A medium-sized softback book with a picture of a golliwog peering out of a cupboard occupying the front, above 'Foreword by Tony Benn'. The back cover has a number of notices(with acknowledgement to the publishers) beginning with: 'Born in the seaside village of St. Agnes, Cornwall, in 1953, Phil Frampton wanted to discover the reason behind his abandonment as a child. For several decades he was unable to unwrap the mysteries. In 1999, Phil finally got access to official records kept on him as a child. Using these records and letters, Phil unfolds an odyssey of joy, rejection, love, racism, drama, abuse, intrigue and deception, and records his reaction to his discoveries. This fascinating, parentless childhood story entices readers to review their own upbringing and parenting.'

The title page has also the subtitle Our Past is a Present and a dedication to 'Ellie, Sidonie and Gail' below which is the information that the book was first published May 2004, and 'This revised edition, July 2004' beneath which is printed the ISBN - usually found on the reverse of the title page. The latter has publication and copyright details, and a long paragraph of acknowledgements.

Tony Benn's Foreword is strongly appreciative and complimentary, and on the back of this is a paragraph listing the author's extensive experience in journalism, travel writing, and other publications.

There are 300 pages of text, the last being a postscript indicating the author's participation in the Care Leavers Association and related matters. The 16 chapters have meaningful titles, and many pages of the book have quotations, all in inverted commas and capitals.

In reading the book it soon becomes clear that the author and Barnardo's had a long relationship that was recorded in written exchanges that occupied 733 pages, and that the author was able to obtain these records at a stage in his life when his education and writing skills enabled him to use them to produce a powerful account of his childhood and youth spent mostly in their care, directly or indirectly.

He takes the account of his origin as the child of a Nigerian student and a piano teacher well into the realm of pre-conceptual thought, through antenatal drama, to his factual arrival. His equally factual rejection by a father who returned to Nigeria, and a mother surrounded by a complex of relations and friends supporting his transferral to the care of Barnardo's, is skillfully reconstructed.

Thereafter his infancy, childhood, and youth are portrayed as between a Barnardo Matron who wants him without being able to say so, and a foster family who don't want him, and also can't frankly say so; hence, presumably, the golly in the cupboard.

His ability gets him through all of this, and on to the further education that enables him to return to the remarkable Barnardo records that figure so prominently in his story. Oddly enough, an autobiographical account of his adult life is not provided, but there is a re-attachment of earlier strands in a meeting with some of the ex-residents from the Barnardo's Home where the Matron was replaced by a man just before the author left. Abuse of the children under the care of this man, on a gross and repetitve scale is reported by his friends who remained in the home after his own departure. The outcomes and consequences of these alleged experiences of his previous Barnardo friends make the golly in the cupboard a relatively pale and comfortable image.

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