The social worker turned author exploring traumatic mother and boy relationships

Mum and Boy is a collection of four unique and thought-provoking stories: A dead boy remembering tragedy from inside his coffin; a boy dealing with the death of his mum, who died by suicide; a teenager who mistakenly kills his father; a teenager dealing with hallucinations.

The complex nature of the relationship between a mother and male child runs through all these stories, often stemming from deep-rooted trauma exposing how this connection can go badly wrong.

“I wanted to talk about that mum-son relationship,” Stephen says. “Obviously, I've done it to an extreme in these stories because I'm a social worker and I know that those things happen and those things go on in - childhood abuse situations - and they impact on children. And they leave them with a lifelong trauma.”

“It never really goes away, because, you know, it's being done at an age where everything is being formed.

“Once those templates are set, they're really difficult to go back and change.”

The book is also extremely personal to Stephen with themes shaped from events in his own life. Stephen was seven years old when his dad died and, as a result he became the focus of all of his mother’s love, becoming “her little crutch”.

“The way she looked at me, I've never had anyone look at me like that ever again in that way. No prejudice, no judgments, just unconditional love.

“The problem was, I think, that it was kind of almost too much. At an age when I was just really realizing that I was a human being, if you like, and I'm kind of interacting with the world. I think that gave me a kind of skewed impression of how the world would treat me and how the world would look at me and gave me an expectation that was unrealistic.

“That affected me, I think it still does. I think it's affected me all of my life in terms of how I relate to the world and how I relate to other people.”

Stephen has been a social worker for over 30 years, working in a number of settings mostly within adult social care before taking early retirement, giving him chance to focus on his writing. Like many people, Stephen found his career path by accident.

“I’d wandered into a job centre, picked up job card for a part time care assistant working in an older people’s home. That became my passport into social work.”

It would be reductive to pigeon-hole the book based on its themes or its author’s social work background, but the impact of this undoubtedly shaped Stephen’s outlook.

“I think during my training, it wasn't only just about training to be a social worker. It was also me going through a kind of self-awareness exercise as well.

“When I actually got into my social work training and I started to look at who I was as a person and where I come from and the sort of things that were in my makeup, that's when I really started to reflect back on all of that and realize what had happened really at that age.”

Stephen’s experiences as a social worker have helped his writing, often informing aspects of the characters he writes.

“Most of the work I remember now is about the time that I was directly working with users and families because, you know, they're the people that stay with you. Your colleagues are great. Of course they are, and you will remember them. But I don't remember them half as much as I remember the users and families that I worked with.

“They’ve given me lots and lots of characters. I mean, obviously, I wouldn't use them directly, but, you know, caricatures and fictionalized and amalgamations of different people I've come across. The really interesting dynamics of all of that has fed into my creative writing.

Mum and Boy is Stephen’s second collection of short stories, but his first collection was mainly based on people that he met through social work.

“It was just a case of when the characters kind of almost arrived fully formed, or as I say, two or three individuals merging into one. What my job then is to drop them into interesting plots and interesting narratives and find a story for them.”

The stories are compelling with three-dimensional characters richly developed over the book’s relatively short length. For Stephen, the heavy topics ranging from mental health, suicide and psychological trauma also carry an important message.

“If you can reach someone and just say: ‘Look, somebody else is aware of this, you know. We're aware of the struggle.’ It might prompt people to actually seek some help, some support.

“That would be worth all the hours that it's taken to actually produce it.”