The Boy Without Love

Book excerpt: Simon Dawson is a broadcaster, smallholder and author of several books including humorous life-on-a-farm memoirs. However, his cheery exterior masks a very unhappy past. His mother did not love him, and informed him of this fact often. She spent most of his childhood trying to find someone to whom she could give him away to, played him off against various gangster lovers and abusive boyfriends, failed to feed him and overtly taunted him. Simon, meanwhile, lost his virginity to a much older woman, failed spectacularly at school, and took the blame for their house burning down. But eventually he found a soul mate and together they now care for a menagerie of animals. In his new book he decides not just to face up to the emotional damage his mother inflicted on him, but to try to understand her and achieve some kind of reconciliation before she dies. Was it his innate unloveableness, or was it something that would now be called postnatal depression? Warm, witty and honest, the book charts the humour, the anger, the confusion, the hurt, the hate and the desperation of a mother who can't give love and a son longing for it. All of this is set against the backdrop of present day life on the farm where some animals also mysteriously reject their young.