Fatherless: A memoir

When his Polish ex-serviceman father denies paternity, after an extra-marital affair, the infant Phil is left with his poverty stricken mother in a 1950s West Yorkshire mill town. Overwhelmed by Victorian levels of hardship, abandonment and repeated pregnancies Annie develops catastrophic mental health problems. She releases the infant Phil to a distant orphanage. More moves follow each confusing separation take their toll on this spirited, imaginative boy who - at every turn - feels violently cast off and set adrift. In this memoir of life under the roof of 1960s orphanages Phil Barber has travelled with love and a wry humour into the dark earth of his tangled roots. Phil's story is a winding river of struggles for freedom and identity. This is not a bleak and sombre tale. Its a search for beauty and belonging among the oceanic pain of feeling exiled from society.