Drawn by the sight of blood seeping through the bandages, I swooned in and out of consciousness. I remember the painful ceremony of the bandage removal. Seated in that watery canister, time was allowed for the bandages to absorb the warm water in order to assist stripping. My legs were eased apart to allow the water to soak through and reach my sensitive parts in preparation for the next painful stage.
Then the unfurling began: I screamed in agony as each layer was peeled. As the bandage grew longer I could see blood dripping into the bathwater. I gripped the bath sides with soap-slippery hands to brace myself against the stabbing pains. I can’t remember any words being spoken as the final half-inch of blood-soaked bandage was unfurled, exposing red-raw skin; my skin, my body, but theirs to invade.
And there, beneath, lay the source of all the pain and interest: my ‘organ’. I never understood why it was done or why pain was inflicted on me with such determination. As I grew older I learned that at that time (wartime) it was a view held by Dolly that the foreskin harboured the possibilities of infection – especially for the female – and so it should be removed!

That was the first invasion of my body by my adoptive parents, but it was not to be the last. That first assault was traumatic, and set the scene. The violent beatings that followed strangled my self-belief and sense of identity and created the conviction that there was something wrong with me. Abandoned at birth with the shame of being a ‘bastard’, a leper, I craved to belong and be accepted as normal. I became consumed with a desire to prove myself.

I was born around 2 pm on the twenty-ninth of May, 1945, in a Catholic nursing home for unmarried mothers somewhere in North London. Outside, military personnel, men and women, thronged the pavements, laughing, singing, and shouting whilst others worked in groups erecting trestle-tables in preparation for the weekend’s continuation of the Victory celebrations. That day everyone was deliriously happy. The War had ended. They had survived.

The Sisters of Faith assisted my mother in bringing me into the free world. I was surrounded by sombre-faced nuns whose singular purpose was to provide a bridge of humanity between an unmarried, eighteen-year-old girl and her newborn child, and a largely uncaring world where she would be judged as a ‘fallen woman’. Society also decreed that my mother’s shame, and mine by association, should be hidden from public view, so arrangements were made for George and Dolly Fowler, from faraway Brighton, to adopt me – so that my mother’s infamy would be erased.

In those days, adoption was used as the solution to hide disgrace, but stigma spreads like poisoned ivy to the furthest reaches of both body and mind. It is a sinister aberration engendered and fuelled by absolute belief and is amenable to neither reason nor cure. You drink from the well and you are tainted forever. My name is Nicky Fowler and I am worthless.

Twenty-one, London Street, my new home in Brighton, backed onto St Bartholomew’s – a huge, 600 foot high Victorian, Anglo-Catholic church located at the North end of town, in sight of the main railway station. Our garden abutted the giant church wall – like a coal-bunker perched against the side of a tall building. This grand building, the pride of the Victorians, eclipsed our natural light to the extent that sunlight was only seen when the sun was at its apex and its rays penetrated the garden gloom. Despite this major drawback, the vegetables planted annually as a supply to take the family through the winter months continued to flourish and grow.

Our house, a grey, dank, Edwardian terrace, was four storeys high, three above ground, and the fourth level, our living area, below ground. This basement living room rarely saw sunlight except in summer, when the sun’s rays streamed through the metal grille in the pavement above.