No One Wants You by Celine Roberts

Author:Celine Roberts [Roberts, Celine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781407022468
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

A Place to Call Home

THE NEW YEAR of 1978 dawned. I decided to try and put 1977 behind me. I had lost two babies but I really wanted another one. Anthony was now three years of age. He was enrolled at a local nursery school and seemed happy there.

The New Year optimism had me thinking that I might become pregnant again. I wanted a brother or sister for Anthony, so that he could learn to share. I did not want him to grow up as an only child. I had an obsession with the fact that only children can be selfish. They don’t want to share. It is entirely understandable to me now why they should do this, but at the time I did not like the trait.

My wish list for 1978 also included our own house. I wanted to buy a house for us, but I realised that to buy our own house I had to have a lot of money. Saving was never one of my strong points. Saving money was a subconscious acknowledgement of the fact that I might need or have use for it in the future. The reality for me was that I did not expect to have a future. The monotonous repetition of the fact that I was no good and that no one wanted me, meant that I had no hope for any kind of a positive future.

Having a child changed this. He gave me a sense of hope for his future, a hope I had never had for myself. Anthony’s existence made me feel a sense of responsibility. I wanted my child to have everything that I did not have. He had a mother and a father. That was a good start.

The next thing that he needed was a house. He needed somewhere that he could call ‘home’. A house of his own would provide him with far more than just the basic human needs of shelter and warmth.

It would be somewhere he would feel safe and could come to, in times of danger.

It would be somewhere he would be accepted unconditionally and be loved by his father and mother.

It would be his family home.

The first problem was money. We didn’t have nearly enough! The building society told me that if I could raise 20 per cent of the purchase price, they would loan us the remaining 80 per cent as a mortgage. In order to save money for a deposit on a house, I started to work extra shifts at the hospital. Doing extra shifts at work also helped me to forget the trauma of the lost babies. Between working such long hours and looking at suitable properties to live in, I recovered from my loss to some extent.

In October 1978, after spending most of the year saving, we bought our first family home. We got a loan of £2000 from a friend of Harry. They were both members of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association and she held him in high regard.

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