A small paperback book with a green cover on which both title and subtitle appear, above a picture of the author as a smiling youngster. The main body of 202 pages includes a postscript, and the fifteen chapters are divided among four parts. The Foreword by Tony Laughland, founder, in 1983, of the social work magazine Who Cares?, explains that he took on the author as a voluntary helper, in 1991, somewhat hesitantly, and had similar misgivings when first shown the draft of Fred Fever's autobiography. However, its published contents, combined with the author's progression as a colleague in their particular form of social work, clearly formed a successful partnership.

In the Introduction the author outlines his response to the publicity given to child sexual abuse in Cleveland during 1987, which roused his own memories, introspection, and then serious psychiatric illness. He sought counselling from Barnardo's, which proved sufficiently unsatisfactory to provoke him to write of his experiences while in care, and to publish an autobiography of the first sixteen years of his life, with the intention of using it to further the awareness of child abuse, and its prevention. An Author's Note follows, although it could well have continued the Introduction, for it mentions how information concerning his parents, gleaned from his Barnardo's records and with the help of his sister, Dorothy Fever, during his mid-twenties, has been placed at the beginning of his biography to establish that he, like the majority of children taken into care, entered Barnardo's because of his parents' inabilities, not his own. In a similar vein, he mentions that the collection of photos inserted between chapters 6 & 7, at the beginning of Part III, do not extend beyond the age of 7 years - he assumes no-one thought him worthy of phtographs thereafter.

The justification for the Author's Note is soon apparent on reading Chapter 1, 'In the Beginning' where mis-marriage, maternal inadequacy, severely premature birth, social services, and compulsory institutionalisation follow fast upon each other, the last being in St. Christopher's Home under the aegis of Barnardo's, with memorable success and happiness thereafter that lasted despite slight spasticity of his legs, inco-ordination of eye-movements, and apparent slowness in learning to read. His account of his further slow isolation from the other children, combined with a change in his carers so that he came under the more direct management of the male social worker, and was met with physical punishment for the first time, is all most carefully drawn. It leads on to sharing a bedroom, while still a youngster, with a large post-pubertal boy whose detailed, progressive, and repetitative sexual abuse of him is described with a discrete frankness that touches the depth of terror involved. With equal insight he describes the development of a painful, and eventually, abusive, albeit non-sexual relationship with the male member of the staff, avowedly a surrogate father.

His story continues into the saga of inadequacy, destruction, unhappiness, that outweighs each attempt at care, and leaves him deeper in distress, into stealing for gratification, but with periods of achievement and friendship in between, and throughout variable levels of social care and supervision. There is a point at which his return to institutionalised care seems inevitable, and with this, poor educational achievement, discrimination, despair, highly organised stealing, confronation with the police, and finally the courts.

There is a sad chapter titled 'Mum and Dad' in which, very much at his own persistent request, he is taken to meet his Mum and Dad, only to discover them living in squalid surroundings, the one a mentally ill and inadequate housekeeper, the other an illiterate council worker, then a gardener, but lately a dustman, and roadsweeper. He writes: 'my only chance of escape did not exist, never had done.'

His school life having become that of gang rackets and stealing, beatings within the Home, and police confrontations without, it was remarkable that he still had opportunities to stay with people outside the Home, and establish almost normal relationships - until he had to return. It is of no surprise that chapter 14 is titled sexual assaults, and that the gradual approach and cajolement into a prolonged and particularly perverted form of sexaual abuse is presented in the context of relationships of distrust and physical abuse by the adult men in charge of his care; it is an existence of adolescency midst deprivation and desolation that is stalked by irrevocable despair. The same chapter includes a further attempt to establish a relationship with his parents that is pathetically rejected, and then his discovery that the staff of the home were aware that he and others were being systematically sexually abused. It finishes with a rejected attempt to establish his heterosexuality - all evidence of his loveless existence.

Suprisingly, chapter 15, titled 'Nobody Cares', tells of how two friends, with whom he went to stay after school finished, at first help him by obtaining some holiday employment, and later disillusion him by revealing their prejudices, and this is followed by various attempts to find him employment that fail, against which is set a series of quotes from his school reports giving glimpses of innate ability amidst a mass of attribution to poor behaviour. The Home at which he had spent so much time begins its closure, and in a short section somewhat enigmatically titled 'Postscript: Who Cares?' that follows him through a number of temporary jobs, starts what seems to offer some promise in photo-copying - until the spectre of abuse rears its head again.

A frank and movingly sad story, correlating well with the Author's note and Introduction.

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