A Friend Like Ben: The true story of the little black and white cat that saved my son. Julia Romp

mum. Just relax a bit and the baby will too.’

      So after being told I was worrying about nothing a hundred times, I pushed down the voice inside that was telling me something was wrong; it’s amazing just how much you can kid yourself. Each night when I tried to get George to sleep, knowing it would be hours before he dropped off, I’d tell myself that things would improve the next day. Each morning when he woke up and started crying, I’d vow that I just had to get through this one because tomorrow was another day. Scarlett O’Hara didn’t have a patch on me when she grubbed in the dirt outside Tara.

      Sometimes, though, after days of George’s crying I’d feel so close to breaking point that I’d leave him in an upstairs bedroom to wail. Closing the door, I’d go downstairs just to be away from the noise, and guilt would fill me that I wasn’t giving George the happiness that I’d had as a child. I knew it wasn’t the same for him to have a mum at home and a dad who lived down the road, and his cries were his way of telling me that I just wasn’t enough. But then I’d go back upstairs, look at George in his cot, so small and perfect with his round, chubby cheeks and puff of blond hair, and wonder what kind of mother I was. Bit by bit, I shut myself away as I started to hide both George and myself from the world, and our tiny house began to feel like a prison.

      The estate where we were living didn’t exactly help keep up my spirits either. There’s good and bad everywhere, from the Hollywood Hills to the slums of India, but let’s just say there was a lot more bad than I was used to where I was living now. Shouts would echo at night as people argued, and I’d hear the smack of punches thrown in drunken fights. Or there’d be a knock on the door as one of the stream of men who hired out one of my neighbours by the hour mistook my house for hers. The grey concrete estate looked like a jail and some of the people living there knew that from experience.

      It was then that I also saw for the first time just how much drugs affect some lives. I’d never even had a cigarette, but now I saw people with eyes that were blank and desperate at the same time. Most days there would be a knock on the door and I’d open it to find someone offering to sell me wrinkle cream or baby clothes, whatever they’d managed to steal in the hope of getting whatever they could for it in order to pay for a fix.

      I hated being in the pathway of all the trouble, and so six months after moving on to the estate I leaped at the chance to swap my house for a second-floor flat in another block. So what if the ceiling was covered in nicotine stains and the front door didn’t lock? I could see blue sky outside my windows and soon made my first friend on the estate – a woman called Jane, who came to introduce herself one day after Dad, who had taken enough steroids to fell a horse so that his hands would work long enough, put on a new front door with Nob’s help.

      ‘Don’t go answering the bell at night,’ Jane told me as we had a cup of tea. ‘Just keep yourself to yourself and you’ll be fine.’

      Jane was tall and slim, and I never saw her without full make-up and a pair of high stilettos. She always looked as if she was about to be whisked off to Harvey Nichols in a limousine instead of going up Hounslow high street. She seemed to like keeping an eye on me and so did her boyfriend, Martin, who was just as kind. Sometimes he would appear at the door with a slice off one of the pig’s heads they cooked in a pot, which I took with a heavy heart because I didn’t like to tell Martin that I was vegetarian. Those were the kind of people he and Jane were: kind and generous, good neighbours who kept an eye on me and did whatever they could to help. Yes, I quickly realised they had a bit of a liking for Diamond White, but it didn’t worry me because who was I to judge? As a single mum on a council estate without a penny to her name, there wasn’t exactly much for me to get uppity about.

      George was sitting beside Lewis in front of the television at Mum and Dad’s house.

      ‘Look at the two of them, Ju,’ she said with a smile.

      Lewis and George were watching Tots TV, just as they always did, because neither of them could get enough of the three rag dolls called Tilly, Tom and Tiny.

      ‘He’s a good boy, isn’t he, love?’ Mum said as she looked at George, who’d got up to follow Lewis out of the room now the programme had ended.

      It was 1998. George was two and he’d started walking and crawling just as he should have done a few months after his first birthday. A year on he followed Lewis around like a shadow and my mum and dad were still trying to encourage me with him. I didn’t say too much when they did. I knew everyone was being kind, but I was beginning to feel sure that my problems with George weren’t just of my own making because although I did everything I could to make him happy, it was like living with a stranger. He could change from happy to raging in the blink of an eye and as much as everyone tried to pretend that normal rules applied to George, I knew they didn’t.

      Take sleeping. At night George would lie awake in his cot for hours, and the moment he learned how to climb out of it, he’d get up every few minutes and scream without stopping if I tried putting him back down. It wasn’t that I was afraid of his temper or making rules. But I could see in George’s eyes that he just didn’t understand what I was trying to teach him. So I had no other choice but to let him toddle around the flat until he finally fell into an exhausted sleep. We must have walked a fair few marathons doing laps of our tiny flat, and even when I did get him into his cot, he often lay awake, chanting words and phrases over and over.

      ‘Buzz Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear,’ he’d say again and again, because those were two of the handful of words that he used now, along with ‘Dad’, ‘Mum’ or ‘Batman’.

      ‘It’s just not possible,’ the doctor would tell me when I went to see him, almost beside myself. ‘Everyone needs to sleep – especially children.’

      ‘But George doesn’t.’

      The doctor looked at me with a slight smile. ‘I think you must have fallen asleep yourself, Julia, so you didn’t realise that George had as well.’

      I knew I hadn’t, but I was learning to keep quiet, and although I still took George to the doctor when something new happened, because I wanted to make sure there wasn’t an obvious health problem, I didn’t keep asking questions when I was told he was fine. I’d been brought up to trust doctors, after all, and everyone kept telling me his behaviour was down to me.

      That’s why I was doing everything I could to make a better life for us and had signed up to do the Knowledge, the exams that license people to become London cab drivers. I wanted to go back to work and provide for George, so I’d been studying every spare moment for the past eighteen months, with Dad encouraging me. ‘Driving a cab would be the perfect job for you, Ju,’ he’d tell me. ‘You can study for the Knowledge at home and then go to work when it suits you, just like I did.’

      But, like a lot of things in life, learning the Knowledge was easier said than done. Driving for a living might sound simple, but if you want to pick up passengers in central London you have to memorise all the streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross station near Trafalgar Square – and there are 25,000 of them. Training for the Knowledge is so hard it’s been proved to make your brain grow, and it doesn’t just end at learning the streets one by one. You also have to know the ‘runs’. These are set routes that get you from any A to any B – lists of streets so long that they fill entire books. I wasn’t sure my brain could fit all that in, and the other big problem was that I hated driving in central London.

      ‘Faster, Ju, faster,’ Dad would shout when I took him up the Great West Road in his old silver Mustang.

      But as soon as I pressed my foot on the accelerator and felt the massive old car almost take off, I’d slow down again in fright. I was too slow for central London, so I decided to study for a suburban licence, which would allow me to pick up passengers in the suburb that included Hounslow. It would still mean memorising thousands of streets, though, so after having an interview and being accepted to train for the Knowledge, I began studying for it at home with George. Putting him in a bouncy chair, I’d sit down surrounded by maps and stare at them as I tried to memorise the roads and runs while he cried fit to burst.

      ‘New