I was asking the people I love to relive the utterly horrific and explain to me how they felt about that horror, to tell me what it did to them on the inside. To reveal the feelings they’d had to not feel in order to survive. My lack of understanding is a luxury paid for by the experience they lived

The lies told about God's Word in order to build a case for racism led my dad and his siblings to reject Christianity, but the values of his parents’ faith – courage, perseverance, love, and order – permeated 6001 and the lives of those in it. My grandfather was soft-spoken and rarely raised his voice, but made his views known. My grandmother was a disciplinarian. She didn't shout but was a straight shooter. My uncles and aunts knew their parents supported their political activities, yet they didn’t think of their mum and dad as revolutionaries in their own right.

I have spent many years judging my dad’s performance as a father. I have spent much less time considering what it took for him to keep going, and to give me what he did. He knows I’m writing about him, and about the things that went wrong and the places where we both fell short. Opening up in the way that he has a radical act of generosity.

PART TWO: Chapter 10: The Wilderness Years: Exile

“Nevertheless, the feeling that my parents had a greater mission that took priority over me became the dominant narrative in my mind, pushing out the many ways in which my mum and dad tried to be present and available. I edited out so many of the ways in which they showed up for me and loved me, my own bias shaping the story I told myself for years.

Writing this book has required me to both collect and re-examine all of the evidence at my disposal, not just that which is most easily accessible in my head. The realisation that I had erased so much of their efforts is hard to sit with.

But from where I stood, it didn’t seem that my dad really enjoyed having me around. Like most children, I assumed the behaviour of the adults in my life was motivated by how they felt about me, rather than their own despair or distress. I know now that the pain of the breakdown of the family he had made sat on top of the wound of being torn from the family of his birth. And to that the brutal aloneness of exile, and it all felt unbearable.