After a couple of years, our home was still in a desperate state of repair, but we had stayed in the same home for a while which I took as a win. So, life felt stable still. I remained at the same school but had changed to the junior school but I did start to struggle at school, although never with my work, but I could not stop talking in class. In year 4, my teacher suggested a chatty chart in lessons to my mum, to make me aware of how much I would talk. After every lesson, a box would be filled in following one of three colours; a pink box meant that I was good, a purple box meant not great nor bad, and a blue box meant I had been too chatty. I never meant to be disruptive, and the feedback from my teachers was that I would ask too many questions, and I would be too nosey if the teachers were talking in private. I do think this stemmed from my undiagnosed ADHD, and it proved to be an issue because my teachers and I, had a lack of understanding of the situation. My mum evidently became frustrated though, and because I had a chatty chart, they would want to see my mum on a Friday afternoon after school to discuss the week. I remember being made to feel shameful over these meetings, that I was impeding on her personal time because she had a new boyfriend, Dave, who she was infatuated with.

Every time I saw him, he had dark grey stained joggers, and straggly black hair and untamed stubble. He never looked any different to scruffy and I could not understand her obsession with him, but he had practically moved into our home and suddenly I became invisible. I was aware that he smoked something that was different to the cigarettes my mum would smoke, but I was blissfully unaware of what it was, but often the smell would dominate our small home. All they did was spend time together, and because Dave had no interest in establishing a relationship with me, my mum no longer did either. Shortly after their relationship began, things really started to get bad. I was eight, and I was not old enough to know what sex was and was extremely confused when I began hearing my mum and Dave at nighttime. Our bedrooms were opposite and because I was afraid of the dark, I couldn't shut my door at night, and they wouldn't shut their door at night too. However, this transpired to not just at nighttime, every single day when The Simpsons was on at six o'clock they would be at it. The living room was next to their bedroom and again the door would be open, and their bedroom light switched on too. For me to move from the living room to the kitchen, I would have to walk past them noisily having sex as her bed was right next to her bedroom door. So often, I would freeze in a room until they were done.

This began stoking up a feeling of anger in me, and I began dreading home-life. This obsession that they had with each other, would happen multiple times a day without any discretion. In front of me, she would persist in putting her hands down his trousers with subtle hand movements. This happened when they were on the opposite sofa to me in the living room and every single time we were in his car. I wasn't really allowed out to play with friends in the park, therefore the feeling of being trapped in an environment that I did not want to be in consumed me, and I was the angriest eight-year-old I knew. Every day I would dread to come home, and it genuinely felt like she had forgotten I was there for a year. I remember going to school without lunches, because she insisted, I made my lunch and when she noticed that the bread was not being used, instead of being a parent and thinking I will make lunch for my eight-year-old, she said I must make my sandwiches. Therefore, I began taking two-slices of bread in the morning when leaving to walk to school alone whilst she was still in bed, and I would throw the pieces of bread into the nearest bin in the street, and I wouldn't eat until I came home.