I wish I could start this book with some explanation, some definite start date or event when my life spiralled out of control, but the truth is my life always seemed wrong. My earliest memories are ones of pain and fear but I cant even give any explanation for why they are.

It seems as if fear was a major factor in my life from the off, only I never knew it was fear. It was to be many years before I could name any of my emotions, all I knew at the time was the pain that it bought with it. I mean how many kids can explain what they feel.

I was 24 years old before I started the long journey of examining my life and  how it had taken me down the roads I had travelled.

It may help to explain that I grew up in a family where things were never talked about ,at least not in front of the kids, and anything that happened in the family stayed in the family. You never talked about what was going on outside of the family home, but worse was that you didn't talk about things in the family either, you just kinda made it up as you went along and hoped for the best.

Talking on an emotional level just didn't happen.

So when I was lying on the floor pretending to be dead  trying to get my Mom to notice me and give me some love, it wouldn't have occurred to me that just going up and asking would be far simpler. I was three or four when this started. For some reason I knew that to show that you needed loving or cuddling was a sign of weakness and men should not show such weakness. Again, I have no idea where this sort of idea started other than from the examples of the men that were around me.

It seemed normal to me to try and manipulate a situation rather that communicate things in a normal way, maybe it was because of this lack of normal communication skills that most of my life I felt desperately lonely and fearful.

I never felt secure as a child, I was always frightened that something would happen to my parents.   Whenever they went out I was obsessed that they would be in a car smash and be killed, this may be due to the fact that my Dad was a heavy drinker and didn't ever consider himself too drunk to get behind the wheel of a car. I remember them going out one night and me sitting up all night frantic with worry that they would not come home. I remember that Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder was playing on the radio, it was years before I could listen to that tune without that sense of dread returning. It was also on this occasion that I learned to tune into the police frequency and from that time on I would tune in whenever my parents were out so I could hear if there were any car smashes. I continued to do this until late in my teens. I would even listen waiting for my Mom to come home from working her evening shift at the hospital where she was a nurse.

It wasn't just the fear of them being killed that plagued me, I also lived in fear of them leaving me or them being sent away to Father Husdons Home which was the main catholic orphanage in Birmingham. My Dad was an orphan back in Ireland and he would often tell me how he was an orphan because he was naughty and if I was naughty I would be sent to the establishment.

There was one thing that I loved in my early years and that was the freedom that I had. The house we lived in back right on our local park, so all I had to do was jump over our fence, cross the brook and I was able to spend hours playing on the swings and roundabout. I had a little tricycle, one with a proper chain so I was able to go faster than most of the other kids. I loved that park and I even had a few friends that I knocked about with and a girlfriend who I was as besotted with as a 5 year old could be. 

But things were to change when one day, as I was crossing the brook and a teenage lad persuaded me with the help of the knife he was holding up at me  to follow him into a small tunnel that allowed the brook to flow under the road. There his made me perform oral sex on him while he assaulted me.

I can't remember much about the actual incident but what I do remember is having to go to the Police station with my Mom to tell them what had happened. I remember it so clearly because they took me into this big room that had windows which you couldn't see through and all the woodwork was painted a dark blue. They also tried to get me to speak to a female police officer. I couldn't do it. I was so ashamed of having to speak to this woman about what had happened that I just started crying. I couldn't describe to this woman that someone had made me suck his willy. I was mortified. Eventually they asked a Policeman to come in and I was able to tell him all about it.

That was it. As with everything in my family this too was brushed under the carpet never to be discussed again. That was the first time that I remember being abused. It wasn't to be the last.

The biggest heartache for me though was the loss of freedom that the incident bought with it. I was no longer allowed to go to my park and play. I also lost touch with the girl that I was so fond of.

I started to become more and more insecure and I also new what is was like to feel ashamed and this was a feeling that was to paralyse me for years to come.

I would feel ashamed about things that I really had no cause to feel ashamed about. I remember once in my first school class having a bottle of milk as you did in those days. I got distracted in someway and when I returned to the place where all the kids were drinking their milk, I mistakenly picked up another bottle.

A girl shouted to the teacher that I had taken another bottle and that I was greedy. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me. I felt absolutely full of shame and yet I had done nothing wrong it was a total mistake. Yet that same sense of shame I had felt in front of the female police officer was back again.

I know today that my formative years were full of negative messages which is probably what led to me have a real sense of not belonging and of a person who couldn't be loved but something was to happen when I was six years old that set these insecurities in stone.

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