Slave Girl by Sarah Forsyth Read Free Book Online

was 17 years old, coming up to my exams and with the possibility of a normal life ahead of me for the first time since I was a toddler – and I was pregnant. My head was spinning; I was in a complete whirl. Who could I talk to? Where could I go? What should I do?
    I plucked up courage from somewhere and talked to Mum. It wasn’t an easy conversation and we were both torn in two. I loved the idea of children and knew I would be good with them – but I was so young and my life had been so messed up. Could I actually cope with becoming a mother?
    Now, when I look back at the young girl I was then, facing such an enormous, life-changing decision, it’s sometimes as if I am watching a completely different person. That teenager isn’t me: it’s someone else and I have no control – no responsibility – for the choices she makes. Mum did her best to advise me, but she was as lost in this mess as me. Neither of us knew what to do for the best, so we sort of drifted into a decision. And that decision was to terminate the life growing inside of me.
    Mum found a private clinic that would do the operation. A week later she and I drove to Leeds together. I don’t know why she chose Leeds, but that’s where we went. We drove in silence, sitting miserably in Mum’s car as the miles slowly slipped by until we came to the clinic that would give me an abortion. It cost £500: we had to pay upfront. I know the people who ran this place weren’t bad people; I know they weren’t intentionally unkind. But it was an awful, hopeless place, a place where you went when you were desperate; a place that, by the time you left, you’d never be the same again.
    I was 16 weeks pregnant and I really didn’t want to get rid of my baby. I wanted to keep it and hold it and love it. Deep down I knew that. But I put on that gown and I walked from the ward to the theatre and lay down on the trolley while they put me to sleep. The nurses told me that when I woke up I would feel like I wanted to wee, but they said that was just a feeling – I wouldn’t be able to wee; I would just feel like I needed to. They were right, of course: it was their job and they knew how it worked. I did feel like I wanted to wee, but I also felt so much more.
    I don’t know if I was supposed to ask and I’m pretty certain no one was supposed to tell me, but I know that if I hadn’t had that abortion I would have a daughter. And today she would be 17 – the same age I was when I went to that clinic with my mum.
    Mum and I drove back to Gateshead the day after the abortion. We didn’t say a lot on the way home. I knew, without her ever telling me, that she was as devastated as I was. I stayed on at college and I passed my exams. I still went out – though I was generally quieter and less wild when I did. I stopped seeing Steve, though. I asked Mum to tell him about me being pregnant but we decided that instead of saying I’d had an abortion we’d say I’d miscarried. It seemed a kinder way to let him down: why should he go through the torment that washed through me from the moment I woke up till the moment I fell asleep? Either way, though, there was no future for Steve and me.
     
     
    Once I’d got my NNEB qualification I could look for work as a nursery nurse. It didn’t seem hard to find and soon I was taken in by a primary school just down the road in Gateshead, helping with the four- and five-year-old children who were starting in its reception class.
    From the very first day I loved it. I loved the job, the work, the school and – above all – the bairns. I’d just got rid of a child and there I was, surrounded by them. They were so young and so innocent, and so many of them needed so much love and attention that some of the pain that gnawed away inside me began to ease off. It felt good – and it was wonderfully easy – to lose myself in the needs of others. Wiping a nose here, tying a shoelace there; above all, holding their little bodies when they