Kerry Katona lived on "tomato ketchup butties" as a child.
Kerry Katona
The 40-year-old pop star can still recall starving as a kid when her mum would go out "on benders for three days", and Kerry resorted to searching through the cupboards to find something she could eat.
She shared: "I 100 percent remember a time when there was not enough food in the house, when there just wasn’t enough money.
"I must have been about nine years old and used to look in the cupboards and think ‘What could I make for tea?'
"When I was living with my mum, she would go out on benders for three days and there would be no food. I was only about nine.
"I would live on tomato ketchup butties. There might be some stale bread in the cupboard and ketchup in a bottle and that is what I would live on until my mum would come home."
Kerry actually resorted to stealing as a means of feeding herself.
She told the Daily Mirror newspaper: "I used to shoplift all the time as a kid. I remember going to Warrington market with my mum and stealing, just because we used to be starving."
Kerry can also recall hiding some of her mum's money to stop her from spending it on alcohol.
She said: "I used to go and cash my mum’s money for her. I’d keep 20p for myself and get myself a Dime bar. I’d try and hide a bit of her money so she wouldn’t go and spend it and go off on the p*** with it.
"I love my mum to bits - she’s nothing like that anymore.
"My mum has OCD and everything is always spotless and clean but during her bad days when I was about nine, she’d come in bladdered and ask me to make her something to eat. I made her a steak and kidney pie and chips and she threw it everywhere. We had just come out of a refuge - we lived in two in Manchester.
"In the first year of high school, we were living in the Salvation Army and my mum went missing and I was there on my own for two weeks. Luckily the other women fed me and looked after me."
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