I slept rough as a teenager: I was stepped over, spat on — and raped

Sitwell in 2023

DAVE BENETT/GETTY IMAGES FOR CELIA KRITHARIOTI

I was the middle of three pretty, privileged, privately educated daughters, each pony or ballet-mad, passions that my late parents, the gastronomes Justin and Melanie de Blank, encouraged and indulged. My parents were amusing, charming and successful, both prodigiously well read and with many similarly erudite friends who came to stay in our large, elegant Georgian house in north Norfolk.

Around their dining table one might find Prue Leith, the artist Lucian and the raconteur Clement Freud, European royals, English aristocrats, designers, architects and the writer Desmond MacCarthy of Normal for Norfolk fame.

They voted Tory, went to church most Sundays and remained married, albeit living rather separate, bohemian lives in Norfolk and Belgravia. On the face of it it was an idyllic childhood — yet despite my young age I was acquainted with human cruelty.

I have always struggled to understand and therefore to conform to social rules — this has instigated varying degrees of bullying throughout my life. Shortly before I was expelled from the last of the many schools I attended in eight years of education I was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia — and latterly, in my late thirties, with attention deficit disorder.

When I left school in 1993 neurodivergence wasn’t much acknowledged. I was told, endlessly, that I was lazy and stupid. An IQ test showed a result of 168. So definitely not stupid, therefore I must be lazy, and therefore at fault.

Aged 11 I was raped by a family “friend”. By 12 I was struggling with depression and prescribed antidepressants. At 13 my most beloved little dog was run over, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and I had a bad riding accident and lost my horse. It was a perfect storm to greet my new pubescent hormones. Yet it wasn’t as though one day I was fine and the next not.

In hindsight my mother was also struggling with undiagnosed ADHD. She and my elder sister, Polly, who was later diagnosed with, and died, from bipolar disorder, were to me unpredictable, and often violently erratic, and they seemed to dislike me my entire life.

Deprived of Norfolk and the companionship of animals, I began to make friends in London. Goths and punks were the first humans that seemed to accept me. I started partying, smoking, drinking, taking LSD and Ecstasy, staying out for nights at a time and skipping school. More than ever I was considered a disruptive influence, both at school and home, and I was thrown out.

“I was ill prepared for life on the streets”

PAUL GROVER/SHUTTERSTOCK

I had nowhere to go. At first I slept in the underpass of Tottenham Court Road station, since there was a group of homeless people and there is a degree of safety in numbers when sleeping rough. Soon I began to date a much older man who had a reputation for fighting. Besides finding him utterly irresistible, I hoped he would protect me. We moved to his patch: the doorway of the Piccadilly Theatre.

I was ill prepared for life on the streets. My boyfriend was a drug addict: when not in prison, he spent his time in pursuit of a hit. Often I would be woken by someone — not necessarily another homeless person — robbing me of what little I had secured to survive on that day.

Party nights, particularly Thursday night to Sunday morning, were the most violent. While the bars were open I would undergo regular small acts of random cruelty, being spat at or kicked by a passing reveller to make their friends laugh, because I was homeless and therefore in their eyes not human. Later, after closing, when the crowds of people waiting for taxis or buses home had dwindled to just a handful of mindless bored drunks, I might be subjected to more sustained acts of violence.

However, it’s after even they have veered off to their soft warm beds that the really dangerous time descends. That dead of night, when the streets are empty after everything closes, before the work commuters start, is a time when you cannot and must not sleep. Those are the hours all homeless people fear the most, when the absence of others who could intervene on your behalf makes way for real monsters. I knew two men who had their throats slit while they slept on Berwick Street, a block from where I slept by the Piccadilly Theatre.

With her sister Clementine as a child

I was raped. The looks that later saved me from this living hell possibly made me more susceptible to this fate than some others. I tried to disguise them, and my all too evident vulnerability, with a mohican haircut but in the beginning I was naive. If someone offered me a bed or a hot bath I followed them, a grateful puppy. In time I became better at calculating risk — I learnt not to trust. But there were still times such as when I was kidnapped in that dead of night by four men who took me to one of their homes, where they degradingly and painfully used my young body like a blow-up doll for their pleasure and amusement.

After negotiating the night you are forced to beg for money. This is a humiliation all of its own, to beg for your survival. Most people ignore you, doubtless they think, like Braverman, that you are a lousy, drug-addled, workshy layabout. They pretend that the cold, hungry and exhausted human being is not there.

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Children were almost always kind, many gave me their pocket money. Those without parents to usher them away from doubtless dangerous me asked with genuine interest about my life. Many people ask about your life, but most do so evidently assuming that they will arrive at a solution you have not considered.

Others bark, “Get a job.” What job prospects did I have? Occasionally police officers would stop me, possibly aware I was a child. I’d lie, give a fake name. I’d heard all about the atrocious care system and I did not want to be taken into care.

Only a handful of adults, including the actor Martin Clunes, were unfailingly gentle and generous. Many celebrities pass through Piccadilly, but he stood out because he always made time to exchange pleasantries, not to judge my failings, just chat. It was a small act of kindness yet one that reminded me of my humanity.

Humanity is in short supply as a rough sleeper. When you can finally settle down to doze, in the relative safety provided by the busy legs striding past you on their way to interesting lives in insulated buildings with hot water, you know not to sleep past midday. That’s when drunk City boys will decide the best place to eject the excesses of their lunch is on you. Or maybe, having been caught short, they will urinate on you. There are no nice hot baths when you’re sleeping rough.

Martha Sitwell in 1996 at Piccadilly Circus Tube station

BLAKE BOYD

Why didn’t I give up and go home? After throwing me out my mother refused to see me or take my calls. When I phoned home and she answered, she would simply slam down the receiver. If my father answered, he might whisper, “Mummy will be out later, why don’t you come for a chicken?” But I was always to be out by the time she was expected home.

Most of you probably assume I was a drug addict too. Was I? No. I did smoke crack once, in the men’s conveniences under Leicester Square, and it was truly divine; it washed away the fear and horror. I also smoked heroin, once, at the insistence of my boyfriend at the time, but found myself dribbling and unable to move — deeply dangerous in an already unsafe environment.

What stopped me falling into these traps that caught so many others? It’s simple: I still had hope. And my darling little black and tan mongrel, Blitz, whom I rescued from a cruel situation soon after finding myself in this one.

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The vast majority of rough sleepers I encountered were survivors of trauma. Many were veterans in the days before the army invested in mental health. Others had escaped the atrocious care system, the rest were survivors of domestic, parental and/or sexual abuse. Added to these already difficult lives, studies show that many rough sleepers are neurodivergent — people whose brains process information differently — conditions we are all familiar with now: ADHD, autism spectrum, dyslexia, dyspraxia.

I was lucky, I was given the chance to get out. At 17 I gave birth to my son; my boyfriend and I had been housed shortly before. But my boyfriend was still an addict. He would take any money we had and I was still forced to beg. It was when I was back outside the Piccadilly Theatre, weighing in at five stone but now with enormous milk-inflated breasts, that Vivienne Westwood spotted me and changed my life.

I went on to become the face of Ascot, married then escaped from the lord of the manor, regained my nerve in the saddle, and was crowned — by the press at least — “the doyenne of sidesaddle”. There came reconciliation with my family. In the end I cared for my father through much of his illness.

Blitz died ten days after my father, but before he left me he trained up my dog Ethel, who has now seen me through a brutal divorce, the sudden death by suicide of my elder sister, in whose memory I rode sidesaddle across Mongolia.

Many more broken bones, a few more broken hearts, including the loss of my latest horses, and finally nursing my mother through her cruel illness before her death. Now Ethel has been joined by Ernest, an enormous bull lurcher, and lately we have adopted a young magpie, Hecate, who imperiously accepts my help, having been made homeless herself at a tender age.

Modelling is picking up again in my mid-forties. I also work as a stylist, a designer and a make-up artist. As a creative still struggling with ADHD I do live a somewhat hand-to-mouth existence in a rented flat, but I have a hot bath every day and just about manage to keep Hecate in worms.

Best of all I have been enveloped by the most wonderful family of friends, who span all social classes but share kindness and humour (and patience with things like thank you letters).

Crisis estimates that it would cost £9.9 billion to eradicate homelessness in the UK, a daunting figure. But official figures show £9.9 billion was wasted on defective or unusable PPE during the pandemic. Maybe some of that money, instead of buying Michelle Mone a yacht, could have been used to help someone huddled in a doorway.