Abuse in childhood is most evident in the internal life of the adult. Many of us went into the care system simply to be cared for only to find ourselves stuck in a kafkaesque nightmare at Wood End. Read more … Continue reading
I received a message that began “I’m shaking as I type all this as I haven’t ever discussed with anyone else before.” He wrote his phone number and I called. Immediately. “Do you remember Mr Read more […]
Yesterday a story broke about police enquiries into Woodend Assessment centre in The Leigh Reporter. Mysteriously the story has now been taken down. But it’s in The Daily Mail. Is it a coincidence Read more […]
The scandal tearing through Britain about missing home office files on alleged child abuse rankles. It’s happening to me. Now NSPCC wants to make covering up chlid abuse, by hiding files, a crime. Read more […]
It’s national care leavers week and the article on the guardian’s website deliberately tells my leaving care story without trying to couch it in statistics or theory as to how it could have been done Read more […]
Cont…) Before entering wood end I bought a book about Bob Marley called Catch a Fire. I read it over and over again. The music led me to his lyrics and in particular The Survival album which seemed Read more … Continue reading
Today I put the finishing touches to a documentary on Bob Marley called One Love. It’ll be broadcast on BBC world service radio on May 13th the day before his birthday. The producer, Dilly Barlow, Read more […]
Alone that following morning I had my breakfast, got picked up and whisked away in The Chancellors car to The Cedar Court Hotel in Wakefield where I spent the day and evening writing an article for a future book on performance poetry. It's all rock and roll eh. Twenty four hours alone in an hotel writing an article called Lost In Action can have an effect. Continue reading
After each visit from Margaret which took place in the sports hall I was strip searched. I was a child that had been in care for seventeen years is all. It was a harrowing institution. We had to walk the corridors in size order. Continue reading
I take the five hour hour journey from one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world to Lilliput. I have two matchsticks holding my eyes open. The moment the car moves skirts off the motorway it is as if I have moved into my past. Memories are everywhere, on every street corner of leigh, this angry little town. It’s the kind of place that people in the cities are barely aware of. But it’s towns like this one that Thatcher was determined to break in the eighties – the mill town and pit towns. My towns. Continue reading