Survival
John Fahey
Author Bio
I was born in northeast England, had an idyllic childhood in western Ireland as a child with my grandparents, was taken back to England when nine and was plunged into a domestic violence environment. I struggled to survive that with the help of relatives, kind people, reading and education. By the time I was nineteen I got a full financial grant to enter a prestigious university in Scotland. When I graduated I migrated to America. The book ends as I’m flying to America with a degree in Chemistry to begin my life as a scientist.
Description
Born illegitimate in north east England in 1944, John Fahey was sent to his father’s parents in western Ireland. John’s parents later married and brought back to England when he was nine, he was continually beaten and battered by his father, who called him a bastard, throughout his teenage years. Surviving on his memories of Ireland, his trust in his Catholic faith, the help of kind people and relatives, and his love of chemistry, John went through major crises, feeling lost and alone in 1960s England and Scotland, he took on challenges, fought back against despair, and struggled with his sexual identity under legal intolerance. But determined to find a better life he went to university and finally to America.
This is a story of surviving against the odds.
Book excerpt
After I was born a bastard, my father having van-ished on hearing of my conception, George Orwell was writing Animal Farm just a few miles from Stockton-on-Tees. The terraced house I was born in was a short distance from the first passenger railroad station in the world. The midwife suggested my Christian names but it was well over seven months until my baptism, after my father was sought out, and found, in Manchester, and forced to marry my mother.
Such was my world in the year in which Animal Farm was written. I knew nothing of those things as I began to talk and learned to read just as I knew nothing of Aldous Huxley visiting more than a decade earlier the site of where I was later to start my working life in the Saxon town of Billingham where he described his awe of Imperial Chemical Industries as the stimulus to write Brave New World. Such is the innocence of a young lad struggling to make his way in the world unaware of the history around him.
It is perhaps appropriate then that my first post university job, several months of work before leaving England, was in the town of Berkhamstead, the place where the last possible Saxon King of England surren-dered to William the Conqueror. In truth Edgar Athel-ing had been proclaimed as king by the Witan though never crowned. The last Saxon King Harold Godwinson had died in the battle of Hastings during that Norman invasion. So ended the Saxon monarchy of England; so ended my life in England.
Author Website
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