Painful childhood memories of abuse and neglect could have ruined Tracey Johnstone’s life. The mother-of-two tells Jim Entwistle how she has finally come to terms with them.

'TRACEY is a waif-like, fair-haired, brown-eyed little girl with the small stature of an emotionally deprived child.” So begins a report into Tracey Johnstone, then aged nine, in one of a handful of typewritten sheets that paint a bleak picture of a childhood in care.

Now 37, Tracey has emerged on the other side of a turbulent childhood which saw her passed between parent, foster parent, friend of family and a children’s home like an unwanted gift.

It has left her with lasting scars, but also a steely resolve to provide a stable and loving home for her own two children and an evergrowing confidence to be able to hold her head up high, despite the frequent and often brutal setbacks which have punctuated her life.

“I am both comfortable with abuse and uncomfortable with it at the same time,” she says, sitting in front of me, still a little waif-like, but with an unbreakable spirit detectable in the glinting of her eyes and the readiness of her smile.

Tracey, who lives in Darlington, is writing her experiences into a book and hopes her story will inspire others to be able to confront issues buried in their past.

The problem is, a lot of her own past has been lost. Records of her years in care are missing.

A lot of what hasn’t been documented Tracey has either forgotten or suppressed.

What is documented shows that Tracey was taken into Park View children’s home in the Eastbourne area of Darlington in 1982, aged nine, after all other attempts to find her a new home had failed.

The documents from Durham County Council show there was no lack of attempts at trying to get her settled with a foster family, or back with her alcoholic and often abusive father.

When Tracey was nine, after enduring six previous attempts to re-home her, one foster mother rejected her as having an “unlikeable personality, a child who whined continually”.

In another foster home, Tracey said she was treated worse than the family dog. “I used to get locked out in the rain and wasn’t allowed back until the thunder had stopped,” she says.

“I was put out in the snow in my nightie. A friend I ended up meeting in Park View was out on the burgle one night and he jumped over into the yard where I was kept. He thought I was a dog because I was whimpering out in the cold.”

And so she came to be at Park View, which first shows up in the Darlington Business Register in 1925. Now demolished, a care home stands on the site.

Despite all that she had been through, primarily because of her father’s inability and reluctance to care for her, she found it impossible to break that paternal bond.

“At the home, I would always be looking out the window thinking, ‘when is he coming?’ But he let me down again and again,” she says.

“Once he came to visit me. The second time he came he was drunk and was turned away.

The third time he came to drop all my things off and I didn’t see him again until I left.”

Her father, for the time being at least, was out of her life. But as one abuser departed, another entered.

“He had a habit getting me on my own,” she says, recounting the abuses inflicted by an older boy over four years. In a cleaning cupboard, with the smell of bleach lingering, and in a wartime pillbox.

Despite her experiences, Tracey looks back at Park View with some fondness. Perhaps it is because the home offered her at least some stability from the nomadic existence she had lived before. Rules and regulations were a good thing for her, even if some residents totally flouted them.

“There were some good memories of Park View – holidays and making friends,” she says, recalling a caravan trip to Keswick, in the Lake District, where the domesticity of her temporary home was a shock. “There was a suite and a television and ornaments. I wasn’t used to that,” she says.

After leaving Park View, Tracey returned to live with her father. He died soon after and Tracey gravitated towards the routes of alcohol and drugs, and with them, more abusive relationships.

PERVERSELY, it would take a chance encounter with the boy who had abused Tracey in the home – now grown up – to jolt her out of her downward spiral.

“I saw him out shopping,” she says. “And my heart just started beating so fast in fear. I don’t think he saw me, but after that, for some reason, I knew I had to sort myself out.”

The abuse was reported to the police, who interviewed the suspect, but Tracey’s hopes were dashed when officers visited her to say there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution.

Despite the setback, the Tracey Johnstone who emerged from that meeting was not the same Tracey Johnstone who had spent the past 15 years hiding behind a veil of narcotics.

“I used to walk around hiding my face thinking, ‘please no one notice me’,” she says, slowly and quietly, but with that spark in her eyes.

“Now I don’t care – I’ve held on. I’m still here and it feels good.

“Sometimes, it feels like I’m floating in the air, looking down on myself as that scared little girl I used to be.

“I saw him again, the lad who abused me, at the hospital. But I wasn’t frightened any more.

I felt proud. I looked him right in the eye and he put his head down.”