When I was sixteen, after a year in care, I found myself slipping through the cracks. Gran was dead, Mum was dead. I had made a handful of friends in the children’s home but when I left I wanted to draw a line under that phase of my life. I didn’t have a job, I hadn’t had much of an education, but I knew that I had a brain, I just didn’t know where or how to use it. I ended up homeless, sleeping in shelters if I was lucky, on the streets if I wasn’t. Then I met Douglas.

He was training to be a lawyer and, in the little spare time he had, he volunteered at one of the shelters I frequented, dispensing free advice. He must have seen potential, because he went out of his way to help me and later, once I was more or less on my feet, we became involved. He seemed so sophisticated even though he was only twenty-five at the time. I understood that he liked the idea of moulding me, but at that point, he was all I had, and I clung to him. It fell apart the first time because he was unfaithful.

But that’s only half the truth. My reaction crossed a line. I don’t know why he took me back, unless he took pleasure in knowing I was cowed. I had put him in hospital, after all.

I drop my face into my hands, unable to relive those events without catching a wave of humiliation and pain. I was a shell, someone who absorbed everything thrown at her, who lived for and through another person. I belonged to Douglas.

It was only when I got pregnant that things began to change.

Douglas took the news badly. I didn’t expect that at all, and I panicked. I considered an abortion, couldn’t go through with it and almost gave Lottie up for adoption, but something stopped me, some inner strength that I hadn’t been aware I possessed. Douglas had encouraged me to be better. Well, I would be better. A better mother than I had been blessed with.

I left him, moving into a rented one-bedder in Catford. It was above a Balti restaurant and the cheapest thing I could find. Below my bedroom window the air-conditioning unit rumbled and the smell of curry drifted in. There were rats too, in the space behind the building where the bins were kept; I’d hear their squeaks and scurrying when I woke in the night. I remember sitting in that place, in the summer heat, breathing in stale spices, Lottie fast asleep in my lap, her eyelashes fluttering, her cheeks pink – my perfect child in this shitty place – and when I found a rat under her cot, I knew I had to get us out before she became aware of her surroundings, even if it meant crawling back to Douglas.