Alleshia Gregson was 12 when she became pregnant with her son Lewis. She told herself that no one would ever know of the baby’s existence. She would keep it hidden in her wardrobe and feed it bread and milk.
What a pitifully naive vision of motherhood, drawn from her experience of looking after her dolls.
She did keep the pregnancy a secret from everyone, including her mother Cherryl and the baby’s teenage father.
Her mother learned of her daughter’s condition just 22 minutes before the birth, when Alleshia texted her from the family bathroom: ‘I’m pregnant and I think it’s coming.’ Lewis, now three, was born soon afterwards in the living room of the family home.
went to stay with his family.
Unbelievably, ten months later, Alleshia became pregnant again by the same boy.
When her second son, Braidan, was born in May 2011, 15-year-old Alleshia had the ignominious privilege of becoming Britain’s youngest mother of two children who were not twins.
Her story, which came to light this week, casts a bleak reflection of a stratum of society in which the products of broken families are blithely having children when they are still children themselves.
Take the father of Lewis and Braidan, who was just 14 when his first son was conceived.
As well as the two children he has with Alleshia, the boy, now 19, is believed to have fathered three more sons by two other girls and is expecting a sixth child by a fourth partner.
One of these other children was born just a month after Lewis.
The teenage father’s fondness for procreating is not matched by an interest in his children once they are born: he has met Lewis once and has not laid eyes on Braidan.
At Headlands School in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, Alleshia’s pregnancy was an unusual event, but only, it seems, because other girls had abortions when they got pregnant.
One teenager who criticised Alleshia said she’d had four terminations in the space of a year.
Given her unstable home life and upbringing, it is perhaps little wonder that Alleshia became pregnant at such a tender age.
She and her mother moved to Bridlington from Nottingham in 2008. Cherryl, 41, has two other children, Kirsty, 22, and Ryan, 21, from a marriage that broke up.
Alleshia’s father is a car salesman, from whom Cherryl split in 2001, when their daughter was five.
She sees her father, but over the years their relationship has been, at best, fractious.
Alleshia and her mother have never stayed in one place for very long, and by the time that Lewis had been born and Alleshia was carrying Braidan, they were living with Cherryl’s latest boyfriend.
But it was hardly a sanctuary. On the night Alleshia went into labour for the second time, he evicted mother and daughter from his home.
Fortunately, a friend offered to put them up after Alleshia returned home from hospital following the birth.
Cherryl is single and living on benefits in a council house after being sacked from her job as a taxi operator last August.
On top of having her council rent paid, she receives a total of £656 in benefits every four weeks, a combination of income support, child benefit and child tax credits.
Because Alleshia is studying part-time at college, her sons’ nursery fees are paid for under a government scheme to encourage people into work — a total of £864 for four weeks’ care.
Cherryl first became a grandmother at 37 when Kirsty gave birth to a son, Jayden, now four.
All in all, the family could be star guests on the Jeremy Kyle show.
Our interview is conducted in the living room of Cherryl’s semi-detached council house, which is decorated in an arresting combination of black and grey. A dartboard hangs on the wall.
Cherryl, dressed in a vest top and trousers, and tracksuit-clad Alleshia, are watching Jeremy Kyle — yes, really — on the widescreen TV when I arrive.
Lewis and Braidan are running around the room, creating chaos with their toys.
In fairness to Alleshia and Cherryl, it has to be said that the boys look happy and are clean and well-dressed — smarter, indeed, than their mother and grandmother, the latter whom they call ‘Ninnin’.
I ask Alleshia how she managed to fall pregnant before she’d even reached her teens. Her answer is heartbreaking.
She tells me that her children’s father is a boy from Nottingham whom she has known since the age of five.
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