When I was a few months old, my father came to see me. We met up in a cafe in Aberdeen. It was winter. My mum often described the scene, how I was all wrapped up in a snowsuit, a baby Michelin Man. She said she sat me on the table between them and then pushed me towards him. “I can’t do this. You take her.”
My dad, who was probably drunk and would definitely have been stoned, pushed me back. “I can’t look after a child. I never wanted to bring a child into this world.” Mum pushed me towards him again and he returned me. Mum said I was good while this was going on, that I thought it was some sort of game. Baby ping-pong. This was often repeated as a funny story. But I never found it quite as funny as everyone else.
My father went back to London, not to be seen for another few years. My mum was left with me and I was left with her.
***
Mum was 20 when she met my dad. She’d left Aberdeen at 16 with no qualifications, then travelled the UK working as a waitress, spending her tips at discos. She was proud of her tough fishwife heritage and a feminist before she knew the word. My father was 42 when he met my mother. A tall American, he was not yet a diagnosed schizophrenic or Valium addict; but he was receiving a pension from the US army after a breakdown during basic training 26 years before, and already in the grip of alcoholism.
It’s not hard for me to see why these two people, both orphans in their own way, transient and looking for escapism, might temporarily find solace in their own strangely distorted reflection. But it’s impossible to imagine it might have lasted. When my mum told my dad she was pregnant, he fell to his knees and cried, “What am I going to do?” She broke up with him and booked an appointment at an abortion clinic. She was 20, vulnerable and jobless, and I don’t doubt an abortion would probably have been the best thing for her. She told me often – several times each year – how she was on the way to the clinic and then changed her mind.
I don’t think she was telling the story to be cruel. I believe she was trying to tell me that she’d chosen me. That I’d been an accident but then I’d been a decision. But she also told me that, though she loved me, having me meant she had sacrificed her whole life. There is a strange, nauseous pull in knowing that that decision had made both our lives so much worse.
The first council flat Mum and I lived in was in the north of Aberdeen, on Manor Avenue, right at the edge of an estate miles away from the rest of the family. It was a bleak, hulking granite block of a house with four flats. Ours had a big fireplace but it was given to us unfurnished – as if people like my mum could find the money to just go out and buy furniture, a newborn in tow, and get it into the house by herself.
Even though we had visitors, what I remember most is how vast and empty the rooms seemed. It felt like it was only me and my mum; we were alone in the world, and that world was a fearful place. Other memories are sparse: a plastic bath by a roaring fire; the cold and damp; my mum pulling an enormous chest of drawers across the door to the bedroom to lock me inside and me screaming and screaming for her, and, when she didn’t come, deliberately shitting myself in outrage.
My mum used to tell me about the time I gave a relative a little lump of my shit to show him how good I was at the potty, and him almost eating it, thinking it was a Malteser. Or the time I poured instant coffee into the toaster to make my mum coffee or filled the bathtub with coal to make her a bath.
Even back then, literally before memory, I knew my mum needed caring for.
***
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) questionnaire asks 10 questions to measure childhood trauma, and each affirmative answer gives you a point. Research has shown that an individual with an ACE score of four or higher is “260% more likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease than someone with a score of zero, 240% more likely to contract hepatitis, 460% more likely to experience depression, and 1,220% more likely to attempt suicide”. I scored eight.
It might be easier to believe that I was somehow unlucky. That I was a terrible exception. But the truth is, the people I grew up with experienced much the same. A little less sometimes. Often a lot more. The difference for me? I saw something on the horizon and I ran. I ran, and I never looked over my shoulder.
I am proudly working class and, in this socially mobile hinterland I currently occupy, I miss the sense of community and belonging that tribe might provide me with. But I was never proudly poor. True poverty is all-encompassing, grinding, brutal and often dehumanising. I think it goes without saying that the gnawing shame and fear of poverty is not something I have ever missed, particularly since I frequently still experience its aftershocks.
While my life is unrecognisable today as a writer, I find myself unable to reconcile my “now” with my past. I knew I’d been taken into foster homes, could remember tiny fragments. I have one clear memory of one of the homes: the largest, cleanest kitchen I’d ever seen, me on a counter, my mum coming to visit me, skinnier than ever and still black-eyed, crying, asking me if I wanted her to look after me again. I don’t remember the foster carer but somehow over the years she’s morphed into the mum from the Bisto ads. I don’t know why other members of my family, who’d all seemed so charmed by me when they were drinking and telling stories, didn’t take me. I don’t understand why they just let me go and live with strangers. And I don’t remember anything that happened in those foster homes. Maybe nothing at all but meals with good gravy and a gentle, normal home life.
Questions about my childhood still disturb my peace. I wake up at night screaming obscenities at phantom shapes, inky terror running through me. What happened to me during those years? Have I really escaped? Has my fragmented memory been protecting me all these years or has it inflated, year by year, this terror? How much of my past is still part of who I am today?
***
I received the child protection documents three weeks before Christmas 2017. There were 56 pages in total. Grainy scans, sheaves of reports and letters, a long list of dates and actions. And across them all, thick black lines, “redacted”. I’d only ever seen that in spy films and it instantly gave me the impression that the documents might have all the answers if I could simply decode them.
The first few pages were about the initial referral from the head of my nursery school in Aberdeen, where my mum had turned up “drunk and not in a fit state to care for the child”. I was taken into emergency foster care. It was September 1983 and I was almost three years old.
The first report in the next file was dated 5 October, around three weeks after I was put into care. These were the first of the documents with large sections blacked out. They detailed how on my mum’s second visit to see me, she immediately left me with <names redacted> and that it later came to light that she had been run over by an articulated lorry and taken to casualty. “The police indicated that she was extremely lucky.”
It went on to say that my mum was trying to pressurise my grandma into taking me. The reason the social worker didn’t feel Grandma was fit enough was stolen from me by a thick black line. There was a line about my mum setting up house with her boyfriend – I assume that was Jimmy, more of whom later. The report stated that since my birth my mum had gone from “crisis to crisis”. It described her as “immature” and “impulsive” and suggested another 21 days in foster care before further review. On my third birthday, the social worker dropped me off at my grandma’s where there was a little party for me. The note said my mum had “made a great fuss”, buying me “presents, balloons and a birthday cake”. I was returned home, against the social worker’s recommendation, at the end of October.
Further reports described the social worker’s frustrations at my mum’s lack of commitment to changing, evidenced by a number of broken appointments. She said that there was still cause for concern about my home life and wellbeing, and there were likely to be more difficulties but, “until a further referral is made there is nothing more that can be done”.
I do not understand this. I understand there are many children who go through worse than I ever did, but I also understand that someone – anyone – should have been protecting me. I was three years old.
The notes frequently referred to my mother’s “ambivalence” about keeping me. They said I was a poor eater, a poor walker, that I enjoyed nursery when I could attend. They said that, after I was removed from her care, I “hadn’t asked any more” for my mother “at all”. Like a bell ringing somewhere, reading that made me feel guilty and disloyal.
The next child protection document described how, at a home visit around four months after I’d returned home from foster care, the social worker arrived to find workmen renovating the flat and Mum living in a single room. There was a party going on. Mum was “verbally aggressive” and asked the social worker to leave.
Because she hadn’t seen me and wanted to know who had care of me, the social worker visited later in the day to find my mum gone. Then the police came and checked Mum was there. She was, but I was not. She told them I was with her cousin, Craig. After this, things become a bit harder to follow. He had taken me somewhere else – <names redacted> – perhaps some kind of boarding house. Then I went to another foster home for four days until a child hearing. Despite the social worker’s concerns, I was returned to Mum.
Document 25 simply said “CORRESPONDENCE”. It began with a letter from the social worker dated July 1984. “Investigated the case further by interviewing various family members. Although much concern was expressed regarding the care of Kerry by her mother, there was little presented in the way of concrete evidence.”
Almost a year after my first referral, on 21 August 1984, the case was closed. Nothing could be done until a “further referral was made”.
***
As I sat at my desk and read that file, I wanted to give everyone involved a modicum of compassion. I wanted to try to understand the motivations and hardships involved in such a complex situation. But then there was that child. And I realised my childhood made itself known to me every single day. In the way I engaged with others, when I slept, when and what I ate. In the thought patterns seemingly designed to undermine me, to make me feel beneath whoever I was interacting with, which made me beg in all sorts of ways for their approval. In the deep loneliness, the way I often said I was a “black hole for love”, no matter how much I was loved in my adult life.
After a week the burning feeling of rejection did subside. I truly understood that it was no one’s fault. That life is too messy to attribute blame so neatly. How can you blame ill and dysfunctional people living in an ill and dysfunctional society? How could I blame my mum, when she was simply struggling herself? How could I blame my father, when the stories I knew of his childhood pointed to terrible abandonment and abuse? Or blame my grandmother for just trying to live her life as well as she could, though it was full of struggles? There was no culpability. Only fragments to be picked up, examined, partly understood and pieced together. There were no answers in those records. Only that life was sometimes brutal to those who are vulnerable and without options.
But the blame didn’t really go away, it shifted. The more I thought about my experiences in care, the angrier I became. It seemed to me that from the very moment a child is born, if the mother is defenceless and poor, then the struggle begins as soon as the first air burns into its tiny lungs. What I experienced, before the age of four, are the symptoms of a society that is structurally designed to further marginalise those who are struggling and those who are poor. These stories need to be told, because we do not want to think of the children a few streets away who have eaten shit food and not nearly enough of it, in a house where the heat isn’t on and they don’t own a single book, in threadbare clothes that are too small for them, being cared for by a parent who desperately requires help themselves.
***
I struggle to remember whole months of my childhood and youth. I don’t remember what my auntie or great-grandma or even the boy I lost my virginity to looked like in any detail. But Jimmy, my first “uncle”, I remember in crystal detail. He wore tight double denim and gold chains, like many men at the time. In the early 80s, he would have probably been considered good-looking, Lost Boys-ish. He had nunchucks, the martial arts weapon, two blocks of wood connected by a thick chain. He thought himself a real hard man, an Aberdonian Bruce Lee. He wanted me and Mum to know that, too.
He’d stand in his vest, flexing his muscles, face smiling, focused, back straight, swinging the nunchucks faster and faster in a figure of eight as though he were on stage and not in our dreary bedroom with its stained carpet. Then he’d start stepping towards us, his smile getting wider and the wooden blocks coming closer, so we could feel the air whipping them inches from our heads. Backed against the wall, if we’d moved a muscle our faces would have been smashed by the force of them. As he did this, his face flitted through moods: delighted; amused by us; deadly fucking serious.
He bought me some child-sized nunchucks and encouraged me to do the same in Mum’s face. And I’m ashamed to say I did, until Mum begged me to stop and I ran to hide in her arms while he loomed over us, furious at my betrayal.
It was around this time that I dared the boy next door to go across the absolutely forbidden main road, and he got run over and broke his leg. I killed all my goldfish with a seaside spade. I took to squashing worms I’d dug up from the scrappy front yard between two pieces of abandoned wood. I believed I was evil.
I don’t know how long Jimmy was with us. He stopped living with us after my mum dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night and on to our front-door steps, screaming to the neighbourhood, “He’s going to kill us. He’ll kill me and my kid.” But we lived on Manor Avenue, where everyone had enough problems of their own. The curtains stayed closed, the lights stayed off and he dragged us inside again. I don’t remember anything else about that night.
The last time I saw him was years later, when we had been rehomed to another estate in another part of Aberdeen. He and Mum got drunk and she dared me to put some of my ice-cream on his face. I smashed the whole cone on to his nose and then held my breath while Mum laughed and laughed, and he quivered with barely contained rage. It was my first taste of fighting back.
***
It’s late and I’m home alone. I’m trying to call Susan, my mum’s cousin, who I haven’t spoken to in 33 years. She used to look after me when she was 14 and I was a newborn. I was the flower girl at her wedding, though I’ve no recollection of it. She picks up. “My God,” I say, “you sound… so Aberdonian. I mean, you would, but still.” What I actually mean is that she has the same voice as the women of my family, lilting and soporific, never to be hurried unless they worked themselves up into a rage.
Susan, whose mother was my grandma’s sister, is a social worker in Aberdeen now. She left school without any qualifications, and then had four kids before retaking her Scottish Leaving Certificate, having another child and then training as a social worker. She talks me through our family tree. The mental illness, the alcoholism, the fights.
When we come to a lull, I ask the question I’ve most wanted to, about my stays in foster homes and why they happened. The piece of the puzzle that is missing.
“Now, I’m also going to tell you this,” she says. “I think you deserve to know. You were three at the time and my brother Craig, he had mental health problems, you wouldn’t leave him with a kid. He came to me with you, crying, saying, ‘Her mum asked me to look after her for a few hours and she hasn’t been back for three days.’ You were crying, filthy, starving. You were just this little child. You were so distressed at that point. He’d been wandering about not knowing what to do, he didn’t know to change you. You were cold and dirty. He had no food to feed you.”
I remember the fear again – how years later I had been reduced to a frightened crying child because I didn’t know what had happened to me, just that there was a big, terrifying, black hole.
“You were just a tiny child. You didn’t even get a few years’ good start.” For a moment we’re both silent and I’m wondering if she’s fighting back the tears the way I am. But mine aren’t tears of sadness, they are tears of relief. Because that is the truth. And all my life I’ve needed someone, one of my own, to simply tell me that, honestly.
Some names have been changed.
• This is an edited extract from Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away And Returning To Britain’s Poorest Towns by Kerry Hudson (Chatto & Windus, £14.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
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