Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [8]
It sounds a bit weird – a bit vain even – saying that, but from everything I can remember, everything I’ve read and everything other people have told me, my mother would have done anything for me. Yes, I’m sure she’d had the stuffing knocked out of her when she realized I was on my way, and yes, given the choice, she probably would have done things differently. But from the moment she discovered she was pregnant, that was it. She was going to be a mum. She really did think she was blessed. Her baby was a gift. Unfortunately, a child was all she had.
Even after relocating to Peacehaven, just along the coast from Brighton, Mum couldn’t easily work with a child to look after, so we existed mainly on state benefits. It’s possible my father also paid some support. A few pounds here and there doesn’t go far, though. We really had nothing.
Home was a series of cheap apartments, each as sparsely furnished as the last. By the time I was eight I was telling people I’d lived in eighteen different places. A lot of my early memories are of us unpacking or packing and waking up somewhere new. Most of the properties were very similar. There were few home comforts to speak of, rarely a stick of furniture and no toys. We had a gorgeous tri-coloured cat called Mushka and a guitar. Apart from a suitcase of clothes, that was pretty much all we turned up with at each new flat.
Granny told me how hard Mum fought to make it work. How she devoted herself to looking after me and doing as much as she could on her limited budget, with trips to parks and zoos. Sometimes it was just a case of letting me play with friends. Because we were constantly moving, our different flats are blurred together in my memory. The earliest one I remember, as a four-year-old, was pretty indistinct inside. I just recall it had a wooden verandah – the only one on the street – which I thought was terribly exotic. Mum would let the other kids on the street come up and play there. Whole days would whizz by and we never tired of it. It was our little kingdom.
‘She did her best,’ Granny told me, absolutely no judgement in her voice. You don’t need money to be a good parent, she understood that. You just need to want to do your best – and we both knew Mum did.
Even so, staring at four walls all day couldn’t have been easy for such a free spirit and she was happy when Granny offered to babysit. I’ve seen wonderful photos of me pottering around in Granny’s garden or playing in their house. I obviously spent a fair bit of time there when I was young.
The only downside was having to conform to Granny’s fashion sense. Two years of hairdressing hadn’t just given her a hairstyle for life – if Granny had had her way I’d still have my hair the same today as she used to style it then, with a tuft of hair pulled through a little cotton toggle on the top of my head. Any other style and Granny thought I looked scruffy. At two I looked quite cute with a little curl looping down across the middle of my forehead. At four I still looked sweet, if unimaginative. By ten, though, I was thoroughly embarrassed about it. But that didn’t matter. That’s how little girls wore their hair, Granny said, and all the while she was teasing the strands into place she’d sing, ‘There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead . . .’ That was me, she said. I never really thought about it at the time, but did she really think I was horrid when I was bad?
For the first few years I lived in blissful ignorance of our impoverished state. I knew all the flats were cold, but I never realized it was because Mum was too poor to afford heating. I knew I moved house a lot more than other children, but I never appreciated it was because we hadn’t paid the rent on the last place. Not even when Mum made me tiptoe down the stairs, our meagre belongings dragged behind us, did I question anything. Why would I? Children just get on with