Ben (3 page)

Dad’s work on the chalets finished in time for the new season and so, suddenly, he was looking for work again – and we were looking for a new home. We didn’t have to look far. Mum got a job at the chip shop in the Kings Oak caravan park to help out financially and, as part of the package, we were allowed to move into one of the vans. Dad bought an old blue Transit flat-bed truck and started going out collecting scrap metal. It went well. For once we had a bit of money coming in, but there was a price. With two parents out, who was getting our tea ready? Who was cleaning the house? Who was picking up ten-year-old Stephen and five-year-old Danny after school?

I didn’t mind doing any of it, not at first. What sister doesn’t enjoy bossing around her kid brothers? It wasn’t so different from playing the parent with my dolls, especially when Danny was young. For as long as I could remember, I’d always known I wanted to be a mum, and my little brother was the perfect guinea pig. He drew the line at letting me dress him up but I think we all had fun in those early years, when the age difference wasn’t such an issue. In any case, what was the alternative? If you see your mum and dad working every hour God sends, then that rubs off. Stephen had his chores and I had mine. That’s just the way it was.

But then one day my eyes were opened. I’d started getting the bus home and my friend Tina said, ‘Are you coming into the village?’

‘What for?’

Tina looked at me like I was an alien. ‘To hang about. Everyone’s going.’

I said I couldn’t. I had to pick up Stephen and Danny, get them home and start on my jobs.

‘Tomorrow, then?’ Tina said.

I shook my head. ‘I have to do it every day.’

‘Oh. Poor you.’

That was the first time I realised there was a world going on outside my family. And I couldn’t take part in it. I didn’t mind helping out around the house – it seemed only fair. But why couldn’t I play with my friends as well?

Mum did her best to make it up to me. For my thirteenth birthday I was thrown a surprise party at the local pub. They hired the back room and all my friends and family were there, waiting to spring out when I arrived. I remember getting a lovely jewellery box. Mum said it was because I was growing up, now I was entering my teens.

We were all growing up, in a way. Mum got a job at Wilkinson’s Home and Garden Store and before long we left our caravan for a bungalow on Wilton Avenue. It was only rented, but after a year or two in holiday lets, it felt like a real home. The only downside was having further to walk to look after my brothers after school. Then Mum was promoted to supervisor and, what with Dad’s scrap business doing well, we moved again. To another bungalow.

That we owned.

Sandy Lodge was a three-bedroom bungalow on Sandy Lane, a leafy road that ran parallel with the beach. The only things separating us from the sea was a bank of trees, then sand dunes and the occasional beach hut. I’d always liked everywhere we lived but this place, with its beautiful green gardens in front of the
vast wash of golden sand, looked different. It felt different, too. Everyone just seemed happier, Mum and Dad included. I could sense it. Especially when Dad started his usual thing of knocking down walls and putting in fireplaces. This time he went even further and converted the loft to give Stephen his own room up there. It really was a great time.

I was starting to have fun outside the house as well. For some reason I took up karate lessons once a week. Mum and Dad were friends with the teacher, a giant guy called Mick Baxendale, so I guess that’s how I fell into it. I didn’t go for long and, in fact, when I next saw Mick again it would be under very different circumstances.

Weekends were my real chance to see my friends. None of us had much money so there was a lot of time spent hanging around the village square or going down to the beach and chatting in the shelters there. At fourteen and fifteen, I noticed I naturally gravitated towards the boys’ groups. It wasn’t a flirty thing – not at first – because we were all just pals. The girls just seemed a bit too bitchy; most of the talk was about who was going to be seen with the best-looking boy. For a while, that boy was Darren Seabrook. It seemed that everyone who wasn’t going out with him seemed to be bitching about whoever was. Which is how I knew, one day, that they were bitching about me.

Darren was my first boyfriend but we both knew he wasn’t what anyone would call ‘a keeper’: his eye was always on someone else. I suppose that’s how I’d caught him in the first place. What’s more, as soon as we were all in a group he’d blank whatever girl he was with to speak to the other lads. Still, when you’re that age you don’t know any better. And he was, after all, considered the most handsome boy in the group.

But boys were definitely on the agenda and there was no better place than Chapel St Leonards to meet them. Like every seaside town, it had a constant flow of new blood. As soon as the weather improved, they arrived – and went – like the tide, as hotels and B&Bs welcomed that week’s holidaymakers. And where did they all hang out? At the pleasure beach and the arcades – in other words, the same places we already were.

I don’t think I was a bad girl by any means. Not compared to some of my friends, and definitely not considering I was only allowed out at weekends and, as I got older, for an hour or two after dinner. But it was nice to have attention from fresh faces. More than that, it was just refreshing to see different people, hear different voices and get more of a flavour of what was going on outside Chapel.

Looks were becoming more important for me. Most of my friends dressed like every other Lincolnshire teenager. A lot of the holiday crowd were variations on the same theme. My style came direct from
Top of the Pops.

I suppose I was fifteen when I first fell in love with Boy George. The problem was, I was already infatuated with Madonna. So, one day I’d have ribbons in my crimped hair and very loud make-up like a Culture Club tribute act; the next I’d be wearing a polka-dot ra-ra skirt, day-glo legwarmers and matching boob tube with the flimsiest netting covering my stomach. To complete the Madonna look, I’d backcomb my hair. For Boy George, I even bought a hat like the one he wore in the ‘Karma Chameleon’ video. I once won a fancy-dress competition because people liked my Boy George costume so much. What the judges didn’t know was that that was how I dressed all the time.

After three years of being Danny and Stephen Needham’s babysitter, I was finally getting my own personality. Unfortunately, I didn’t have many opportunities to show it. I was still only allowed out till eight in the evening, and it was beginning to hurt. Dad had strict ground rules on how long a girl should be out on her own, and that was about the limit. Of course, all my friends were out later. Even Stephen was allowed to come home at nine. That, I suppose, grated the most. He was two years younger than I was, and it was because of him and Danny I wasn’t able to go out with friends after school. For the first time in my life I found myself saying, ‘It’s not fair.’

But there was no getting out of it, however often I begged.

‘We’re a team,’ Dad would say. ‘We all have responsibilities. Yours is to look after your brothers until we get home.’

I couldn’t argue, as much as I wanted to. But I felt trapped. In the daytimes it was school, in the afternoons it was doing chores and at night it was bed. Then one day I thought,
If I can’t get out of my chores, I’ll have to get out of something else.

That only left school and bed.

With a village full of that week’s new faces, wasting every day at the Earl of Scarbrough comp was the last thing I wanted to do. So I stopped going. It began innocently. A boy called Craig whom I’d met that Saturday said, ‘Fancy meeting up tomorrow lunchtime?’

I thought about how long it would take to get the bus back to the village square and decided.

‘Yes. All right. I’ll meet you at 12.15 by the clock tower.’

That would give me half an hour with him, then fifteen minutes to get back for afternoon classes. It was doable. But when the moment came to get back on the bus, I didn’t take it.

I’d never bunked off school before and for an hour or two I couldn’t relax. Even though Craig and I had run down to the beach, I still expected to see teachers come crawling out of the dunes hunting for me. But they didn’t come. And the next day at morning registration, nobody mentioned anything. As far as my form tutor was concerned, I’d been there all day.

The second I had that lightbulb moment I thought,
Well, they won’t miss me this afternoon either!

At first I did it a couple of times a week, always waiting nervously for the hand-on-the-shoulder moment. Then it became more and more frequent and, eventually, I was almost brazen about it. I wasn’t getting up to anything naughty with these lads and I still got back in time to collect seven-year-old Danny and get him home and the dinner on. What was I doing wrong?

Lots, obviously. Eventually, the teachers worked out my little ruse and told my parents. Dad, as expected, hit the roof. Mum waited till he’d calmed down and then told me the same things in calmer tones. They were disappointed in me. What was I playing at? How could I deceive them both like that?

And of course she kept asking me why I’d done it. But the truth was I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t say, ‘You’ve kept me indoors looking after my brothers for so long, cooking dinners, ironing and cleaning, when I should have been out there with my friends. I’m just trying to have the childhood you never let me have!’

If I’d said half of that it would have broken her heart. So I took the tears, took the punishment of being grounded for a week, and let Dad drive me to school the next day. And then I caught the bus into the village at lunchtime as usual, and didn’t go back.

Again, it was a week before the school twigged. Dad was called in with me to see the head, which didn’t please him because it meant time off work. The head told him that I’d been absent again, and made the mistake of asking what he was going to do about it.

‘What am
I
going to do about it? I drove her to school every day. I marched her through the doors. It’s your bloody job to keep her here!’ With that he gave me a look and said, ‘I’ll see you later.’

I couldn’t have been more nervous waiting for Mum and Dad to come home that night. I made more of an effort than usual getting dinner read: I really pulled out all the stops, as though that would stop me getting punished for skipping school and, even worse, showing Dad up in front of the head.

I’ll be honest, I was expecting the slipper. Instead, Mum said, ‘We’ve spoken to the school. They’re recommending sending you to a psychiatrist.’

I hadn’t seen that coming. I don’t think anyone had. Mum looked sad as she said it. But they were at their wits’ end. The school said I had psychological problems. I wasn’t a normal child. I needed specialist help.

Living in a caravan had never bothered me. But having my friends discover I was seeing a ‘shrink’ was too humiliating to imagine. I tried everything to get out of going, to no avail. Mum drove me to the therapist’s office, then sat in the waiting room until my hour was up. Then she was called in without me and it was my turn to wait.

When the door opened again, the psychiatrist was smiling and Mum was in tears.

I’d poured my heart out to that stranger and, by the looks of it, she’d repeated every word back to Mum. How I’d felt denied
a childhood. How I felt robbed of the chance of making friends, of fitting in, each time they’d moved us. How I hadn’t felt valued as anything other than as a glorified babysitter. How I’d played mummy to a seven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old when I should have been trying on lipsticks in Boots with my friends.

I suppose I had been rebelling, but not intentionally. I’d never meant to hurt anyone, it was just how I felt. And I think Mum understood. The psychiatrist made sure of that. Mum couldn’t wait to apologise. Dad did too, in his own way. Stephen was old enough to look after Danny now, and do more around the house. I think he realised that maybe I should have more time to call my own.

Best of all, the psychiatrist told them I wasn’t mad. ‘Kerry won’t need to come again unless she wants to. She’s just a girl who wants a childhood she feels she never had.’

I wasn’t a wayward teenager. I was just a normal one.

After that, family life was sweet. For a while. Quite a short while, actually. Mum and Dad did cut me some slack and I tried to stay at school as often as I could bear.

But then I met Simon.

Being allowed to go out straight from school made a huge difference to my life. Still, though, Mum insisted I go home first to change. My friends weren’t made to do this but I didn’t mind. It meant by the time I got back to the beach or the square or wherever we were meeting, I’d stand out in my Madonna number among a sea of kids all bedecked in the same black and white blazers and tops.

If anything, the boys looked more identical than the girls: there wasn’t much they could do to personalise school trousers and shirts. But even on weekends or when they’d changed, they all seemed to appear wearing the same casual ‘uniform’. It was as if they didn’t dare stand out. Which was probably why us girls found it so easy to drift from one lad to another: they looked the same, they acted the same, they may as well have been the same. I was dating a nice boy called Mark Williams at the time. We were just kids fooling around. He’d rather have been with his mates and me with mine, but going out was what we were expected to do. It would only be a matter of time before he swapped me for one of my friends or I him for one of his.