Pete’s childhood looked enviable from a distance Caribbean beaches, flights between continents, and the polished rituals of a British boarding school. But behind the postcard scenes was the emotional reality familiar to so many Third Culture Kids and Boarding School Survivors. His infancy was marked by constant uprooting, emotional whiplash, and the quiet, confusing ache of never truly belonging anywhere for long. Boarding school added another emotional wound: the well-practised shutdown of a child learning to survive abandonment, captivity, and abusive adults who used fear to silence children. The early seeds of the CPTSD that would follow him into adulthood were sown.
Somewhere Never Home is the story of a childhood lived everywhere and nowhere. Moving between Scotland, Africa, the Caribbean, and an abusive English boarding school, Pete grew up a classic Third Culture Kid: adaptable on the surface, fractured underneath. What looked like privilege hid the early wounds of emotional abuse, institutional harm, and the long shadows of Boarding School Syndrome and cPTSD.
For decades, Pete wore the labels of success – Cambridge, the BBC, Unilever, and a career leading disaster responses across some of the world’s toughest places. But beneath the competence lay the hidden consequences of a TCK upbringing, early abandonment wounds, and boarding-school survival: alcohol misuse, failed relationships, and the exhausting lifelong performance of pretending to be “fine”.
Told with humour, candour and hard-won hope, this memoir is about unlearning those inherited labels and understanding the adult patterns they created. It speaks to anyone shaped by childhood instability, institutional harm, or the long tail of CPTSD. It shows that recovery isn’t about erasing what happened but slowly reclaiming the self that learned to pretend it didn’t. It’s a book for anyone who has spent years ignoring or running from their past, and is ready, finally, to come home to themselves.
Available here.