On the Saturday morning, I was in the bedroom on the first floor of the farmhouse. Mum woke and came into my room to say good morning. There was a big, deep window set back in the thick stone wall and I was sitting on the window seat with the window open.
‘I’m going to jump out,’ I told her matter-of-factly and edged closer to the ledge.
I can only think I was looking for attention and, to her credit, Mum didn’t entertain it.
‘Oh well,’ she shrugged. ‘Breakfast is ready if you want it.’
Then she walked out.
It was a random thing to say, and I think I was only doing it to try to work out how she would react. Despite my flashes of bad behaviour and the tantrums I sometimes threw, Mum was always patient and understanding.
My life in Oxford should have stayed perfect and for many months it was. After all, I was living in my ideal home with the mum I had always wanted. She was homely, loving and affectionate. There was more trust and security than I had ever experienced. At the weekends we did all sorts; our lives entwined. She expanded my horizons and took me to museums and to galleries. We were regulars at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and went to the museums in London; we spent hours in the Natural History Museum and I loved looking at the dinosaur bones; we went on long dog walks. I loved arcades and specifically dance machines. There was one near us and she used to take me on those and spend hours standing there, watching me.
I started a new school. Mum chose it even though it wasn’t the nearest school to our house because it was smaller and was the feeder school into what she had been led to believe was one of the better secondary schools in the city. She was aware that given my background I would need stability and the secondary school she was hoping to send me to had a reputation for being a caring establishment. At primary school I flourished. I loved art, music and English; I was good at drawing and sketched a lot in my spare time. I learned keyboard. I made friends and Mum encouraged me to invite them round for tea and to play. When the time came to leave and start secondary school, she did everything in her power to persuade the local education authority to allow me to stay on another year. I was one of the youngest in my year group anyway and, up to that point, my schooling had been so disrupted she felt it would help me settle into my new life and give me stability. I completely agreed – I loved the school and felt safe there, I didn’t feel ready to progress to secondary school. Unfortunately, however, the local education authority decided they knew better and told her that I would have to move up with the rest of Year Six, even though the head of the primary school supported her application.
The first summer I lived in Oxford we went to Devon and Cornwall on a traditional seaside holiday. We stayed with friends in Cornwall for the first week. They had a house overlooking the sea in a picturesque fishing village. During the second week we stayed in a caravan in Devon. I did things I had never done before such as swimming in the sea, body boarding and mackerel fishing; I got my hair braided, too. Away from everything I relaxed and the bond between us grew. For Mum it was a chance to see me have the kind of holiday she remembered enjoying as a child and a chance for her to show me off to friends. The official adoption hadn’t gone through at that point as Barbara was still in the process of appealing against my removal so, even though I was living with Mum, she still had to seek permission to take me away. She was supposed to get permission every time we went away and, if she had any friends or family to stay at the house, she also needed to get permission for this.
Holidays became a big part of our life together and in the following years, as the troubles started, they became a way for us to reconnect. A year later, Mum took me abroad for the first time in my life. We went to stay at my uncle’s house in the South of France. I was more excited about the prospect of flying in a plane than anything else and begged to sit by the window – a wish Mum was more than happy to grant. As the ground dropped away and the cars and houses got smaller and smaller until the plane punched through the fluffy white clouds and cruised off into the blue sky, I stared in wonderment.
I was filling up on the opportunities I had missed out on. It wasn’t just foreign holidays, love and affection I had gone without for the first 10 years of my life, it was normality. In essence, I had missed out on being a child. Often I assumed it would all end and the dream would be over. Outwardly, I was confident and happy; inside I still had deep insecurities. I would wonder why Mum wanted me.
One day I asked her.
‘Why did you choose me?’
Mum looked at me kindly.
‘Because you looked like a lovely little girl who deserved a chance,’ she said.
But I didn’t believe I was lovely; at that time I didn’t realise I had had a particularly difficult upbringing. I didn’t reflect on things but somewhere inside there were unresolved issues caused by my turbulent early years.
I could be quite stand-offish, especially around adults I didn’t know. I didn’t want to make eye contact or talk, I wasn’t trusting. I wasn’t even trusting of Mum until I had tested her a few times to see how she would react to my moods and behaviour. I was more trusting of men than I was of women, which was strange when it was men who had let me down.
In theory, Mum should have known all about my background but, in reality, she only knew parts of my history. She was given a form before she chose me, which listed a whole range of issues a child in care might have faced, and was asked to rate them on how she felt she would cope. The issues were things like disabilities, mental health problems and physical neglect. The one thing she wouldn’t know how to cope with, she said, was sexual abuse because she had no experience of it. They told her that it was not an issue with me. Even though I had reported it, all my life it had been brushed under the carpet; I was never believed.
Time passed. I started secondary school; we settled into a domestic routine. Still the legal adoption was dragging on and I became fixated on it: I wanted it to happen. I wanted to be free from my old life. It was around this time that I also started to ask to be called by a different name: I didn’t like Lauren, I didn’t like who she was or where she had come from. I’m not sure where the name Lara came from – I think I read a book with a character called Lara in it and decided that was what I wanted to be named. I asked Mum to call me Lara and whether it would be possible to change my name legally. She explained that if that was what I really wanted then, yes, she would call me Lara from then on but we should wait a while and see how I felt in a few years’ time before permanently changing my name. If I really was sure that I wanted to formally become Lara in a year or so, then we could look into it.
The adoption process started to depress me. I worried that, until it was sanctioned by the courts, I wouldn’t be staying. All the time I wasn’t legally adopted I felt there was a chance I would be taken away again; I felt insecure. I was scared to get used to the stability until my place with Mum had been made official.
I moped around the house. It felt like the issue was hanging over my head. I became depressed and took to my bed but Mum came up with a plan to get me up again and back at school.
‘So, are you well enough to go and get a puppy?’ she asked.
I had been reading a book about puppies and was keen to have one of my own to look after. Mum knew there was nothing she could do about the court process but she could cheer me up with a distraction. I grinned at her.
‘I’ve been doing some research and there is a breeder nearby,’ she told me.
I got dressed and we drove to a nearby smallholding that unfortunately turned out to be not much better than a puppy farm. There were outhouses full of different breeds of dog. I didn’t care, though – I wanted a dog like Mum’s and immediately fell in love with one. A clumsy ball of fluff, he tripped over his bed and it flipped over on top of him. He wasn’t the prettiest puppy I had ever seen but I didn’t care: he had bags of character. He came home in my coat, with sawdust all over him. He had huge ears, which he eventually grew into, and we call
ed him Snowy.
At home on the first day, he managed to climb into the chimney breast and came out black with soot. He was magical! Snowy slept in my room in a little puppy tent and he cheered me up enough for me to go back to school. At the end of the day Mum would come and pick me up with him in a bag. In a way, having Snowy proved to me that Mum was committed. I thought to myself that having a dog meant she couldn’t get rid of me, even if the adoption didn’t go ahead.
Thankfully, in March 2004, it finally happened. We were given notice that there would be a formal hearing in Birmingham and were invited to attend as a way of marking the day I officially became Mum’s daughter. We made a whole day of it; we went up the night before and stayed in a hotel. Granny, Grandpa, Michael, Victoria and Mum’s other brother Gerry also came. There were two social workers and a lawyer in attendance too.
In the family court there was an official ceremony. Mum and I had bought outfits to wear – she helped me choose mine – and the judge announced that I was officially adopted. Then we all had our photo taken together and the judge let me wear his wig. I signed a certificate to say that I consented to be adopted. It was final, it was for real and, at that point, I dreamed the stability would last. The process had taken 13 months from the date I moved to Oxford. It went on and on. Throughout, Mum had been left largely on her own. I had shown testing behaviour at times and, while the support worker was always on the end of the phone, she was based in Birmingham. Once every six weeks a posse of people from social services descended on her to tick boxes and have review meetings. They would ask basic questions: Was I eating healthily? Was I in school? Mum told them about my behaviour and they agreed that I was testing her to see how she would react.
The first 18 months were not easy for her but they were what she had been expecting and we had lots of good times, getting to know each other. Neither of us knew what dark clouds were gathering on the horizon.
Chapter eight
SCHOOL’S OUT
On the surface everything looked normal. At home I had structure and routine: I came in from school and did any homework that needed to be done before the television went on. Mum and I had supper together; sometimes I would help her cook. I then had a bath and went to bed – it was all very normal. Perhaps that’s why things started to go wrong. I didn’t know what normal was. It was unfamiliar and alien. I loved Mum and respected her but I found being told what to do difficult. She liked to sit at the table and eat and talk without having the telly on in the background; I didn’t. She also encouraged me to change my clothes every day, which I didn’t like doing. She would leave clean clothes out for me and sometimes I would put them on over my dirty ones from the day before. At other times, I would try to get into bed with my day clothes on. Mum was very laid-back in most respects but it was things like cleaning, hygiene and wearing clean underwear that she was fastidious about. With me she needed to have different boundaries because of where I had come from. I had never been shown how to keep myself clean and presentable so she had to take extra care in making sure I bathed regularly, cleaned my teeth and brushed my hair, especially as I was going through puberty when those things are so important. I thought she was nagging but she was just doing what a mother should; her priority was getting my self-confidence up.
After the legal adoption, I was permitted to have friends over for sleepovers without them needing to be vetted and Mum allowed me to play out so long as I was home by 7.30pm. Even though her boundaries were perfectly reasonable, I always tried to push them.
I would start arguments over the slightest thing and blow them up to ridiculous proportions. At other times I would be rash and dangerous. I would try to hurt her with words. Once, just before I started secondary school, I told her that she was the worst mother in the world and that I just wanted to go back and live with Terri. She wasn’t, and I didn’t, but I craved a reaction from her. Another time we were driving along one of the main carriageways in Oxford and I opened the car door and threatened to jump out onto the concrete. Mum quite rightly flipped and told me how unacceptable and dangerous such behaviour was.
I always knew when I had upset her, though and knowing this upset me. I was confused by the way I acted. After one argument Mum had to go out so we got in the car and drove off together in silence. There was an awkward atmosphere in the car. She pulled up at the local store and got out to buy some dog food. She left me in the passenger seat and, while she was gone, I noticed a pack of Post-it notes and a pen in the glove compartment. I felt so guilty about causing the row that I scribbled the word ‘sorry’ on as many notes as I could and stuck them all over the inside of the windscreen and the side windows. I knew I was in the wrong, but I didn’t want to verbalise it – it seemed easier to write my apology down. She hugged me when she saw what I had done; she was always ready to forgive.
Around the time I was 12 years old I went through a phase of ripping up photos – I did it to try to get a reaction. There would be an argument and I’d disappear to my room, where I’d pull out photographs of Terri and of my brothers and sister and start tearing them apart, before throwing them in the bin. I did it because I wanted a reaction from Mum, but, in reality, it upset me more than her. When I had calmed down or locked myself in my room in a sulk, Mum would quietly pick up all the pieces and carefully store them for me – she always believed that I should keep mementos of my past because one day I might want them. She continued to encourage me to see my birth family, even though often I didn’t want to do so. After the adoption there was talk of me having six contacts with Terri a year but that would have been impractical and it remained three times a year: one at every school holiday.
‘It is really important,’ she would explain. ‘Your relationships with your brothers and sister are for life.’
The destruction of property became a pattern whenever I felt frustrated. If we had an argument and I was upset or cross, I would do things that upset me but that I also thought would upset someone else, such as throw my laptop. Mum tried her best to stop me from doing it.
Within a few months of moving I had started secondary school and in the first year everything went reasonably well. It was a comprehensive in Oxford, which Mum chose because she had heard good reports about it. Before the first day of term, I went for an induction with other children from my class in primary school. We got to try sample lessons and meet the teachers and the other children. It was daunting. The school seemed huge but, having moved around so often, I was confident that I could cope with the change. And I was thankful that, for the first time in my school life, I would not be the only new face in the classroom. I started with a whole new year group; I was more worried about the older kids because I had goofy teeth and I feared being bullied.
Although I tried hard to begin with, after a year I started to struggle. It’s a difficult time for any kid. I was going through puberty and was struggling with moods. With the benefit of hindsight I know there were many unresolved issues from my past coming back to haunt me. I developed an attitude problem; my moods changed in the blink of an eye. One minute everything was fine, the next, for reasons I didn’t know or understand, I would get angry or very down. It didn’t help that I was an early developer and hormones were amplifying my confusion. Though emotionally naïve, I was growing into a woman.
Puberty presented me with problems I felt unequipped to cope with. I don’t remember anyone ever giving me the talk about the birds and the bees; I didn’t know how relationships worked. Mum tried to talk to me but it’s not easy for someone who has never had a child to communicate such personal stuff to someone who has come from an abusive background. When she started to broach the subject I cut her off quickly.
I started my periods before I moved in with Mum, but they stopped for a while and started again soon after I moved in with her. I freaked out when it happened. I thought I was dying. No one had ever discussed the subject with me and Mum assumed that I had already been told but I didn’t know what was happening to me. I did
n’t know about growing up; I was frightened.
Mum assured me that what was happening to me was normal. But she hadn’t expected it yet – after all, I was only 10. Once we got over that, I felt I was a grown-up and I had to act like one. It’s a big benchmark in a young girl’s life.
I started secondary school when I was 11. In the first year, Year Seven, I tried hard but by Year Eight I was starting to have problems. Academically, I was trying hard. I was good at English and my favourite lesson was design and technology. I liked using the tools, especially hammers, because they gave me the chance to vent some of the anger I often felt bubbling up inside me. However, I struggled with maths and was embarrassed by my lack of numerical skills. In every maths class the teacher always seemed to pick me out to answer questions, which made me defensive.
My attitude started to change. I had a volatile temperament – I felt like I was bullied by the teachers and then some of the older pupils began to pick on me as well. They would make cutting comments about my teeth. Then they found out where I came from, and they started picking on me because of that. I began to fight back and I started to dread going into school – I hated it.
No one seemed to be there to listen to me or to ask why my behaviour was on such a steep, downward descent. In primary school I had always been given a lot of support, especially as I was inevitably the new kid in class, but in secondary school it was sink or swim. It didn’t matter what your issues were, you were expected to do everything on your own and I had trouble coping. There were a lot of expectations and I couldn’t handle them. Over the years I had become so used to disruption that finding myself in a normal situation with a bunch of kids who were all in the same boat threw me: I felt uncomfortable being comfortable. The same thing was happening at home – I had spent so many years in flux, expecting things to change, that I found stability hard to deal with. All the time I would test to see what Mum’s breaking point was; I wanted the adrenaline rush of an argument.
Girl for Sale Page 8