'˜Precious' memoriesof life as foster child

It’s a remarkable story, one Precious tells in her newly-published memoir Precious.

In its pages, Precious, now a freelance journalist living in London, tells the tale of her struggle to find an identity that fitted amid all the conflicting messages, the story of her attempts to decode a childhood full of secrets and dysfunction.

“I was advertised in Nursery World”, she says simply “It just said something like ‘attractive baby needs new home’.”

Her mother had moved to England from Nigeria, met and married a man from Sierra Leone and become pregnant with Precious. But the relationship fell apart.

“I really don’t know much about it, except that it broke down before I was born.”

And her mother, still alive and living in North London, certainly isn’t prepared to explain what happened.

“My mother does not answer. I never met my father, but I know that he is dead now. I did eventually manage to track down his family. He was killed during the Civil War in Sierra Leone in 1999.

“I now have very spasmodic contact with my mother. It’s a strange relationship. She has four children, and she says if she could lead her life again, she would not have had any of us, and she doesn’t say that to insult us. That’s just how she sees it. I haven’t seen her since last year.

“But she was a princess, from a local royal family in Nigeria. The family had plenty of money. They had been through the Biafran war, and they had lost money during it, but she definitely came from privilege. Her father had been educated at English boarding schools.”

But Precious, it seems, was not part of her plans.

“At the time in the 70s and even the 60s, there were quite a lot of people coming to England from Africa, often to study, and they would often advertise children. They could not afford a nanny. They wanted private foster parents absolutely dirt cheap - people who wanted cash in hand.

“And so I was advertised at birth. Some family in the West Country took me initially. My mother put me with this family at nine days but didn’t visit for two months. When she visited, she saw I had been horribly mistreated. She took me back and advertised me a second time.”

This time Precious was taken in by a woman in Midhurst, aged around 57 who sadly died last year. Precious has carefully changed names in the book and is reluctant to name the woman now, but for years she was simply Nanny.

“Before she got me, she had privately fostered two Nigerian boys for several years. They had suddenly gone back to their parents because they had finished their studies, and so she bought a copy of Nursery World and saw the advert.

“She was a very interesting lady. She had her own two grown-up children in their 20s by then. Before she began fostering, she had huge problems with agoraphobia and had not left the house for nine years. She felt that having children would force her to leave the house. It was a bizarre way of dealing with agoraphobia! She would take it little by little, to the end of the street and then a little bit further.”

And so, aged three months, Midhurst became Precious’ new home in 1971: “I was there for about a year and then my mother took me back. Nanny was not sure if it was for good, but after I was gone several months she assumed that was that and looked in Nursery World for a new child, and there I was in Nursery World again. My mother had decided that she didn’t want to keep me. I went back to Nanny. Nanny wrote off and replied to the advertisement, and my mother delivered me again and told Nanny this time I would be living there until I was seven or eight which was the age I could go to boarding school.”

When she was eight, however, Precious became the centre of a protracted court case, Nanny seeking custody against her mother: “My mother was not nice to me at all. Sometimes she was physically abusive. I didn’t want to live with her. But it was very overwhelming for me as a child. It was very dramatic. Typically a child would be sent back to its birth mother, but at one point my mother attacked Nanny. Displays like that didn’t help her case. I was made a ward of court to stay with Nanny as my legal guardian.

“I went to school at Midhurst Grammar School until I was 16 and then Chichester College to do my A-levels. But I stopped A-levels and ran away to London. I had had enough of feeling isolated. I was more or less the only black child around at the time. I felt a real sense of confusion. Nanny used to tell me that I was a white girl, which I clearly wasn’t!”

Precious became pregnant at 18, came back to her have baby and then returned to complete her A-levels: “And then the academic side took off.”

She read English at University College, Oxford, and now works as a journalist in London.

The book is partly to raise awareness of private foster care which is still prevalent. While it worked out on the whole for Precious, in some case it’s an easy way for paedophiles to send off for children.

But she also wrote the book simply because it is a fascinating story. Precious doesn’t feel scarred by what happened: “You just have to have a sense of humour! But certainly my teenage years became more and more turbulent. I was extremely confused.”

And even now, she is no closer to understanding her mother’s behaviour in it all: “There must have been some reason, but while I was researching it all, my mother was just like a closed book to me.”

Precious: A True Story by Precious Williams is published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (ISBN: 9780747584216,RRP: £14.99).