Reblogged from Besonian:

A long time ago, I was eight years old. I was an only child. I lived with my mother and grandmother in a small town in the south Midlands. We had little money. Mum worked in a large grocery shop in the centre of the town and earned just about enough to feed the three of us – plus a dog called Rex. She and my father had split up when I was about three. I had – and still have – no visual recall of him, but throughout my childhood and teenage years, men became for me symbols of affection and reassurance. I missed him desperately. But Mum would never talk to me about him.

All this left me – at home at least – a rather isolated and lonely child. And Mum, ever under the often crushing thumb of her overbearing, domineering mother (my grandmother, a woman in her sixties and herself cruelly wounded by life) found coping with me more than she could easily handle most of the time. So it would be fair to say it was hardly a carefree, happy household. I took every opportunity to get away from it. I’d go out and play all day in the street with other kids or go on walks over the nearby fields with the dog, Rex whom I regarded as my best and truest friend.

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