FORWARD.

From my earliest memories I only had one thing…. ‘my family’, ‘my kids’.

I was told time and time again that I was worthless and so my world revolved around my younger brothers and sisters whom I looked after with a sort of tenacious ferocity. They came first and woe betide anyone that tried to hurt them. To do this I became stubborn, determined and single minded with a fierce appreciation of right and wrong.

We are certainly products of our own childhood for this outlook has stayed with me, much to the annoyance at times of my husband and own children.

I am severely dyslexic, with hardly any formal education, having to teach myself to read, write and even tell the time when I left the orphanage at sixteen. This means that many of my descriptions are voiced in simple, childlike terms and on the whole we have used these, except where they did not truly describe the depth of the feelings or the situation, then I have leaned on my husband to provide a more illustrative description. Please excuse this, but although the words sometimes are not exactly my own, the situations are. My memory is accurate, even from the age of three, and events at that time have been verified through later conversations with relatives.

And the feelings are only too real and are often as strong today as they were at the time.

It has been difficult to decide on the language to use to write my story. I now speak with no accent whatsoever and using hardly any ‘Scottish terms’. My dialect was beaten out of me at the orphanage along with the foul language that punctuated every sentence. Indeed I have little recall of the dialect nowadays and an almost pathological aversion to using swear words.

So we have written the account using my words now, with a few terms and a mere hint of the coarse language I used. Again please excuse this and we apologise for any glaring errors.

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CHAPTER 1

The sun would wake me, managing to force it’s way through the grime-stained window and light the dingy room in which I lived. A small spark of brightness in a dismal and depressing landscape. I’d slip carefully from between the twins sleeping bodies, the warm wetness of the mattress at once obvious, and I’d perch on the end of the bed and try to wipe the wet pish* from my body with a scrap of old grey towel.