PART 1
I grew up in care.
If you have, you know the thing where you get placed, and it goes well for four months, and then one evening it stops going well and nobody can quite tell you why, and you are back in a minibus with a bag on your knees.
Three times for me. The third one lasted eleven months and I still think about their kitchen.
That is also where I met my husband. He was in the same place. Two of us out of about forty in that building.
We fell in love properly, later, at nineteen, and it was not complicated at all.
Neither of us had a career. I was on a till at a supermarket on Marner Street. He fixed cars.
We got married and rented a decent flat and had Hattie, and for about three years we were as happy as
