a long time ago

this is me. it was taken, i think, outside the flats where we lived. i always look really hard at old pictures of me to try and see if they give any clues to what was going on inside my head. in most of them i am just a little girl looking at the camera.

this one would have been when i was about 5. i would have already been at school.

i remember on my first day at school my dad was living somewhere else. my mum said he was living in a flat in camberley with a woman. later on he came back. my mum told me she did not want him to come back but he had threatened her that if she would not let him he would never see me again. i was devoted to him and she could not bear the thought of this. when he was living away from us i used to sit by the window on the old sofa waiting for him to come home. my dad had grey hair and i used to call him my ghost. my mum told me that i kept saying "where is my ghost?" which broke her heart.

for my first day at school my mum bought me a wooden pencil box with a sliding lid. i spent ages playing with the lid. it had a little dent like a handle so you could pull it open. i had an apple and got into trouble for eating it in the class. no-one told you that apples were for break time.