I used to love being taken to our local library in Mountain Ash. It was something my parents did with Jason and me every week. There was something so special about going in and choosing another new book to read. I would spend ages finding one. I looked forward to that day every week.
For my birthdays Mum would hold a little tea party with cake, but I didn’t have parties like other children my age. There would just be a simple opening of the presents. I liked getting books, and I started collecting dolls. When I was very young I started collecting Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. I dressed them up in nightclothes and tucked them into a bed I made for them every night. As I got older I probably wasn’t into the same toys and games as other children. I was into fairies and fantastical figures, especially those drawn by Brian and Wendy Froud, who worked on the puppets for The Dark Crystal movie and helped create the character of Yoda for Star Wars. I enjoyed using my imagination and playing on my own, but I also started to become aware of the world around me. At the age of five I regularly came home from school for lunch. One day Mum served me a chicken leg and chips. I stared at it, thinking.
‘Mam,’ I said, ‘is this the leg of a chicken?’
‘Yes.’
‘An actual leg of an actual chicken?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I can’t eat this,’ I said. ‘What do you call people who don’t eat these things?’
‘A vegetarian,’ Mum said.
‘Well, I’m going to be one of them.’
Since then I’ve never touched meat. Once I’d made that connection between animal and plate, I just thought, Oh my God, no.
I have massive respect for my parents because they didn’t try to dissuade me or patronise me. They never lied to me, either, by serving something and telling me it wasn’t meat. They just accepted it and told me the truth, even if it meant making something special for me at mealtimes. My grandparents, on the other hand, just thought they were indulging me. They thought they should be stricter. They would serve me food and claim it wasn’t meat. I might have been young but I wasn’t stupid. I knew it was.
I was a challenge, and not just for my family. Once I’d calmed down and accepted – to a degree, at least – that I had to be at school, I found learning came easily to me. I was the first in my class to write my name and the first to read a book. I wanted to push on and learn more, but the teachers just wanted to hold me back so the other children could catch up. Instead, I read whatever I could lay my hands on at home. A particular favourite was the What Katy Did series by Susan Coolidge, about a girl who is always getting up to mischief until a horrible accident leaves her bedbound. I loved the idea of a very big, close family unit and Katy and Clover, her sister, being best friends. It contrasted with my own experience, with our small extended family and an older sister I annoyed with my outbursts. Leanne and I might have struggled to form a really close bond anyway because of our age gap, but at times I felt she didn’t seem to understand my anxiety. I think she thought I put it on to get attention. I also shut myself off with my reading. I enjoyed stories like Heidi and Black Beauty but quickly moved on to adult books, fiction and non-fiction.
Once I became interested in a subject it quickly turned into an obsession. Space intrigued me from a very young age. I just loved the idea of being so small in a huge solar system that never seemed to end. It gave me a feeling that the problems I was facing were not really a big deal, because look how small I was in the universe. I could gain a little perspective sometimes, which helped calm me down.
Another obsession was Queen Elizabeth I. I can’t remember what sparked my interest, but I loved the fact that she was a strong woman who had opposition against her but always took on the challenge. She was the underdog who few people thought would rule, yet she became one of the most successful monarchs Britain has ever seen. I loved this particular quote: ‘I may not be a lion but I am a lion’s cub and I have a lion’s heart.’ She wasn’t to be underestimated. I also loved the way she turned fashion into a power statement – she just screamed power – and the symbolism in Elizabethan paintings, which told people she was all-seeing and all-knowing.
It was during this obsession that my dad took me to Waterstones. When we asked about a book on Elizabeth, the assistant said, ‘Do you want me to find you a children’s book?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want the one by David Starkey.’ The historian had written a biography on the Tudor monarch to accompany a TV series.
I can still picture the look of surprise on her face. I was only seven. That year my dad also bought me my first copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and I would read it every Christmas.
As if my anxieties and eccentricities weren’t enough for my family to contend with, I began to sense that there was more to the world around me than what other people saw. I started to have what can only be described as psychic experiences. Clearly, thanks to my anxiety, I was more sensitive to my environment than your average child. But it was more than that. I could sense that people were trying to reach me – that spirits were communicating with me. At first it scared me. I was hearing voices, feeling presences around me that other people weren’t aware of. I told my parents, but they didn’t understand and thought it was just my imagination. I knew this wasn’t one of my obsessions. There was something to this. I was still a very young child when these experiences became more common and scary.
I sensed the spirit of an elderly lady who seemed to take delight in frightening me. One day I was sitting in my brother’s pushchair in the passageway in our house when she kicked it full force and I was thrown into the front door. My mother came running.
‘What have you done?’
‘It wasn’t me. It was the old lady,’ I said.
The look on her face told me she didn’t believe me. My parents weren’t that open to the idea of spirituality at that time.
The elderly woman wasn’t the only thing I experienced. I’d hear heavy boots walking up and down the stairs in the night, and the door would open on its own and shut again. Items in my bedroom would also rearrange themselves.
Trying to make sense of the spirit world was one thing. But for my parents, the real world was challenging enough and there were more pressing issues for them to contend with. My dad was starting to struggle. As well as working as a labourer on building sites, he had been doing shifts driving a taxi. There were times when I hardly ever saw him. But then he started to develop mental-health problems and had to give up work. Money had always been tight, despite his best efforts, and when he was no longer able to work we were under even more pressure. We became very poor. We couldn’t afford the things other children take for granted, like ice creams on sunny days. Our coal was donated by charities. The council house we lived in was falling down, literally. The roof leaked and it was waterlogged. The council deemed it uninhabitable, so we went to the top of the housing register as a priority case to move. They found a house for us in Aberdare, another former mining town ten minutes’ drive away. It meant moving schools.
We were assigned social workers to assess our general wellbeing. My parents discussed with them how hard it was getting me to go to school. Mum wanted me to stay at home, but they said I needed to be socialised and going to school would sort that.
There was only one school that would take both Jason and me, which was a bit of a trek from where we lived. There were schools closer to where we lived in Trecynon, but my parents were keen for us to be together. If I’d thought my time had been hard at my last school, it was nothing compared to this place. At first I thought it might not be too bad. My teacher was nice and showed me some compassion. But after I moved on to a new teacher, I was on