Trafficked Girl

by Zoe Patterson

  ‘I’ve got bruises from where Mum beat me,’ I said, rolling up one leg of my trousers quickly when everyone turned to look at me.

  ‘Is this true, Mrs Patterson?’ The woman from the NSPCC looked shocked when she saw the black, purple and yellow marks that almost completely covered my calf and shin. ‘Did you hit your daughter and cause that bruising?’

  I was holding my breath, expecting Mum to explain, in the fake-reasonable voice she’d adopted while answering all their other questions, that I was somehow responsible for my own injuries. But the strain of pretending she was a rational human being had obviously proved too much and she started screaming, ‘Don’t you fucking look at me like that, you stupid bitch. She’s lying. I told you: she’s fucking mental.’ And, finally, they saw her as she really was.

  ‘I think it would be a good idea for Zoe to live somewhere else for a while,’ the social worker said when Mum eventually calmed down enough to be able to hear her. ‘Just for a few weeks, while we do an assessment. It’ll be on a voluntary basis. So you’ll still have a say in any decisions that need to be made on her behalf.’

  I don’t know if she said it because she really believed my parents cared about what happened to me. But Mum refused to give her permission for me to be taken into care – just to be awkward rather than because she didn’t want me to go, or perhaps because she was afraid of what else I might tell social services once she no longer had any direct control over me – and when she stormed out of the living room, Dad signed the forms.

  ‘I’ll come back later this afternoon,’ the social worker said as the two women tidied their papers and closed their notepads again, ‘after I’ve sorted out somewhere for you to go, Zoe. Just pack what you’ll need for the next few days.’

  I was elated at the thought of getting away from my home and family, even if it wasn’t going to be forever. But I was also very anxious about being left there with Mum after what I’d just said and done. For some reason, however, she didn’t follow me when I went up to my bedroom to grab what I thought I might need and shove it into my school bag. In fact, she stayed in the kitchen and didn’t speak to me at all until the social worker came back a couple of hours later, when she shouted at me, ‘You better not have taken my fucking hairbrush.’ And that was the last thing she said to me before I was taken into care.

  I discovered some years later that the social worker had made a note in my file to the effect that my mother was ‘very verbally abusive’ towards me. Mum’s parting words did have some relevance, however – in her mind at least – because having never had a hairbrush of my own, I would sometimes use hers. What is interesting, in retrospect, is the fact that as soon as I showed the two women my bruises and Mum knew I was going to be taken into care, she allowed her mask to slip, and finally someone outside the family was able to see her for what she really was – a foul-mouthed, screaming bully who was more than capable of inflicting physical violence on her daughter.

  Before I left the house that day, the social worker checked my bag, and I can remember feeling embarrassed when I told her I didn’t have a toothbrush. Although my brothers all had their own, I had to steal toothpaste from the cupboard in the kitchen and smear it on my finger to clean my teeth. It must have been obvious to Valerie Hampton that I was anxious, but instead of saying something comforting to try to make me feel better, she told me coldly, ‘You will be given a toothbrush and toothpaste when you arrive at the children’s home. Any other toiletries you require will be purchased for you in due course.’ So I didn’t say anything else.

  When we got downstairs, the social worker opened the living-room door and said, ‘Say goodbye to your parents, Zoe,’ which was something I hadn’t even thought about doing and the prospect filled me with dread. But I needn’t have worried, because Mum wasn’t there. ‘She doesn’t want to talk to her,’ Dad told the social worker. Then he handed me a £5 note and told me to be good, and I followed the social worker out of the house.

  I was very frightened when I left home that day. However dysfunctional my family might have been and however unhappy I’d been throughout all the time I was living with them, it was the only home I’d ever known and I couldn’t even begin to imagine what lay ahead. But as well as being frightened I was relieved, because whatever did lie in store for me, I knew it couldn’t be as bad as spending the rest of my childhood being beaten by my mother and living in constant fear of being sexually abused by my dad.

  It wasn’t until I was sitting on the back seat of the social worker’s car clutching my school bag that what she’d said about a children’s home finally sank in and I asked her, ‘Aren’t I going to a foster home then?’ The image I’d always had in my head of the ‘better place’ I might be able to live if I ever plucked up the courage to ask for help was of a clean house with sunny rooms that smelled of furniture polish, with foster parents who bore a striking resemblance to my friend Carly’s mum and dad. So I was disappointed when she said, ‘There isn’t anyone available at the moment who can deal with … Who can take you in.’

  Perhaps the words she didn’t say were ‘someone with your issues of drinking and self-harming’. Then, after pausing for a moment, she told me, ‘We’ve found a bed for you at a place called Denver House. It’s a residential care home for children of your age. You’ll be fine there for a few weeks, while we do the assessments we need to do.’

  It wasn’t what I’d been hoping for and I was disappointed not to be going to a foster home. But even being at Denver House was going to be better than being at home. Or so I thought.

  Chapter 6

  We were driving through town on the way to the children’s home when the social worker suddenly said, ‘Oh look, isn’t that your mum?’ She must have left the house almost as soon as we did and I could tell that the social worker was surprised to see her out shopping, carrying on as normal as if nothing had happened. I wished she hadn’t pointed her out though, because I still believed that it was my fault Mum didn’t love me, and my heart ached when I saw her.

  It was late afternoon when we arrived at Denver House. My first impression was of a large, intimidating building that wasn’t homely at all, in any way. In fact, a girl who came for a brief stay a few days later freaked out when she saw the bars on the office window, because she thought she was going to be locked in, like in a prison. It was an impression that Yvonne, the very stern woman who was in the office on the day I arrived, did little to dispel.

  With her long, billowing skirt, ‘sensible’ flat-heeled shoes and a mouth that turned down at the corners, Yvonne looked as though she probably disapproved of smiling and never indulged in it herself, which was a first impression that proved to be very accurate. She was bad-tempered too, and got really angry with some lads who burst into the room to have a look at the new girl while she was explaining the rules to me. After she’d shooed them out and shut the door, I could hear them laughing and running up and down the corridor, until eventually she went out and shouted at them to be quiet because they were scaring me, which was true, although I think I was even more intimidated by her than I was by them.

  When another woman came to take me to my room, I kept my head down as I followed her through what seemed to be a maze of corridors and up the stairs to the first floor. Each corridor was divided by a couple of glass fire doors and carpeted in a rough material that was more like something you’d wipe your feet on than actual carpet. ‘That’s your bathroom,’ the woman said, nodding her head towards one of the four or five doors we passed before she stopped, unlocked another door and added, ‘This is your room.’ Then, after she’d searched my bag for anything I could use to harm myself – or someone else – she gave me a key, told me I’d be charged for a replacement if I lost it, and left me there alone.

  Dismal as it was, my bedroom at home was almost luxurious compared to the stark austerity of the room I had at the unit. The furniture consisted of a narrow wardrobe, a small set of drawers and a bedside table, all of which was industrial
grade, designed, like the carpet, to be hard-wearing rather than to look nice. There was a narrow fold-up bed too, the sort of thing you’d normally keep tucked away in a corner somewhere for use by an occasional visitor. In fact, the mattress was so thin it provided almost no protection from the metal springs of the bed frame, and after I’d slept on it for a few nights, a sympathetic member of staff gave me an extra duvet to put under the sheet. But at least there was a lock on the door.

  I had to go down to the dining room at tea time, but because of the problems I have eating in front of other people, I sat on a sofa at one end of the room, as far away as I could get from where all the other kids and members of staff were sitting, and didn’t eat anything at all that night.

  Sensing that some of the kids were looking at me, I avoided making eye contact with any of them as I examined my surroundings. The carpet at my end of the room was the same dark green as the one in the corridors, and as well as another pink-cushioned cane sofa like the one I was sitting on, there was a bookcase with a few books, some board games and a half dozen copies of National Geographic magazine on its shelves. The floor at the other end of the room – the eating end – was covered in thick lino, which was separated from the carpet by a strip of metal, and as well as two dining tables – one for the staff and the other for the kids – there were some mismatched chairs that looked as if they’d probably come from charity shops.

  We were allowed to watch TV in our rooms for a couple of hours every night, so after everyone else had finished their tea, I went back upstairs and watched A Touch of Frost, because it reminded me of being at home with my family, or at least of sitting in my bedroom and hearing the theme music playing when they watched it together downstairs.

  Like the woman in the office when I arrived earlier that afternoon, the member of staff who came to take the TV away didn’t smile at me or ask if I was okay. Apart from telling me her name was Frances and that she’d come to collect the television, she didn’t speak to me at all; she just unplugged the set, picked it up and walked out of my room, leaving me to close the door behind her. In fact, I don’t remember anyone saying anything nice to me on that first day. No one seemed to wonder how it might feel to be in a strange place full of people I didn’t know, or to realise that just a few kind words might make it all a bit less daunting. Or maybe they just didn’t care.

  The sense I already had that nothing had been done to try to make Denver House seem homely and less like an institution was compounded when I was getting ready for bed and went to use the bathroom that I’d be sharing with the lads who had rooms on the same corridor. It wasn’t that the bathroom was dirty; it was just old-fashioned and functional, like something you might find in a pub or a cheap hotel. There was no shower – we used a clear plastic jug to wash our hair; the bath and washbasin were a bit chipped, there were pink tiles on the walls, lino on the floor, and a sanitary bin that was emptied at regular intervals by someone from a sanitary waste disposal company.

  I was in a really bad way by the time I went to live at Denver House. My confidence and self-esteem were low and I found it difficult to do even simple things like keep myself clean. So I was very anxious when told that I would be expected to have a bath every day in a shared bathroom. In fact though, the problem was easily solved when I discovered that the staff ticked things off on the daily record sheets whether you’d done them or not, after which I just splashed some water on my face in the basin instead, and no one seemed to bother.

  The following morning, a member of staff showed me how to use one of the large washing machines that lined a wall in the laundry room. ‘You will be responsible for washing your own clothes,’ she told me. ‘The staff here are not your servants.’ They did wash the bedding, however, and after we’d stripped our beds every Saturday we had to take our sheet, pillowcase and duvet cover downstairs, then collect clean ones from the untidy pile that had been dumped in the cupboard where all the cleaning stuff was kept.

  My mum always made my bed when I lived at home, which was one of the reasons why I wasn’t ever allowed to sit on it. Fortunately, however, I’d learned how to do it myself just a couple of years earlier, during a school trip I’d been on to an activity centre, which lasted for five days and four nights and which I wished would never end. So at least I didn’t have to embarrass myself at Denver House by asking how to change my bedding.

  There were just five lads and one other girl living at Denver House when I arrived. I didn’t see the girl much, and my first impression of the lads was that they were all quite wild, although maybe they were just used to the routine. What I also found intimidating during the first couple of days was that there seemed to be a lot of arguments between the kids and the staff, and a real sense of ‘them and us’, like there is between prisoners and prison officers in TV programmes. So even though no one was openly hostile or aggressive, I was quite scared of the other kids to begin with, although that changed to some extent the second night I was there.

  After supper that evening, most of the lads went to the TV room and I decided to follow them. Of all the rooms in Denver House, the TV room was probably the most homely, even though the blue paint on the walls was scuffed and the dark-grey carpet too bristly to be comfortable to sit on. The furniture consisted of a TV on a stand, two sofas and a single armchair, which actually matched and could have come from Ikea, rather than being charity-shop rejects like most of the rest of the furniture in the building, but which had burn marks on the armrests that I found out later were caused by the habit several of the lads had of holding lighters to almost anything that was made of wood.

  Opposite where I was standing in the doorway of the TV room, watching the boys messing about, there was another open door through which I could see into a room with pale-yellow walls and the same grey carpet that was only very slightly bigger than the pool table it contained. I was just leaning forward to get a better view into it when a boy who had said hello to me and seemed quite friendly the night before suddenly pushed me. I don’t think it was personal. I think he was just trying to look big in front of the other lads. But I knew instinctively that if I didn’t stick up for myself right from the start, I’d end up being bullied by everyone. So I pushed him back, and we started to fight.

  Fortunately, after we’d wrestled each other to the ground, I managed to get on top of him and hit him on the head with my trainer, much to the amusement of the other boys, who were standing around us laughing. The whole thing probably only lasted a few seconds, but I’d been right to stand up for myself and no one else bothered me after that.

  When I was quite young, my brother Ben got a punch bag, which he put up in one of the sheds in the garden at home. I had already seen boxing on the television and had been completely enthralled by it, because it was so quick and clever and because the men were sweating and I thought they were shining. So by the time I saw the Rocky films a bit later, I was already hooked.

  I know some people hate the violence of boxing, but it does involve skills and sportsmanship that I found inspiring. And perhaps I was also struck by the whole concept of being able to fight back. So, as I wasn’t allowed to touch my brother’s punch bag, I’d made my own out of a 3-litre cola bottle that I filled with grit, then somehow managed to tie to a rafter with some washing line in the other, very rickety garden shed. I couldn’t hit the bottle very hard – the grit-filled plastic would probably have broken my knuckles if I’d tried – but just going through the motions made me wonder if maybe I could fight back too, which I had actually done, just once, before my brief encounter at the unit.

  It was at primary school and a couple of girls had asked me and my friend Martha to go to the park with them. But when we got there, they started hitting me and calling me names, then chased after me when I tried to run away. They had obviously planned it, and when Martha ran up a ladder on to the climbing frame and refused to come down to help me, I decided to try to talk to them.

  ‘Why did you ask me to come to the park wit
h you if you don’t even like me?’ I asked them.

  ‘Because you’re fat and ugly,’ one of them said.

  Then she kicked me, they both laughed, and I punched her in the face. I only did it once. I know it isn’t okay to hit someone, and I had tried to talk to them. But I’d never experienced anything that came even close to the feeling of satisfaction I had knowing that I could stand up for myself and refuse to be bullied. It was their turn to run away after that, and the next time I saw them they were nice to me and we became friends. It was a lesson I put to good use that night at Denver House, and although I didn’t ever become real friends with anyone there, most of the lads were actually all right.

  It was possible to avoid having much contact with the other kids in the unit most of the time, except at meal times when we were all supposed to be in the dining room. Even that rule wasn’t really enforced, however: if you weren’t there, you simply didn’t get anything to eat until the next meal. So I ended up hardly eating anything at all, although I don’t think any of the staff even noticed. Certainly no one ever tried to talk to me about the issues I had with food. Eating your meals in the dining room was just another thing they ticked off on the daily record sheets whether you’d done it or not.

  There’s a saying ‘First up, best dressed’, which I think used to refer to children in large, poor families who had to share their clothes: the first child to get up in the morning could take their pick, while the last to surface would have to make do with whatever was left, even if it didn’t fit. It was pretty much like that at Denver House too, with the charity bags of clothes people used to drop off for us, and with the bedding – for example, the last lad to collect his bed linen on a Saturday morning might end up with pink sheets. I suppose it didn’t matter in the greater scheme of things that some of the stuff we were given was okay and some of it really wasn’t. But it seemed to be yet another indication of the general lack of thought that was evident in lots of aspects of the way the staff at the unit treated us, which was a shame looking back on it, because for kids who already believe they’re worthless, even small things can reinforce the idea that anything is good enough for them. It’s obvious when you think about it, which no one at Denver House seemed to do at the time.