The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland Read Online Free PDF Page B

never forget the journey because I had never been on the underground before and I had never seen anything like Paddington station, with so many people in such a big place making so much noise all at the same time. It was a world that I had never seen before and it all looked wonderful.
    With whistles blowing and people shouting, we all walked along the platforms looking at the trains, but mum couldn’t read the signs, so she asked some people if they knew anything about the train that we had to get on to go to Ireland and they said yes, and they explained to her what she had to do. She said thanks and then she began to run along the platform with all of us children running along behind her. It was like an adventure and I loved it. However, as she turned and ran down another platform next to the train that we had to get on, it was just too difficult for me to keep up with her anymore and I fell. I got up and I began to walk behind her, but suddenly mum stopped running, then she turned around and began to grab and lift us one by one onto the train.
    I walked towards her and it was my turn. I looked down at the gap between the platform and the train and the gap was so big that I could have easily fallen under the train and onto the tracks; but before I could say anything to her, she grabbed me and, in one huge swoop of her arms, she swung me onto the train. Then she stepped onto the train and shouted, ‘Is this going to Ireland?’; but before anyone could shout back, the train began to move and it began to leave the station. She quickly turned around, opened the carriage door and jumped off the train; and as she did, the carriage door swung open and crashed against the side of the carriage and it made a huge smashing sound. But before we could do anything, mum turned around, ran up to the carriage door and slammed it shut, leaving us looking at her through the window.
    Then she just stood and smiled, and as the train pulled away from the platform she began to wave goodbye at us. I screamed and shouted at her, ‘Mum, stop’, but the train kept pulling away and then she was gone. I could not believe what she had just done, I sat down and put my head down onto my lap and I began to cry, then Kevin told me that mum had planed it that way all along and that she never intended to come with us back to Ireland. ‘I’m taking you’, he said. ‘I will be taking all of us all the way to Ireland and all on my own. Now shut up and sit down’, he said. But I started to scream at him that we didn’t want to go to Ireland without mum and that we wanted to stay in London with her. But he just looked at us and said nothing; he was only sixteen years old and he was taking three little kids hundreds of miles to Ireland, so what could he do with us apart from look and wonder what was going to happen to us all when we finally got to our dad’s house in Ireland?
    After a while, Kevin told us that it was going to take hours to get to the docks and ferry by train and he said that he had nothing for us to eat or drink with him and that he had no money to spend on food or water while on the train. We looked at each other, not quite understanding what he meant, and then we all looked out of the train windows and watched as the world went by, and I began to cry again; but Kevin just ignored me as if I were not even there. It was a long and difficult journey for us and some of the people on the train began to get fed up with us crying, playing and messing around, but they couldn’t do anything about it, apart from complain to Kevin about us, but he couldn’t do anything either and we didn’t understand what was going on anyway. So, by the time we arrived at the last station, we had worn ourselves out from playing and crying, and we didn’t make a fuss about anything Kevin told us to do. Even when Kevin told us to carry all our own stuff, and even when he said that we had to walk over a mile to the docks to catch the ferry, we still said