Daddy's Little Earner by Maria Landon

Author:Maria Landon [Landon, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780007283972
Google: P4pIyBqtXCMC
Amazon: B002RI9IYW
Publisher: Harper Element
Published: 2008-09-03T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

hockey sticks and playing hooky

Not knowing what else to do with Terry and me, the social services eventually decided to send us to a boarding school called Wymondham College. I was eleven, and it was my first year of secondary school. All our lives we had felt different and outside the norm wherever we went, whether it was within our own family, in the local schools we had been sent to or the foster and care homes. In this posh boarding school full of middle-class children, many of whose families were serving overseas in the armed forces, we stuck out like really sore thumbs. The authorities’ argument for sending us there was that they wanted to get us away from Dad’s influence, which was entirely understandable, but during the weekends and holidays they would send us straight back to him, so we were still completely under his influence and remained resentful and cynical about everything the staff might be trying to do for us at Wymondham.

At the introduction talk held when we first arrived at the school a teacher asked all the new pupils if we had names we preferred to be called, like Kate or Katy or Kathy if we’d been christened Katherine. For some unknown reason I piped up and said that I would prefer to be called Diane. I have no idea why I picked that name out of the air; I just didn’t want to be Maria any more and I said the first name that came into my head. From then on I was known as ‘Di’, like I had invented a whole new identity. Except of course I hadn’t; it was still the same damaged, confused and insecure me trying to fit in to yet another alien world.

In many ways sending us there was a good idea. The school regime provided an incredibly strict and structured environment, totally different to anything we had ever encountered before. Every minute of the day was accounted for so there wasn’t much time for sitting around brooding on the unfairness of life or on how much I was missing Dad. There were organized sports during our free time and I learnt to love games like hockey and netball, which I would never have come across otherwise. Social services had even equipped me with my own hockey stick. It felt so good to have a possession of my very own, something I dare say all the other girls there took totally for granted.

There were letter writing and reading times and chapel times, and even some weekends were filled with activities, so we were never given a chance to become bored or get up to any mischief. Once I had got over the strangeness of it all, there was a part of me that liked it, but there was no way I was ever going to feel that I fitted in with the other girls. They were all very kind and polite to me, but they were so well

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