‘I’m not saying I’m not scarred. But scars do fade’: Baroness Lola Young on her childhood in care

In March 2012, Lola Young, who sits as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, clambered on to the rush-hour bus that would take her from the children’s social care office in Islington, north London, to her home. In her arms was a box: a collection of papers she was so anxious to open she did it there on the bottom deck of the number 38, spreading the pages precariously across her lap. Names, dates, brief notes about prams and the application of olive oil to infant skin…

As the bus wove and lurched, Young read the story of the beginning of her life, and already there was so much to take in. On 30 July 1951, a baby with her name was, she learned, delivered to a Daisy Vince of 207 Tufnell Park Road – a baby that was then eight weeks old, rather than six, as she’d always been told. The traffic inched along, and as it did, she wondered… What difference does a fortnight make? None, probably. But if she’d been misinformed about this, there was surely more news to come.

The documents were far more numerous than Young had imagined – for a long time, it had seemed as if Islington council might have lost her file altogether – and a lot more reading lay ahead, some of it consoling, and some very upsetting. In the end, though, better to have done it than not. She has no regrets. “I’d written an autobiography before I began trying to find my records,” she says, once we’ve found our way to the room in the Palace of Westminster where we’ll talk (after 20 years in the Lords, she still gets lost in its warren of corridors). “But it didn’t settle with me until I had them. They were an archive of my life, and they provided a kind of anchor: a through line for the story.” Last March, two decades after she first learned she was legally entitled to access her files and 55 years after she left the care of the London borough of Islington, she finally finished reworking it – and now she’s about to publish the result.

Does this feel like a full stop? She smiles. “I’m glad I got it out of my system. But it’s more of a semicolon than a full stop.” Her life these days is hugely successful and replete, but the fallout from a childhood in care goes on, as it doubtless will for ever. “It [her childhood] is contested,” she says, a reference to a member of her birth family who disputes her account of events. So many people are involved. She’s close to her adult son, Gregg, and reading her book has, she tells me, been painful for him: “He has strong views about the situation.”

What about his father? Young divorced her husband several years ago, but they remain close friends. “I don’t want to speak for him now, but I know that when we first started going out, he was incredibly moved [by what had happened to her]. I used to end up feeling sorry for him. I sort of felt I had to comfort him, that I had to say: it’s all right, you know?”

Her husband would tell her that it really wasn’t all right – and he was correct to do so. But human beings are extraordinary: “I’m not saying I’m not scarred. But scars do fade.” The years she has spent working on behalf of the “care experienced” have, she insists, given her a sharp sense of perspective. “I remember telling someone when I first looked into the policy side of this that I had three different social workers as a child, and they said: well, you were lucky because some kids now have 33. I had some horrible moments growing up, some really difficult moments. But I’m old now [she is 73] and I do feel that I’ve met so many people in the most desperate of circumstances.”

Growing up in care needn’t define a person, she says, but it does shape them. “I don’t think it’s offensive to ask if what I went through made me the person I am today. I’d rather not have had those experiences, of course. But it’s a sliding doors thing. What if, instead of refusing, I’d said: yes, Mother, I will come to Lagos with you? That would have been one life. Or what if I’d said, yes, Father, I’ll live with you and your family after all? That would have been another life. Or what if someone had adopted me when I was a year old? Another life there. They all would have been different, but what’s the point of thinking like that?” She sounds straightforward as she says this, almost upbeat. But I’ve read her book – it made me sad and furious – and thanks to this, I know that life taught her long ago not to daydream.

***

Young spent her first years in a world that brings to mind the fiction of Patrick Hamilton. Her Nigerian parents, who were not married (her father already had a family at home), had come to the UK to train and to work, and an unexpected baby was something they were seemingly neither able nor willing to take care of. And so, Daisy Vince stepped in: one of only two women in the area who were willing to foster black children. But the arrangement was unofficial. Vince received no money from the council for Young’s care, and though health visitors and social workers visited periodically, recording their impressions of mother and child in their notes – “20 July 1952: Well & happy. Has won a prize at a baby show recently” – they were hands-off by today’s standards. It was, perhaps, a case of out of sight, out of mind. No one thought to query the situation.

Vince was a widow and by 1951, on her way to being elderly. “She was born in 1886,” says Young, a date that seems, in context, scarcely credible. “I’ve a photograph of her with her sister aged about 15, and they’re in long pinafore dresses, like something out of Conan Doyle.” Her tall Victorian house in Tufnell Park had been divided into four flats. On the ground floor lived two middle-aged single women. Above them, lived Daisy’s daughter and granddaughter.

Vince, a longstanding foster parent, lived in the basement. It had a kitchen, a front room, a scullery, and one bedroom, in which she and all the foster children slept together. When Young first arrived, there were two other children living there. Their fortnightly bath night was, she recalls, “a palaver”: buckets and saucepans had to be filled with water and heated on the stove in the scullery; these were then carried carefully into the front room, where a tin bath stood by the fire.

Vince was, in her own way, kind and encouraging to Young, and so were her extended family: at Christmas, there were lots of presents. But the times were racist, and so, at moments, were Vince’s daughter and son-in-law. “Daisy was unusual, I think,” says Young. “She used to tell me Africans were more intelligent than white people, perhaps because she had only encountered those who were here to study medicine, the law, chemistry.” Tufnell Park was shabbily genteel, and very white, and so, later, was her secondary school. “Most black people who came here then were from the Caribbean; they were in west London, not our patch of Islington. There just weren’t many black children around.” The only black child she knew well was her cousin, who also came to live with Vince. The two of them were – and still are – close.

Reading about this, one’s mind fills with questions. Why did Vince cleave to Young, even in the face of resistance from her family? (Daisy was firmly against the idea of Young being taken into official council care.) And what of Young’s biological parents? Her cousin’s parents visited regularly, and gave Vince money for her keep, but Young’s were mostly absent, and cash rarely forthcoming. At first, I tried to believe they must have been in some kind of hell. Perhaps, I thought, Young’s illegitimacy had brought shame to them, or maybe they were working all hours, struggling financially.

However, as the years tick by, and they never return, it becomes apparent they’ve chosen to abandon their daughter, and that their parsimony has nothing to do with circumstance. As Young suggested earlier, both of them later gave her the option to live with them in Nigeria. But when she refused – she didn’t know them; she wanted to stay with Vince and her schoolfriends – they didn’t press her; they shrugged and went home to pack their suitcases. Onwards, and upwards. In Nigeria, Young’s father went on to become an important and wealthy man: a judge with a big reputation and his own driver.

Young cannot really provide any answers. All she will say of Vince is that she’d had a hard life. Her father died when she was young, she’d lost two husbands; on some level, perhaps, she needed to be needed. As for her biological parents, she can only agree with me. “Neither my father nor my mother dragged me, screaming and kicking, on to the ship that was sailing to Lagos. I’d love to know why they acted as they did – that’s one of the things I hoped to find in my records – but there is no explanation. They just sort of… cut the link.” Memories are, she insists, often fuzzy. But even her adult encounters with them – they’re both dead now – were chilly and unyielding. She went to Lagos once for a family wedding, and it was agonising (an experience she recounts in her book). She has travelled widely in Africa, but she will never return to Nigeria.

***

Young liked school: the girlfriends she made there, a kind of surrogate family, are still her close gang. But she never felt secure, knowing the arrangement with Vince could end at any moment – and as things would turn out, she was right to feel this. When she was 14, Vince died. Life changed overnight. At first, she went to live with her cousin, whose parents now wanted her back. But she was a cuckoo in their nest. In the end, she had to go. The only option was a children’s home. It was a long way out of London, and it took her hours to get to and from school. In the winter, she hated the walk down a dark country lane. And the place was noisy, chaotic. It was hard to be studious.

Did she miss Vince? Had she loved the woman she always called Mum? This isn’t something she writes in her book. “Nobody’s ever asked me that question before,” she says. “This sounds… I didn’t know what love was.” She thinks. “What are the components of love? You want to please somebody. You want to feel that they matter, and you matter. You want to feel wanted.” The truth is that she doesn’t know if she loved her.

She hoped to go to university but she failed to get the grades – and now, aged 18, she was on her own, the council free of its responsibilities towards her. For me, this is both the most heartbreaking section of her book, and the most inspiriting. In her rented room, she gets herself together, and on she goes. She works in an administrative job, and in a children’s home. She trains as an actor, and appears in Play School and Metal Mickey. She goes to university, and becomes an academic. Finally, she applies to become a so-called people’s peer, succeeding on her second go to become Baroness Young of Hornsey. And she has a family, too. “I used to say I’d never have children. I didn’t want them to go through what I had. But in the end I realised that, whoever my child turned out to be, all I had to do was to make sure they always felt loved.” Did she fear abandonment herself? “Maybe that was underneath. But my principal feeling was more puzzlement than fear. I would always think: why does that person like me? Why does she want to be my friend?”

Before I go, we talk about what has changed for the better for children in care, and what is worse – the issues that keep her at her desk in the Lords even as she thinks about retirement. “Systems are usually designed to perpetuate the system, not to serve the people who encounter it,” she says. “Some changes have been good. There have been improvements in record-keeping; children receive a memory box now. If you and your foster carer are in agreement, you can stay with them now past the age of 18. At 18, some local authorities will also put you to the top of the housing list. But [on the negative side] children are often constantly moved, and to places where you wouldn’t want to put them; where there is criminal activity going on. Children’s homes have been privatised and, run for a profit, the accommodation they offer is often substandard.”

At the root of all this, however, is the stark fact that there are 100,000 children in care in England and Wales. Why are they, and what can be done to reduce such numbers? There are not nearly enough black foster carers, she says, and while the ideal is that black children be placed with black parents, absolutes are not always useful here. “What I am saying is that these things are complicated. For example, I know of some couples where only one partner is black, but social workers felt they had a lifestyle that wasn’t right for a mixed-heritage or black child because it was too middle class, essentially. There is this idea of essential blackness, that if you don’t go to carnival or listen to reggae… ”

The phrase “people who look like me” irks her. “It’s an oversimplification.” Difference is important, but the differences even well-meaning people infer when it comes to skin colour are often dubious. “Does it mean, you know, that I’m supposed to be a better dancer than you?” Actually, she probably is a better dancer than me, I say: I’m a total embarrassment under a glitter ball. She laughs. “You haven’t seen me on the dancefloor!”

After this we set off, back through the warren, looking for a lift she’d never used before this morning. Does she like being a baroness? She tells me that it took her a long time to learn the ropes, and as she writes in her book, soon after she was introduced, an elderly peer made a racial slur in her presence. But the place has changed a lot, and her title is a useful weapon in her armoury (her areas of interest include the fashion industry and modern slavery as well as child protection; she is founding co-chair of the all-party parliamentary groups on ethics and sustainability for fashion; and sport, modern slavery and human rights): “Walk into a room where people know you’re Baroness This or Lord That, and it makes a difference. I would say it makes too much difference, but I try to ride with it, and to use it for the better.” In a courtyard at last, we say goodbye, and as she disappears briskly around a corner, all I can think is that I’ve truly never been happier to be just another item on someone else’s to-do list.

• Eight Weeks: Looking Back, Moving Forwards, Defying the Odds by Lola Young is published on 28 November by Fig Tree (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply