Free Essex Boy: My Story by Kirk Norcross Page B

happy about it at all. He didn’t like to think that I had ADHD. He would say, ‘It’s just a phase. You don’t need all this
medicine and meetings, you’ll get over it in your own time as you grow up.’
    The bad side of it all was that I started to feel like taking Ritalin was making me a hard man. I would think, ‘This is pretty cool. Yeah, I’m so naughty that no one can control me. I’m so mad I need tablets to control me.’
    And the other kids were like, ‘Cor, are you on Ritalin? You must be nuts!’ and they would be a bit respectful to me because of it, so in a way it made me play up to my
reputation.
    On top of all this, Mum, Daniel and I had another problem on our plate: we were about to be made homeless again.
    After we had been in the house for about 18 months, Mum spoke to the council about her rent, and they said, ‘What do you mean,
you
have been paying the landlord, Julie?’
    And she proudly told them, ‘Yeah, I pay him bang on time each week, and have never missed a payment, but things are tight, so I was wondering if you could help out more?’
    And they told her, ‘But Julie, you are not supposed to be paying the landlord anything, that is what we are doing! If you’re paying him too, he’s getting double the
money!’
    Wow. That sent Mum into a proper rage. She went straight round to the landlord to try and get her money back, but she didn’t have a chance. The guy told her to get lost, and said he wanted
us out of the house. I guess he saw it as the easiest way to avoid paying us back, now that there was no way Mum was going to play by his game. We had to move out fast, so Mum spoke to the council,
but again they had no houses going spare that they could move us into.

 
FIVE
    Growing Up in a Hostel
    So that was it. I was eleven years old and Daniel was fourteen and it looked like we were about to become homeless for the second time in our lives. Not exactly something to
boast about.
    Mum put her pride aside and spoke to her parents, and we went back to Nan and Granddad’s for a while. The three of us in one bedroom. We were so grateful, but we felt like a real burden at
the same time. They had their own lives to be getting on with, but now they had to look after us too. And it was embarrassing for Mum – she was thirty-three and back living with her parents. That’s not exactly what you plan for your life.
    But this time she didn’t wait around for someone to come and help us. She was getting wise to this whole housing thing. So she went straight to the council and sat there day after day in
their housing department, until finally they told her they had somewhere for us. It wasn’t exactly luxury – a room in a hostel – but it was better than nothing. As far as council
housing goes, everyone knows a hostel really is the lowest of the low. It’s the bottom rung of the ladder, just above homelessness.
    Not that I really understood all of this at the time, though – to me it was just another new home, and I didn’t really mind. I remember when Mum sat me down on the bed in
Granddad’s house one day, and explained, ‘We’re moving to a new home in a hostel. It’s a big building with lots of people living in it in different rooms, but at least we
will have our own space.’ I imagined that it was like going to a holiday camp!
    So the day we moved I was pretty excited. A lady called Shelley from the council came and drove us to the hostel in her car. We didn’t have much. Any furniture we had owned, Mum had given
away, mainly to family, so we put what we had in a few boxes. It was mainly clothes, and bedding, that kind of thing, and we were able to fit that in the car.
    The only thing I was sad about was leaving Bella. We couldn’t take her to the hostel with us, so she stayed living with Nan and Granddad. They loved her, though, so we knew she would be
happy, and we’d get to see her all the time.
    Then Shelley took us to the hostel, on Charles Street in the