Little Girl Lost: Who do you turn to when you have no name, no home, no family? - Paperback

by Chris Newton (Editor), Ingrid Steel (Author)

When Ingrid Steel was first put into an orphanage at the age of four, she did not even know her real name. Nor would anyone tell her who her parents were, or what had happened to them. After years of bullying, deprivation and gratuitous punishment - even sexual abuse - in a series of homes and orphanages, she was incarcerated first in a borstal, then in a mental hospital. One day after returning to the orphanage, Ingrid made a secret pilgrimage to Somerset House in London to discover her real identity. She came back in triumph clutching her precious birth certificate - only to have it taken from her. That was the last straw. Desperate to be free to live her own life, she forced her way out of the orphanage and into the cold and wet. Would she at last be able to lead a life of freedom? Little Girl Lost is the first part of Ingrid Steel's shocking, heartrending life story.

Author Biography

For the first sixteen years of her life, Ingrid Steel did not even know her own name. She spent her childhood being shunted between orphanages. Her anger at the cruelty and bullying she suffered led to her being branded as a violent troublemaker, and she was even admitted to a mental hospital and at one point committed to Borstal. It was not until Ingrid won her freedom at the age of sixteen that she was able to embark on a normal life. She has now been happily married for more than 40 years to a lorry driver and has four grown-up children. Her work as a nurse gave her the opportunity to start investigating her past, and in her thirties she was finally able to identify her long-lost parents and even make contact with the brother she had never known she had. Ingrid lives with her husband in Dymchurch in Kent.