phone and hear one to one conversation in a crowded room or have a conversation with two or more people.
I have been called 'ignorant', 'awkward', 'useless', daft and many other names as a result of my difficulties.
This used to really hurt and frustrate me when I didn't know what was wrong but knew I wasn't being deliberately awkward.
I seem to be overweight and not overweight, overweightness runs in my family, but I have skinny arms and other places and a big belly and thighs, no matter what I eat or don't or no matter how much work or exercise I do. I hate my funny lumpy misshapen body and wish my neck would let me hold my head up.
Sometimes in the mirror I look tall and tanned and confident with glowing skin and hair, sometimes I look pale and pasty and droopy and ugly.
My clothes also vary like this, but the worst thing is when they smell bad when I can't wash or change them.
I am very childlike and my voice is high and thin and sounds like a defensive chld. It is very embarrasing if I do use a phone as people are rude and think I am hoaxer or something.

Time to upset you all by getting poetic (or not) again:

Family:

What is family?
a group of people around us
to help us, talk to us, boost us
hear us, annoy us, quarrel with us

people who share our lives and values

family, people with empathy
for our joys and sorrows
people who share the hardship
and the pain

people who share food and drinks and laughter

people who understand, siblings,
the people who are closest to us
my family are the homeless
my street brothers and sisters,

And our parents are the people who reach out and tend to our needs.

This was written after the abuse by my adoptive father and the end of the relationship and the reportig of the abuse, it is about the sorrow of losing the father I had looked for and about my attempt to keep my faith, and also about my death wish as the pain was so bad. I have chnged one line in order to protect identity, It is God I am running to in thelast line, I tried so hard to have God as my replacement father:

Beloved Father:

Every night I dream the same,

All the accusation, all the shame,

I am disabled so blame my disability,

For others’ stupidity and irresponsibility,

For others sinful motives I am hurt,

For my reactions to their treatment,

I am wrong because they can’t be,

I am a burden an outcast,

They despise me for my past,

Every night I dream I am running to you,

Outstretched arms, yours are too,

Then you turn away.

I loved you as a daughter loves a father

Why was I accused?

I trusted you,

Why was that trust abused?

But as time goes and memory is gone,

I will go on searching everywhere,

For that shore more beautiful than my home,

He is waiting for me there,

 And I will be a child again,

Running to my Father’s arms with joy.

http://www.healclergyabuse.com/#!

for all clergy abuse victims, a helpful site.

http://www.educatingtoendabuse.com/id23.html

http://www.ffrf.org/legacy/books/betrayal/

Do read the quotes in thew second link, when I was being abused I had no idea that other people went through the same thing.

Don't feel that you have to read the links, they just give additional information and different views.

http://brokenrites.alphalink.com.au/

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0405/p01s01-ussc.html

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/marchweb-only/3-18-31.0.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19042603

Keep in mind though, that for all the thousands of genuine abuse cases there are also innocent priests who are accused and ruined.

Just as in Harry Keeble's book there was an innocent man among the genuine peadophiles, and his life was ruined by allegations, not all church leaders are bad, I know a number of good priests and leaders, but it is very easy for the good people to be drawn into church cover-ups, as I saw in main village and hometown.

http://adultsabusedbyclergy.org/

http://archives.weirdload.com/stats.html

http://www.underthegreenwave.com/clergy-abuse-survivors-kicked-out-of-church/

The church are very able with excuses, I remember when a housegroup at my abuser's church turned me down and claimed to 'not have enough room for anyone more'.
And I wonder, what is the point of a church or a housegroup that makes untruthful excuses, especially when it is know to be excuses and hurts and damages those that the excuse is made to?!