Introduction by author
"A single person is missing for you and your whole world is empty."
Joan Didion
I first met Charlotte six years ago. I am a journalist and I was looking for a story - instead I found a mother, destroyed by a very cruel system, through no fault of her own and having lost her precious son by reporting the most evil of crimes.
The first part of my journey through Charlotte's nightmare was told in the prequel to this novel - Mummy Where Are You? But so many have asked to know what has happened to Charlotte since she lost residency of her precious nine-year old son M, that I have at last persuaded her to allow me to tell you how her nightmare has continued through a series of horrific and unjust Court processes to her life as it stands today. Why did Charlotte lose custody? What did she do to deserve this? Surely she must have harmed her son? I hear you respond. I will tell you - she reported the sexual abuse of her son by his father and sought help.
Sadly Charlotte is one of many women in the UK today who are in this same position, for despite the propaganda that we see daily in the media, reassuring us that those who report sexual abuse of their children will be supported and helped to get justice, a different outcome has been the case for so many innocent mothers and children who have been turned on by the very system to whom they turned for help.
Mummy's Still Here is based on a true story, but all names and places have been altered to protect those involved and to comply with the legalities of the injunctions placed on women who try to speak out against this intolerably cruel regime.
Charlotte has been placed on a worldwide, lifelong injunction and cannot speak as herself without facing severe penalty - even jail. I am more fortunate in being able to tell you what she cannot. I have been her friend and confidante since we first met some years ago now and like Charlotte, I believe that change cannot happen unless we continue to voice the truth against evil.
"It is an artist's duty to reflect the times in which we live."
Nina Simone
From now on the voice you will hear will be Charlotte's as she told it to me through lengthy discussions, oceans of tears and diaries she has kept for M when one day he is old enough to know how much Mummy fought to try and save him, her deep and unfailing love for her child and most importantly to remind him, that through it all - Mummy's Still Here - and always will be.
Jeanne D'Olivier
Dedicated to an
Island that saved my life,
when another took it away.
Introduction
My name is Charlotte. I am nobody special. I lived an ordinary life as a writer and teacher, living in a small seaside cottage on a beautiful Scottish Island with my most precious son who I raised as a single mother since birth.
Our life was uneventful, not extraordinary in any way. We played on the beach outside our small white-washed cottage, paddled in the waves - dug for crabs in the sand and cycled on our bikes to the nearby lighthouse for picnics. To many our life would appear one of simplicity and normality - until one day it became extraordinary in the most horrific of ways.
Island living can be unexciting and somewhat sheltered from the outside world, but to us it was everything and to me, having my son was the most amazing thing I had ever experienced and all I had ever wanted.
Then one day everything changed and our simple world was shattered into a thousand pieces and turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare in a single moment - a moment when my son told me what his father had been doing to him since he was three.
Now seven years on I have come to another Island to try and find a fragment of the peace I lost on that terrible day. To try and find the person I was before this happened and to try and find a reason to live without the only person who matters to me - my beautiful son M.
I will remain ever grateful to Italy and the island of Ischia that has brought me back from the edge and reminded me that there is still beauty in the world and things to enjoy. I feel strangely at home here amongst the olive trees and over-emotional Italians who voice their anger, love, passion and delight in their hugely expressive language. I vow to learn to speak in their poetic tongue as my own fails me so badly. Am I just following in the footsteps of writers past or have I lived a life here before? Either way it feeds my soul when it so badly needs the soothing touch of la dolce vita.
I, like so many women in the United Kingdom right now am silenced and cannot reveal my identity without risking severe penalty, even jail.
Instead I will tell you the story of Charlotte, a fictional woman who represents us all that have had our lives shattered by the terrible hand of evil and who have experienced the same problems faced by so many women throughout Britain, Canada, United States and other “civilised” countries around the globe.
One of the reasons I love Ischia is that the Italians understand that nothing can sever what is part of nature. That cutting the cord between mother and child is sacrilege and born out of evil and cruelty. So many abuse their positions of power in this world.
Judges play God in the Family Court but nothing could be more cruel than to separate mother and child. That this is happening to innocent women throughout Britain is symptomatic of disease in the family court judicial system. It is a systemic problem of massive proportions that sees more and more mothers losing custody of their children to physically and sexually abusive fathers and leaves mothers in despair and living in fear of speaking out. Most are injuncted by the Court - but if we continue to live in fear of speaking our pain and suffering, if we allow ourselves to be oppressed, then change cannot occur. The veil of secrecy that protects the abuse of justice from scrutiny must be lifted for with every evil regime that has ever existed, good has eventually triumphed by the voices of the masses against the evil of the few.
For as I speak as Charlotte, I speak for each woman who has suffered the loss of their child through the insidious and pervasive system that takes all that is good and smashes it into a thousand splinters, leaving nothing behind but a void that can never be filled.
Charlotte is everywoman. She is fictional but real. She is the prototype to women taking back their lives. She is in every mother in this land. She is you and she is me. She is us all. Here is her ongoing story and mine.
Mummy's Still Here...
Jeanne D'Olivier
Chapter 1
The beginning of the end
Christmas 2010
I walked from the court room with tears still pouring down my cheeks. I had been given my freedom from jail, but not from life. My beloved M had already left the Island and was headed to a life of who-knew-what? I did not know if I would ever see my son again, what horrors lay ahead for him, now unprotected and without all those he loved and who had fought to keep him safe. The unimaginable had happened. He had been given to his father, the man, he had alleged, was a child abuser.
My knees had buckled under me as I climbed down from the dock and a friend had had to hold me up to escort me out of the room. For me there was no freedom now, not ever. My raison d'être for seven and a half years, had been my son - my precious child who had been taken by force in the United States by three armed policemen - his crime, telling the police what his father had done to him - for which he was snatched from his mother's arms and carried out by his little arms to be taken to strangers in a foreign land.
I had been left crippled and barely breathing, powerless to do anything whilst this state enforced abduction of my son took place. I had been left with no blood in my body, numb with grief and paralysed by fear for what he must be enduring and feeling.
Now, just over a year later, having spent five and a half weeks in jail and only escaping my nine months sentence by dint of an expensive Human Rights Lawyer
, I once again was powerless whilst my son was removed from his home, his family, everything familiar, to live with a man who had not even wanted him to be born. A man who now had full custody, along with a woman who my son barely knew, my ex partner's wife of only a few weeks - an Ace card he had played to strengthen his chances of gaining full residency.
How was M bearing up? I had no idea. How did I go on breathing without him - my whole world gone? I turned on my legal team with passionate fury, "why didn't you fight?" "Why didn't you appeal the Fact Finding judgment?" That terrible Judgment that called my son a liar and me a manipulator. Truth and logic turned on its head - the only lie was the one that the Court itself had perpetrated - the myth that my son had made up child abuse at five.
There had been two medical experts and evidence that had been ignored and ridiculed to protect the lie - the abuse - the satanic misuse of innocence. There could be no worse outcome for any of us - for M - for my steadfast elderly father - for me - all crushed by a gross distortion of truth - a decision - an evil force that grows in number and takes prisoners of children and mothers who report abuse.
There was no relief in freedom from jail - jail was where I still lived - shackled by the chains of not being free to protect my son from harm. Physically I was no longer in a cell, but mentally, I would never be free until I held my beloved son in my arms and he was safely back in my care. This day was now a distant dream - a flicker - a flame so small that I dare not breathe unless I extinguished it.
"It's not that bad." Brian tried to reassure me. "Look you can still see him for an hour a week in the UK. You can fly over from the Island and after four weeks, you can move there and see him for six hours every weekend. It's a good result really."
"My son is with a paedophile." I screamed. "You say that is a good result."
"I realise you are upset now. But in time you will see him more and probably end up with shared residency. It really is a very good outcome under the circumstances." Brian spoke in the cold, deliberate, emotionless way of most Family Court solicitors who have just lost - dressing it up to be something it was not. He knew as well as I did, that it was only a matter of time before I would be cut out of M's life for the rest of his childhood.
"His father will play the game for a few weeks Brian. Then he'll make something up and be believed. Another lie to follow the last - but this time it will end with me losing all contact with my son - forever."
I ran from the Court - almost knocking Philip over, the QC who had just won my Appeal against the abduction sentence - the only man on the case who had any integrity but even he looked sheepish.
"I'm so sorry." He said quietly.
"You should have appealed the Fact Find." I repeated the instruction I had been giving him and lawyers before him, for the past three years. Philip bowed his head and quietly said, "I know."
My friend Liz ran after me and took me to a nearby pub. She bought us both a stiff brandy and coke. I was freezing in my thin grey suit. It was December - two days before Christmas. I could not stop shaking, but it was more from the shock than the cold. I could not feel my body. My heart felt as if it might stop beating at any moment.
I gulped the drink, still crying but not even feeling my tears - I took a cigarette from Liz and smoked it without tasting it. I could not move. I was a statue - frozen in despair. I had been turned to stone by a crushing injustice that took my precious son and gave him up to the jaws of hell without remorse, compassion or even logic. Nothing about this made sense - nature turned on its head.
"Come on Charlotte. We need to find your Dad. He'll be worried about you." I knew she was speaking but I could not hear her words. She pulled on the sleeve of my jacket. "Charlie. We have to go."
"No...I can't...I can't walk..." She gently brought me to my feet and led me back to where my father waited distraught outside the court building. Neither of us could say anything as I climbed into the passenger seat of the car. We were both too shocked, too angry, too bewildered. We headed back to the home I had shared with my son for most of his childhood - our seaside cottage, our haven, our sanctuary.
"I'll take you for something to eat and you can stay at mine tonight." Dad said, not knowing what else to do. I shook my head.
"No thank you. I just want to be alone." I spoke in a whisper. My voice was coming from someone else, my own was gone. It had been stolen along with my son and my heart.
"Please. You have to eat." Dad urged, barely able to hold his own tears back.
"I'll be alright." I said. But I would never be alright again.
Walking into the living room, I was greeted by my puppy Coco. Liz who had looked after him whilst I was in jail, had managed to put him in the house for me and I picked him up and held him close to me. I sat on the settee unmoving, clutching the little bundle of warmth in my arms, feeling his little heart beating as he licked the salt of my tears from my cheeks.
Day turned to darkness and the only light came from the flickering fairy lights on the tree I had put up for M, flashing on and off in a sequence of white and blue florescent dots. It was four a.m. when at last I moved. I crossed the room and dragged the plug from the wall - we were now in total darkness - forever.
I fed the dog and then fell onto the bed exhausted but unable to sleep. The dog slithered under the duvet to find a warm spot behind my knees. My body felt like ice but for the one patch of fur huddled next to me. I turned on the television to drown out the silence and the constant thoughts and memories running endlessly through my mind. I don't know what was on. I wasn't watching, merely staring - a deer in headlights - blinkered by the bright light but transfixed. Nowhere to run to and no escape from the certain death that was before me - the death of everything that was true and right and born out of love and purity - a living bereavement that has no end.
The phone rang piercing the stillness of Christmas Eve morning. It was ten a.m. I had only left the bed to let the dog out and feed him. He had looked hopefully at me for a walk, but I could barely make it up and down the stairs. "I'm sorry Coco. Later." I picked up the phone and heard Philip's voice on the end. He was saying something about organizing the first contact. He said that Brian would be ringing me and that the one Clinical Psychologist who had so bravely stood up to the Judge and told him his Judgment was wrong, had also said she wanted to speak to me. I heard myself agree politely from a voice that came from far away. I was going through the motions of how a phone call with one's lawyer should be. I was a silhouette against the white wall of nothingness that stretched before me.
Philip reiterated his condolences for the loss and said he had to go as he and his girlfriend were getting ready for Christmas. He wished me Happy Christmas but I think he immediately regretted it, because he quickly said goodbye.
I walked over to the tree and began tearing it to pieces, bit by bit, tugging baubles and tinsel from the branches and scattering them on the floor, just as the pieces of my life were now strewn before me - a mother's life- M's life - a broken jigsaw with pieces that would never fit together and never form that picture again.
I went upstairs and pulled on some track suit bottoms and a sweater and with sudden anger and determination, I spent three hours packing into boxes, the Christmas we would not have.
Spent with the effort and lack of sleep, I eventually put the last box away and closed the hatch to the loft where M's presents had been hidden ready to surprise him on Christmas day. I had no way of even getting these to him now. For the first time I would not be able to give my son a gift on Christmas Day. The only gift I could give M now, was to go on living - this would require more effort than anything I could possibly have bought him - but even in the bleakness and hopelessness of despair, I knew that the love I had for him would keep me alive. There was no God I could turn to now. The only person who could save me, was me and if I had any chance of saving him, I had to save myself.
Dad called round late morning to offer to take me for lunch but I had no appetite and no wish to go anyw
here. He stayed for a while and we drank tea. He offered to take Coco on the beach and I accepted gratefully. The dog jumped up excitedly, oblivious to anything other than the anticipation of a good run and a mouthful of seaweed to drag along the sand.
Dad returned half an hour later. We hugged each other but had no words of comfort to offer on either side. He was almost as badly affected as I was. I knew he felt he didn't deserve to place his loss in the same category as my own. "I'm just the grandfather. He's your son." He would often say. But the reality was that he had been more of a father to M, than his own had ever been and unlike his own father, he had taught him all the things that mattered. They had done all the man things, spending hours throwing hoops behind the garage and riding out to the nearby lighthouse on bikes. He had made him hurdles to practice his beloved athletics on the patch of brush land behind the house and Dad had stood on cold days timing him whilst he ran tirelessly across the grass. M worshipped his grandfather - Grandad gave him his wings, whilst I endeavoured to provide the roots and the comfort.
Dark circles under Dad's eyes betrayed the sleepless night he had spent. He looked as exhausted as I was but he was trying to go through the motions of his routine. Ever a practical man, despite his big heart, he sought solace in attempting to continue with normality - but the reality was that nothing would ever be close to normal again.
He told me some friends had invited us to spend Christmas Day with them but I couldn't face it. I wasn't ready to start walking yet...I was still trying to breathe.
I only left the house once that day and that was to buy cigarettes. I had given up fifteen years ago, but I no longer cared. It was something to do - lighting the cigarettes, watching the blue smoke twisting in the air before me, not tasting them or really even inhaling them. I merely smoked because I did not know what else to do.
Mummy's Still Here Page 1
