Two Years

I was born in London in 1962. I spent the first 12 years of my life in a children's home, struggling not only with the fact that my parents had abandoned me, but also trying to cope with being of Caribbean decent. I was sent to Jamaica at the age of twelve to be with my Grandmother, Aunty, Brother and Sister all of whom I was to meet for the first time. In Jamaica I learnt to adapt to a different way of life and culture; I saw my father for the first time and lost a good friend in the Island's capitol, Kingston, during the violent civil unrest of the late seventies and early eighties. I returned to England in 1982 and after living a play boy type of life for a few years, I decided to seek out my mother and find out what went wrong. The years which followed took me on a path towards self-destruction, trying to hang on to someone I knew I could be, but just did not know how. Alcohol and drugs had created a different person within me and we would have continuous fights for the right to be me. It ended up in February 2006 with us both in prison on the island of St Lucia, a hard core prison. I won. I started to write out of sheer boredom; what followed was a self-therapeutic journey to the land of a reality which I had left behind a long time ago.