Chris and Kelly
Pippa Wischer and Hayley Hillis
Digital photograph
PXE 1015/18
We’ve been living here five months. We were at a refuge and we needed somewhere else to stay. We didn’t know anyone. We had no money. Two days after we got here, my daughter went into labour. It was absolutely terrifying. I remember thinking ‘She’s going to have her baby in this caravan park’, but you just sort of go into action. We don’t have a car. So I ran from the caravan to the telephone booth, back to the caravan, then to the front office and back to the caravan again and finally the ambulance arrived. Bubby was born within an hour of her getting to hospital.
We’d love to move out now. We need more space, especially with a baby. He’s at the stage where he wants to crawl around and he can’t do it. There’s not enough room.
My daughter was living with my husband and me when she fell pregnant and then her boyfriend left her and my marriage fell apart so we moved out together.
I was at the end of my rope. We left with what we could carry. We had to get out and think. Somewhere calm. Somewhere safe. So this has been a good pause in our life. She’s been a wonderful support my daughter, because I was terrified. I wouldn’t have got out sane but for her.
We’ve had to be very positive. You’ve got to be. It’s vital.
From the beginning we’ve been cutting out positive words and phrases from magazines and newspapers. I’ve stuck them all over the walls of the caravan. There was so much negativity in our lives that I felt we had to wake up to a positive and go to sleep with a positive. We had no radio, no TV. We had nothing to keep us entertained. So we cut up all the positives we could find. Not that there were a lot of them. All this bad news was happening in the papers at the time. But we did it. We did it.
Chris and Kelly