Like a message in a bottle thrown from the same beach twenty
years ago  I’ve returned.  And though the shoreline of Lancashire has
changed has the message inside it?  I  unravel as I drive there with radio producer,  Jo Wheeler, through the towns and villages  of Lancashire to
my destinations, Atherton and Leigh.    I don’t belong here. I’m a stranger. The
message is the same.  There’s no family
here. No connection.  What I always wanted was never here to want.   Ambivalence
confusingly fills the space where connection should be. 

Except for an occasional newspaper article, tv or radio
appearance no one here is reminded of the  dreadlocked boy  from the chidlren’s homes who went barefoot. Not enough to ever have tried to find me.   I’m here to interview people for a documentary
called Child of The State wherein I am trying to do two things;   find
children whom I was in care with and view my files held by the local authority.

The only person I find 
who was a child in care is  Peter
Libbey.   He was my first friend of the first
children’s home at eleven years old.  Jo
Wheeler the producer holds the microphone between us  as I ask Peter what i was like on first sight
“we’d never met someone like you before” he says. I think he means “we'd never met a  black kid.” I know he means that. I knwo what he means cause I hadn't either, hardly.

 We reminisce on  fun times. But our experience is different,
Peter put himself in care. I was there because of deception.  What
was a safe haven for him was an abusive prison for me.   What’s between us now  is  twenty years at least but as he talks of
our  bailing hay on to the tractor through  hot summer afternoons on the fields of Gold at 
Marshes Farm the  years between us  fall away and  a flood of memory gushes in.