Family is a group of people proving each other’s existence over a lifetime. Without family I had poems. In poetry I stuck a flag in the mountainside to mark where I had been. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it then did it fall? So the saying goes. It did fall. And I know it because I wrote it down at the time. In poetry I sought documentary evidence that I existed at a given time. And, given time, I would investigate through the poems and find more evidence.

‘Secrets are the stones that sink the boat.
Take them out. Look at them. Throw them out and float.’

My first professional reading was at seventeen. I was given night-release from Wood End – a prison for children. I read on stage at the Abasindi Coop, a black women’s cooperative in the heart of Moss Side in Manchester. I was paid £25. It was 1983. I was rich for a night. I danced to reggae music and returned the next day to Wood End where I was strip-searched and placed back in regulation clothing.

With a birth certificate, a letter from my mother, and a fist full of poems I left The Institution with two aims. The first was to find my family. The second was to become the poet whom I already was. Due to being moved from institution to institution I didn’t know anyone who had known me for longer than a year. I was about to embark on a search for a family who didn’t know me either.

In 1984, almost immediately after leaving Wood End, I approached a socialist printer called Stephen Hall of Eclipse Prints. I paid him on ‘tic’ (monthly) and printed 1,000 copies of Perceptions of the Pen which I sold to friends and the families of mill workers and striking miners. Poems from Perceptions of the Pen are in The New British Poetry, 1968–88 edited by Gillian Allnutt and Fred D’Aguiar (Paladin).

Within a year I also set up my own business – A.S.W.A.D. Gutter Cleaning Services. I wrote a poem and printed it on a leaflet to drum up work. I posted it through the letterboxes of every house in my town. In 1986 I took my first play through a full run at the Edinburgh Fringe, at South Bridge Centre on Infirmary Street, with Pit Prop Theatre and Leigh Drama Centre. I had poems published in the local paper, The Leigh Reporter.

‘I am not defined by my scars but by the incredible ability to heal.’

When my ladders were stolen the gutter-cleaning business was done, and so I moved from the Lilliputian villages of Lancashire to the great city, the OZ on the horizon – Manchester.

‘Child says to me in a workshop, “Are you famous?”
I says, “The answer’s in the question.” ’