In care since birth, and adopted by a British couple as a baby, Lemn Sissay always wondered why he was different to his younger, white brother and sister. As far as he was aware, his name was Norman Greenwood and his own mother had abandoned him - the Greenwood's were his forever family. But none of this was true.
At the age of twelve, Lemn's adoptive parents cruelly handed the bewildered child back to Social Services and wanted nothing further to do him. Then followed six horrendous years of care home life, before he was able to escape the serial institutionalisation he had been forced into.
At the age of seventeen, Lemn was finally able to get hold of a copy of his birth certificate that showed his real name and that he was both British and Ethiopian. But is was not until 2016 that Lemn was able to get copies of his files from Social Services and he could learn the full truth behind his traumatic experiences - and that his mother had been pleading for his safe return since his birth.
This is Lemn Sissay's memoir, recounting his dreadful treatment at the hands of the social care system - an experiment that saw him in care for eighteen years, against the wishes of his mother. It is a story of neglect, cruelty and abuse, but also celebrates the strength of determination, creativity and hope.
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This is a powerful and moving book. A tale of a terrible start in life and the institutional failings of the care system from the late 1960s to the 1980s. It is damning indeed.
I was horrified to read about how a black baby could be removed from his mother - a mother who had asked for help in desperate times - and deliberately put up for adoption by a white couple, as some sort of arrogant social experiment, against the wishes of his mother. Even his true name was denied to him, when he was renamed Norman.
If you are able to overlook the highhanded way that Social Services treated Lemn as a baby, he was mostly happy as part of the Greenwood family, the family he thought of as his own. But his relationship with his adoptive parents broke down in the most distressing way, once the Greenwoods had children of their own. How bewildering must it be for a twelve year old boy to be removed from everything he knows and placed in a children's home run by disaffected and emotionally absent staff? No wonder his life started to go off the rails!
What follows is a gut-wrenchingly sad tale of a life that goes from bad to worse, ending in a residence in an institution intended for young offenders, so wholly inappropriate for a young person in Lemn's circumstances - not to mention the most appalling, cruel and abusive place imaginable.
This book broke my heart at the way Lemn has been treated. Being just a couple of months older than Lemn, it has really brought home to me how different your life can be when you are not brought up as part of a loving, caring family.
What does shine through though, is the strength and determination of Lemn Sissay. His life got off the the most dreadful of starts and yet the person he has become is one full of creativity, love and hope.
I defy you not to be moved to tears by this incredible memoir - and the next time you fell like having a moan about something, take a leaf out of Lemn's poetic book!
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