Prologue

      I never had anyone looking after me—I always just looked after myself from when I was very young.

      My father, a phoney spiritualist preacher, used me as a punch bag from the day he abducted me as a two-year-old from his estranged wife’s home in a spiteful gesture of revenge. His partner Freda treated me like her slave, starving and beating me daily and locking me out in the back yard in all weathers. Things weren’t any better when they took me to live in South Africa then abandoned me, so that I ended up sleeping rough on the streets of Johannesburg at the age of twelve. When I was seventeen, I came back to the UK to look for my Mum but found she didn’t want to have anything to do with me; she and my sisters had their own lives to lead by then.

      I was pretty streetwise and knew how to keep myself alive. I wouldn’t starve or die of cold so long as I could forage in dustbins for food and find an old shack to sleep in. But I didn’t have a clue about how normal human relationships worked. I didn’t have any social skills or instincts about character. If someone was nice to me, I thought that meant they were a good person and I gave them my trust. If they treated me badly, I thought it was my fault, that I must have done something wrong. As for love, I didn’t know what that meant.

      A whole new learning curve was about to begin.