It’s clear to me now that much of the reason why my grandparents tried to be so strict with me was that they had already brought up one daughter, my birth-mother, who had gone off the rails in spectacular fashion by getting pregnant at such a young age. Although they never discussed it with me directly, I think my grandmother in particular must deep down have felt guilty that she had allowed that to happen. The outcome was that they tried to correct what they saw as their earlier mistakes by keeping an even closer control over me. I would constantly say: ‘Don’t worry, I am not that stupid to have a child, so don’t worry about that.’ The truth was that I had never planned on having kids, didn’t want to get married, wasn’t interested in children at all. So I used to throw that at them all of the time. ‘I am not the same as your daughter, do not think I am going to have a child, I have no intention of having a child; the last thing on earth I want is to have a child.’ They never talked to me about the trauma of the time when their daughter got pregnant. It was a subject that was impossible for us to have ever discussed. I could never raise the issue with them because anything that even hinted about me not being their ‘real’ daughter was terrifying for them to talk about. It was almost as though an open admission that I did have a birth-mother would somehow take me away from being their child. Because I loved them so much, it was the one thing I could never do to them.
The irony is, my birth-mother was only too happy to talk about it whenever I saw her whilst I was growing up through my teenage years. She would often tell me how she would never have left me with anybody else other than my grandparents… blah, blah, blah… that she knew they would love and care for me… blah, blah, blah. It reached a point where I used to hate seeing her sometimes because I wasn’t interested in hearing her story but she clearly had a need to tell me all of the time and bring the subject up on every possible occasion I would be thinking: ‘I don’t want to know, you don’t have to bring it up every time, I am not interested, I don’t want to talk about it.’
Partly for that reason, I never built a strong relationship with my birth-mother, and a blazing family row one Christmas in my early teens led to a long-term break with Eileen – a row that stopped the two of us communicating with each other for years. According to a survey, a typical British family has an average of five domestic rows between the time when the kids wake up to see if Santa has been and the end of the Queen’s afternoon address to her nation. Unfortunately, my family was no exception to the rule.
As is often the way with Christmas, the dispute began with the smallest and silliest of ‘words’ and rapidly escalated from a border skirmish to all-out thermo-nuclear war. After a traditional lunch, with traditional quantities of booze for all the adults, I was playing a light-hearted game of cards with my grandfather and my birth-mother’s husband. After losing the fifth hand in a row I foolishly made what was meant to be nothing more than a joke that ‘someone is cheating around here. Who’s hiding all the cards?’ The effect on the winning high-roller, my birth-mother’s husband, was startling. He jumped to his feet and started shouting at me. ‘How dare you say something like that,’ he screamed. As he yelled into my face, I at first tried to say it had been merely a bit of banter but then soon ended up giving him as good a tirade of swear words as I was getting in return. Both of us were becoming more heated by the second but I was still astonished when he suddenly leaned over and pushed me backwards against my chair. I rocked from the unexpected shove but managed to keep my balance and stay on my feet. I may not have been physically hurt but my teenage pride had taken a battering, and my tongue went into overdrive: ‘How dare you, how fucking dare you push me like that; who the fuck do you think you are?’
I was in full, admittedly foul-mouthed flow when he suddenly pushed me again, so hard this time that I fell over the chair and went sprawling on the floor. Now incandescent with rage, I was cursing like the proverbial trooper when my birth-mother rushed into the room to see what was causing such chaos and commotion. The remains of the day and our always-strained relationship might still been salvaged if she had just been willing to listen to my side of the story, but that was never an option. She was only interested in the fact that I was swearing at her husband, not that he had knocked me over in a silly row about a game of cards… not interested in what I had to say at all.
Already angry and upset, it was easy for much of my rage to instantly transfer to my birth-mother. ‘How fucking dare you.’ I thought, ‘It’s unbelievable. I make a joke and he behaves like that and puts his hands on me, and all she’s interested in is the language I’m using.’ I was so disappointed in her, so disappointed that she was more interested in the language I was using in retaliation than in the fact that her husband had sent me flying across the room. I no longer remember how the row ended that day, whether I left or they left, but the result was the same either way; I could not help but feel rejected once again by the one woman I might have hoped would stand up by my side. My real mother and I had nothing more to say to each other. Even in retrospect, I find it impossible to judge now how much hidden resentment from the past events of my childhood fed into my feelings that day and over the year or more that followed. Perhaps the row was another nail in the coffin. All I know is that I felt so betrayed that it caused a long-lasting rift.
Two months later a birthday card, containing money in lieu of a present, arrived from my birth-mother. I ripped the card into pieces, left the money untouched in the envelope and sent it back, ‘return to sender’.
CHAPTER 13
LEAVING HOME
It was a shocking telephone call for me to overhear. A few half-whispered words that were to destroy the security of the only home I had ever known and leave me homeless, penniless and without a family to depend upon.
My grandmother was in the front hall, speaking with the local social services department and trying to arrange for me to be taken into care. I had never planned to eavesdrop on her; I had just slipped into the house quietly and crept upstairs so as not to disturb my grandparents. Then I heard her one-sided telephone conversation.
‘But surely you have to take her into care if we can’t cope. She’s only just 16 and anyway what difference does her age make?’
It is hard to describe how I felt when the hammer blow understanding of what my grandmother was discussing struck home. I was horrified and deeply upset, silent tears were running down my cheeks and, in the quietness of my upstairs bedroom, I felt more rejected than ever before. It was, of course, a situation I had provoked through my own behaviour but nothing could take away from the fact that this was the only loving mother I had ever known, now trying to have me removed from her life. I had no real concept of what being ‘taken into care’ meant other than that it was the sort of thing that happened to girls whose parents had died, or been sent to prison or who had been so bad themselves that they had to be locked up in a council home. The fear of losing the security of my own house, the comfort of my own tiny bedroom, the love of my grandparents and the stigma of council care simply overwhelmed me. Within seconds I regressed from being a feisty, lippy, sometimes foul-mouthed teenager to a little girl who desperately wanted her mummy.
Looking back on that day now, I understand exactly how close to the edge I must have driven my poor grandparents for them to make such a decision. As a teenager, however, full of the fake bravado of youth, desperately trying to learn an adult independence, I could see no explanation at all. As fast as my fears had grown and my tears had flowed, the shock was replaced with an ice-cold anger.
‘I heard you, I heard who you were talking to,’ I shouted to my astonished grandmother as I flew down the stairs. ‘You bitch, you cold-hearted deceitful, hateful fucking bitch.’
Even by the standards of the monumental rows we had on a regular basis, my language was cruel and unfair but driven by a mix of anger and fear. ‘How could you do that? If you just want me to go, you only had to ask, not go sneaking off to get me taken away.’
Startled because
she had not known I was even in the house, my grandmother did her best to defend herself from an attack which must have arrived out of the blue. ‘It’s your fault Miranda; you’ve driven us to this. We just can’t cope with you anymore. It’s too hard to try and look after you and you don’t make anything easy.’
The row was short and sharp and bitter and, not surprising in the circumstances, deteriorated rapidly into my foul-mouthed rant and my grandmother’s embarrassed but angry defence. My grandfather must have been in the house but I cannot remember him saying anything at all as I stomped upstairs, banging doors and finally throwing a few clothes into a rucksack. As I tried to pick what things I could pack, I heard my grandmother making another call, this time to my birth-mother trying to explain what was happening. It made no difference to me; if my adoptive mum and dad didn’t want me, I certainly wasn’t going to take advice from the woman who had given me away. By the time I clumped my way downstairs again there was nothing left for any of us to say. Neither of my grandparents said or did anything to stop me leaving. I was 16; I had no money, few clothes with me, no idea where I might stay and no family left to whom I might turn. As I angrily slammed out of the front door I was, for the first time in my life, truly on my own.
My grandmother had hit an insuperable problem in the telephone call she made attempting to place me in care. Being over 16 meant that the local authority had no responsibility to take me into care or to offer me any support. If she had made the call just a few months earlier, when I was still 15, then she might have had more success. Clearly now, I was going to get no help from officialdom. The truth is that I would not have known how to access any such assistance, even were it there to be offered.
Standing on the pavement outside of the house I had lived in forever, I had not a clue where I could go. Still angry, I wandered the streets for a while then used some of the little money I had to call a girl with whom I had been working in my Saturday job at a local chemist’s shop. I have no idea what I told her but, although we hardly knew each other outside of that job, she was kind enough to let me stay on her sofa for a few nights. In fact, I was to stay with her several times in the months to come, although always being careful to find somewhere else to move to at regular intervals so as to give her some respite from my ‘temporary’ presence in her flat.
Another friend, Julie, also offered me a sofa to sleep on. She lived not far from where my present-day dungeon is located, and unlike my first temporary refuge, she did have the benefit of central heating. After many winters of freezing in my grandparents’ home, that was, for me, a luxury beyond measure. The downside of being with Julie, apart from the awkwardness of living on a sofa and out of a suitcase, was that she was in the process of separating from her husband and he clearly resented my presence in her life. I was desperate to find somewhere else to live and then found the answer in being asked out for a drink by a guy who lived rent-free in a London squat. At that time I was mostly definitely not dressing to impress potential boyfriends. The fashion was all for baggy trousers with even baggier tops. But I knew I was a pretty young woman and the guy asking me out was more than passable. He was fit and muscular, a bodybuilder and the sort of guy who did turn me on. He was never going to be a permanent partner in life but moving in with him temporarily would ease my growing accommodation problem and give me a boyfriend of sorts as well. He worked part-time as a bouncer, his squat was rough and ready, on one of the worst council block estates in London, but my choices were strictly limited. I moved in.
To say that my new home was in a rough part of town would be a monumental understatement. Half of the flats were boarded up, no stones had been left unthrown in breaking plenty of windows and it was the type of neighbourhood where even policemen feared to tread. The outside walls of each flat must once have been white but the little peeling paint that remained had long since turned to 50 shades of dingy grey. By early evening, the time when I would arrive there from school, young gang members were hanging out on every corner. I would sometimes watch from my window as the occasional passers-by foolish enough to walk through the estate were subjected to a barrage of catcalls and threats from this weird, drug-addicted boys brigade. Whatever danger my family had feared I was in from going out late-night clubbing was as nothing compared to the dangers I faced once I left the security of their home.
My new friend’s flat was on the first floor and so it involved a trudge up a staircase, strewn with litter and reeking of the smell of fresh urine and stale disinfectant which the council would splash around more in hope than expectation of improving the environment. I would often get off of the bus in the nearby high street and walk past those yellow police notices appealing for information about ‘an incident’ which had occurred a night or two before. There must have been times when they ran out of signboards. Most of the incidents were muggings, or stabbings or gang fights of one kind or another and as I and my boyfriend were just about the only white people living on the entire estate I could not but help feel vulnerable. I was always thinking: ‘Oh God, please don’t let me get any problems tonight.’ We may not be talking New York ghetto here but being barely 16 years old, with no family who wanted to know me, and living in a place like that, really rammed home to me how alone in the world I truly was. Amazingly, despite my constant nervousness, I was never bothered by anyone, a fact I put down to my boyfriend being a body-builder whose sheer muscle-power earned him a grudging respect on the mean streets where we lived.
The other odd thing was that the flat itself, an illegal squat for which nobody paid rent, was actually a clean and decent home. It had central heating, believe it or not, and some carpets, windows and even a working oven. A previous tenant had left the flat partly furnished and my friend had reached an agreement to pay the utility bills so that it still had running water, gas and electricity. It was almost like having a two-bedroomed flat, on split levels, with an upstairs and a downstairs.
On one of my first nights alone in the flat my attempts to do English Literature homework were interrupted by a commotion outside. I saw scores of uniformed policemen sneaking along the wall and then converging in a rush on the building below. They rammed open the door and soon afterwards dragged out a group of guys with all of the accompanying chaos and noise that you could possibly imagine. I was thinking, ‘Oh bloody hell, nobody even knows where I am at the moment; anything could happen, somebody could break the door in and I’m here on my own.’ I felt entirely alone and vulnerable. When the guy I was staying with got home I breathlessly told him the news. ‘Big deal, what’s the problem? It’s a crack house down there. They raid it all the time. One opens up on the estate, they raid it, shut it down and another opens up across the way.’ It was a sobering thought; this was not the place for homework and I had to live here and get to and from my school each day. Life was going to be challenging.
My nights with the bodybuilder had already turned into a sexual relationship although it was clear we were never going to be a dedicated couple. In many ways it was a shag of convenience for both of us. I was 16 and legal now, although he was at least twice my age. Even so he had a great body, a bodybuilder’s muscles in places where many men don’t even have muscles, and was certainly a lot better endowed that the earlier teenage love of my life. He also had a car, so could sometimes save me a three-bus journey by dropping me at school in the mornings or picking me up after classes. He had no problem with me staying with him but also made it clear he did not want me living there full-time. He already had a ‘steady’ girlfriend who used to turn up occasionally and other women as well. I never minded because I was not looking for romance; this was just a place to stay and I never minded making myself scarce when he had other company for the night.
The downside was that I could never unpack my small bag of clothing and the few bits and pieces that comprised my entire worldly possessions. I would never know who might be in the squat on the three or four nights a week when I couldn’t stay. As a consequence I lived a nomadic life
out of the rucksack, moving between school, work, the squat, the flat where my friend from the chemist lived and the occasional night on other friends’ sofas. The biggest difficulty of all was getting the money on which to live. I had mostly free accommodation but I still needed to feed myself, buy some clothing, pay for my bus fares and just have some money for day-to-day survival.
Work was nothing new to me. I had always had a job of some sort to supplement the tiny amount of pocket money which was all that my grandparents could afford to give me. I’d done a paper round, worked in shops, in a bakery and lots of other things. They were all such crap jobs, and the one thing I did know was that I wanted more out of life than that. I used to look at the people I was working with in some boring shop job and think to myself, ‘This is their whole life. How terrible it must be to have no education and be stuck in a job like this, not just for a Saturday or one evening a week, but for your whole life.’ I knew that wasn’t going to happen to me. The irony was that the only way that I could now support myself and stay at school was to take more of those same crap jobs from which I was so desperate to escape.
So I got a job cleaning offices in the morning before school, and another job cleaning houses at the end of each school day. Then at weekends I managed to get work in a local chemist shop which was close enough for me to cycle to on Saturdays and on a couple of afternoons after school. Between classroom and work there wasn’t time for any sort of social life and the only light on my horizon was that I was finally earning enough from my multiple jobs routine to be able to afford a room of my own. I said goodbye to the squat and moved into a tiny bedroom in a shared, terraced house in West London. I still drive past the house most days now on my way to work at my far more spacious dungeons nearby. One of my abiding memories of living there is that I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to cook anything. It wasn’t only a lack of money which forced me into eating little more than plain rice and vegetables. I was scared of poisoning myself because I had no idea of how to tell if meat of any sort was properly cooked or not.
Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story Page 9