Which title for my autobiography?

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The first initial draft of my book is completed.
It is the story of my life, the underlying theme being Reactive Attachment Disorder or the effect that an abusive and neglectful childhood has on a persons ability to form relationships as an adult.

I initial chose the title Bastardtopia as Utopia and Dystopia are invented words so felt I could invent similar to describe the world the illegitimate is made to inhabit.
Some like it but others say it is off putting.

Here are the first couple of pages for those who are interested, bare in mind this is an initial draft.




Chapter 1

?Is that Daddy?? are the first words I recall uttering as I looked down from our top floor flat in Scrutton Street, Shoreditch, to see a lone figure shrouded in a 1959 London fog walking past the fire escape below. ?No?, replied my Mother without even needing to look. My first and only memory of my Father and it wasn't even him, just an anonymous stranger, unaware of imprinting himself on the memory of an infant boy, at least reminding me that I must have once held the notion of having my own father, of being part of a family, for by this stage, though my mother and I still lived in an apartment provided by the company which employed my father, he had already exchanged my Mother for an eighteen year old Swedish Au Pair.

I would have liked to remember my Prussian paternal grandmother traveling all the way from Germany to visit us, as did my Father?s wife who wanted to take me back to Germany to raise me as her own, perhaps because I was such an adorable baby, but more than likely a pretext to reclaim her man, still a rare commodity in post-war Germany, and I would especially like to remember the walk in the park with my Mother when we bumped into Father with his new girlfriend but alas, my memories of the first 18 months of my life are limited to the afore mentioned figure in the fog, not enjoying having my face licked by Tosca our Boxer dog, being transported in the 1959 version of a child?s safety seat, the passenger footwell of somebodies car and a train journey to Liverpool in the arms of my Uncle Peter when my little finger was crushed in a sliding door. Possibly the journey that ended in my first abandonment at 18 months old to be brought up by my maternal grandparents for 1960 was not a good time for a single woman to raise an illegitimate child, even a woman attractive enough to have dated an international footballer with whom she shared the same name and whom she deemed ?too nice? to continue the relationship.

Mother claimed Grandfather was the nicest man she ever encountered, which seems at odds with her taste in men, so tall, it is easier to recall his large brown shiny shoes then his face, a cook in the merchant navy with a home full of exotic objects of art from his adventures to the Java Seas, a gentle Geordie of the ***** Clan of Border Reivers and a Nephew of the Victorian artist *** ***. Still mostly away at sea, I was left in the care of his Liverpudlian wife Ada, not the most affectionate of women. She was kind enough to endure my use of her shins as a highway for my toy cars as she sat by the open fire reading or knitting. Televison had yet to be invented as far as I was aware so life was a quiet and tranquil affair. She would bathe me in the kitchen sink or I would watch her as she manhandled the washing through the heavy old mangle.

Mother, of course, still enjoyed life in London, many miles away so was somewhat absent in my life. She did on occasion make the trip to visit us. One evening, I lay awake in my cot aware of a visitor downstairs. Eventually, grandmother came to get me for it was indeed my Mother. One might now expect to read of my running into mother?s welcoming arms for hugs and kisses, such behaviour however was not practiced in our family, well at least not to my knowledge, but just to be in the company of such a mythical creature was enough for me. She granted me a smile and informed me the swept wings of my toy aeroplane should be pointing backwards rather than forwards as my logic suggested, priceless information for one destined to become an aircraft mechanic. However, even at the age of two or three I was acutely aware that she had not been that anxious to see me, comfortably established in an armchair, drink in hand, why had she had not run up the stairs the minute she walked through the door in her desperation to see her beloved son.

Grandmother became ill and died, so in 1962 it was time for me to suffer a third upheaval. It was decided I should be adopted by my mother?s cousins family who lived just along the road; their five year old daughter enjoying her new role as a caring older sister, eager to share her hope of seeing the Beatles pass by on a bus at the end of the long road in which we lived, a road seemingly devoid of life in which a four year old boy on a red and blue tricycle was safe to peddle past bombed out houses and wonder at the rainbow held captive in an oily puddle.

I have a photograph of the time, a trip to the zoo dressed in the smartest outfit I have ever owned, a broad stripped jacket on a happy little boy held in a kind man?s arms.

But circumstances denied me this opportunity to live a normal childhood, for within a few short months illness would claim the life of one of their children and so I had to go, never to see this family again. Though I was by now used to being turned away, I had run out of options and so had to return to London, rejection traveled ahead of me, waiting in my mother?s new home.

Chapter 2

Grandfather had returned from the Navy, sold up in Liverpool and jointly purchased a small terraced house in Streatham, South London with my Mother and her new husband. He was not at all impressed to find he now inherited a bastard reminder of his wife?s second hand womb and he ensured I would be punished for it.