Page 52 - Great Elizabethans

Though Lemn Sissay’s childhood was hard and miserable, and he was let down by the people who should have cared for him, he grew up to become a brilliant writer – a poet whose work has touched and inspired thousands of readers.
FROM PLACE TO PLACE
When Lemn Sissay’s mother came to Britain from Ethiopia in 1966, she didn’t yet know she was going to have a baby. After her son was born in 1967, near Wigan in the north of England, she found it hard to look after him, so she asked if he could
be cared for by foster parents for a little while. But instead of giving her the help she asked for, a social worker took away her baby, renamed him Norman (the social worker’s own name) and gave him to a white family to adopt as their own. His mother wrote letter after letter, asking for her son to be returned,
but she got no answer.
When Lemn – who didn’t know his real name – was 12, his foster family decided they
no longer wanted him and sent him to a children’s home. They would never see him again. In homes and foster families over the next six years, Lemn was punched and kicked and racially abused, nicknamed ‘Chalky White’, and treated with carelessness and cruelty. As the only Black boy in most of the places where he lived, he stood out. People spat on him when he rode the bus and called him horrible names. When he painted a small part of one home’s roof with the Ethiopian flag, he was sent to a secure centre where many of the children had been charged with serious crimes. Here, he was locked in a padded cell, searched and beaten. All his life, he was told that his mother had abandoned him.
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