Ok not really exciting as stories go but it isall mine.

Borne 1962, right at the start of the sexual revolution, Mother was just 15 and a few months old when I was borne, and just couldn't cope with a baby. So I was left in the care of my grand parents while my mother went off to 'find herself', to say they didn't really want me is an understatement.

We lived in a very small village and by the time I was 12 I was a 'feral' child, totally wild and totally uncontrollable. I knew nobody loved or cared for me and so I went out of my way to show that I didn't care right back.

Well not strictly true, there was a man in the village, a divorced 40 - something farm labourer. He would watch for hours as I threw stones at glass bottles in the street, climbed trees, fought with other children, all the things I was becoming infamous for around our sleepy little village. One day when I was writing on the pavement (sidewalk for the dammed Yankees) with a chalk stone, he came to the end of his garden and placed a biscuit (cookie) on top of the gatepost, then he walked away again. I watched his every step, followed him down his path with my eyes, saw him standing at his front window, where I always saw him when he was watching me. I looked at the biscuit, only rich tea or arrow route but I took it and ate it, if I were 12 again and the time was now I would have run a mile. A few days later I was up to no good again in the street and I watched him walk to the end of the path and put a side plate on the path right behind his gate, it had a small piece of chocolate on it which I snatched up and ran away with.

This went on for a few weeks, the tit-bits getting closer and closer to his house until it was on his front door step. Each time I would 'steel' the food and run away, then, after about eight weeks, I came home from school and he was sitting on his front door step with a biscuit on the flat of his hand. I walked down the path, slowly, uncertainly, until I was four feet away from him, he moved his hand a little closer to me and I backed away, then he put the biscuit on the step and went inside. I did my usual snatch and run, the next day this was repeated again, this time I took the biscuit from his hand, as I turned to run away he said "wait!" He asked me what I had done at school today, I grunted an inaudible reply and ran away.

Over the next two years he made great efforts to win my trust, to get me to tell him all the things my mum or grandparents should have been asking me and getting me to share with them. Every time I stepped into his house I was expecting him to make a move, try to touch me, try to kiss me, ask me to do unspeakable things. The child I was, that's the thing I thought men expected from me, but he never did.

During the time I had known him, about three years in total, he went from an 18 stone (252lb) ruddy-faced man to a 10 stone (140lb) grey faces, sunken cheeked man. To my childish mind it was because I was eating all his treats for almost three years, then on my fifteenth birthday he passed away, I ran from the school bus to tell him all the tings I had received as presents, show him my collection of cards. Share my day as I had for such a long time but he was gone, the door, ever open in the past was locked, no answer to my knocking. The woman from the house next to his told me he had died of cancer earlier in the day, sitting on the step where he tamed a feral child just over two years before. I was lost, devastated, just fifteen years old and my whole world was at an end. I took a day off of school to go to his funeral, he had no family there to mourn his passing, a few neighbours, a feral girl that was cleaned up for the occasion. Then a face I recognised, standing at the back of the church, a face I hadn't seen in real life but on faded photographs on my grandparents mantle-shelf, it was my mother. I was in emotional turmoil, I had lost my only adult friend and was so desperately unhappy, now I see my mother for the first time in my life. She didn't recognise me, why would she, she hadn't even seen so much as a photograph of me to my knowledge in all my life. The service was wonderful, the internment so hard for me to take that I ran away, I ran and didn't stop for hours, I fell into a hollow on the moors a few miles from home, I cracked my head, cut my knee but that wasn't why I was crying.

It was dawn the next day when I awoke, cold and wet from the early morning due, my eyes stinging from the hours of crying. I walked slowly home, kicking at anything that came across my path, I walked toward his house, the first time I had since he had passed away, the door was open, the windows too, his floor mats hanging on the line, someone was beating the dust of years from them. I ran through the open gate, my heart was in my mouth, it couldn't be him, I knew that, he was dead. I rounded the edge of the floor mat and ran straight into my mother. She said "Hi Rose, I missed you after your fathers funeral yesterday"................................................................................