Brixton, 1990

"If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."

The childish voice quavered and shook, echoing eerily in the damp blackness of the old cellar.

He was ten years old, and he had no idea when he was going to be let out of the cellar. It was the stuff of nightmares, his nightmares, and as the darkness claimed him as its own, he tried desperately to cling to his mind by quoting the play he had been reading. Even though it was the fault of that play that he was now in this position, he didn't blame Shakespeare. He blamed no-one except his father. The man who had so often kicked and beaten his mother until she was a trembling shadow of herself, the man whose loud, angry voice permeated even the deepest sleep of an exhausted child, the man who...

The boy shuddered. Everyone had insisted his mother's death had been a tragic accident. He knew better, but he also knew better than to say anything about it.

Today he had been reading The Merchant of Venice from his mother's Collected Works of Shakespeare. It was the only thing of hers that he had been able to salvage. Everything else was either broken or sold, or burnt.

The pile in the garden had grown until it was taller than he was. Admittedly he was an undersized, scrawny twig of a boy, but it was still a large bonfire. He had watched in horror as his mother's possessions were set alight. It was as if his father wanted to destroy her memory as easily as he had erased her existence. He had run outside, screaming, but had been met with an eyewatering blow to the side of his head, and a largely unintelligible roar. He gathered from this that his father had been drinking again.

The roaring and the beatings always increased in direct proportion to the amount of Scotch consumed.

He had waited, curled up on the ground, until the bonfire had died down and his father had gone inside the house, and then he slowly unfolded his thin legs and rose rather unsteadily. He scrabbled madly in the still-hot ashes, desperate to find something, anything left of her. He burnt his hands, but it was worth it - he emerged scared but triumphant, clutching a tattered book. It was scorched and charred around the edges, and the dark red leather of the binding was blackened and smeared with charcoal, but the main body of it was intact. He hid it under his jumper and fled back to the house. The Collected Works of Shakespeare was his treasure from that moment on, and he pored over it, filling his head with words. Large parts of it were a total mystery to him, but even the words and concepts he didn't understand sounded beautiful in his head. And the best thing was that every single one of those words had belonged to his mother. Sometimes when he recited them he could almost hear her, and when he held the book close to his heart he felt sure that if he concentrated just a little harder, he would be able to see her more clearly - maybe even touch her. But he could never quite concentrate hard enough, and she existed only in the space behind his eyelids when he closed them tight against reality.

He had managed for some weeks to maintain secrecy about his Shakespeare, but all good things come to an end, and nowhere is that saying more true than in the home of a violent man addicted to whiskey.

The beatings almost didn't touch him now. He had endured so many broken ribs, sprained joints and strained muscles that one more hurt barely made any difference. What bit him worse than the belt-buckle and ate into his prematurely aged soul was the flood of bitter words that accompanied the physical brutality.

Vicious, spite-ridden invective reverberated around his tired brain in a heartbreaking whirlpool. When the attack was over and he had been shoved, pale and unresisting, down the steps of the cellar, dully aware of the door slamming shut behind him, he lay on the cold ground and stared silently at the engulfing dark. The fear ebbed, replaced by worse horrors - pain of heart and body, accompanied by a sickening drop in his already smashed self-worth. The words still returned in the blackness, mocking him.

What do you want with Shakespeare, idiot? You've got no business reading, you pathetic little runt. You're as useless as your mother was. Always had her nose in a book. Never enough time for me. I swear it gave her ideas. She was always less obedient when she'd been reading her precious books.

And then that moment of complete terror as he had watched it click in his father's mind.

Where did you get that? It was hers, wasn't it? You stole it, you little rat! Do you know what that makes you? A thief. When you're in prison do you think they'll care that you like poetry? Sniveling brat. I'll teach you to take what's not yours.

He never cried in front of his father, no matter how the belt stung, or how his wrenched wrist might ache along with the kicked ribs. He had learnt a long time ago that crying, even pleading, didn't help at all. In fact it seemed to exacerbate the alcohol-fuelled rage. He bit his tongue and clamped his teeth together, and refused to make any sound. But when the cellar door was locked and he was left alone with the damp walls, then his eyes would start to overflow with silent tears, and his broken body would shake until he finally gave into the darkness and fell into a deep and grateful sleep.

It might have lasted hours or even days for all he knew. There was no real sensation of time passing in the cellar. Sometimes he thought that he had been forgotten, and his active imagination drew him horrifying pictures of people breaking the door down twenty years from now and discovering his skeleton huddled in a corner. He wasn't sure if he really dared to shout, even if his father had forgotten him. It would probably only earn him more blows and insults. But he sensed the rapid weakening of his body, and knew that he needed food and water soon.

He levered himself up with his arms and rather shakily approached the door. It looked very solid. He slammed his fists against it and shivered in pain as the impact echoed up his arms. It was possibly even more solid than it looked. He kicked at it, trying to ignore the muscles screaming in protest at this further abuse, and shouted at the top of his voice until his breath gave out in a massive dry sob and he collapsed in a tangle of aching joints to rest his spinning head against the foot of the door.

It felt like centuries. He drifted in and out of consciousness, his nightmares seeming to take hold and drag him, screaming, back into the wretched moist chill of reality.

He missed his mother. Her absence hurt most at times like these, when he wanted her arms to comfort and protect him, her voice to soothe him and make him smile, her eyes to reassure him that someone at least considered him worth loving. When she died, the tiny pocket of safety that had existed, fragile and nebulous, in the corner of his world, burst like a soap bubble, and left only acrid terror behind it. He wanted to tell her he loved her. He wished, with a passion far too powerful for a ten-year-old, that he had been big enough and strong enough to save her. Hot tears of anger and sorrow burnt his weary eyes and scorched streaky paths down his face. He wanted to give up. But in the bitterest moments, his mother's face swam before him, and her voice, pulled from memory, told him how proud she was of him. He had to make her proud. He wanted to justify her faith in him.

He was going to survive. He was going to make an escape plan. And when he got free, he was going to prove himself to everyone - but it would always be for her, because she was the only one who believed in him, and he loved her.