By the time I was 15, my parents were dead and so were all my grandparents. My much older brother took me in to live with him, his wife and their blended brood of 7 children.
It was about 9 months before I was due to leave school. Further education was out of the question and I was pushed into working full time in a factory for a pittance the day I left School. This was the early nineties for context and I was on two pounds an hour, so after tax and national insurance I wasn't earning much. SIL's son was the same age as me and was on the same wages.
She made me pay thirty pounds a week room and board and was vociferous about making sure I had paid up every Friday. Her son was supposed to pay the same as me. He virtually never coughed up but never had a word said to him about it.
All the kids who were old enough were supposed to share cleaning the house (all the cleaning), cooking, shopping, washing up and laundry. There was a chart.
Guess who was the only one who complied. Yes, me because I was petrified of her vicious tongue, general nastiness and occasional physical violence. I also covered her kids chores that they refused to do because I would also get punished when they didn't do their chores.
Her and my brother used to fuck off out to visit friends and leave me to cook all their kids dinner/tea/supper. They quite often did so leaving no food in the cupboard, fridge nor freezer. So, after paying my room and board, I had to pay again to feed myself and seven kids out my left over wages. I remember on more than one occasion being out of money and resorting to stealing a bag of spuds from outside the local corner shop in order to cook her fucking ungrateful brats some chips.
Sometimes I managed to keep a little of my hard earned money. Her kids used to steal from my purse while I was asleep and spend it on sweets. I was gaslighted and told I must have been a stupid clumsy little bitch and lost it. One of them told me years later that they had taken money from me. I also suspect that SIL took some.
While I was still in school, I had two twenty pence pieces in my jacket pocket once that my uncle had given me (keep the change from going to the shop for him) , she even took that.
Also while still in school, I had money given for clothing that my social worker arranged. The second my social worker left, SIL took the envelope...no clothes were purchased.
So, at 16 I was working 40 hours a week. Walking 2.5 hours a day to get there and back up two of the steepest hills you ever saw, one on the way there, one on the way back. I used to arrive home ready to fall to the ground. I had to the clean, cook the evening meal and wash up.
She called me a lazy cunt and brow beat me into taking a second job waitressing 3 nights a week and Sunday afternoons. There were times when I used to sit in the restaurant kitchen barely able to move from exhaustion because I didn't even have time to eat. I used to buy a yogurt to quickly eat at work and steal a few chips from the kitchen.
My brother and SIL were on the dole.
Brother used to do stuff about the house but my SIL never lifted a god damn finger. Children weren't children to her, they were servants to be screamed at and berated for the slightest failure to do her exact bidding.
A nice little CF additional.
When I was nearing eighteen, I got a BF.
I was a virgin at this point.
Being a responsible sort, I went to the GP in order to go on the pill just in case we got serious (we did, he became DH and still is).
She found my pills.
Called me a right little fucking slag
The cheeky fucker part (or maybe just massive hypocrite)?
Her 15 year old daughter was in the next room holding her six week old baby having been fucking anything in trousers since she was eleven years old.
Phew, that was cathartic.