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in the mirror and instantly saw myself as ugly. I saw myself through Eunice’s eyes, and tears began to well up, but I blinked them back. I was not going to show weakness.
    ‘We’ll soon get rid of all this,’ she said as she wrenched my hair up and into a tight ponytail. Eunice had always hated my hair and although my mother had asked her to keep it long she could not wait to chop it off.
    I would look in the mirror on my own and peer at my face, running my fingers through my hair, and tears would drip down my cheeks. Was I bedevilled? Was I really evil? Eunice made me feel ugly, hideous and worth absolutely nothing.
    At first my parents would write me a letter every week and Eunice would stand over me as I read them. Sometimes she would intercept the mail and keep letters from me and when I would ask, ‘Has there been a letter from my mum and dad?’ she would shake her head. But I couldn’t believe that they had stopped writing. I would go and look at the floor below the letterbox, but if Eunice saw me looking, she would turn nasty. I was beginning to see a new, bad-tempered side of her which was very scary and which I didn’t like at all.
    One morning I was watching out for the post when Eunice appeared at my side, furious. ‘It’s no good you looking, there’s nothing there,’ she said roughly.
    Her eyes glinted and I felt afraid and bewildered. Why was she being so odd about me getting letters from home?
    ‘Isn’t there any post today?’
    ‘No. Now get away from the door.’
    I felt I couldn’t argue as her behaviour was quite terrifying. Then, soon after that morning, the letters from my parents stopped coming altogether.
    I was very confused as initially I had felt that Eunice’s house was a nice place to be. But she was changing and she seemed to be getting tougher towards Thomas and me in particular. I noticed, increasingly, how nice she was to Charlotte, and how harsh she was to Sarah. For instance, Charlotte had a nice room, but Sarah’s room was very cold and untidy. Thomas and I had been put in to share with Sarah and when the new baby boy, Robert, arrived he was allowed to stay with Eunice. It was like there was a ranking order, with Charlotte and Robert at the top, and Sarah, Thomas and me at the bottom. We had to ‘serve’ the other two quite often, making sure they had their food first, had the best toys or watched the videos they wanted. We were made to feel we were second best all the time, which was hurtful and humiliating.
    When we’d been there for about six months to a year, Eunice stepped up her campaign to warp my mind against my parents and really began to brainwash me – all of us, in fact – about the nature of my parents.
    One day, we were in the kitchen clearing up the dishes after a meal when Eunice suddenly blurted out, ‘Of course, your parents are big drug addicts, they’re hopeless people. You do know that, don’t you?’
    Eunice was glaring at me, but I was shocked and outraged, so I leapt to their defence. This was my mum and dad she was talking about. How dare she?
    ‘No, they’re not, they’re nice.’
    Eunice continued to stare at me fiercely through her big glasses for a moment, her lips compressed together in a thin line – a look I was learning to dread; it was really scary.
    ‘It’s time you knew the truth – your mum’s had loads of abortions. Do you know what that means? She kills babies.’
    I was shocked at the idea of my mum killing a baby, and while I know now that this was untrue, at the time it confused me because I did have a very early memory of my mum telling me about a stillborn baby – I think it was a girl – when I was really little. But Eunice insisted my mother had aborted the baby which sounded terrible and upset me hugely. She made it sound as though my mum had killed her with her own bare hands. The stillbirth was something that I had talked about a lot when I was little. I used to tell children at my two different schools that