Childhood, prisons, and things

For a few nights we lived in a hostel, then moved into our new home on Springfield Road. At that time I think nearly every household in the community had someone, usually a Prison Officer and the ‘man of the house’ living in it.

The centre of the community was a 1960s or 70s club with a bar and large hall with a stage. As was often the case in those days, such places weren’t out-of-bounds to children (but then neither was the prison), and so I remember spending quite a bit of time during my early childhood in the club. On any normal days, walking into the club there’d be men still in their uniforms drinking at the bar, playing darts and maybe playing prison themed songs on the jukebox such as Iron Maiden’s The Prisoner (a song based on a TV series about a weird village which is essentially a prison, which now seems doubly apt). The air (which was probably barely breathable) was filled with cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke, and there were (probably) pork scratchings on offer. Given the presence of uniformed men getting drunk, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that rather than going home after their shift, many of the officers instead went to the club. Either that or they were due to start work (well, this was still the 1970s and early 1980s).

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, while I was a small child, my Dad’s continued affairs in our hometown of Burton-Upon-Trent, made things difficult. One day my Dad was in the pub, and a friend suggested he’d make a good Prison Officer. My Dad thought that was a good idea, and so went off on his training to become a Prison Officer. Shortly after he was given the opportunity he needed to run away from our hometimes, by being given a job at a Prison down south in Buckinhamshire. This meant that my immediate family, me and my parents went to live on an estate at the bottom of a hill from 2 prisons, including the one my Dad worked at, HMP Grendon.

As you can imagine (or perhaps not), life on an estate attached to Prison, was very much about the Prison too. Over the years, including after I’d left the estate, I spend time as a child and teenager, in the prison itself. Initially I’d sometimes join my Dad on Gate Duty, sitting around in a room off the area in front of the massive prison gates, with my Dad and a portable black & white TV. Later though I got to spend some time in the main prison buildings, on the wings, in cells, and the prison gym, chatting to inmates, but that’s a whole other story.

During my time on the estate as child, I first started drinking and smoking. Someone ‘found’ a packet of fags. A group of us children decided we’d had enough of fake sweet cigarettes (these were a thing), we had the real thing, and what better to go with a fag than a pint of beer. Except we had no pint glasses, only a pile of kegs of beer out the front of the pub. Then someone worked out how to get beer out of the kegs. So we took turns putting out mouths over a keg of beer, and pressing the top down to get a stream of beer. It wasn’t the most precise method of doing things, and I remember my friends Dad asking why we reeked of beer and fags one day.

Christmas on the prison estate was something ‘special’. Firstly, one of the prison officers would dress up as Santa Claus and visit children on the estate. I think somewhere there’s a photo of me in bed with my friend’s Prison Officer dad, dressed in a red Santa hat and wearing a white beard attached with elastic. Secondly, the main Christmas event happened at the club. I remember this experience well. All the children would gather in the main hall, the adults divided the room into two by drawing a massive grey (or possibly cigarette smoke yellow) plastic corrugated curtain across the room. There’d be a pantomime thing about Santa coming, then some 1970s ‘Christmas music’ would play, they open the corrugated plastic cage door, and Santa/Officer whatever would be wheeled into the room on a large wooden sleigh with all the presents on the back. These would be handed out to the appropriate children. Or in my case one year, the inappropriate child. I remember Santa/Satan handing me my present, and I started unwrapping it, only to have it snatched out of my hands again because some prick had taped another child’s present to mine.

There were other important annual festivals held at the club and the field next to it, including the traditional burn an effigy of a Catholic night known as “Guy Fawkes night”. One Guy Fawkes night we had the usual bonfire on the field and a fireworks display. Then all the adults went back to the club to get pissed, leaving us children alone around the fire, with a wheel barrow full of unused explosives. This was the 1970s/early 1980s remember, we did not have ridiculous health & safety rules back then, no mobile phones, or games consoles, we had to make our own entertainment. Which is exactly what we did, with the fireworks, and the bonfire. Some genius had the brilliant idea of combining the explosives with the fire. It was all very orderly, for a couple of minutes at least. A simple plan, to form a queue at the wheel barrow, grab an armful of rockets (possibly some nearly as big as me), then casually walk back to the fire, and throw the explosives onto the fire. Which I did. I had just turned around to fetch another armful of rockets, when there was a lot of loud banging and whizzing behind me, and rockets started shooting off in random directions at all the children. I hit the ground, startled, and lay there as I felt the rocket narrowly miss me. My Mum didn’t know about this until I was in my 30s when I mentioned it on Facebook. “What? I didn’t know about this!” She replied, “Well, no you wouldn’t, you were all off getting pissed in the club”.

When I turned school age in 1980, the estate didn’t have its own school, so I attended the one in the nearby village. I remember some cold, frosty mornings with my mum walking me to school, the smell of the autumn air, and the conkers on the trees while I (probably) ate a Curly Wurly (if you don’t know what that is I am not going to explain it to you).

I don’t recall there being much to do on the estate. I think I spent some of my time hanging around the garages at the back of our house, but also in the shed, where there was I think an electric cooker (not plugged in) and I think I made mud pies. I remember running screaming to my mum though, because I got my hands dirty, and I hated getting my hands dirty. I think the house still had a coal boiler in the kitchen, and I remember creeping downstairs into the kitchen sometimes to eat salt and various condiments in the kitchen. I had a room at the back of the house, sometimes I’d sleep on the floor and stare at a stick man picture on the wall and make the figures move around in my brain, though I honestly remember them actually moving. There were sometimes blackouts, the electricity would go off, possibly due to strikes.

My parents bought me a little peddle car to sit in and ride around in. It was a bright yellow AA (Automobile Association) pick up truck with a winch on the back. I decided though, that it was a milk float! The problem: I had no milk to deliver, but, I had a clever plan. I had noticed that other houses had milk delivered to them in glass bottles, which was perfect. I had a source of milk to deliver, all I had to do was collect it, then deliver it. So I rode around in my ‘milk float’ collecting bottles of milk from people’s doorsteps, then delivering them to other houses. I was very happy about this, and remember a couple coming out of their house, after I’d stolen milk from their doorstep, and smiling at me. At least, I think they were smiling, I had trouble understanding facial expressions. Though I was not aware of Communism at the time, I feel I had successfully redistributed (milk) wealth, among the working classes.

Everything was going well with my new job delivering milk, that is until my Dad found out, and stamped all over my red plastic fire engine toy that he’d just bought me, in front of me.

My dad seemed to have frequent problems with his temper. In another incident, he threw a mug of tea over me as I sat on the sofa. Fortunately it wasn’t boiling hot, I wasn’t scarred, at least, not physically.

As a light interlude in this story, I recall that I enjoyed blinking my eyes really fast, because it made the world sort of ‘stroboscopic’, I called this my ‘flashing lights’ or maybe it was ‘disco lights’?

Then there’s the bit where I had a particularly chewy bit of meat in my dinner only to discover it was part of my own tongue.

Sadly my Dad’s affairs, the main reason we’d had to get out of our hometown, started up again, At one point my Dad was tried to convince my Mum to be in open relationship, something she later said she didn’t want. Still, my Mum also started an affair with another Prison Officer, one of my Dad’s friends, I think called Chris, At one point, I think both my Dad and my Mum were having an affair with one half of the same couple from down the road.

One day when I was 4 years old, I am not entirely sure why but possibly something to do with my Mum’s affair, my Dad held a knife to my mum (I think to her throat). My mum, scared off course, had enough, and she called the only person who might hep her, her lover. She got into his car and drove off, leaving me with my Dad for while. My dad couldn’t ‘cope’ with me, so he had one of his lovers move in with us for a while, I think someone called Anna (not the person mentioned earlier, another woman). That didn’t work out. Though I didn’t know the details of what had happened at the time, I felt abandoned, and had in effect, been abandoned by my Mum. Then my Dad sent me to go and live with Grandparents back in Burton-Upon-Trent (which ties up with some memories I wrote about in a previous piece of writing). Which meant in effect, I had been abandoned by both my parents, at the age of 4 years old.

I went to live with my Grandparents for a while, I don’t remember how long for. I remember I used to make ‘dens’ under the dining room table, but possibly my favorite place to be, was the old coal outhouse attached to the back of the house in the yard. I used to sit in the coal shed, staring at the wooden door, I think I was depressed, and lonely, but I felt quite safe in way, knowing my Nanna was inside, but also I wasn’t overwhelmed by anything. I felt particularly safe listening to the rain on the roof as I sat inside the coal shed.

Around this time, probably since about a year before, two things happened to me. The first was that I developed really painful constipation, which affected my mood. I have a memory of my Nanna once trying to relieve it with a bar of soap, which to be honest, I shouldn’t go into any further detail about.

The second thing that happened to me, was that I developed what I now consider to be an eating disorder. In those days I would have been called a picky or fussy eater, what I think it was in modern language, was Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, possibly triggered by being autistic, and a sensory reaction to certain foods, which was then made a lot worse by caregivers.

My grandparents grew food in the garden. I think they’d boil vegetables to death, the smell and taste was very strong to me, and the texture was really weird. I’d take a mouthful of certain foods, and I would react by retching and rejecting the food. The physical sensation of this was horrible, but the reactions to this made it much worse. I was the child of a fairly poor working class family, who grew food, and I was rejecting it. This didn’t go down well with some. I was a small child, and I felt out of control of my body, and ashamed. Over the years this got worse. I think at one point, someone tried to force feed me. I was mocked for it, and people were angry at me in front of relative strangers as well. I felt I was the problem, I was wrong. Later I dealt with this, by avoiding certain foods altogether, and by eating alone as I was too scared to eat around people. This only started changing in my 20s after meeting a person who found me new foods to eat, and cooked for me, who I felt safe with, who became my friend, and later my partner, Katie.

At the same time as the ARFID developed, my Nanna spoiled me with sweets, chocolates and cups of tea with sugar in them. When I went to stay with her, she’d stock the pantry under the stairs out like it was a sweet shop, with pink wafers, Viscount biscuits, chocolate bourbon creams and probably any 1970s or 1980s sweets you can imagine. Probably as a result of this, I later would comfort eat sweet things, which at points developed into binge eating (though without throwing up). Essentially, by the time I was a teenager, I ate very little ‘good’ food (my dinner was things like mini pizzas, Findus crispy pancakes, and boil-in-a-bag beef) if indeed I ate a proper meal at all, but mostly I was fueled by sweets (my particular favourite was plain chocolate hobnobs, and I would eat an entire packet to myself but still perhaps start on another one). I then became very thin, my clothes would hang off me (I needed to make extra holes in my belt to keep my jeans up), and I developed body dysmorphia. I have also had periods of my life, where I have wanted to be thin, or thinner, worried about my stomach, despite it not being a problem, and being too thin.

That’s enough of the eating disorder stuff for now, back to being abandoned and living with grandparents.

My Mum came home and I went back to the prison estate to live with my parents again. Things never really settled down though, and I think largely due to my Parents’ affairs, we once again had to move away.

Copyright © 2026 Siobhán Sarelle