Selected extracts from interview with participant 11
I:
Do you want to start off talking me through your timeline?
R:
Okay. So in terms of my childhood, growing up, I lived at home with my mum and dad. It was pretty good, my mum and dad were so in love, always running around and hugging each other and laughing and kissing. There was always lots of fun, Mum didn’t mind if I made a mess if I was painting or we were baking. We lived in a really nice place, with a park with a great slide only a few minutes from the house, which I used to go to most days. And my mum’s sisters, my aunties, lived just around the corner. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, but my cousins Jess, Kate and Jim and I were pretty close.
I:
It sounds as though you enjoyed that part of your childhood?
R:
Yes, definitely.
I:
Did that change when your dad left?
R:
No, not really. Things were calmer at home, and it was quieter, but it was okay. Dad told me I needed “to be mum’s little helper”, but looking back, I was already a really good kid. Mum and I always understood each other really easily: I could tell when she wanted help and when she’d rather be left alone. It did used to upset me when mum was sad, because I knew she missed him, but I think I was too young to properly understand. I was only four, and I still got to see dad in the evenings or the weekend. At about the same time, I started playschool. I really enjoyed having so many friends to play with, and my cousin Jim was in my class, which meant I got to see him every day. We’re still good friends now.
I:
OK.
R:
I found it harder when I moved to primary school. At playschool everything felt really fun and easy; I really didn’t understand the work at primary school. When everybody was making sentences and spelling words, I just couldn’t do it. It made me really upset because I wanted to get the gold stars that the other children were getting. When I was nine I was diagnosed as being severely dyslexic, and then I got some help at school. Mrs Wiggins came to see me in the library twice a week. I found it really embarrassing at first having to leave lessons, but she understood how my brain worked and helped me to start to read as quickly as the other children in my class.
I:
You mentioned some friends on your timeline?
R:
Yes, Nicola and Sarah. We had to hang our coats next to each other on the first day of school, and Mrs Clemo, our first schoolteacher, told us that we had to look out for each other and be friends. So we did. Nicola lived close to my house - you just had to walk along the back lane, and there were no cars there - so at some point, I must have been about 8 or 9, my mum said that I could walk to Nicola’s house by myself. I felt so grown up. I used to go there all the time - my mum used to joke that her mum would have to start charging me rent! Just before the end of primary school, my dad had to move away for work. It felt kind of weird, because it happened around the same sort of time that Nan died, and Dad had been living with her since he moved out. Thinking about it now, I’ve never really thought before - those two things are probably related, and maybe he didn’t need to move away. He tried to talk to me on the phone, but he never really said very much, so we stopped speaking very often, but that’s okay.
R:
Things were different in secondary school. Sarah and Nicola had to go to a different school. I didn’t get a place to go to their school because we lived just outside the catchment area. There were a few people from my primary school that went, including the school bully, a girl called Fiona, but it wasn’t the same as having my friends there. I found it quite lonely and tried to hide away. Fiona joined up with a group of other bullies, and she made my life hell in that first year. I think I became known as someone you could easily bully - they’d all make fun of me being dyslexic and because I didn’t have the most expensive shoes or whatever.
I:
Did you tell anyone?
R:
I told my mum, and she tried really hard to sort things out. She spoke to the school, and when that didn’t work, she went to Fiona’s parents’ house one evening and banged on the door until they let her in. I was completely mortified, but the bullying eased off after that.
[….]
R:
And then (when I was 14) I met James, I had been going to trampolining class on a Friday night at the community centre. It was the time that I always saw Nicola, and I loved trampolining, I was so good: I could do all of the somersaults. One evening there was a party, and Jo, the girl whose house it was, her older brother James was there too. I thought he was so cool, he was a bit older, and the lads my age all seemed so immature, you know - they still all thought girly stuff was stupid. He looked old enough that he was able to buy alcohol, and so we were all drinking cider at the party. We went out for the last two years of school, and then he decided to go into the army. I really didn’t want him to do it, and we argued all of the time. I really loved him, but I just couldn’t face him being away all of the time, so we split up.
[…]
R:
I didn’t do very well at school, even though in Year 8 I got some really good help: they gave me a computer, and that made everything so much easier, but I just couldn’t think when it came down to my GCSEs [exams]. Everything with James was just going on, and I couldn’t think about anything else. Thinking about it now, I don’t have a GCSE in English or maths, you know, above the grade C, so it meant that I couldn’t go on the college course I wanted to. I think it’s all worked out well now, in the end.
I:
Do you want to tell me what happened after you left school?
R:
I was really panicking, because I had always planned to go on and do hair and beauty college, you know, an NVQ, but they wouldn’t take me unless I agreed to redo my GCSE in English. After finding school so hard, I just didn’t want to do any more exams, and I didn’t want to lie to them about it. My cousin Jim always said he wasn’t going to go to college - he wanted to get out and start work, he said. Before he even finished his exams, he had a job lined-up in a call centre where some of his friends worked. He said it would be a real laugh and that he could put in a good word for me. So he got me the job. I had to go for an interview, I felt so nervous, but he told me it would be okay that I had the job.
[…]
R:
On a work night out, I met Nick. I hadn’t really had another boyfriend since James - they’d all seemed to just be interested in one thing. Nick works on the evening shift, so I hadn’t met him before. On our first date, I could tell he was different: he wore a shirt and everything. My mum told me then that she thought he was a keeper. We’d only been together about six months when I fell pregnant. I was absolutely terrified. I didn’t know how mum would react, I thought dad would give me a right telling off, and I had no idea how I was going to be a mum to a tiny baby. But Nick was great. He told me we could do whatever I wanted - he made it seem like it would be easy.[…]
R:
I had the worst morning sickness - I felt sick literally all of the time. Before I was pregnant, I’d go out drinking every Friday and Saturday with work people. We’d have such a laugh, but once I was pregnant I couldn’t even bear the smell, so I had to stop going out. It felt really weird; I felt so different to everybody else. Luckily, I found out that Nicola was also pregnant, and that made it better - to know someone knew what I was going through. We both ended up going to this session run by the midwife where they tell you what you’re supposed to do. It was so patronising, it’s like, ‘I’m young, not stupid’.
[…]
I:
How have things been since Natalie was born?
R:
It’s been hard, people tell you that they don’t sleep, and that you won’t get to sleep, but you can’t really understand it until it’s happening. We are lucky that we live with Julie [Nick’s mum] and Paul [Nick’s stepdad], but… No one else is going to see this, are they?
I:
No, nobody will know what you said.
R:
It’s just sometimes they can be really pushy. Like I wanted to try to breastfeed Natalie, but Julie kept on telling me to go to bed, to get some rest, but I think it was because she wanted to give Natalie a bottle. So she’s been really kind, and I don’t know what I’d do without her helping, but sometimes it’s just difficult. I feel like I can’t do what I want with my baby, but there wouldn’t be space for us to go and live with mum and Mark (my stepdad).
[…]
R:
It’s like, now I’m pregnant again, I know I shouldn’t be smoking, and I’ve tried so hard to stop. Nick tells me off for it, but in the evening when he’s out at work I sit with Julie [his mum] and she lets me have one of her fags. I only ever have one, one a day, two at most. When I see the midwife, I have to blow into this tube and it says if you smoke, so I make sure I don’t smoke the day before, and it says that I’m a non-smoker. I am definitely going to stop, but it’s just so hard.