My leaving care story…
Notwithstanding the garish colour scheme, Happy Eater was a slightly dreary chain of roadside restaurants scattered around the A roads of Southern England in the 1980s and early 90s. The kind of place I would probably be too much of a snob to eat at now, unless I really had to. But I didn’t mind so much when I was a teenager — they sold burgers of sorts and anyway, I got to “eat out” so very rarely that it always seemed exciting. It was in a Happy Eater, on the A27 just north of Worthing, that I “left care”.
I was 16-years-old and my brother, who was a couple of years older, and I were being informed by our social worker, Mary, that she would not be seeing us again, because we were no longer “in care”. I did not have any particular emotional response to this. Nor did I have any sense, at the time, of the significance of the moment.
It is possible I felt a little sad I would not see Mary again — she had been my social worker for a very long time (in this respect, I now understand, I was lucky). I never really knew what social workers did, but Mary was benign and kind, and would take me to Happy Eater or the beach at Climping in her Volkswagen Campervan, which always had a Snoopy soft toy sitting in a miniature deckchair at the back. Anyway, she said she would not see me again and she was right, she never did.
The truth is, if you are in care for 14 years you get rather used to adults and other children, significant or not, coming in and out of your life. Everything feels temporary and you have no control over it, not much point getting too upset. However, it would be a mistake to presume this apparent equanimity meant it didn’t affect me — that it did me no harm. Because it did. It’s just that, at the time, I did not realise how. The drip, drip, drip effect of continuous loss and rejection.
I tried as a child, and I often do now, to rationalise things. I had just left the boarding school for boys with emotional and behavioural difficulties that I attended for the last four years of my time in care and was living with my Dad in a council flat. Children who lived with their parents were not in care. Obviously. I have no idea if the local authority still had any legal obligations towards me in 1992, but no further support or input was offered. Perhaps I would have rejected it if it had been — I cannot fully put me into the mind of my 16-year-old self.
For the first year after care, I lived with my dad and attended a photography course at a local college. I wanted to be a war photographer — Christ knows why. But I couldn’t cope with it — I did not know how to make and keep friendships, much less romantic relationships, and I watched college life go on around me. I was too cripplingly shy to even ask for help with aspects of the course I found difficult. I felt stupid, worthless, ugly and scared. So I left. Very sweetly, the first-year tutors wrote to me, they implored me to come back, they said I had “real talent”, they promised to help me in anyway they could. But I just could not face it.
My Dad moved away to Devon, I rented a room and by 17 was living “independently”. I started another course, in performing arts, in another college. To survive financially I signed-on the dole and claimed housing benefit, I was only allowed to do this if I promised to give up college if I found a job. Obviously I did not look for a job, but I became very skilled at convincing the person behind the desk that I really, really was looking.
I gradually made a few friends at college, but really I coped by binge drinking far in excess of any of my peers. It was the only way I could control my social anxiety and, by then, extremely bleak mood. I guess the structure of the course, and generally having a reason to get up and something to do, held me together a little, because at the end of the three years, I really did fall apart.
The straightforward reportage style that I naturally write in does not lend itself to describing my descent into the most terrifying, wretched depression and self-hatred — how I would spend days lying on my bed in a foetal position sobbing, occasionally jumping up to pace around the room and punch the side of my head in rage. How I believed with complete and concrete certainty that there was something innately wrong with me — that I had bad blood.
I became so scared to leave my room, it took a huge effort of will to cash my dole cheque and buy some food once a fortnight. After maybe six months, when I had long since stopped answering the door, a friend of mine scaled the side of the house, climbed in through my first-floor window and jumped into the room I lived in. He moved me, for a few months, into his mum’s house and, in that singular act of kindness, almost certainly saved my life.
Unfortunately, it is not the case that from this point on my life gradually turned around. I continued to struggle for several years in various ways and have bouts of similar episodes, although they tended to pass more quickly. I continued to be lucky, whenever I was at rock bottom, whenever I though I could not survive, someone would treat me with a generosity I did not deserve. Most people, ultimately, are good. Better than I am for sure.
What did I need? What could have been provided for me, as a care leaver, that would have made a difference? Well somewhere secure to live would have been useful — I had nine addresses in the 10 years after I left care and no option to move back to my parents when things went wrong. Some financial support too, so I did not have to fraudulently claim unemployment benefit to go to college, live on value baked beans and bread, and occasionally shoplift.
But mainly, I could have done with someone — a GP, the community psychiatric nurse, maybe a therapist if someone had been willing to pay for it, anyone really — to tell me, to help me understand that there was nothing innately wrong with me. I did not have bad blood. But I had been abandoned by my mother, sadistically physically abused by my first foster carers and bounced around the system for a few years.
And that’s the kind of shit that will fuck anyone up.
