Mummy Where Are You? (Revised Edition, new) Read Free

woman handed the tickets back, barely glancing into the car, eyes no doubt bleary from the early morning start or just bored with the dull monotony of the relentless tedium of checking tickets.
                  The fear did not leave us as we lined up behind the other vehicles waiting to board – another half hour still to go of anxious waiting before we even mounted the vessel that would take us the forty miles to our freedom and on to a new promised land where at last there may be some hope to flourish – if indeed our souls could ever recover from the daily torture, threats and mental cruelty that the system had put us through for the last two years.  The work they had begun in my teens and had been determined to finish in my forties, but this time with greater and more acute cruelty and pain than ever before as they tortured the ones I loved most before me, my innocent beautiful child and my loyal and kind father just as, after years of struggle we had at last begun to know each other.
                  I fingered the gift from my closest friend of two entwined hearts to represent our two small families – for she too was alone with her child and she had amazed me with her passion, her loyalty and her courage as she had quietly and without hesitation offered to help us prepare in the instant we had made the terrifying decision to leave our home, our loved ones and all that had once represented our security – and been replaced by social security – a high security prison that was surrounded by water.
                  “You cannot fight them.  They operate behind a cloth of gold.”  The lawyer had said – the one lawyer on the island that was outside the system and only because he did not work with the local Courts but accepted work from behind the scenes of criminal law.  “I cannot help you because this is not crime.”  But it was crime, it was crime of the worst order, it was crime against humanity, Man’s inhumanity to man – to woman, to child.  And now here I was crossing the ocean with my child, turning myself into a vigilante as I breached every order, whilst innocent of anything other than loving and raising my precious son and wanting to keep him safe.
                  “You can only punch at the cloth, but you will not make a dent.  They are all protected and will only protect each other.”  He told me as I curled up inside knowing he was right.  He had been my last hope of finding a “legal” way out of the intractability of a noose that grew ever tighter around my throat as my voice diminished further and further into a whisper.  I had long since lost any colour in my pale outline but had carried on speaking our truth, turning this way and that, hopelessly trying to hold back the tide that rose higher each day – a cruel sea on which we were tossed endlessly, waves that threw us hard against the grey stone walls and smashed and crushed us until we were so weakened we could barely breathe any more. 
                  My son’s cries to make it stop resounded without end – make them stop – make the Courts, Social Services, the so called officers, experts and Judge – all colluding in destroying an innocent child who had dared to break his silence to tell me his father had been abusing him and that he no longer wanted to see him.   For that he was punished, accused of lying, bullied and denigrated by the system, by one so called expert after another, all who refused to listen to him.  All who said that I and even my father had put words of filth in his mouth to alienate him from a man that had shown no interest in him from conception until he was six months old and then only as a pawn to keep his right to control and bully and hurt - A one or two-day-a-month visitor, a virtual stranger who had failed to win the love or respect of my little boy and had scared him on each visit with threats of punching him if he ever told the