Age 10, my mum told me my dad didn’t like me – it ruined my relationships
26 August 2026 · first published in The i Paper
I was ten when my mother told me. It took forty years to understand what it had done.
I remember the quality of her voice that day.
I sat at the kitchen table and my mother knelt opposite me, one knee, eyes raised to meet mine. This felt important. Her voice was careful, like it was carrying something fragile and she was testing the strength of each word as she spoke it, making sure it didn't shatter. And then she said it.
I'm sorry about your dad, Harry. He just doesn't... like you.
I was about 10. She wasn't being cruel. She said it out of kindness, as a mitigation for the ordinary cruelties she'd watched with her own eyes, and I have never once blamed her for it.