'I was so ashamed and I thought to myself: how could I kill him?'

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

"The moment Geoffrey was born, it was different. “The doctors and nurses were behaving differently, and I felt differently.

I asked ‘have I got one of them?’ “The phrase the doctors used, and is still often used, is that they ‘were sorry to have to tell me’ that I had a disabled child… “I didn’t want to bring him home, I put a net over his pram because I was just so ashamed and guilty… “The thoughts I was thinking were becoming really obscene.

How could I kill him? How could I eliminate this child from my life? How could I do that?” The gut-wrenchingly honest words of an 85-year-old woman from north Manchester, shot through with pain and hard-won wisdom as she looks back on some of her darkest moments.

Bernie Wood spent the first years of her disabled son’s life ‘not loving’ her child, even contemplating ‘how could I kill him?’ – until one fateful night that she left her home, believing she might never return to her husband, and their family of five.