Forgotten gives an account of the complete life story of Les Cummings, who had to come back to the UK from his adopted home of California to make a legal challenge to his town council for his abusive treatment when growing up in council followed by foster care.
This book is powerful, well written and I was able to read through it easily in chunks without it being a novel-style page-turner. The author is honest about the times that he wasn’t the perfect person as a result of his upbringing, either when fighting and rowing with siblings or resorting to petty crime.
Since starvation also came into play as well as other forms of abuse, this memoir also brings to mind the story of Unloved by Peter Roche, where food was withheld deliberately and almost made into another drug which drove people to theft. It comes across that Cummings’ legal fight gave him some catharsis. I say that but it’s an assumption, since there is no description of the therapy undertaken by the author overseas, just that he had some. So that’s one minus point for survivors, despite the author’s description of his more direct methods of redressing the balance in his younger days and you’ll have to make up your own mind about the moral boundaries.
Even without any reference to therapeutic action taken by the author you can check the website for more information about the case, featuring scanned copies of some of the social work records at the following location:
http://thechildrenscottagehomesjusticeproject.web.officelive.com/ham.aspx