The Times Magazine 41early years develop a powerful “origin story”
about themselves – they have not only been
born, their identity has been created by the
struggle to overcome.
Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader,
was a carer for her mother, who has bipolar
disorder, from the age of 10, became pregnant
at 15 and left school with no qualifications at- She described to us how she has thrived in
the dysfunctional chaos at Westminster that
has left most MPs traumatised. “The trauma,
the screaming, the unpredictability, this is my
bread and butter. This is life, this is what I’m
used to,” she said. “In fact, I think it’s really
strange when people are nice.”
Sajid Javid, the health secretary, grew up
in a two-bedroom flat for a family of seven in
Bristol. His father, Abdul Ghani, had come to
Britain from Pakistan in 1961 with only £1 in
his pocket and hauled himself and his family
out of poverty, working in a factory and as
a bus driver before opening his own shop.
Javid’s mother, Zubaida, who worked as a
seamstress, spoke little English and he would
often have to translate for her at the doctor’s
surgery or in shops. Javid’s background could
not be more different from that of the public
schoolboys in the Tory party, but he says the
struggles in his life have grounded him and
been an advantage in politics.
“I have a different understanding of things,”
he said. “Most people don’t have privilege.
Most people are ordinary, hard-working
people. I can look them in the eye and say,
‘I know what it’s like.’ ” Even though he has
served in the cabinet under three prime
ministers, Javid doesn’t feel as if he can sink
into complacency. “I’ve always felt an outsider
and I still do. I don’t feel I’m part of some cosy
club... I still need to fight for things.”
Ed Balls, the former Labour chancellor,
described his battle to overcome a stammer,
which meant he would somehow find himself
unable to get the words out in the House of
Commons or in television interviews. “My
huge problem for years was trying to deny and
conceal and to stop and prevent. That made
me sound very combative,” he said. “And
actually it was the realisation that it was just
part of who I was and telling people, ‘This is
who I am,’ that took lots of pressure and lots
of stress away. I thought it would make me
seem weak. But it’s been so liberating and so
affirming, actually. And I wish I’d known that
at a much earlier stage.”
The Bake Off winner and TV star Nadiya
Hussain told us that she still struggles “every
single day” with anxiety, having been sexually
abused as a child on a visit with her family to
Bangladesh and suffered appalling bullying
at her primary school. She had her head
flushed down toilets and her fingers smashed
in doors by the bullies and has spent her
life determined to prove them wrong, using
cooking as her salvation. “It’s a memory I can’t
erase. When I’m having my nails done, I can
see my eight fingers that were smashed.
I would grow my nails back and then they’d
go blue and drop off again. I still struggle with
cleaning toilets; some days I just can’t get near
them, so I avoid drinking.” There are timeswhen she has felt “anger and resentment”
towards some of the things that have
happened in her life, she told us. “But they
had to happen for me to be where I am today.
If I could have met ten-year-old me I would
just hold her so she could know that she’s
valued and that she is there for a reason...
In order for her to be who she is now, she
had to go through that.”
Several of our interviewees have described
the knowledge that they have survived as
their “superpower”. The poet Lemn Sissay was
brought up in care. His mother, Yemarshet,
was a young Ethiopian woman who came to
England to study. While here she discovered
that she was pregnant and gave her son up to
be fostered so that she could complete her
education. She wanted their separation to be
temporary, but the social worker who took
the baby from her ignored her requests to see
her son. He even gave the boy a new name:
Norman (the social worker’s own name)
Greenwood (the name of the family that was
going to foster him). At 14, Sissay tattooed
the initials “NG” onto his hand. It was only
when he was 17 and finally got to see his birth
certificate that he discovered his real name.
When Sissay was 12, the Greenwoods – the
only family he had ever known – rejected him.
“I became the enemy within,” he told us. The
day that the social worker came to collect him
to take him to a children’s home is still seared
in his memory. “I can remember the walk to
the car and I can remember my mum not
hugging me at the door.”
The Greenwoods claimed – wrongly – that
he had wanted to leave. It wasn’t true, but this
dishonesty meant that nobody from his old
life contacted him. “It was emotional
Hiroshima, wipeout,” he said. “I used to run
away from the children’s home and sit in the
park looking at the house, watching the bay
windows. I couldn’t understand how I could
not be allowed into it. It was unimaginable to
me that they wouldn’t take me back.”
Between the ages of 12 and 18, Sissay was
moved from children’s home to children’s
home, each one more desperate than the last.
“There was definitely not love. The one thing
that the child in care needs is the one thing
that the care system then felt it was absolutely
impossible to give. There were no hugs. There
was emotional cruelty, there was physical
abuse. As a child you don’t have the right
to say, ‘This isn’t good enough. You are not
giving me what I need,’ because as a child you
don’t really know what you need. You don’t
really know what love is – you just know
when it’s not there.”
Poetry became his escape. He thinks
his writing is a way to anchor himself in a
turbulent world. He wrote, he told us, to prove
he “wasn’t alone” and the words scribbled on
the page became “the evidence that I was‘I still feel anger and
resentment. But those
things had to happen for
me to be where I am today’
Childhood trauma Continued from page 29Nadiya HUSSAIN
BBC/PA