I’m from a romany family and a lot of my relatives are still on the road. My mum was brought up in one of the old horse-drawn waggons, but her parents bought a house in Middlesbrough when she was five, and she’s been in houses since then.

I lived in Middlesbrough until I was four with my mam and dad, but my dad was a drinker and my mam left him, and we moved to South Bank. I suppose, like many of the people here, we came because it was cheaper than anywhere else. My dad died of sclerosis of the liver when he was fifty eight. For a long time I didn’t have any contact with him, but not long before he died I found him again, and I used to take the kids over to see him.

I remember enjoying the small amount of school I had. Neither of my grandparents could read or write and out of my mum and her ten brothers and sisters only my mum and one sister can, and it’s the same with my cousins. That meant that no one had any expectations and since all my friends nicked off I thought I should as well. I didn’t want to be seen as different or stuck up, so I did what they did. I stopped going in altogether when I was fifteen.

I was on the glue by the time I was thirteen, and when I stopped that I started drinking, and when I was twenty six I started using speed, which I’ve been on ever since. I don’t know how my life would have gone if it hadn’t been so affected by my elder brother Alan. He became a heroin addict when he was seventeen. He got on it with his wife Mandy.  One night when Alan and Mandy were locked up by the police I agreed with social services to look after the three children. I didn’t realise at the time that I was making a commitment to bring them all up, but that is what happened because they never went home after that.

By that time I had three children of my own. My brother Alan came round all the time on drugs, and his son, Stephen, who lived with my mum, and who became a heroin addict too when he was a teenager, he was with us a lot. I tried to keep it all together but it was too much for me, so I took an overdose. I took the pills on a Friday and I didn’t wake up until the following Monday. A social worker came to see me at the hospital and I told her I couldn’t cope and that I’d been using speed. She told me she could see the pressure I was under, which made me wonder why she didn’t do more to help. But everything went on as before.  And when my daughter Jennilea was seventeen she had Mason, who I’ve brought up because she couldn’t do it herself.

I’ve never known anything other than South Bank and all the time I’ve known it it’s been getting smaller, and I’ve come to feel that I’m getting smaller too, and I feel that as they knock it down parts of me that were strong are being reduced to rubble. Sometimes I’ve wondered whether complete collapse would be preferable to this shrinking feeling and whether I make it all worse by putting up with too much. Which sounds rather depressing, but I’m not a sad person nor would I say I’m unhappy, but I do wonder how my life would have gone if I’d lived somewhere else.