Isolation from Family

Phillip Wyatt: Not Coming Home


Phillip was born in 1959 in Bristol. He attended a local special school for deaf children in Bristol from the age of two. Then at age eleven he went to a residential special school for deaf children in Surrey, continuing on to the school's residential sixth form college.

Here Phillip describes the sadness he felt when he started boarding school.

Transcript

When I arrived at the school. My Mum and Dad explained that it was a boarding school and that I wouldn’t be coming home for another two months. I was shocked. We went up to bed and there was a scramble to grab the best beds, mine was apart from the others and I felt very left out from the rest of the group and alone. That night, of course, I cried. I felt heart broken. I’d been hurt by the others, and my parents had left, the family who usually kept me safe with and who would have sympathised, they weren’t here.

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