Brighton 1958

As Kinnersley Manor faded into the distance of my childhood — those years from 1952 to 1958 that sit in my memory like an old photograph — I felt as though I had stepped into a kind of mist. Things became blurry. Nothing was settled anymore. Mum had to find somewhere for us, somewhere safe, and she was never one to give up. She asked around, leaned on acquaintances, and eventually found a friend in Hove — possibly through another friend — who said she would take me in.

Their names were Bob and Sadie. I would be the only child in the house, as they had none of their own.

Chapter 2 – Brighton: A Borrowed Childhood

Looking back, I was six years old when I first arrived in Hove to live with Sadie and Bob.

The years I spent with them were probably the closest thing I ever had to a normal childhood. After the cold routine of Kinnersley Manor, their home felt almost like another world. It wasn't my home in the true sense of the word, but for a little while it became a place where I could simply be a child.

Sadie and Bob ran a modest guest house near the sea. I was the only child in the house, something that felt strange at first. There were no rows of iron beds, no dormitories filled with frightened children, and no harsh voices echoing through long corridors. Instead, I had something I had never known before: a room of my own.

It is difficult to explain what that meant to a child who had never had any space that belonged solely to him. I could close the door, sleep in my own bed, and wake up knowing where I was. It was a small thing to most people, but to me it was a kind of security.

Life settled into an ordinary routine. I went to the local school, where I was simply another pupil. I joined the Cubs, proudly wearing the uniform and taking part in the activities that so many boys of my age took for granted. For the first time, I was beginning to experience something that resembled an ordinary childhood.

Being the only child in the house suited me. I had already learned to amuse myself, and I never felt the need to compete with brothers or sisters for attention. Looking back, I think those quiet years gave me a chance to recover from everything that had gone before, even though I could never have understood that at the time.

Some Sundays followed a familiar pattern. Bath time came once a week, as it did in many homes during the 1950s. Strange though it may sound, I remember those baths not because they were remarkable, but because they weren't. The fear I had known at Kinnersley Manor wasn't there. No screams, no panic — just another ordinary part of family life. It was one more lesson that not every adult intended to hurt you.

My mother visited me once or twice while I was living there, usually with my sisters. My father came only once. Those visits always felt slightly unreal, as though I belonged to two different worlds that never quite fitted together. When they left, life with Sadie and Bob simply carried on as before.

I stayed with them until I was eight years old. Only much later did I come to understand that they had wanted to adopt me. They had no children of their own, and I believe they would have gladly made me part of their family. My mother refused.

As a child, I knew nothing of the conversations or decisions that took place between adults. I only knew where I lived. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder how different my life might have been if that decision had gone another way.

For those two years, however, I had something I had rarely known before or since: stability. It was borrowed rather than permanent, but it was real while it lasted. Even today, when I think of Brighton, I remember not great adventures or dramatic events, but the quiet comfort of an ordinary life, a gift that, for a little while, was enough.

I can still find the house in my mind without looking at a map. It was 15 Langdale Gardens in Hove, and even now I can picture the black-and-white mosaic path leading to the front door. I remember placing my small feet carefully on the pattern as I walked towards the house, never imagining that the image would stay with me for the rest of my life.

The brick piers are still there today, as is the little balcony that looked out over the front. Time has changed many things, but somehow that house has held on to the details that mattered to me.

What fixed the address in my memory was the letterbox at the end of the road. It stood overlooking the sea, and every time I think of Langdale Gardens, I see that red pillar box with the ocean beyond it. Strange, the things that stay with us. I have forgotten countless names and faces over the years, yet I have never forgotten that walk up the mosaic path or the letterbox looking out towards the water.

For a little boy who had known so much uncertainty, Langdale Gardens became something solid. It was one place in my childhood that I could return to in my mind, unchanged, long after the years themselves had passed.

Many years later, I went back to see Bob. I didn't know whether he would even remember me. We talked for a while, and then he reached into his pocket. He took out a small, worn school photograph. It was a picture of me when I was six years old.

"I've always carried this," he said.

I don't think he ever realised what those words meant to me.