I wanted my parents to think about me rather than fighting with each other. I was ten when they split up, and I couldn’t stand their fighting, so I caused trouble in every way I could. I think if they’d stayed together my life would have gone a different route, but they had their own lives to lead. In the end you can’t control those things, and if I had realised that at the time it would have spared me a battle I could only lose.

I went into care soon after they separated because my mum considered I was beyond her control, and I guess I probably was. My mum went to court to get me back three months later, but I couldn’t settle down at home, and, after I got into trouble with the police again, I was sent back into care. I spent the next years at Family Group Homes, which were meant to be more like real families than regular children’s homes. We called the staff aunty and uncle, though that didn’t necessarily make it any more like home.

I don’t see either of my parents now. There came a time when I lost confidence in them. I kept a relationship with my mother for a while but once, when I ran away from care and came back to South Bank and stayed with another family, she told the police. Things like that stuck in my mind over the years, and I came to think that she had treated my sisters better than me. She didn’t do for me what she did for them. As for my dad, I never fell out with him, but he went off and got on with his life elsewhere.

I came out of care when I was fifteen or, at least, I was thrown out for nicking money from cash boxes. I was nicking money and spending it on acid and mushrooms. I came straight back to South Bank because that was the place that felt like home, even though my mum had moved to Guisborough by then. That was nineteen eighty three, and I was more or less continuously in gaol from then until two thousand. I did thirteen sentences plus the time spent on remand, mostly for burglaries.

My son Ben, who is fourteen, was kicked out of school some time ago, and now he’s on an ASBO for burgling a shed and for harrassing a shopkeeper. He was already on special needs before he was excluded. He had a home tutor for a while, just for two mornings a week. Now a van comes and picks him up of a morning and they do a combination of physical stuff and some reading and writing. He smokes cannabis to calm down, which I think helps him.

I try to keep calm as well. I’m not around in the mornings - I get up after lunch and I drink from then through to about four in the morning, when I go to bed. I like the hours on my own when the others are asleep. That’s when I get my thoughts together. I’ll have between sixteen and twenty cans of lager each day. They don’t make me drunk but they help me to keep level, which is what I need.