It was maybe in 1961 - perhaps the summer when this photo was taken of Great Gran Emma Arnold putting her arm around me in Elder field north nearby the London and Birmingham railway line in Sheldon .Its a moment that haunted my life . I had by that time been adopted , "In family" by Great Gran Emm'a son who was my own mother's half great uncle .
Unfortunately I was child abused and mistreated . My real mom went on to have two more children both born by the time this photo had been taken . It tortured me and I lived more as a "rejectee" in a kind of kind of unseen long term exile .. I knew all about "my sisters" for they were still called that , despite the paradox of me not being with them in my proper family place . And Pammy my "full" sister was not with me either . If we saw each other at some family occasions - we knew who we were - we had been in a home together in 1956 - put there by our mother . Pammy and I had bonded .
This one moment of being in this area with Great Gran magnetised me unconciously so that I would go back to this spot nearby the railway in Sheldon in my childhood - it was like a compulsion . I kept going there after she died in 1968 and the world for me was changing slowly towards my own breakdown..And when the world built its factories and firms by this area I still passed it like a forgotten prayer and faith that maybe someway I would be finally seen ..
Great Gran had been in the Erdington Workhouse in 1907 and 1913 a few times - she had lost children and her daugher Florence (my real mother's mother) had been displaced for years with an aunt in 1913 - 1918 and I was to be heading toward the same place as the Highcroft Mental Hospital by 1973 suffering from terrible feelings of an unrecognised void of self .. I had not been recognised for the pain I had been in . No-one "saw" or spoke in my Birmingham family , it was the way - iron in the tongue was all . No feelings were ever discussed . Its no wonder - they were too painful in the history of painful childhoods we had all had ..
"Forget the Past" was always our defensive family code ..The damaged past inside us though - never forgot some of us ........
