"There would be fighting and arguing and I'd be screaming like a nutter. I had no windows; they were all boarded up. We were getting complaints left, right and centre and the council were threatening to evict us."
The windows had been smashed by her then eight-year-old son Shane, egged on, she says, by a group of older young people. So the family lived in darkness behind the boarded up panes. The garden was full of rubbish, other residents made 30 complaints about the family to the council, largely about noise and arguments with neighbours - some untrue, says Elaine. Shane was on the verge of getting an antisocial behaviour order for harassing people on the estate. Three of the children were truanting from school and eventually Shane was excluded permanently for fighting, while Amy, now 16, was on the verge of being kicked out too.
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