Girl at Fifteen 1982 - 1983 (15 - 16)

It looks like I wrote this when I was around 18 - I find it interesting now, how many times I've written in the third person - obviously a survival technique (it didn't happen to me - it was someone else).


...Girl at fifteen lives in a smallish village with her mother, step-father, older step-brother and younger brother and sister.

She doesn't feel as though she is loved or wanted by her mother, with elements of resentment etc. and constant emotional rejection.

There are many fights between her parents, from which she is used as a scape goat and a tool for releasing her mother's frustration and anger.

The only time she is really and truly happy is when she is able to socialise with the local crowd. Many of her closest friends are a few years older than her but she fits in well with them and feels that she's liked and wanted.

Along with the others, she loves heavy metal and rock & roll, so the youth club, youth club discos and young farmers' nights are always enjoyable and memorable occasions.

She works weekends and school holidays on a pig farm, the farmer's son is only nine and she often pushes him around in a wheelbarrow. He's also good friends with her younger brother and sister who are seven and eight. She loves the farm and has her heart set on working full time on a farm when she leaves school.

This isn't really something the school is able to encourage one of their 'young ladies' as it's a Catholic school for girls but no way does she want an office job. She's a tom-boy, one of the lads and proud of it!

In the January before her sixteenth birthday, she can't stand living at home any longer and is sick of being punished for things she hasn't done and sick of the hidings that just make her mother feel better. She is sick of not knowing when and what she is going to get 'bawled out' for next. So she leaves.

She packs a small bag and runs to the youth club where she finds a girlfriend who has a car and gets a lift to the city, where she spends the night with a boyfriend before really starting life out on her own.

She initially lives with her cousin and travels to the city each day to finish the very last phase of her schooling. She gets on fairly well with her teachers and fellow pupils but she is constantly getting caught for smoking and skiving off the lessons she doesn't want to attend. Her 'self-definition' is a likeable rebel, definite non-conformist but rarely actually disruptive.

The stay with her cousin is fun while it lasts but, unfortunately, only short lived. Her mother doesn't feel that the cousin is a good influence on her, so she is placed 'in care' until her sixteenth birthday.

Being put with foster carers for five or six months doesn't sound so bad, except the family she is placed with live opposite her own family and it is hell all round.

For the short time she lives there, she is forever being reminded that if she steps out of line - just one foot out of place - she will be kept in care until she is eighteen.

Shortly after her sixteenth birthday she finds a job in a shop through a Youth Training Scheme and lodgings with a lady in the city. Working in a shop isn't her ida of fun so she finds new work at the local animal shelter. It's roughly a year before she is on the move again...