From homeless to music scholar

I can remember sitting in a corridor at primary school waiting for one of my first cello lessons. The sound of my teacher playing a beautiful piece of music on the piano was coming from the room and, in that moment, I recall feeling very excited. 

I was 10, and I think I felt how many children do when they try something new – a bit excited, a bit scared. I was worried about getting things wrong but once I started, it felt different from anything else I did at school. In class, there was always a right and a wrong answer – two plus two had to be four – but with music there wasn’t one fixed answer. You could take it in different directions. There was a sense of freedom in that. 

I played the cello for a couple of years and took my grade 1 with a distinction. But when I moved to secondary school the underfunded music department had no string instruments. I didn’t come from a musical family, and we couldn’t afford instrument hire or lessons, and so that was it. I stopped. 

When I was 14, my parents bought me a second-hand cello for Christmas. It was a huge surprise. First, they gave me a box of sheet music and I didn’t understand why until I turned around and saw the cello standing in the doorway. 

But it felt like I was starting from scratch. People who were serious about music had been playing properly since they were very young, and I worried I’d never catch up. So I told myself it wasn’t going to go anywhere; I just liked playing again. But I found myself wanting to get better and to make the kind of sound I heard in videos online.

Then life became even more complicated. In 2022 we were made homeless after a no-fault eviction. The landlord of our family home had inexplicably been allowed to bring forward our eviction date before we had been able to make alternative arrangements. Bailiffs would turn up and intimidate my family and then, one day, I came home from school, and I no longer had a bed.

We went from one temporary place to another – we briefly slept in my grandparents’ living room, followed by three hotels and three short-term flats. It lasted almost two years. There was no fridge, no washing machine, no place to cook. My school let me shower there and even washed my clothes. I remember once having to come in wearing pyjamas because I had nothing else clean.

From that day education just took a backseat. It didn’t seem important anymore. I still went to school but it stopped being about learning; it became somewhere to be warm and have a meal and feel normal for a bit. My mental health began to decline and after a while, even going to school became too much. The situation had gone on for a long time. It felt so humiliating. 

For a while I didn’t play my cello at all. Then one day I’d just had enough of everything. I took my cello, a chair and a fold-up music stand into a stairwell of the hotel we were in and played a piece called Legende five times in a row. Each time was a different emotion, a different stage of grief. I felt angry, I was hurt, I was upset and that was when I realised that music is something that gives me the ability to really express how I feel, even if it’s just for myself. Even if nobody else ever hears me for the rest of my life, I still had my music, my cello, and I was going to fight for it. 

I joined the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra. It gave me people to talk to and something to look forward to. For the first time in a while, life wasn’t so bad. 

It was through orchestra that I first heard about the Harry Humber Scholarship for Loughborough Schools Foundation. An email was sent around hoping to attract applicants of grade 7 standard. Having only just got my grade 5 I clearly wasn’t the target audience, so I deleted the message. But my mum had also received the email and suggested I apply. I told her that they wouldn’t even look twice at someone like me, but she said, ‘If you never try, you’ll never know.’