Kevin Lewis never had a chance. Growing up on a poverty-stricken London council estate, beaten and starved by his parents, bullied at school and abandoned by social services, his life was never his own. Even after he was put into care, he found himself out on the streets caught up in a criminal underworld that knew him as 'The Kid'.

Yet Kevin survived to make a better life for himself, and has become a bestselling novelist in his own right.

The Kid and The Kid Moves On, published together for the first time in this film tie-in edition, are his heartbreaking and inspiring true story . . .

The Kid - Film trailer

The Kid by Kevin Lewis is now a film starring Rupert Friend.

Click here to watch the film trailer of The Kid.

‘Devastating. I can’t think of a story that is more sad or a story that it feels more essential to go on reading’
Allison Pearson, Evening Standard

‘Harrowing, chilling … with passages of heartbreaking frankness. By the end, your heart is overwhelmed’
Daily Telegraph

‘A moving true story’
Heat

‘Kevin’s story reminds us that we need to look out for our own’
Trisha Goddard

‘Devastating … every parent must read’
Daily Mail

‘Incredible. A fantastic story’
Fern Britten, This Morning

An extract from Kevin Lewis' The Kid, film tie-in edition.

The Pink Tin House

I was born on 8 September 1970, so this is not a story from the ‘bad old days’, this all happened at a time when British society was priding itself on becoming enlightened. We had the welfare state and child-protection laws and an army of well-meaning people dedicated to making it a fair world for children born at the bottom of the social heap. But still they couldn’t save me from the fate that awaited me in my own home.

On my birth certificate it says we lived in Gypsy Hill, near Crystal Palace in South London, but I only remember living on ‘The Horseshoe’ – a curve of houses on King Henry’s Drive in New Addington, near Croydon in Surrey – so we must have moved there when I was still too young to take in what was happening. It doesn’t really matter where we were living because any house that our family occupied would soon have looked the same.

That strip of the South London suburbs was a bleak and culturally desolate area. There was row upon row of twentieth-century social housing provided for those who couldn’t afford to live in the city, mixed in with street after street of dreary ‘affordable’ housing for those who aspired to a more genteel suburban existence. There was no cultural history for the community to feel any pride about, no sense of belonging. In New Addington there was nothing to soothe the eye or the soul. It was just a place where hundreds of thousands of people lived until they could afford to move to somewhere nicer. Many of the families, just like ours, were never going to be going anywhere, trapped in a spiral of poverty, debt and desperation.

King Henry’s Drive was a long, busy, depressing road lined by row upon row of tin houses, with the Horseshoe in the middle and tower blocks at the end, and roads either side leading nowhere. The Horseshoe, as the name implies, was a curved side road allowing the houses to be set back from the main road around a large patch of grass. If a private company was building the Horseshoe today it would be called a ‘crescent’ and would be prettily landscaped with trees, but all we had to look at on the grass was a public phone box and the houses opposite. All the houses around it were built of corrugated tin and were owned by the council. I don’t know if the architects who designed them intended these houses to last for more than a few decades, but they are still there today, although some of them have now been improved with new tiles on their roofs and wooden cladding on the outside walls. In the early seventies they were all still just tin boxes for living in, cost-effective places to put families in order to stop them ending up on the street.

Every house in the row was painted a different pastel colour, probably in the hope of lifting the spirits of those who had to live in them and giving the area some sort of character. Ours was pink on the outside, which belied the filth and misery that existed inside those flimsy walls. Behind the house was a garden, which backed on to the car park and playgrounds of Wolsey Junior School.

Some of the neighbours had managed to make their homes look quite nice, with well-tended front gardens, tubs and hanging baskets, decorative fences and pretty curtains at the windows. Their efforts to add colour and life to their houses merely drew attention to the lack of colour and life all around. Anything like that would have been completely beyond the abilities or imaginations of Gloria and Dennis, my natural parents. Just existing was almost more than they could manage. Gloria never bothered to change out of her dressing gown unless she was leaving the house to cash her Giro and it never occurred to her that she should even clean her own house, let alone decorate it or improve it in any way. Even today I can’t bring myself to call them mother and father.

On the rare occasions when I’m talking to one of my brothers or sisters, I always refer to her as ‘your mother’. Some wounds are just too deep to ever heal. Gloria was a giant of a woman, over six feet tall and lean, with all the physical strength of someone constantly supercharged by a powerful bad temper. Dennis was physically strong and silent, whereas Gloria was loud – and she was violent.

She never talked in a normal voice, only shouted. She was never calm, always angry. No one liked her, which made her angrier. The neighbours hated the way she was screaming at them one minute and scrounging from them the next; they hated how every other word that came from her mouth was an obscenity. It was a constant, ugly stream of the few most aggressive expletives the English language could supply, fired out by a jet of permanent spite. When she tried to be nice to people outside the family and make them her friends, which wasn’t often, she was still too overpowering and they would shrink away from the onslaught of her personality.