Give me back my past

She was six: her brother 18 months older. It must have been late at night, she says, because all the other children at the St Hilda's children's home in York were in bed. "They took all our clothes off us, and made us put their clothes on. They took us to a dorm that had just been painted. My brother and I spent the night in the same bed - we were so scared.

"It was a bit like being in prison. The following morning, when we talked to the other kids, it was all 'what are you in for? Where's your mum and dad?'"

They were questions six-year-old Jan (she was Janet Jones, then) couldn't answer - and still can't answer 42 years later. Her father, she says, 'did a runner' before she was even born, and she has never met him. Her mother, she believes, may have had a nervous breakdown, and there appears to have been some kind of scandal: but later in her life, right up until the day she died - even when Jan briefly lived with her as a single mum in her late teens - her mother would never talk about it.

"We would just start to argue," Jan, now 49 and living off Nunnery Lane, says. "She would just say: 'You blame me because I put you away' and get very hostile. There just wasn't the closeness between us."

There is something especially poignant about that because, in those first years after she was taken into care, Jan could think of only one thing: getting back home to her mum.

"I just missed her, she was all I had ever known," she says. "So I kept running away. I was always trying to get back home to her, and just being really rebellious."

It soon earned her a reputation in the home as a troublemaker - and the hostility of one of the 'aunts' who looked after them in particular.

"She used to slipper me in front of all the other kids in the dorm, and lock me in a cupboard for hours at a time. Then she would open the door and say 'are you sorry?' and me being what I was then, I would say 'no' and she would put me back in again."

After almost two years in St Hilda's, Jan - like so many other children brought up in care - was moved on. There were different foster parents, and other children's homes in York - she remembers spells at Danesbury Drive and Feversham Cresent. Sometimes she was with her brother, sometimes not.

Two of the foster families, she says, were 'really nice'. "But they didn't want the two of us (her and her brother), only me'." Others weren't so nice. One foster father in particular used to beat her with his belt. "Once he hit me with a buckle on my back. I tried to get back to my mum to show her, and say 'they are hitting me'," she says.

Once or twice she did manage to get to see her mum, and even stayed overnight - "it was like an added bonus," she says - but she was always sent back. "All my mum's children, she never brought any of us up, we all got fostered," she says.

Eventually, after another spell back at St Hilda's and even a couple of weeks, when she was 11, in a remand home - "they just didn't know what to do with me", she admits - she was sent to Nursery Drive children's home in Acomb. It was a much smaller home than St Hilda's and she was happier there. "We were able to be more like normal kids."

At 15, however, she was in foster care again. Then, before her 16th birthday, she found herself pregnant with her eldest daughter Janine. She went back to live with her mum.

Having Janine was wonderful, she says. "She gave me something to live for, and calmed me down. My mum loved Janine, and accepted her." But Jan found that Janine's father was already married - and even though her own mum loved Janine, things became more and more difficult. "There was so much that I wanted to ask and couldn't get answers about, all the whys."

At 18, she married, and moved to Swindon. There was to be no happy ending. That marriage was the first of three, all now broken, and while she loves her four children and eight grandchildren, she is still tormented by her own disrupted childhood.

She has, she says, very few happy childhood memories. "I don't have a normal family relationship, like children do with parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles," she says. "I just feel different. I can't explain it."

She believes she 'blanked out' much of her unhappy childhood in care. "My daughter who is 12 now, asked me were there any happy times?" she says. "There were a few. But mostly it was terrible."

What makes it worse is that when, a few years ago, she began to try to find out more about her past, she found the council, which had been responsible for her care, had lost all her records.

They may have been 'dumped' in the mid-1970s. Jan had hoped they might hold answers to some of the questions she has about her past - questions she couldn't ask her mother before she died, or that her mother wouldn't answer. "I just think they the records might hold some of my past that I need to find out about before I can move on," she says. "I'm hitting 50 and I want the second half of my life to be better than the first."

Now she is pinning her hopes on getting in touch with some of the other children that knew her when she was in care.

One of her most precious possessions is a group photo of her with other children from St Hilda's on a day trip to the seaside. "We went to Scarborough," she says. "We had buckets and spades. I suppose we did the normal things."

It is virtually the only photograph she has of herself as a child, and she hopes it may jog the memory of other children on the trip.

"I just want to talk to some of the children I was with and share memories with them," she says. "To find out how they turned out, what they feel about their childhood, if they have had the same sort of life as me. Just try to get some sort of grasp on my childhood. I think then I could lay a few ghosts and put a lot of things behind me."

If you knew Jan when she was in care in York in the late 1950s and early 1960s and would like to get in touch, write to Stephen Lewis at the Evening Press, 76-86 Walmgate, York YO1 9YN.

Updated: 12:14 Wednesday, November 28, 2001