For the first sixteen years of her life, Ingrid Steel did not even know her own name. She spent her childhood being shunted between orphanages. Her anger at the cruelty and bullying she suffered led to her being branded as a violent troublemaker, and she was even admitted to a mental hospital and at one point committed to Borstal. It was not until Ingrid won her freedom at the age of sixteen that she was able to embark on a normal life. She has now been happily married for more than 40 years to a lorry driver and has four grown-up children. Her work as a nurse gave her the opportunity to start investigating her past, and in her thirties she was finally able to identify her long-lost parents and even make contact with the brother she had never known she had. Ingrid lives with her husband in Dymchurch in Kent.