A Child Called Hope: The true story of a foster mother’s love

Like lots of other Italian immigrants, Dad worked at an Italian restaurant, but there was never any money. Dad was a gambler, so they had lots of money worries. He loved to bet on the horses, but he would also bet on football – anything, really – and his pockets were always full of little white gambling slips that he brought home from the bookies. He lost more often than not, but you knew when he had won, because he would come home with presents. If he had lost, he could go missing for days at a time.

Dad probably shrugged off a lot of responsibility, because my mum had her family network to support her, so why was he needed? When her family used to argue with him, I was always his ally and stuck up for him. He was never wrong in my eyes; he was never wrong until I was in my late thirties and I started to understand what kind of life my mum must have had with him.

I used to think Mum was mean and I hated her for shouting at Dad, but what I didn’t think about when I was a child was how much responsibility she had. I never understood my mother; all I knew was that my dad made me feel like I was the most special child in the world, and whatever I did wrong, he stood by me. My mum, on the other hand, had three jobs and four kids by the time she was twenty-two and she had no time to mollycoddle me. Not only that, she had a husband who gambled away his wages. If only I had taken that on board while I was growing up, I might have been able to understand the stress and strain she was under and given her an easier time. Instead, I was always angry with her for shouting at my dad. What chance did Mum have with me? She would have got more response if she had tried to reason with the cooker.

Dad should have been the main breadwinner, but the responsibility for putting food on the table was down to Mum. She was exhausted half the time, because when she wasn’t at home looking after us she was working shifts in the local pub or in the café, and when she wasn’t doing that she cleaned the local school.

Somehow, their relationship survived, but Mum got no sympathy from Nan. It didn’t matter how many plates got broken or how many saucepans got dented, how often she saw my mum sobbing her heart out or how often my dad went missing; Nan’s response was always the same: ‘You’ve made your bed, you lie on it.’

Was she right? I would say she was, because although it seemed harsh, she kept the family unit together.

We lived in Bermondsey at the time in a two-up, two-down. We had no boiler and no hot water upstairs, so we attached a hosepipe to the downstairs tap, threaded it out of the kitchen window and threw it up at the bathroom window until somebody caught it and we could fill the bath. The big problem was that by the time the bath was full, the water was lukewarm. The bathroom was freezing anyway, because you had to have the window open, so we sat and shivered as we washed ourselves clean. Even now, I can bath myself in two minutes flat.

I went to a Catholic school, obviously – being from an Irish-Italian background I would not have gone anywhere else – but I hated the nuns. I remember when I was about six, walking along the corridor to a class and because I started talking I was dragged out of the line. I had no idea I was doing anything wrong, but the next minute I remember getting the cane on my hand in the head teacher’s office. Four times she hit me with full force. She didn’t care that I was little; she held nothing back. The head teacher was a nun, and she was so terrifying I remember wetting myself, and then getting the cane again for wetting myself. I got no sympathy when I started crying; I was simply given a clean pair of knickers, told not to cry and sent back to class.

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