I invite people to consider this interview with a woman who was one of the UK's youngest mothers.
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Kathleen Moss was just 12 years old, the same age as Georgia, when she gave birth to her daughter. To this day, people still mistake them for sisters. It was in June 1998 that Kathleen caused a national outcry when she became Britain’s then youngest mother, sparking furious debate at the time about declining moral standards.
Losing her virginity to a 14-year-old boy — a family friend — in a caravan at Butlins camp in Pwllheli, North Wales, hers seemed to be the bleakest of modern morality tales. They had sex, she said at the time, because they were ‘bored’.
In a newspaper interview after the birth, Kathleen — who looked even younger than her years — told the world: ‘I don’t care that I’m a mum of 12. I’ll just have to get on with it like other mums.’
But what happened to them? Until now, Kathleen has spoken rarely about her life since Georgia’s notorious birth, for fear of others’ judgement. Today, aged 25, Kathleen cares very much that she became a mother at 12, but cares even more that her daughter should not — as she puts it — ‘make the same mistakes I did’.
‘When Georgia turned 12, it brought back a lot of memories about what I was like at her age. When I look at her, I find it hard to believe that at her age I was already a mother. She seems so young.
I had to grow up overnight, but I’m proud that Georgia can still be a child and I’m very protective of her innocence,’ says Kathleen.
‘I want her to go to college and have a career before she settles down and has children. She knows what happened to me, although we don’t talk about it very much because she’s too young to really understand.
'She knows how important it is for me that she gets an education — something I now really wish I’d had.
‘I don’t think Georgia will make the same mistakes I did because she seems much wiser than I was at her age. She knows what she wants from life and wants to meet her targets at school. She’s a good kid and I’m very proud of her.
‘I regret falling pregnant so young, but how could I ever regret having Georgia? I can’t imagine life without her. Even though I was only 12, the minute she was put in my arms I just felt overwhelmed with love for her.’
Kathleen adds: ‘It scares me when I think of her becoming a teenager. I keep saying to her: “You are not allowed a boyfriend. Finish school, go to college or university before you even think about having kids.”’
And at what age would Kathleen allow Georgia to have a boyfriend? ‘Never!’ is the reply.
Kathleen knows there are many people who expected her to be a disaster as a mother. Indeed, how could a 12-year-old be expected to possess the maturity and responsible attitude required to raise a child when she was so vulnerable herself. And while it would be fair to say Kathleen would have little in common with some middle-class mummies, with their pureed organic carrot and Baby Einstein DVDs, she must have done something right, for when you ask Georgia, she says: ‘She’s the best mum in the world.’
Georgia continues: ‘When I went to school I never noticed that my mum was much younger than the other mothers. No one ever said anything. She was just like everyone else.’
Today, Georgia is very much looking forward to being a bridesmaid at her mother’s forthcoming wedding to fiance Tim Willcox, 24, who she met on a social networking site a year ago and who plans to work in the recycling business with his twin brother.
Kathleen, who left school without a single qualification, is hoping to retrain as a florist in the near future, having been consigned to a series of ‘dead end’ jobs such as bar work on account of her lack of education.
While shy and lacking in confidence, Kathleen seems determined to set a good example for her daughter and provide a more conventional upbringing than the one she had.
The family are hoping to move soon from the sprawling council estate in Wythenshawe, Manchester, where Kathleen grew up, to a new home near Milton Keynes.
Yet despite the most difficult of childhoods and motherhood at a time when she’d not long grown out of dolls, Kathleen is not the type of woman to blame others for how her life turned out, although some might argue she has every reason to.
She will not say a bad word about her late mother, Pauline McCarthy, who she clearly loved, despite her many failings. Pauline died six years ago from breast cancer, aged just 47, and not a day passes when Kathleen doesn’t miss her.
Kathleen was seven years old when her father, Jimmy Moss, who worked for the local council’s refuse department, died suddenly from cancer aged 53.
Pauline, who’d married at 16 and had three children from her first failed marriage and two from her 17-year relationship with Jimmy, fell apart after his death.
‘The estate where I grew up wasn’t the nicest place in the world, but I remember us being a happy family until my dad died,’ says Kathleen.
‘I was the youngest and a real Daddy’s girl. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. It had a huge effect on us and I don’t think my mum got over it. She suffered badly from depression, although she always tried to put on a brave face for us.’
Despite Kathleen’s best efforts to present her mother in a kind light —describing her as wonderfully supportive after Georgia was born, spoiling her grandchild — it is clear there was often little parental supervision or discipline when Kathleen most needed it.
By the age of nine Kathleen was regularly playing truant from school, spending her days in front of the television at home and smoking her mother’s cigarettes. Welfare officers were regular visitors to their home, court fines were imposed, but they had little positive effect.
In an interview after Georgia’s birth, Pauline McCarthy, who never married Kathleen’s father and confessed to drinking up to six cans of lager a night, appeared to abdicate all parental responsibility by saying: ‘Kathleen has a mind of her own. She may only be 12, but she makes her own decisions in life. I don’t tell her what to do.’
In a further shocking admission, she said she hadn’t even realised Kathleen was pregnant until she was eight months gone and close to giving birth. It was one of Kathleen’s older half-sisters who first suspected.
‘I was a bit rebellious,’ says Kathleen.
‘I just didn’t like school and didn’t want to go. My mum tried to make me, but I’d run away and come home again. I regret that now. My mum gave me a lot of freedom. She was never breathing down my neck, but looking back I wish that she had.
‘I’m very different with Georgia. I’m quite easy-going, and while I give her some freedom I’m much more protective and want to make sure she gets the education I never had. I loved my mum, but I’m a very different kind of mother.’
Kathleen says she was not a sexually precocious child. Ignorance, naivety and a lack of parental supervision appear to have been her undoing.
She’d gone on holiday to Butlins, in North Wales, with her older brother, then aged 17, his girlfriend and her family when she had sex for the first time. It was with the 14-year-old brother of her brother’s girlfriend.
It wasn’t love, she says, it wasn’t curiosity, it wasn’t experimentation, it was just something that happened when they became bored with the television programme they were watching alone together one night.
Nor does she blame the boy, Georgia’s father. She says they both knew what they were doing. It was, however, something they never cared to repeat.
‘I didn’t realise I was pregnant until after about four or five months when my tummy started to get bigger, because I was still having periods. I was terrified and just went into denial. I thought that if I ignored it, it would just go away,’ says Kathleen, who hid her bump under baggy clothes and a thick puffa jacket.
‘It was my older half-sister, who was 22 at the time and living with her partner, who became suspicious because she’d just had a baby.
‘One evening, my older brother and his girlfriend came round with a pregnancy test. When it came back positive, they were shocked.
‘We went downstairs and told my mum and she just burst into tears. I don’t know if she felt embarrassed or ashamed of what people would say, because it was all such a blur.
‘She was angry, not so much with me, but with other people for not keeping an eye on me on holiday. It was unheard of back then for a girl of my age to have a baby.’
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