He was physically abused by his mother from a young age. He is still physically scared on some parts of his body from incidents.

She always scared him into never telling anyone about it, so all his family just thought he ran away from home for no reason.

Some of the brothers and sisters acted a little disrespectfully saying that my dad shouldn’t have ran away just because he didn’t like getting told off, as that’s what they were told. They weren’t aware of how bad it got.

Eventually the police took him into care after finding him and taking him back to his house on so many occasions, with him begging them not to.

I remember at one point, when I met the family, his Dad saying something like “oh I remember when I came home from work and your Dad and fell out of a tree and broken his arm, and a couple brothers and sister nodded, remembering hearing about that.

What they didn’t know is that it was actually his mother who had hit his arm with a hammer and broken it when he was 7, after getting mad at him for not drinking his milk, and then forced him to say he fell from a tree to everyone else. I never said anything when they mentioned this story.

I had absolutely no interest in his mother at all. All I wanted was to know my aunties and uncles and most importantly, see if I had any cousins who looked the same and me.