Mother's helping Mother's

He was just a child, terrified, alone and lost in the jungle of Uganda. Then a troop of monkeys began to offer him food.The correct term for 'feral children' - those brought up by a beast, rather than a human - is, apparently, 'isolates'. It's the first vaguely fascinating thing you learn when you start digging into the more obscure libraries, trying to work out how much literature there is on the subject, and how much is credible. The second thing you learn is that all the studies are terribly worthy and wary: there's so much potential doubt floating around that every chronicler seems to have sacrificed any threat of narrative drive or excitement for the kind of leaden, trustworthy prose more normally associated with reports on the tensile strength of concrete rather than reports on My God, babies brought up by animals!The third thing you learn has to do with geographical difference. Down the centuries, the East appears to have had all the exciting isolates. The Wolf-Child of Sekandra! The Bear-Girl of Fraumark! Closer to home, it becomes at the same time duller and more surreal. The Sheep-child of Ireland. The (I am not making this up) Duck-boy of Holland. Or, perhaps, the saddest of all, Confined Child of Pennsylvania (brought up, presumably, not by humans but by Americans). And the fourth, most vital, thing you learn is that this whole subject does deserve to be taken extremely seriously. As soon as I meet John Ssebunya, who fled into the Ugandan jungle as an infant after watching his father slaughter his mother and was then cared for, nourished and taught by a bunch of vervet monkeys, it's obvious that trauma has been inflicted, and that, no matter how easily the matter might lend itself to cheap jokes, John has an important story to tell - of the love the animals showed for him, and of his 10-year re-assimilation back into human society. A story, it turns out, which he will tell slowly, but tell well. Just as soon as I man