‘I DARED TO BELIEVE I WAS WORTH MORE’ Sharmaine Lovegrove tells her incredible story of survival
Stories of resilience and empathy have guided Sharmaine Lovegrove from being homeless in her teens to becoming a publisher who champions inclusion and diversity
One Wednesday afternoon in 1997, I packed up my belongings and left the home I’d grown up in. I thought we’d all have some cooling-off time and I would be back in a few months. In fact, I never went back and was never to reconcile with my parents. The best way I can describe the relationship between me and my family is akin to Roald Dahl’s Matilda. I wasn’t an only child, but I was a lonely child, and I had an extraordinarily different perspective on the world compared with my parents. Our values were different; although they were educated and had good jobs, I felt that they were much more aspirational and consumerist, while I craved culture, books and ideas.
Over time, these differences were exacerbated and expressed in our diverging attitudes and my inability to conform to their wishes. By the age of 16, it became clear that I was no longer able to live in my family home in a way I felt would be positive for my future.
First stop was the home of one of my best friends, Jessie. She, her family and their dog Sandy welcomed me into their home for a period I don’t think any of us realised would be as long and exhausting as it was. Jessie’s parents were kind, thoughtful and gave us a lot of freedom. Freedom wasn’t something I knew how to deal with, so I pushed boundaries: ran up huge phone bills, ate all the food, and generally ran amok. Not because I was meaning to be disrespectful, but because I wanted to do everything I hadn’t been allowed to and I had little understanding of how my behaviour affected others.
Jessie’s parents came to me one day with a triple-digit landline bill and explained I would need to pay them back. I did, but it was clear that I needed to move on. After some sofa surfing with various friends and family across London, I ended up staying in hostels in Soho. They were for young adults between 15 and 19, an age when the state is still responsible for you. After that, you are all on your own.
This was the time when I should have been doing GCSES and A Levels. If you lived in a hostel, you had to claim Jobseeker’s Allowance to be eligible for housing benefit. Although there were myriad reasons for young people to end up homeless, they were not allowed to go into full-time education too, as that was considered a job. On top of this, you were not allowed to be in a hostel between 9am and 4pm each day, and so with no school and no job, a lot of my fellow homeless teenage friends ended up roaming the streets of central London. They were preyed upon by pimps, addicts and beggars, and quickly ended up pushing drugs, getting into prostitution or becoming addicts themselves.
I knew the city well and could escape to friends’ homes during the day, with the lure of a fridge full of food. I knew
I had to stay away from trouble, but my new friends and hostel mates came from across the country. Some had suffered in unthinkable ways and, in many cases, groups of older men quickly took the place of the abusers they had run away from.
Although the present seemed bleak, I held on to the hope of a better future
I went back to my old school and enrolled without anyone knowing what was happening to me; silent, determined and living a double life. I knew the bureaucracy around education and housing wasn’t joined up, and I had broken lots of friendships by outstaying my welcome at family homes. Although it was challenging, I managed to finish my education with results I’m proud of.
Because I was well-spoken, people often didn’t believe my story. I wasn’t able to get a council flat or housing association accommodation, as the authorities didn’t think my need was great enough. I implored that if I could have a place of my own with an address, I would quickly be able to move on, as I would secure work. I knew this in my heart, but no one believed my homeless situation was anything but self-inflicted and temporary because of my accent, and so I wasn’t afforded accommodation that would have changed my life. Instead, I had to sleep rough. A favourite spot was in a one-way alley behind Shaftesbury Avenue. It was quiet and hidden, and the only place on the streets I could actually wake up having had a dream. I had blankets and sleeping bags donated by a charity to keep warm. I’d also made two friends, one in his 20s and another in his 40s, who looked after me; that was really important for my safety.
To say this period of time was grim is an understatement. No one should have to live like that, especially someone at the beginning of their adult life. Although the present seemed bleak, the past wasn’t an option to go back to. I held on to the hope that the future had to be better.
I spent about six months sleeping on the streets, although it felt like years.
I’m lucky that I was eventually able to get back to staying with friends. Then, when I was 19, I found an advert for a room on a boat called Goldilocks. It was moored on the River Thames between Chelsea and Vauxhall Bridge, on the south side of the river in the shadow of my favourite childhood monument, Battersea Power Station. The fairy tale connection and its location struck a chord, and the people who lived there liked me and offered me the cabin.
It was the most romantic time of my life; my bedroom was filled with novels and I’d found a job at the second-hand book market under Waterloo Bridge. There, I honed my skills as a bookseller, talking to tourists and locals who crossed the river to enjoy the walk, the views and the books. They loved writers such as Georges Simenon, John Le Carré, W. G. Sebald and Carson Mccullers and I loved discovering the great storytellers from America and Europe and discussing them at length with my colleagues on other stalls.
As I knew, an address and a long-term home would set me up for my future, but the experiences I had along the way helped me continue to push boundaries and be uncompromising in my convictions about working my way up in the book trade. I got a job in Foyles, running the black literature section, then in the London Review Bookshop. After that, I was a literary publicist.
I didn’t want to blame anyone. I wanted to be self-sufficient and capable of love
When I was 27, I decided to move to Berlin because I was drawn to the culture, freedom and opportunity for a fresh start. It was here I met a British man who was smart and spoke perfect German. We got together and he helped me live out my dream. In 2009, I opened an English language bookshop in Berlin called Dialogue Books. The following year, we got married, and in 2011, we welcomed our son into the world. We moved back to London to be closer to my husband’s parents, my grandma and my sisters.
I created three companies that worked with books and storytelling, and made a name for myself in the industry as a publishing entrepreneur. In 2017, I had a life-changing conversation about the issue of diversity in publishing with Charlie King, the managing director of publishing division Little, Brown at Hachette UK, and soon after, established the inclusive publishing imprint Dialogue Books.
Today, I stand tall and proud as a publisher. The incredible books we bring to the world at Dialogue are all by brilliant storytellers from minority backgrounds, whether they’re BAME, LGBTQI+, disabled or working class. This is a job I never dared dream of, at a global publishing house that recognises the need to publish books by and for everyone in society. The situation with regards to diversity in publishing is changing, but the numbers, expectations and representations for all minority groups are still lacking. However, a lot of the great work is being done by independent publishers who continue to inspire and encourage me, and I am thrilled my authors are central to the conversation.
It’s also a privilege to have a job where
I am surrounded by books on a daily basis. Other than the love from a handful of people, literature has been the most consistent thing in my life. It’s reading stories of the lives of others – Dr Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin – that gave me a foundation of empathy. It’s this that gave me the knowledge that people before had it harder, and that people around me were suffering. And it’s this that encouraged me to forge forwards and carve out a space for myself like the amazing protagonists my favourite writers had given life to.
Like Roald Dahl’s Matilda, I dared to believe I was worth more than the situation I was in. I believed that I could have an impact on my own destiny. I didn’t ever want to blame anyone else for my decisions. I wanted to be responsible, self-sufficient and capable of love.
It’s been tough, but I’ve built resilience through the challenges of my teenage years. I write this from my four-bedroom house in Bristol. Listening to my child play gleefully with my husband, I cannot believe the unsettled life I once lived. Or at least I wouldn’t if I didn’t still see and feel the issues of inequality in our society today. All of this set me up for the long road ahead to campaign for equality for all, and I pinch myself daily that I have come out the other side.