Tortured by Daddy ; Michael Seed's Childhood Was One of the Most Shocking You'll Ever Read About. But in a Testament to the Human Spirit, He Became a Priest and Friend to Premiers and Royalty. His Story Is at Once Haunting and Deeply Inspiring

Summary

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KNOWN as 'the priest to the stars', Father Michael Seed has been a friend of the last six Prime Ministers and is a regular visitor to both Parliament and Buckingham Palace. He converted the politicians Ann Widdecombe, John Gummer and Alan Clark to Catholicism, and is a senior aide to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the archbishop of Westminster. Now, after a lifetime of silence, he is finally revealing the painful and profoundly disturbing story of his childhood - and how he triumphed over its horrors.

MY EARLIEST memories are of Mammy and me wanting to escape. Not from the squalor of life in the slums, but from the terror and the hatred and the violence. From the man who beat and tortured us: Daddy.

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Tortured by Daddy ; Michael Seed's Childhood Was One of the Most Shocking You'll Ever Read About. But in a Testament to the Human Spirit, He Became a Priest and Friend to Premiers and Royalty. His Story Is at Once Haunting and Deeply Inspiring

The best we managed together was to steal away in the afternoons with a friend of Mammy's. They were the only happy moments I remember from my childhood.

I did try to run away alone once - to live with the gipsies - but I was found and dragged home and beaten unconscious by Daddy. I was too terrified to ever try again.

But Mammy tried to escape many times - and, finally, when I was eight years old, she succeeded. She threw herself in front of a train and left me to cope with life and Daddy without her.

After that, every day for five years I thought of trying to follow her by killing myself. I even lay on the track, in the exact spot where she had died, hoping to die under the wheels of the same train.

But, each time, at the last moment, something more powerful than my desire to die made me scramble to safety.

Sometimes, today, I still cry for the lonely, frightened little boy I was then - so unhappy and so longing for love - and marvel at not only surviving the brutality and the other appalling abuse, but, also, in the end, triumphing over it.

As that boy, I found it difficult to understand when other children talked of having nightmares in their sleep. For me, sleep was the only time whe...

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