My father was only 21 years old when I was born. A young dad. A proud dad. I was conceived on his 21st birthday in May and born the following February after a 12-hour labour in the Marina Roche hospital in the northern suburbs of Moscow. It was winter time.Dad had met my mum through her cousin. He was from Guyana, in South America. Guyana had links with Russia due to both having socialist to Communist political leanings. More than anything my father wanted everyone to be able to rise up out of poverty, and to be able to access free healthcare and education.He’d won a scholarship to study civil engineering in Moscow, at the Patrice Lumumba University, and had left his native Guyana at the age of 18, escaping its civil war.My father was super-protective of me to the point that he wouldn’t allow me to have a bike or ride a horse (he thought these activities extremely dangerous) and after school every day my brother and I had to return straight home. We weren’t allowed to play with our friends. It didn’t help that when I was around 11, Sharon, one of the girls at our school who was slightly older than me, got hit by a coach when she was crossing the road.Her body flew into the air and she ended up in a coma for years lying in a hospital bed before her life support machine was eventually switched off. Sharon was a real life Sleeping Beauty.As a young child I idolised my father even though I was a witness to his beatings of my mother.My mother did run away twice. The first time she took my brother and I in a taxi from our home near Chepstow to the train station at Newport, then from there to London and the Russian Embassy in posh Kensington Gardens, London. I was eight years old at the time, my brother would have been around six.We were small, we bunked off school. It felt like a super-naughty rebellious act.My mother headed to the Russian Embassy, the address of which she’d written down in a small, cheap, brown diary. Her handwriting was part English and part the Cyrillic alphabet of her native Russia.So there we sat in 1974 in Kensington Gardens, mum explaining that she was being mistreated by dad and that she wanted to return with us to Moscow, to be back with her family.