A heart wrenching memoir of a woman trying to overcome
the emotional, physical and psychological trauma of
childhood abuse in, What A Life!
Children remained with their foster families for a long while, with or without frequent visits. Although the mainly white English working class families were paid for their service, they effectively became surrogate parents to those kids. This private arrangement was intended to help struggling students to focus on their jobs and studies. It probably saved Ola’s life.
When Ola became five years old, her parents took her back from her foster parents to live with them in South London around 1969. Ola’s early memory of her biological mother was of a cruel and wicked woman. Some of the things Ola faced from the time she was about five years old, till she was twelve years old were very cruel indeed.
The very idea that loving parents could inflict such abuse on their first child begs belief, but for the physical evidence scars consistent with Ola’s account. She was abused verbally, physically and emotionally – the physical scars are still there to prove it - All this at the hands of her own mother and father. .
It was strange that even the courts and the Social Services were well and truly deceived.