Afterlives
BBC Radio 4

Petra Velzeboer and Dawn Watson, greeting each other for the first time on the former’s doorstep as Coldplay’s Chris Martin warbled “I will try to fix you” in the background, seemed oddly au fait with their respective upbringings. Both admitted that it was as if they had already met.

Amid talk of similar childhoods, whether in Europe (Velzeboer) or Brazil (Watson), and casual remarks about spending one’s childhood “out doing good”, it took a moment or two for the enormity of this shared heritage to strike home. Only when the words “trauma” and “cult” were dropped into the conversation did the listener grasp what was going on.