Fatherless (Paperback)

When his father denies paternity, the infant Phil is left with his poverty stricken mother in a 1950s West Yorkshire mill town. Burned by loss and desertion Annie's mental state frequently breaks apart. Before his third birthday she releases Phil to a distant orphanage. A series of subsequent separations 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 a 1960s orphanage Phil Barber has travelled with love and a wry humour into the dark earth of his tangled roots. Fatherless is an account of a displaced boy reaching through a lonely childhood and desperate adolescence to forge his way to manhood. Phil's story is a winding river of struggles for identity, and a search for beauty and belonging among the oceanic pain of feeling exiled from society.