A week ago I had a rendezvous with twenty students from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The meeting had come about after a professor at the distinguished university, Maren Niehoff, who lectures in the humanities, had stumbled upon my book while visiting London’s renowned Foundling Museum last year. She enjoyed my story so much, and found it so relevant to her course, ‘The Individual and Society’, that she decided to make The Last Foundling required reading for her elite students in Jerusalem alongside the meditations of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Sigmund Freud, Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence. It goes without saying that I was utterly blown away when I learned of the company I was keeping as an author!

Professor Niehoff emailed me following her visit to the museum to ask if I would like to meet her students at the museum on 29th March, following a visit she had arranged to Oxford University, where Maren had studied in her youth, to talk about my experiences growing up in institutional care at the Foundling Hospital with reflections on my struggles adjusting to society after I left it at fifteen.

Known at its inception as the Foundling Hospital, Coram is still committed to improving the lives of the country’s most vulnerable children and young people after nearly 300 years of operation and is, in fact, the world’s oldest registered charity (it was renamed Coram after the institution’s closure).  The original Foundling Hospital had been set up by a seafaring philanthropist called Captain Thomas Coram who obtained, after seventeen years of intense lobbying, a Royal Charter from King George II in 1739 to provide for the care and education of illegitimate and deserted children.

I thoroughly enjoyed answering the students’ questions about my story, relating a little of my life through those years of challenge and lovelessness,  and I felt it to be a great privilege and honour to meet Professor Niehoff with her wonderful young students. Happily, I was among the very few foundlings who managed to locate their family and enjoy considerable success in the years that followed. I’ve uploaded a collection of photos taken by my younger son, Grant, of the visit below.