‘I always knew Mum loved me, but life wasn’t easy for her as she was a depressive,’ Kerry said in later years. ‘One minute we’d be laughing and joking, the next she would be telling me she wanted to die. I found out that she’d been slashing her wrists when she once rolled up her sleeves to wash the dishes. Wrapping bandages around her wrists became a part of my life. I knew if I wasn’t around, she’d be dead. That was a big responsibility for a little girl.’
As with so much in Kerry’s childhood, it had a profound affect on her later years and her relationship with her mother, which is now stronger than it has ever been. There were – almost inevitably, given the circumstances – periods of near estrangement when Kerry was growing up, but behind it all was always a very deep affection and an extremely strong bond, which might in part have been promoted by the fact that, even as a very young child, it was Kerry who had to play the maternal role.
The very fact that she grew up having to look after her mother when it really should have been the other way around created an added depth to the relationship. Kerry has never criticised her mother, never blamed her for anything at all in her childhood and always maintained that she wanted to be as close to her own children as she was to her mother. In those very early days, it was Sue and Kerry against the world and, even when they were living apart, that never really changed.
When Kerry was five, her mother married Arnold Ferrier, a kind man, and who already had four children of his own. There seemed, for a short while, to be some semblance of stability in the household. Kerry was devoted to her new father and was soon calling him ‘Dad’. It was the first time she had ever had a proper paternal figure in the background and someone with whom to share the burden of her mother’s illness. It marked a brief period in which Kerry was allowed to be a child, without the burdens of adulthood on her very young shoulders.
Like many little girls, she was also beginning to discover a love of dressing up and playing with clothes. Indeed, for the first time, the theatrical side of her character was beginning to come to light, as she started pretending to be taking part in a wedding. ‘As a child, I would run around the house pretending to be the bride and I would take my Mum’s white lace tablecloth and use it as the veil,’ she said. ‘It was my favourite game and I always imagined it was a really spectacular, grand occasion attended by really important people.’ Indeed, that grand ceremony was exactly what Kerry was going to get in years to come, when she fulfilled her childhood ambition and became the bride she had always dreamed about.
But that early happiness was not to last. Sue and Arnold split after three years, and Kerry initially stayed with her stepfather, partly because she was devoted to him and partly because of her mother’s mental health problems. Sue, however, swiftly decided that she wanted her daughter to live with her and launched a custody battle, which she won. Kerry was, after all, her daughter, and she was determined to look after her herself, difficult as it so clearly was. And it was a commendable decision, made for all the right reasons, despite the problems involved.
Sadly, however, life became even more difficult for mother and daughter, with Sue choosing a series of violent boyfriends, who would turn on both her and her daughter. ‘Some of Mum’s boyfriends used to beat the crap out of her and me,’ Kerry revealed. None of them compared to Arnold, who had been a loving and affectionate father figure to Kerry; indeed, they made life as miserable as possible for Sue and her child.
It was no life for a little girl and it was soon to get even worse. It had become obvious to everyone that Kerry simply could not continue living with her mother. Sue clearly loved her daughter, but equally was simply not capable of looking after her. And so Kerry was sent into foster care for the first time. By the age of 16, she would have lived with three different families before, with the fourth, at last finding some semblance of a caring and stable family life.
Kerry’s early fostering experiences were dreadful; she did not find the foster homes loving and later said she was treated differently from the natural children of the parents she lived with. There might have been awful problems involved with living with her mother, but at least she knew that Sue loved her and wanted nothing but the best for her daughter. That was not the case with the first three foster families Kerry was sent to live with.
She never settled down into any of the families, and never found any real sense of happiness, something recognised by her husband Brian McFadden before the two split up. ‘What she says to me is that her whole life people have let her down,’ he said. ‘She never met her dad. She had all these different foster parents and people always abandoned her or let her down.’ Sadly, of course, Brian was ultimately to do the same thing himself, although in the early years he was very aware of the trauma his wife had had to live through.
One benefit from all of this suffering was that it did establish in Kerry a very strong desire to make something of her life. ‘Being in Care made me even more determined to show what I was worth and that I could succeed,’ Kerry said later. ‘People can be judgemental about those who have been in Care, assuming they’re trouble, or stupid.’ It was, undeniably, a very difficult time in her life.
Neither was there much relief when she visited her mother at home, as Sue’s violent, self-harming episodes continued. ‘One day, Mum walked in with her wrists covered in blood. I couldn’t take it,’ said Kerry. ‘I told her if God wanted her dead, He’d have taken her by now. Then I flung her pills at her and said, “Mum, if you’re gonna do it, go ahead.” It sounds horrible but it was what she needed to hear.’
Indeed, it did the trick; that was the last time Sue tried to hurt herself. But it was a terrible stage for Kerry to live through. As a child, having to inflict ‘tough love’ on a parent takes a maturity far beyond most people’s years and, yet again, Kerry was forced to take on the parental role. Although still very young, Kerry was having to grow up fast.
The constant changes in where and with whom she lived caused problems in other ways, too. Kerry was constantly being taken out of one school and put into another – in total, she attended eight throughout her childhood – which meant that there was no continuity either in her education or in the people she met. Kerry was not naturally academic, but that side of her was never able to develop because she was forever changing from one school to another. It was hard for her to form friendships, too. Kerry has always had an outgoing, bubbly personality, but at that age children need to be in the same place for a while together in order to form firm friendships. Scarcely had Kerry had a chance to form one set of friends, than she was forced to start getting to know a new lot. All told, it’s remarkable that she has emerged as unscathed as she has.
Her grandmother Betty was only too well aware of how difficult the young Kerry’s life was back then. She did her best to help, but there was a limit to what even she could do. ‘It was very hard for Kerry as a youngster,’ she said many years later. ‘She must still go over it in her mind all the time. She was a happy-go-lucky kid, but it was hard for her. Some kids are tough and she was one of them. She used to stay with me now and again. But her Mum’s made up for not being able to be there for Kerry as a teenager and everything is OK between them now.’
Kerry did, in fact, also spend periods living with her mother before meeting the family that was finally going to help her, but it was the near-stabbing episode when she was thirteen that sent her back into Care, a life that she found utterly miserable. However, shortly afterwards, there was an all too rare piece of luck in a very difficult childhood.
Kerry met Fred and Margaret Woodall, an event which turned out to be a great success. Kerry went on to live with them for three years from the age of thirteen, a period that, at long last, established some stability in her life and gave her an insight into how most people lived. A tough little girl, Kerry would probably have turned out well whatever she did, but her association with the Woodalls undoubtedly gave her a boost.
‘They gave me a chance in life,’ she said, looking back upon her childhood. ‘They and their son Paul, who is