AS one of the members of pop sensations S Club 7, Hannah Spearritt’s life was meant to be a dream come true.
But since leaving the band in 2003, she has faced a series of living nightmares, including devastating health issues and the death of her ex-boyfriend and bandmate Paul Cattermole.
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In an interview with The Sun on Sunday yesterday, Hannah, 42, revealed why she first blamed herself for Paul’s death – and the real reason she quit the band’s reunion tour.
And today, in exclusive extracts from her new book Facing The Music, she tells of the terrifying moment her daughter suffered a serious injury – only for her and partner Adam Thomas to wrongly be accused of causing it.
It began in early 2023 when they were in the kitchen and heard daughter Tora, then two, crying in the living room.
Here, Hannah reveals the horrifying chain of events . . .
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“THE scene that I came upon in the living room will stay with me forever.
Tora was standing on the couch, eyelids horrifically lacerated with the worst facial injury I’ve ever seen.
I carried her through to the kitchen and started to go into shock while Adam phoned an ambulance.
He changed her and mopped up all the blood so she wouldn’t see it and start to really panic.
Only one of us could accompany her in the ambulance, so I stayed with our other daughter Taya, then four, and waited for my friend to come over in the car so we could follow them to hospital.
It seemed like an eternity before we got to the hospital, and Adam told us there was a surgeon who would need to do the surgery the next day.
About an hour after we arrived, one of the nurses came in and asked Adam if she could have a word with him outside.
As soon as he left the room, the police were waiting and arrested him.
Unbelievably, the police and some of the hospital staff felt it was likely that he was responsible for the injury.
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Tora needed emergency plastic surgery to piece her eyelid back together and in equal measure she needed her father at her side.
What was already a terrible situation had ramped up to something indescribable.
What we later found out was that they suspected both of us and decided to leave one of us with our daughter.
While our little girl was lying in a hospital bed, waiting for the news of whether she’d lost her sight in one eye, our belief is that malicious allegations filed by a former employee tarnished their view of us from the start.
It felt like being in one of those police states.
Eternally grateful
When they let Adam out on bail, they would not give him back his phone, and throughout the entire 12 hours he was held, refused to give him updates on how Tora was.
We had to attend a Zoom call alongside police, social services and the hospital.
The nurse who attended when we arrived at the hospital immediately stated that in her opinion, based on her many years of experience, there was simply no way we could be responsible.
Our belief – stated over and over again at every stage – was that one of the dogs we were looking after had jumped up on Tora in excitement and had swept his foot across her face.
It really would not have taken much work on the part of social services to reach the same conclusion.
Despite the testimony of the nurse, social services were more inclined to believe there was no smoke without fire.
We were told we would have to live in accommodation where other responsible adults were present while they continued their investigation.
Our complaints with all the services are ongoing at this time. We are eternally grateful to the surgeon for the work on Tora’s eye.
She made a full recovery, at least physically.
It’s hard to know the full impact on her subliminally, given the way we were treated as parents.
- Extracted by EMILY FAIRBAIRN from Facing The Music, by Hannah Spearritt, published in hardback on Thursday by Renegade Books, priced £20. Ebook and audio version also available.
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