On the day we were evicted from our flat and made homeless, it wasn’t until late afternoon that the council told us where we could go – a hotel in a town an hour and a half by bus away, where we didn’t know anyone, and where I’d never even been before. I would never have been able to get my eldest daughter, Bella, to school and, even though I was heartbroken, I made the decision to let her move in with my mum, who lived near our old flat.
She was seven and I had never been apart from her before. We had been evicted from our rented two-bedroom flat in Birmingham, where we’d lived since Bella was a baby. It was the only home she’d ever known and I’d never missed a rent payment – our landlord simply wanted to sell the flat, and we were out in April.
