Poet Lemn Sissay, with the help of London’s Foundling Museum, has gathered 59 athletes, artists, CEOs and others who, like him, spent part of their childhoods in care. The result is an inspiring photograph for young people in care today
Introduction by Claire Armitstead. Interviews by Killian Fox
Sun 24 Jul 2022 08.00 BST
“Ionce was Christopher Goldsmith,” reads a poem, neatly typed out on one side of a piece of A4 paper. On the back another poem is handwritten, composed on the train into London this morning, fresh on the page. They’re part of a poem-a-day project by their author Paul Cookson, who was born in the north of England and adopted shortly afterwards by a family in Essex. “Christopher Goldsmith lived for a month,” he writes, “then quietly died, slipped away/ Almost never existed… Christopher died so that I might have life/ and have it more abundantly.”
Cookson is one of the success stories of the UK’s care system. He was the eldest of three adopted siblings, all from different families. They were happy, he says. “None of us have ever gone back to look for our birth families.” But his writing tells a subtly different story: “And so, nearly half a century later/ nearer to the end of the journey/ than the beginning,/ those questions arise/ and may remain unanswered/ but arise anyway.”