I pushed my feelings deeper and deeper inside me - I dared not allow them pubic exposure, especially in a place like this and I worked harder and harder at freezing my pain on the inside whilst my face had long since frozen into the expression of a haunted, hunted wild animal, who could never escape the trap.
It was only acts of kindness, found in strange places that kept that flicker of a flame of life from being extinguished altogether. It was the act of Amanda coming quietly to my cell that morning, and planting a kiss on the top of my bowed head - handing me the rolled up drawing of an angel, which I stuck on my notice board with toothpaste, wondering how long I could keep that tiny flame of hope alive when it seemed further out of reach with each passing day.
This would be the only gift I would receive that day, but the only one I wanted was my son home with me and this nightmare to end.
I waited frantically for a visit from my legal team, who seemed to have abandoned to me my fate, hoping that they could give me cause to be optimistic and wondering how we managed to accumulate so many lawyers.
Looking back we should have insisted that Brian managed without the extra help he had claimed was so imperative, but we had no experience of the way the system was designed. We just kept pouring money into the legal machine whose mouth gaped wider and wider and demanded more hungrily, as the wheels of injustice had turned. So many in the situation were forced to give up. I suppose we lasted longer than most simply because my father had the money to do it. I might as well have stuck to self-litigating for all we had achieved, but for the criminal case at least, we had needed a strong QC and I had to maintain faith in Phillip as my only means of release.
After supper I sat on Amanda’s bed and talked to her again about her own situation. I couldn’t understand her acceptance of what was so clearly wrong. She knew her daughter would be taken into foster care any day. When I asked her what she wanted for herself, she said she didn’t care and wouldn’t mind staying in jail for the rest of her life. She was clearly a bright, talented woman with much to offer and I felt angry for her that she'd been beaten down to this.
It was not in me to give up completely, even when I hit my darkest moments. I clung on with every bit of strength I could muster, to my belief, that truth would overshadow the lies and win the day ultimately. I refused to accept that there was nothing I could do to change the inevitable. For me, anything else was unthinkable and like a mouse on a wheel, I carried on, pouring over files, reports and papers sent in by the lawyers, in readiness for the final hearing in the Family Court - even this engendered jealousy.
The fact that I was allowed files in my cell was another source of annoyance to the other girls who saw it as favouritism. Having the files was a double edged sword, because without my own comprehensive cupboard full of papers and my computer, I had little to refer to in trying to challenge the latest pack of lies presented as “reports” by Miss Whiplash and the Guardian. I would read the terrible fabrications and make notes for the lawyers without being able to talk to them or discuss with them how best to deal with things. I sometimes felt that it would be easier not to have the files and to be left in peace - but peace was something that was far out of reach, files or no files.
I tried to instil in Amanda some determination not to give up and yet I knew the cruel reality - the Department were omnipotent. You could kick as hard as you liked at the cloth of gold, but they were all protected and you are on the other side.
Amanda wasn’t a criminal, just someone in pain who'd cried for help and this was the help she’d received – to be locked up and have her daughter stolen from her. Nothing had altered on the Island in thirty years it seemed. They had been treating women this way since I was a girl and long before, my own experiences in my teens had forced me to grow up fast. People with problems were given more by the system. Animals were treated better. I failed to see how locking her up going to solve Amanda's problems - it seemed insane. Whilst correctional institutions are clearly necessary for those who've committed serious crimes, it seemed crazy treatment for someone who has just lost hope or self-belief - jail was hardly the place to get back on one’s feet. Control of the masses was the only thing on offer - lock up and shut up - not to mention what doing this was costing the tax payer.
Voiceless, powerless and childless, as I had been the lost child back in my teens - now my child was lost to me. I told myself it wouldn't be forever. I would never give up. I would go on fighting for him for as long as it took and with everything in me. I took my strength from the love I felt for M and each time I found myself sliding closer to the edge, I used love to pull me back.
My lawyers came to see me the week following my committal. I was excited to see them, praying they would bring news of seeing M and turning the case around. Part of me was also dreading it, in case they too had lost hope, but I was eager to know how they were getting on with preparing my appeal. I longed for the simple comforts of home, the companionship of my little dog, a soak in my own bath and a decent hot meal with proper cutlery. But none of these things came anywhere near to my longing for M.
I was taken to a holding area, told to sit on a bench and then locked in. It was a freezing cold day and was snowing outside. The lawyers had been held up due to the weather conditions. I feared they may not make it at all. After what felt like an eternity, the guard took me to a small cubicle and I was told they'd arrived.
Where I'd been relaxed and comfortable in their presence in the past, I now felt shy and self-conscious. They'd never seen me without make-up and I felt naked and exposed without it. It had been a useful mask behind which to hide my pain and now they would see me in my raw, pale state. I had dark circles under my eyes so black that my eyes looked sunken. In the brief moments when I was faced with my reflection in the small mirror above my basin, I saw a ghost looking back – a deer in headlights – a face I no longer recognised as my own.
My skin was dry and patchy from the ice-cold air and no available moisturizer. The strip lighting on the wings sapped all vitamin D from the body and highlighted flaws. Stripped bare of all the accessories one takes for granted in the daily routine of “normal” life, it's incredible how exposed and vulnerable one feels.
I'd always had a slightly lazy eye, made worse by sleep deprivation, the harsh lighting and sleeping with the television on every night. I was afraid to be “alone” in my cell or with the metaphorical embodiments of my fears – the monsters that haunted my heart, soul and mind – the fears and horrors of our new reality. One thing was certain, what I was seeing now, was a skewed view, a world that has swung from reason, normality and simplicity, to this crazy distortion of what life should be. If our bodies reflect the pain we feel inside, then certainly my left eye shifting off centre was an apt metaphor – I was seeing a world that was one-sided and completely wrong.
Whereas in the past I had always had lots to say, suggestions to make and a strong need to fight, I now felt defeated, overwhelmed and paralysed by my grief. I no longer felt the closeness I'd previously shared with my legal team and saw them as part of the outside world that I had ceased to belong to. They couldn’t feel my pain or desperation and they were paid to represent me, not support me.
As my lawyer in the States had said many times, neither M, nor I, had ever had a voice and my voice was buried so deep within me now, that I couldn’t externalize it any more. I knew that would be the same for M too, who I had watched slipping away before me. He had gone further and further inside himself, since they'd taken him. I'd tried so hard to help him to stay outside of that shell, but in here I could do nothing. At least when I'd been able to see him, despite all the restrictions of the contact centre, I'd been able to encourage him back out into the light – now I could only pray that he would do that for himself.
I was the embodiment of Edvard Munch’s “Scream, "painting – the silent, voiceless, piercingly loud, but intangible and inaudible - beyond the hearing of anyone other than those who'd been impaled like a thorn bird
on the pinnacle of Motherhood; a knife rent through -an agony and horror that no-one but another mother in the same situation could feel. No release – no end – not even the release of death – because to die would leave M alone and I could never abandon him. There was now only a tiny window to our purgatory which I must try hard to keep open before it was obscured forever.
After what seemed an interminable wait, Phillip and Brian came into the cubicle. They feigned positivity. Brian’s huge form seemed even more awkward in the tiny room and I felt small and embarrassed in my altered state, with my bright orange plastic waistcoat – marking me out as a prisoner. I stood up and accepted an awkward hug from Phillip and then we all sat down.
“When can I see M?” I said frantically. But they had no more news than I did. I wanted to shake them, beg them – why was this proving so difficult? Brian made noises of red-tape, bureaucracy, the difficulties of co-ordinating the jail, with the Department – but I didn't hear any of it. All I heard was the heavy thud as my heart hit the floor. The news I was living for, still eluded me and nothing else mattered.
“You mustn’t see this as the end.” Brian continued, trying to sound upbeat and reassuring – but he didn’t sound convincing. He knew, as I did, that my chances now of regaining custody of M were one in a million.
I'd learned the hard sad fact that the Family Courts, had nothing to do with justice. It was a forum where those who held the best cards won. M’s father had held the Ace Card from the beginning. Having seen the psychologist privately, he had convinced her that I was nothing more than a vindictive ex-partner carrying bitterness for him leaving me, when nothing could have been further from the truth. The reality was that I'd felt relief when he'd left me, my only anguish was for M who I believed needed a father and any pain I felt was for his loss, not my own. But R had sounded plausible to those who'd listened and like a domino wall, each one falling into the next, the experts kept on passing the baton of untruth forwards. Unless someone could discredit the first one, the rest would just go on building the same wall and no-one seemed to consider the damage to an innocent child – my child.
If I'd felt that R had even an ounce of love for M, and could be sure he wouldn't harm him, I might even have conceded to residency for R, to free M from the restrictions of foster care and its oppressive regime, but I lived with the fear that he'd abuse him again and for the time being, at least he was safe, even if conditions were less than ideal.
I felt surges of anger that even our own “expert” had taken some of the lies on board and reiterated them in her report. But put the microscope on any parent and you can take anything and twist it into something that makes you a “less than perfect” parent. I'd even been criticised for choosing to support M in sporting activities, rather than encourage him into a world of watching more television, playing computer games and apathy. This was described as him over-doing sport. The foster carers seemed to have made those observations to the expert, no doubt to cover their own shortcomings. I'd always been slim and keen on exercise; but from the pictures I'd seen on the internet, I knew they were both short and overweight, had they not been, they may have seen M's former life as preferable to a life spent on the settee - and yet strangely, even our own expert had supported their view. It was crazy, but that was how little it took to damn you - despite this, she had been firmly against M going to his father.
A year later, the press would go to town on the subject of Family Court "experts," but for now, these people were revered and made decisions about the lives of children every day – decisions that took children from loving homes and placed them in foster care – an industry that made millions out of wrecking families and where each person in the chain, Guardian Ad Litem, Social Worker, Psychologist and all kinds of expert witnesses, skimmed the cream from the top of the destruction of a family unit.
Of course there are incidents where children are at serious risk of harm and need to be removed for their own safety, but since Baby P, the state began snatching children with alacrity from good homes on the flimsiest of grounds. In a huge proportion of cases children were taken on the grounds of emotional abuse – a term that is so wide and non-specific, that it could amount to as little as a parent raising its voice to a child when it is naughty and a neighbour rushing to the authorities. A simple thing such as a child having grubby knees, could be turned into a case of serious neglect. What little boy, playing outside in the playground at school, doesn’t come home with a bit of mud on them? But they could take anything and twist it into something sinister. Just as I'd been criticised heavily because one term M’s clothes hadn't been ironed very well – even though the school were aware that I had broken my right wrist and it was in plaster at the time.
Whatever M's father did, right or wrong was described in glowing terms. A simple game of football, observed by the foster carers made him suddenly a wonderful dad. The fact that M and I had shared many such a game, almost daily after school counted for nothing at all. That was the way the system worked. Once those within the chain had made their choice, the dice were heavily loaded in the favour of the chosen one.
I so much wanted to believe that this Kafkaesque nightmare could still be turned around and I would wake up to a world that made sense again, but as Brian and Phillip talked about strategy, their words seemed hollow and empty. There was only one thing in my mind that turn this around and that was to challenge the Judge’s Judgment that had found for "no abuse." They needed to appeal the Fact Find out of time. I'd been saying this all along from my first lawyer onwards – but still no-one listened. They said it was too late – they said we couldn’t go against the Judge’s findings – even when our expert, the only properly qualified psychologist on the case had found otherwise – for despite her report being less than favourable to me, having reiterated some of the nonsense from the school – where R was the fee payer – M had told her – “I hope Daddy won’t do it again".
“Trust us. Our way is best.” Brian said.
But I neither trusted them, nor believed they were right and they were my only key to getting out of jail where at least there was something I could do to help M.
“Appeal the Fact Find.” I reiterated every time they came to see me. So they stopped coming and sent an underling instead. They only wanted to hear what would please the Judge - it was a case of appease Court first and client last – that way their jobs remained secure.
I was led back to my cell – cold, empty and desolate.
Chapter 15
I thought things couldn’t get any harder in those first few days; but worse was to come. The Deputy Governor called me to his room. The probation officer was with him. They said that Social Services weren't going to bring M to see me. I'd already gone without contact for over a week and was grieving every second more and more. I needed to see him to reassure myself that he was all right and so he could see that Mummy was still around and would go on being so. I knew my incarceration, to M, still a small child, must have seemed very frightening. He was likely too to have endured some hard questions at school and possibly even jeering. Some of the parents were not sympathetic to me and might talk in front of their children. He needed even more support than before to cope with this, but he'd only his abuser, the cold faces of Foster Carers and social workers.
I told the Deputy Governor that M and I had a right to see each other under the Human Rights Act. He looked at me with disdain as he said chillingly: - “You’re in jail, you have no human rights.”
This comment reverberated in my mind for years to come – it said it all – the complete lack of adherence to the law of this police state – a child having no human right to see his mummy – the person who'd raised him his whole life so far. How could it be justice? It was inhumane, but they made no apology for it. In fact, there was a glint of cold steeled cruelty in the Deputy Governor’s eye as he delivered his missile – a little power, certainly went a long way.
I left the room stunned and rang my Dad for my cursory
ten minute call. He was with Phillip and Brian. He put Phillip on the phone.
“That’s completely wrong, of course you have human rights and so does your son,” but somehow his words meant nothing as the bottom line was that I had no control inside the prison that held me. Whatever Phillip said, those holding the keys - held the only key to my seeing M.
We had an artillery of truth, nobility, bravery, integrity, honesty and love, but we weren’t fighting in an arena that was right or human and none of us were equipped to know how to defeat such evil – not even the big gun QC that we'd brought in and the supposedly highly experienced team of lawyers. Something deeper and more sinister that lay behind all this - radix malorum est cupiditas – but was it money or something more primitive and deplorable that lay at the root of this? Would we ever know?
All I had left to hold onto was the love I had for my son. I kept telling myself that love was a higher and stronger power than this evil anti-world we'd entered. No matter how much I willed that love would, as the cliché, conquer all, it was conquering nothing at present and the fierce tigress of motherhood raged inside me, trapped in my cage whilst watching my cub taken by hunters.
It seemed obvious that Miss Whiplash, the Social Worker, was now getting her revenge for my previous barrister lambasting her in Court. Not one thing that Social Services had done, had been in M’s best interests, but certainly it had been in someone’s and I longed to know whose. Why had everyone backed a paedophile? What dark secret was this Island hiding that allowed such cruelty? As each day passed, M’s fate to be placed with this man, drew closer.
The best we could now hope for was that he be kept in Foster Care until I was released. I knew that M had begun to forget and be confused about the danger. It was more than three years now from when he'd first told me what had happened to him. It was written in one report that he “didn’t know what was real and what was a dream.” The result no doubt, of much brainwashing. Deep down, I suspected that M still knew what happened, even though they had distorted the facts in his mind. I was sure that one day it would surface from his unconscious - whatever lay in his future.
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