I was thirteen when I made my first bid for freedom, by just walking out of school and continuing walking until I was a safe distance away in the countryside. I managed to stay free for over a week before the police caught me. The thought of being sent back home to Mum and Amani terrified me, but I was even more frightened of grassing them up to the authorities. I fought as hard as I could to make the police believe me, telling them that my brothers abused me but not daring to mention Mum and Amani or Uncle Douglas. They had to investigate the accusations, which meant I had bought myself some more time, but the family all closed ranks and told the same story: that I was a liar and had been trouble from the day Dad had died. Mum was able to point to the accident as an explanation for why I had been struck dumb and why I was such a difficult and unstable child. She was always very good at persuading people in authority to believe her, which meant that none of them would have believed me even if I had had the courage to speak out.
In the end it was decided that there was no truth to any of my accusations about my brothers and I was delivered back home by the social services. The moment the social workers left, Mum and Amani reverted to their true characters and beat and raped me with even more violence than I had experienced until then. They were determined to break my spirit and ensure that I never thought about trying to run away again, but by then it was too late, because I now knew that it was possible to just walk away, even if my first attempt had ended in me being brought back. However much they hurt me and demeaned me when I was at home, they couldn’t stop me from simply walking out of the door when I was back at school. I also now knew that there were places for children to run to and I bounced back and forth to a number of care homes once I was old enough to start running away from school and home, gradually being delivered back to Mum less and less often.
By that stage my head had been so messed with I was a real problem to anyone who tried to control me, even those who had good intentions and were hoping to help me. I was still too afraid to tell anyone the truth about what had been done to me throughout my childhood. The anger and fear and misery of the previous decade were stewing up inside my head and finally one day I flipped in the care home I was in at the time and exploded.
I was sixteen years old and I went on a wild rampage, smashing up my bedroom, not caring about anything any more, raging like a wild animal. The key workers tried to restrain me, but it was too late for that. My anger made me too strong for them and I managed to escape, running out of the home without having any idea where I was going. Once I was outside, I could see the rest of the staff having a meeting inside and I grabbed a brick, lobbing it through the window at them, shattering the glass and hitting one of them on the shoulder.
That night, when the police brought me back yet again, the man in charge of the home told me he’d had enough, and I was to leave.
‘Pack your bags and get out,’ he said, ‘and don’t come back.’
‘I ain’t got nowhere to go,’ I snapped.
‘Go back to your mother. You’ve got a home to go to.’
I knew Mum and the others had gone away for a few days and the house would be empty, so I slept in the garden shed for the night, planning what I was going to do next. I knew I had to leave the area and the only place I had ever heard of was Charing Cross in London. I’d heard other kids in the care homes talking about it after they had been caught and brought back, telling one another how great it was in the world of the homeless and free.
‘Yeah, you’ve got to get away from this place,’ they’d tell me. ‘Charing Cross is the best place you could go to. There are millions of homeless kids there.’
Although I harboured the same wild dreams of becoming rich as most other young boys, it was the thought of finding someone to love, who would love me back, that was my greatest goal.
The next morning I broke into the house and went through it, collecting every bit of small change I could scrounge, as well as all the food and clothing I could find in the cupboards, stuffing it into my bag. There wasn’t much there to take, as Mum squandered virtually every penny anyone brought into the house on drink, spending all her time down the pub and no longer cooking family meals for any of them. As I went, I left a trail of furious devastation behind me, smashing everything that came within reach, burning my bridges and making it impossible that I could ever return.
Chapter Four Standing on the Slip Road
My heart was thumping as I stood by the side of the slip road down to the motorway at dawn. I was wearing my blue ‘shell suit’ and trainers–which was pretty much the only uniform I ever wore at the time–trying to thumb a lift down to London before anyone spotted me and took me back.
The adrenaline was still pumping from my rampage, the anger still throbbing in my head, and now I was anxious to get away from the area as quickly as I could, in case one of Mum’s neighbours had heard the racket that I’d made when I was ransacking Mum’s house, or seen me coming out and called the police to report the crime. Even in my agitated state I felt a bit guilty about all the damage I’d done, but at the same time I felt a strange sense of satisfaction at having finally taken a small revenge for all the pain that gripped my heart. I wanted it to be a final gesture to her and to my brothers and to Amani, before I disappeared from the area, losing myself for ever in the bustle and excitement that I was sure I would find in London.
I had all my worldly possessions, and whatever else I had been able to snatch from the house, in my precious bag. It was a sort of holdall backpack thing that was to become my closest and most treasured companion in the coming years. When you have practically nothing in life, you cling tightly to the few possessions you are able to truly call your own.
I was on a nervous high at the thought of finally escaping, like a freak burst of sheer happiness, which was helping me to cope with the cold of a spring morning and the steady drizzle that was soaking through to my bones, making my cheap clothes stick uncomfortably to my skinny, shivering frame and my hair hang lankly over my face. I must have looked a bit rough already, having slept the night in the shed before finally plucking up the courage to break into the empty house, and it had been at least an hour’s walk in the rain to get to the slip road; so I suppose it wasn’t surprising that the cars kept on streaming past and not even slowing down to consider offering me a lift. If I had been sitting inside a nice warm, dry, clean car, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to stop in the rain and open my door to someone like me either.
It hadn’t occurred to me for a moment during my walk to the slip road that I might not get picked up at all, but as the hours ticked past and the cars, vans, motorbikes and lorries kept tearing by, most of the drivers not even giving me a second look, I felt fear gripping my guts with increasing intensity. What if I was left standing at the side of the road until a police car or someone who knew me came past and spotted me? What if they took me back and I had to face Mum and the rest of the family after I’d trashed her place and stolen her money? It might have been only a couple of quid in ten-pence pieces, but I would be judged on the principle of the thing, and the fact that I had dared to challenge her. I knew from past experience how immediate the punishment for even the smallest imagined transgression could be if she and Amani managed to get me on my own, and I could clearly picture what they would do to me for daring to make such a brave stand. I knew the authorities wouldn’t take me back into the care home after I had lost my temper and hurled a brick through the window at them, so I couldn’t expect any shelter there either. I had no option but to keep standing by the side of the road with my thumb out for as long as it took.
The hours kept on going by and the rain barely let up. My initial high spirits sank out of sight. After a whole day of being ignored, during which I