Stolen childhoods of the Post Office scandal: ‘I lost all my mates'

Times

12-07-2025

Adi Misra will never forget the day his mother was sent to prison. It was November 11, 2010. It was also his tenth birthday when Seema Misra, eight weeks pregnant, was sentenced to 15 months in prison at Guildford crown court for stealing £74,000 from her Post Office branch.
'I came back from school and no one was there,' recalls Adi Misra, now 24. 'After that, things just went sideways.'
Misra also remembers his father coming home covered in bruises, having been beaten and racially abused on the street after news got out of his wife's conviction. Their family shop in West Byfleet, Surrey, was graffitied. Many of his close friends — spurred on, he thinks, by their parents — broke contact with him.
The plight of the hundreds of subpostmasters and subpostmistresses caught in the Post Office scandal remains shocking. They developed depression, were bankrupted and evicted. At least 13 were driven to suicide.
Less well known, however, is the enormous toll that it took on their children.
Last week Sir Wyn Williams published the first volume of the Post Office inquiry's final report, in which he acknowledged the 'very significant suffering' of family members after the failure of the Horizon IT system led to false accusations of theft.
The report came with 19 recommendations, one of which was that a compensation scheme be established for the children hurt by the scandal. It will be administered by the charity Lost Chances, set up in March for the children of wronged subpostmasters.
The charity relies on a GoFundMe page for funding. Katie Burrows, who runs it, and whose mother was a subpostmistress convicted — and exonerated — of theft in Derby, says that although the group had met representatives of the Post Office, in November, and Fujitsu, which developed and maintained Horizon, in March last year, neither company had donated a penny. 'We shared deeply painful stories and all we wanted was a simple donation, which all big companies can do these days,' she says. 'We have received nothing.'
Nigel Railton, the Post Office chairman, has previously made a 'clear and unequivocal apology' to everyone affected by the scandal.
A Fujitsu spokesman said: 'We have apologised for, and deeply regret, our role in sub-postmasters' suffering. We hope for a swift resolution that ensures a just outcome for the victims.
Although many children of subpostmasters are relieved to have had their pain recognised, they are also still dealing with the damage the Post Office inflicted on their vital early years. 'You can't turn back time,' says Adi Misra. 'The damage has been done.'
Although Adi's parents didn't tell him the full story until he was 18, the shadow of the scandal blighted his childhood. 'I lost all my mates,' he recalls. 'I moved cricket clubs every season because it got a bit weird. I moved school in the end. Every time it was because people found out I'm the son of Seema Misra.'
Millie Castleton, the daughter of Lee Castleton, a prominent campaigner for the subpostmasters, also experienced bullying at school. In 2007 the Post Office ordered her father to pay back £23,000 and took him to court in the only civil claim the Post Office brought against a subpostmaster. When he lost he was ordered to pay the Post Office's £321,000 legal fees.
Millie Castleton remembers being eight years old, sitting on the staircase and listening to her parents frantically trying to understand what had gone wrong with the computer system. 'It was so confusing,' says Millie, now 29 and a history supply teacher, with a warm Yorkshire accent. 'As a child I had that feeling that my dad's not done anything wrong.'
Kids on the school bus would shout at her: 'Didn't your dad steal a load of money?' 'It paints a target on your back,' she says. She was spat at, called names. 'Kids are kids, they repeat what their parents say … it's just a bit difficult to think about, really.' She never told her parents about what she was going through. 'I didn't want them to worry at all.'
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At weekends, she would tell her parents she was meeting friends and take the bus into Scarborough. Instead, she would walk around all day on her own. 'I'd say I was meeting whatever girls I could name at the time,' she says. 'I'd walk around, then I'd come home and say I had a wonderful time.'
Millie says the experiences she had made it difficult for her to trust people in later life. 'There's that horror that someone's not going to believe me.'
To this day, Millie has anxieties about money. She lives at home with her parents and their cocker spaniels, Sully and Miss Martha. As a teenager, she saved money from her café job in a box under her bed, frightened to spend it. 'I was just so afraid that I might need it one day,' she says.
She would skip meals in the school canteen to save £1.50. This spiralled into an eating disorder, when she was studying history at York St John University, when 'the money anxiety kicked into overdrive'. She dropped to little more than five stone and was hospitalised. She graduated, then spent eight months at a clinic for eating disorders.
Castleton says it was a way of asserting control. 'It was a case of this is the one thing that I can control,' she says. 'I found the worst coping mechanism and I just clung to it.'
Money anxiety manifested itself in another way for Adi Misra. He describes the family as 'well off' when he was younger, with properties and trips to the cinema. Suddenly, birthday parties stopped — there were no friends to invite, anyway. He started working young and always wanted a job at a bank because it paid the highest salary, so he could help his parents out.
He now has his own business as well as a full-time job at Deutsche Bank. 'I don't keep any of my salary,' he says. 'All of my money goes to my parents — every single penny,' he says. 'Whenever I need money, I'll ask them.' Seema Misra has received an interim payment, but still doesn't have her final settlement. Adi lives at home with her and his father, Davinder, in Bisley, Surrey.
Seema Misra was not alone in the dock. She was eight weeks pregnant with her youngest son, Jairaj. She served four months in Bronzefield prison before being released and gave birth with an electronic tag on her ankle. Jairaj has lived every moment of his life under the shadow of the Post Office scandal.
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Last week the 14-year-old appeared in a crisp white polo shirt on a Zoom call. Hovering protectively in the background, Seema and her husband sipped cups of tea before the school run.
Jairaj says that it gives him some comfort that his mother had been pregnant with him at the hardest point of her life. 'I'm really glad I was with her. If I wasn't, something bad could have happened,' he falters. 'She could have killed herself.'
In 2019, when Jairaj was nine, the High Court ruled the Horizon scheme was to blame for the accounting failures that led to Seema's imprisonment. His memories since then have been a lot happier. His mother has become an admired campaigner and her case featured in the hit ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. When she received an OBE, his teachers came up to him to pass on their support. 'She's a really strong woman,' beams Jairaj, who plays guitar in his school's Big Band. 'I'm really proud of her.'
In many ways, the Misras were lucky: their family held together. Other families have been irrevocably broken by the Post Office scandal. Tim Dennis recalls how his parents started arguing after they bought their Post Office in 1998 in Minehead, Somerset, when he was 16 and his sister, 18.
His father, Anthony, was a subpostmaster, while his mother, a solicitor, ran the shop. After Horizon was installed and began causing confusion, Dennis, now 43, says his parents would stay awake until the early hours, arguing more and more intensely as they tried to grasp the inexplicable accounting anomalies.
He recalls Christmas Day in 2000, when his mother and sister spent the whole day sifting through the accounts. 'The continuing losses affected both of my parents' confidence, and their relationship became more strained,' he says. They spent tens of thousands of pounds, all their savings, making good the losses. 'They'd even borrowed money from my grandparents.'
In June 2001, his mother ended the marriage of 24 years. 'I came home one night and Mum had just gone,' says Dennis. Auditors came to the branch in May 2002, by which stage there was no more money left. His father was declared bankrupt. 'My relationship had got so strained with my dad by this point. I blamed him for the breakup,' Dennis says.
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Alone and cut off from his family, on Christmas Eve in 2005, Anthony tried to take his own life. He was told by the paramedics that if they had arrived two minutes later, he would have died.
Dennis had almost no contact with his father for 20 years but in the past five years, as more and more news of the Horizon scandal surfaced, father and son have forged a new relationship. They have breakfast together in Plymouth every Monday.
His parents are still estranged, though, and Dennis places the blame squarely at the foot of the Post Office.
If it weren't for the Horizon malfunctions, he says, 'I'm certain my parents would still be together. We'd still have Christmases together, birthdays. If it wasn't for the Post Office, we would still be a family.'