How the Post Office scandal ruined our childhoods - from bulimia to suicidal thoughts and vile abuse - and why Paula Vennells' tears are too little too late By Kathryn Knight Published: 17:03, 24 May 2024 | Updated: 17:36, 24 May 2024 e-mail 1 View comments As a child, Katie Downey would perch on the stairs of her parents' cottage and listen to their angry arguments when they thought she was in bed. 'It was usually about money,' she says. 'I didn't understand what was going on, just that they were always upset and emotional.
' What the 11-year-old Katie did know was her life had already been turned upside down. Months earlier, her parents Tony and Caroline had told their only daughter they were leaving their village home in Cumbria to start a new life abroad in rural France . For Katie it meant moving from the place she loved and everything – and everyone – she knew.
Katie Downey with her mother Caroline and father Tony, who was a subpostmaster Unable to speak the language and bullied by local children, for two years she barely spoke a word to a soul. As the years went by, her bewilderment morphed into growing resentment at the way her parents had – as she saw it – ruined her life. It would take years before Katie, now 28 and a language teacher, learned the devastating truth: it was the Post Office that had, effectively, taken away her childhood.
For her loving father was one of hundreds of subpostmasters affected by the Horizon accounting software scandal. So distraug.