Memoir Draft: Matthew, Matty, Matt
Memoir Draft: Matthew, Matty, Matt
Moving from a children's home in one country to supported lodgings in another at 16.
This isn’t the piece I planned to share this week. That piece is taking a little longer than expected. Hopefully, it will be completed soon. Instead, I’m sharing a draft piece of a memoir I’m writing about growing up in the care system. This chapter is about moving from the Isle of Man to the UK when I was 16.
I hope you enjoy it. Any feedback is welcome.
The bare wind blew me with optimism as I watched the island dissolve into the horizon. Wet sea salt sprinkled my face while the roaring engines shredded the water beneath, oozing a million white horses from its rear. My body oscillated between itchy and clammy in time with the ferry, crawling its way through the choppy swell. At last, I was escaping Alcatraz!
Nine months earlier, I scuttled on to the final outcome of Every Child Matters: To Achieve Economic Wellbeing. According to the policy, I needed to be ready for employment, live in a decent home and a sustainable community, have access to material goods, live in households free from low income, and most importantly, I must not be ‘NEET’ (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). At its core, the purpose is to mould young people into a set of socially constructed middle-class Christian ideals as if they were the norm.
Still, it is the gift the care system gave everyone on their sixteenth birthday. No announcement, fanfare, or celebration. Just a subtle shift in the air that I had outstayed my welcome. This is the only outcome with an age requirement and, as such new language. A graceful pirouette of words used to disguise its true motive. My regular battles over my care plan had now been replaced with a Pathway Plan. Pathways lead somewhere, and in this case, it was out of the door.
I wish I could say it was a surprise or a poorly kept secret, but it was how someone came of age in the system. Early on, my tongue was branded with terms like ‘semi-independence’, ‘NEET’, ‘transition’, and ‘life skills’, but those would now begin to identify my life. No longer would my dysfunctional family relationships be a valid reason to support me.
A distorted voice thundered from the tannoy, signalling everyone on the ferry to swarm like ants to the stairwell. The deck smelt of early morning diesel, with puddles of wet sea salt littered between the field of vehicles. Frequent quakes rumbled under our feet, with the dark brown bellows of the crew’s voices reverberating off the dark steel walls. This wasn’t my first time leaving the island, but this felt different. I could sense my life beginning to open. Gone was the drug addict. Gone was the expelled schoolboy. Gone was the young offender. Gone was the chav, the tearaway, the castaway, the runaway, the scum, the scruffbag, the scally, the kid from care. This was a fresh start. Life beyond a children’s home. It was different. A new separation was taking place. Life beyond the state surrogating my needs. I hoped.
Such an opportunity rarely presents itself, but there I was with it. Back on the island, I introduced myself as Matty, but it sounded exactly like what I was: a juvenile delinquent. Reincarnations are rare. Matthew, Matty, Matt. How do I introduce myself now? From now on, no one will check my file before meeting me. For the first time, I was in control.
I cocooned myself in the care home’s car. I had completed the biggest game of Tetris of my life, it stuffed with all my worldly possessions. I had become a master of packing light. Ahead of us in succession, like a well-rehearsed Mexican wave, each car let out three stutters before the growl of the engine.
The best person put forward to aid my escape was Graeme. He was an agency care staff worker from Liverpool who relished in his temporariness, and treated the job as if it were a hire car, aware he could always get a new one whenever he wanted. Graeme was a tallish, blubbery, bald man in his late twenties who was about as bright as an eclipse and less mature than the kids he looked after. Still, he was the only person at the care home who knew how to drive on motorways and was qualified to be my chauffeur on this journey.
We eventually arrived at Whaley Bridge. It was a rural town which looked like any other town, decaying and blowing away and on its way to nowhere. The sun never shone above the ground, and not even the residents could pinpoint it on a map. I didn’t know what the image of living away would be, but it wasn’t this. Graeme pulled into the driveway next to an abandoned-looking black Toyota Prius. He turned the engine off, and in the sudden silence, my eardrums thumped in time with my heartbeat. I could no longer tell if it was still the comedown or if the reality of the situation was beginning to seep into my bones. But all my senses were pulsating negatively.
Stepping out of the care home car, I saw a house and not a placement for the first time. This was a nice house, in a nice neighbourhood, with nice folk. People like me aren’t supposed to live around here. They had thrown me into the deep end of affluence and ambition.
I walked through the door, and downstairs was just one big kitchen with a couch randomly placed in the middle. I supposed this is how posh people live. There was no TV in sight, just a computer tightly packed into a corner.
Standing towards the back door at the other end of the room was a smallish woman with all senses of authority gravitating towards her.
“I’m Fiona,” she said. “I’ll be your landlady. Or carer. Or whatever it is they call me. Did you have a nice journey?” It was the first time I had met someone with a posh voice. I melted with anxiety. Which name do I choose? The old cliché of there’s one chance to make a first impression ate away at me. Was I ready to be away from that life? Matt felt weird, and I hated Matthew.
“It was fine”, I replied. Then, I squeezed out, “I’m… Matt?” I checked to see if Fiona was analysing me. Of course, she wasn’t. I can’t remember exactly what we talked about after, probably music, food, just polite trivia designed to protect a delicate beginning.
We went out and walked her dog, a black Labrador called Gordon. It was warm but breezy, and the half-coloured autumn leaves held on for dear life each time a gust of wind blew. Fiona told how she worked for the Local MP, running his constituency office, and the feelings she got when she made a positive difference to someone’s life. She told me of her two children, who were both a university, and how one of them used to be in a band and wrote songs. She told me of how she was terrible at cooking, and if I could get by on a diet of sandwiches.
Fiona was a good woman, and everything about her was genuine with well-meaning intentions. It wasn’t something I had come across before. But it was clear this was her first contact with the care system. She would now brush shoulders with people, ideas, and worlds that had only existed inside the words of sensational newspaper articles and textbooks. This world was no longer a concept for her to feel compassion. I assumed Social Services would have prepared her for this. There I was, in a decent home, in a sustainable community, with material goods and a household more than free from the shackles of low income. With one simple move, all their boxes were ticked, regardless of whether Fiona and I were ready for the reality of it.
Later, I sat on my new bed, with new sheets, in my new room, in a new house, in a new village, in a new borough, in a new county, in a new country, and then it hit me. I may have escaped, but I was all alone. I didn’t know anyone. I was away from my family, away from my friends, away from my past, away from social workers, care staff, constant meetings, forms, and their crazy language games, just away! I was now an expeditionary, an empty wall, no longer a definitive person. I had no past, no files for people to read, nothing to go back to, and nobody to lean on. Life would now be a question mark, and Social Services expected me to crossfade into this new life, like a DJ effortlessly changing songs.
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