In my mind, it was all my mum’s fault. She was ruining my life, so I was mean and horrible to her. She had a nightmare with me. Half the time, I wouldn’t talk to her. ‘Whatever,’ I’d say. ‘Shut up. Go away. Leave me alone.’ I can’t believe I spoke to her like that. It was so rude. If someone told my mum to shut up today, I’d want to kill them, but I said it all the time back then.
It was really hard for Mum because she had to put everything aside to stop me from doing what I wanted to do. She was constantly leaving work early, or taking time out in the middle of the day to come and pick me up. Still, she felt it was worth all the hassle and inconvenience. Convinced that my friends were a bad influence on me, she wanted to protect me from them. In her mind it was worth doing for my sake, even though I hated her for it.
Meanwhile my behaviour at school became worse and worse. I didn’t listen to the teachers, I just wanted to chat to my friends and make them laugh so they didn’t forget me. Because I was so angry about all the restrictions on me, I talked back in class and was rude and obnoxious. It was beyond a joke and things were getting out of hand.
To be fair, my parents didn’t entirely blame me for what was going on. My mum felt I’d got in with the wrong crowd and my dad was disappointed that the school couldn’t discipline me or keep me interested in lessons. I didn’t realize this at the time, though and felt they were blaming and punishing me unjustly.
Strangely, the person I found I could talk to about the problems I was having at home was my stepmum Karen, perhaps because she was an outsider and could take an objective, detached view. It was a bit like having your best friend’s mum to turn to and I really appreciated that. It’s funny, isn’t it, we’re brought up with the stereotype of the scary evil stepmum, but my experience was exactly the opposite. However, although she could listen and advise, there was nothing Karen could do about the storm that was brewing.
Everything came to a head one morning before school in November 2003, about a month after my fourteenth birthday. I was about to get in the car with Mum to be driven to school when the doorbell went. ‘Can you get that?’ Mum said. The bell went again and I answered it to find my dad standing on the doorstep.
What the heck is he doing here? I thought. He hadn’t been to our house in a long time.
‘Get in the car, Stacey,’ Mum said. Dad got in beside her.
‘Why are you coming?’ I asked Dad. He said nothing. Oh, God! I thought. He was so irritating.
When we arrived at the school gates, Mum and Dad got out of the car. ‘What the hell?’ I said. ‘Why are you at my school? Why are you here?’
‘Come on,’ my dad said gruffly. We walked through the school gates and I realized they were making a beeline for Mr Mayo’s office. So I was heading for a telling-off. Big deal. The head teacher’s assistant asked us to sit and wait outside his office for a few minutes. When we finally went in, Mr Mayo was waiting for us, with the deputy head teacher sat next to him.
‘We’re not happy with what’s going on,’ my dad said. ‘If you don’t address our concerns about discipline at Abbs Cross, we’re going to take Stacey away.’
Great. Wonderful, I thought, not really taking the situation seriously.
The meeting didn’t take long. There was talk of me leaving school. There was more talk about my parents taking me away and putting me in another school. I crossed my arms and rolled my eyes. What were they going on about?
Then my dad dropped a bombshell. ‘All right, she’s leaving,’ he said. ‘Right now.’
My mouth dropped open. ‘What?’ I said. I was shocked. I thought it was just going to be a case of promising to do things differently, of agreeing to behave in class and treat my teachers with respect. I would say I was sorry and they would give me another chance and everything would go back to normal. So why was my dad suddenly saying he was taking me out of school? I hadn’t even had a chance to defend myself.
‘Thank you very much,’ my dad said. ‘And I’m sorry,’ he added, standing up to leave, along with my mum. I stayed in my seat, looking from Mr Mayo to my dad in confusion. ‘Come on, we’re going,’ Dad said, and I had no option but to leave with them.
On our way out, we passed a couple of my mates in the corridor. ‘Where are you going?’ they whispered. ‘What are your mum and dad doing here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, feeling totally bewildered. ‘I don’t know where I’m going.’
As we got in the car I burst into tears. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I sobbed as my parents drove me home. ‘I want to go back to school.’
‘That school isn’t good for you,’ they said.
‘All my friends are there!’ I yelled. ‘You can’t separate me from my friends!’ But the subject was closed.
Back at home they made me pack up some clothes. ‘Why? Where are you taking me?’ I screamed. I was hysterical now. I would have done anything to stay, but they weren’t giving me a choice.
They bundled me back into the car and took me to my Auntie Mal’s flat in Hackney. My mum just couldn’t deal with me any more. I was too much heartache for her, so I was going to stay with Auntie Mal and my nana for a while.
I sobbed for the whole journey. I begged for my phone back, but my dad shook his head and said I was forbidden from getting in contact with any of my friends. I wasn’t allowed to phone them, email them or write to them. ‘Why? It’s not fair!’ I yelled.
‘We only want the best for you, Stacey,’ he said. ‘You’ve got so much potential, but your friends are holding you back.’
So this was it, the end. After all the fun we’d had and all the growing up we’d done together, I wasn’t even going to have a chance to say goodbye to my mates. The life I knew and loved was over, just like that. I didn’t see or speak to my friends for years afterwards. It was really sad.
It took over an hour to get to Auntie Mal’s. It felt like the other end of the earth. There was no chance I’d be bumping into any of my mates from Dagenham over here. Auntie Mal answered the door to her flat with a welcoming smile. ‘Come on, then,’ she said warmly as she greeted me. ‘We’ll have fun.’
My heart sank. ‘Ugh!’ I sighed as I reluctantly entered the flat. I don’t want to be here; I really don’t want to be here, I thought. I liked Auntie Mal a lot, but what was I going to do with her, day in, day out?
When my parents left, she showed me to the middle bedroom in the flat, which I was going to be sharing with her son Robert. I slumped down on my bed, feeling numb with shock, unable to take in what had happened over the last eight hours. I’d got up in the morning thinking I was going to school as usual, and now I was in disgrace, a long way from home, isolated from my friends and out of school for good. What was going on? As Auntie Mal left the room, closing the door to give me some privacy, tears poured down my face. I flung my head on the pillow and sobbed my heart out.
It tore me to pieces inside to think about my friends. What would they be doing now? I couldn’t bear to imagine them having fun without me, at the park, at each other’s houses, or just wandering around the streets. They didn’t know I’d left Abbs Cross for good, so when would they start to miss me? Would they be wondering where I was yet? I pictured Jade and Joely having a laugh at Jade’s flat, or over at the park with everyone else, sharing a bottle of White Lightning and daring each other to snog people. I thought about the alleyway opposite Elm Park station and the doodles on the walls. Every morning before school my mates would still be meeting up there, eating bacon rolls, swinging on the steps, drawing on the wall and laughing their heads off about who they fancied – without me. It destroyed me that I would never see them again. It was devastating.
I punched the pillow in anger and frustration. Why were my parents so mean to me? I didn’t deserve it, I really didn’t. OK, I was rude to my mum, but only because she was so horrible to me. It didn’t occur to me to see things from my parents’ point of view. I was your typical self-absorbed teenager, so I didn’t give a thought to all the wo
rry and heartache that Mum and Dad had been going through. All I kept thinking was that it wasn’t my fault! I just wanted to hang out with my friends – what was wrong with that? Everyone needs their mates, don’t they? My thoughts brought me full circle. My life wouldn’t be worth living without my friends. Overwhelmed by self-pity, I buried my face in the pillow and blubbed all over again. I felt like the unluckiest person in the world.
I cried until there were no tears left. Totally wretched and drained of energy, I fell asleep. When I woke up a couple of hours later I started crying again. How would I survive without my mates? I just didn’t know. The days stretched ahead, bleak and empty. I wondered how long I’d be trapped in Hackney. My dad had said something about staying here to give my mum a rest, but surely I would have to go to school at some point? It was the middle of term, after all. They wouldn’t be sending me anywhere in Hackney, I knew that much. The schools near my auntie’s flat definitely didn’t have the best reputation.
My auntie left me to myself at first and I spent days feeling sorry for myself and obsessing about how much I wanted to return to Dagenham. I felt like I was missing out on everything; all I could think about was how much fun everyone would be having without me.
Luckily, my auntie never judged me. She didn’t care that I had kissed a boy or hadn’t done my homework. It didn’t bother her. She just wanted me to be happy. And I wasn’t angry with her. I saw my parents as my jailers, not Auntie Mal. She’s a lovely person and we’ve always got on well. She’s my dad’s oldest sister, and when their father died, she helped my nana raise my dad, uncle and auntie. Big and really pretty, with lovely dark skin and fair hair, she’s six years older than my dad but has always looked really young.
I listened to everything she said, because she spoke sense. ‘If you want to smoke, smoke,’ she’d say. ‘But it’s not good for you.’ That meant so much more than someone just shouting, ‘DON’T SMOKE! YOU MUSTN’T SMOKE!’ She was cool.
For three months I hadn’t been allowed to go anywhere without my mum driving me, but my auntie trusted me to go and post her letters on my own. OK, she knew I didn’t have any money to get on the tube and go back to Elm Park, but I still felt grateful to her for letting me out, even if it was just to go to the post box. Then one day, after I’d sat in my room being miserable for long enough, she said, ‘Come on, let’s go shopping.’
I think Auntie Mal felt sorry for me. She thought that perhaps my parents had handled the situation wrongly and that it was a bit much for a kid to take all her friends away and shove her in someone else’s house. Rather than resolving the situation, my parents had just cut me off from my old life and made me start again. Wouldn’t it have been better to sit down and discuss it first? Maybe they felt they couldn’t get through to me, but at the time I felt they should have tried harder. Perhaps I’m not taking into account how much of a nightmare I was, though. They were tearing their hair out over me, while I was living in my own selfish bubble. They just didn’t know what to do with me, so they did what they thought was best.
For me, the worst thing about it was that I’d had no choice; I wasn’t given a second chance. I was sure that if I’d promised the head that I would change completely, if I had turned up for all my lessons, done my homework and started behaving, the school would have been happy enough to keep me on. I think they were just trying to scare me when they talked about letting me go, but my dad took them at their word and said, ‘See you later.’
I wasn’t given the opportunity to say, ‘If you’re going to take me away from everything I love, I’ll stop being naughty and I’ll sort it out.’ They just took me away and then everything was gone.
Whether I could have behaved is another matter. Could I have changed? And how long would it have lasted if I had? I don’t know. But perhaps I should have been given the chance to try. Anything would have been better than what I now faced: an empty life in limbo, with no friends and no school to go to.
Gradually I stopped moping, though, and started doing things with Auntie Mal. She was my nana’s carer at the time, so we just did everyday things. It was probably quite fun for her to have me around, I suppose. She had a big collection of beads and sequins, so I’d sit and make bracelets in the kitchen with her – I love anything shiny! I helped her to cook and she taught me to make meringues. And sometimes she’d take me to the cinema, or to the shops.
My nan was also really good to me. She adored me and would have done anything for me. She never told me off. ‘You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,’ she used to say. ‘Do what you believe in.’
‘Yeah, all right, Nana,’ I’d say. I think her main worry was that I would fall out with my family, like my dad and my uncle had fallen out. It was very upsetting for Nana that her sons didn’t get on and she didn’t want any more rifts, so she never made me feel like I was in the wrong or took sides. ‘As long as you know that everyone is here for you,’ she’d say, waving her hands around. ‘Your parents are doing this for a good reason. Now, eat!’
You felt loved when Nana was around. She was always pinching us and saying, ‘Beautiful children. Gorgeous children.’
I stayed with Auntie Mal for a few weeks and then began dividing my time between her flat, Mum’s house and Dad’s house. It was a strange existence. For more than six months I wasn’t allowed out to see a single friend. I was never left alone in the house, either, in case I rang a friend or ran away. It was awful, especially as I didn’t enjoy spending time with my mum, dad, sister or brother, because I was so angry with them all. I don’t think they were that keen on seeing me, either, at the time because I wasn’t very pleasant. They were probably as relieved as I was every time I went back to Auntie Mal’s.
I couldn’t help thinking that life had been much more productive when I was sitting in class, not listening to my teachers. Now I just sat around sulking, thinking about how unlucky I was. For the first few months Abbs Cross sent me school work to do at home. But then I stopped bothering with it and they didn’t chase me for it. There was no incentive for me to work out equations or write essays when I wasn’t going into school.
It took my parents ages to find me another school. I couldn’t get into any of the schools in the same borough as Abbs Cross, because they all wanted to know why I’d left my old school, and my dad had to be honest, obviously. As a result they all turned me down. It was inconvenient enough to take on a new student in the middle of the school year, let alone a naughty one.
My mum and dad went to several appeals boards to plead my case. They met the school teachers and governors and tried to persuade them to take me, but every time they got knocked back. Meanwhile, to their disgust, the local education authority didn’t make a single enquiry as to why I wasn’t attending school, or get in contact to see if I was OK. While the government were threatening to fine and jail parents whose kids persistently played truant, no one seemed in the least bit interested in the fact that I hadn’t been to school for six months at the age of fourteen.
My parents felt like they were going round in circles and they were running out of options. My education had been on hold for far too long at a crucial time in my life. What on earth were they going to do? Some of my dad’s relatives suggested sending me to a Jewish school. Most of my cousins had gone to the Jewish Free School in North London and they were all doing well. My dad wanted me to go to a Jewish school, so he decided to approach King Solomon High School.
In his letter to the school, Dad had to show that he was Jewish by proving that his mother was Jewish, because according to Jewish law, your mother has to be born Jewish in order for you to be Jewish. Of course, that meant that I wasn’t technically Jewish, even though my mother had converted to Judaism.
These days I think that if you believe you’re Jewish and you want to be Jewish, that should be the end of it, but at the time I couldn’t have cared less. I just wasn’t interested. Now I love being Jewish, although I don’t think it matters what religion you are, as long as you in
terpret the message in a good way.
The way I interpret it is, if you’re good to everyone around you and treat everyone as you’d like to be treated, you’ll be fine. Even if you don’t get everything you want in this world, we’re all going to die and go to the same place. So as long as you’re good, everything will work out.
I like the Jewish traditions because they bring you close as a family. When we celebrate Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday that falls around Christmas time, we incorporate Christmas into it, because I don’t think you can miss out a national tradition like Christmas. My mum’s house is the Christmas house in our family. Me, my brother and sister all sleep there on Christmas Eve in our old bedroom, with Zach, of course. Christmas isn’t even about religion half the time; like Hanukkah, though, it brings the family and the whole nation together. It’s lovely when Zach and I are lighting the Hanukkah candles together and it’s lovely when we’re opening presents under the Christmas tree and having a roast turkey dinner, too.
If you’re all coming together, I think you can take a bit from every religion. After all, your religion doesn’t determine whether you’re a nice person or not – that’s down to whether you’re a good person deep down. Otherwise, you could celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah every day all year long and it wouldn’t mean a thing.
Unfortunately, just like all the other schools, King Solomon wrote back to say there wasn’t a place for me. By now, my parents were absolutely desperate, so my mum and Karen went to the appeal at King Solomon, with the rabbi from Dad’s and Karen’s synagogue, who supported my application. My dad couldn’t go because he was photographing a wedding that day. Mum, Karen and the rabbi sat in front of a long table of representatives from the school, plus the appeal board judges, who were there to listen to both sides, and Mum did all the talking.
The next day the appeal board rang her. ‘Your appeal for your daughter to attend King Solomon was so sincere and heartfelt that there was no way we could turn it down,’ she was told. She nearly collapsed with relief. At last I would be going to school again.
Stacey: My Story So Far Page 5