You only realise how precious motherhood is when you actually become a mother you know! My mum was the only one from her family to be born in England, everyone else was born in Jamaica. I have a brother and sister from my step dad. He's really cool. He's always treated me like his own. Whatever them lot get, I get, and if ever I need anything he's there. My mum got diagnosed with epilepsy when she had my younger sister and then a couple of years ago she got diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. In these sorts of situations the family just pull together – it's hard but you learn to manage. I did a lot of things like getting my brother and sister ready and taking them to school. I used to get away with everything at school because they knew I was late because I’d be dropping them lot off. I even got out of an exam early once just because I said I was going to pick them up, and I wasn’t! I used to go to church when I was little, like seven or eight. But me and my cousin used to hide or pretend we were sleeping so they didn't take us to Sunday School because we never liked it. My uncle took us to church on Gaythorne Road – the Light of the World or something like that. I don't know why we went because no one was religious. They were Rastafarian but they weren't religious.

Leeds Road was our patch. We used to hang around Seymour Park. All my friends were Asian. There were me and a white girl and all the rest were Asian boys. There was no black people, no coloured people. There was a few black girls but they moved out. I didn't like hanging round with girls anyway because they were too bitchy, so I was mates with all these Asian lads. We never looked at the colour of their skin or anything like that. Obviously we knew that our friends went to mosque and stuff like that.