IN THE SHADOW OF EIGHT: My Childhood of Pain, Silence, and the Courage to Survive

She was eight years old when her father died. Within weeks, she was sent away. She would not be free again until she was sixteen.

In the spring of 1991, Morenike Alade leaves Ilesan, the small hill town where she grew up in a house with blue shutters. She takes one bag, her father's battered book of folktales and a single red coral bead on a black thread, the last birthday present he ever gave her. Her aunt in Lagos has promised her a good school and a better life. Her grieving mother believes it.

What waits behind the iron gate of No. 8 Ayanwale Close, Mushin, is something else entirely. Morenike sleeps on a mat on the passage floor and draws water from the well before dawn. She cooks, scrubs and sells iced water in the traffic until dark. She learns the rules very fast. Never ask questions. Never complain. Never tell. On her first night, the coral bead is locked away. Her letters home go unanswered. Her aunt tells her, again and again, that she brought death into her father's house, and for years Morenike believes her.

So she learns to hide. She smiles in class while she is hurting. She wears a cardigan in the Lagos heat so that nobody will see her arms. She sings in the church choir, keeps other people's secrets as well as her own, and saves her tears for the dark. Nobody guesses, because she has made very sure that nobody can.

But even in the shadows there are small lights. Mama Ngozi, who sells provisions from a kiosk at the end of the close, presses bread into her hands and tells her she is not nothing. Ruka, a school friend, slides half her lunch across the bench without a word. One teacher looks a little too closely and asks the question nobody else has dared to ask. Then a frightened seven-year-old named Kudi is brought to No. 8 to work, and Morenike discovers that although she cannot protect herself, she might be able to protect someone smaller. It is the bravest thing she has ever done, and it will cost her more than she can imagine.

Thirty years later, Morenike is a teacher, a wife and a mother. She has built a quiet, careful life on top of everything she buried. Then, on the morning of her own daughter's eighth birthday, the sound of a key turning in a gate sends her straight back to the passage floor at No. 8, and she realises that the silence she learned as a child has followed her into every room of her adult life.

Told with honesty and tenderness by the woman that little girl became, In the Shadow of Eight moves between a 1990s Lagos childhood and the long, unfinished work of healing. It is a story about the faces behind closed doors, the pain hidden behind a smile and the questions that haunt a child who has no one to ask. It is also a story about courage: the quiet kind that keeps a child alive, and the harder kind that a grown woman needs to finally tell the truth.

Inside this book, you will find:

A child's view of grief, fear and loneliness, told without self pity. The people who failed her, and the ordinary strangers who refused to. A friendship between two house girls that becomes a lifeline. An honest look at how childhood pain follows us into marriage, motherhood and work. Fifteen chapters that each close with "A Picture to Keep", a short moment to hold in your heart.

For anyone who has ever smiled while hurting, or carried a secret far too heavy for their age, this is a story about what it costs to stay silent, and what it takes to finally speak.

How long can a child stay silent? And when she finally finds her voice, will anyone listen?

Note: this is a work of fiction written in the form of a memoir. It deals with child neglect and physical abuse, which are shown through emotion and aftermath rather than graphic detail, and it contains no sexual content.