Alexander Sinclair - Mummy Doesnt Love You

How can a small boy convince the doctors that his mum is lying?

Alexander Sinclair was the target of his mothers irrational hatred she stopped at nothing in her campaign to tear apart his life and mind.

As a young boy, Alex received severe beatings from his mother, and she force-fed him amphetamines and Vlium to keep him in line. It wasnt long before his health was in the balance. While on holiday in Greece, she committed her son to one of the worst mental institutions in Europe, where Alex experienced unthinkable horrors.

But his mothers hatred was to take a more sinister turn still how much could Alex take and survive?

Uniquely shocking and heartbreakingly sad, Mummy Doesnt Love You will haunt the reader long after the final page.

Alexander Sinclair is a military historian and the author of several books of history. He is married and lives in the south of England. Alexander Sinclair is a pseudonym.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781407026572

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Alexander Sinclair is a pseudonym.

Published in 2009 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group company

Copyright Alexander Sinclair 2009

Alexander Sinclair has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be
found at www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780091928070

To buy books by your favourite authors and register for offers visit
www.randomhouse.co.uk

To my father, whose forbearance and perseverance undoubtedly saved my life

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some limited cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

HARD HANDS GRASPED my shoulders and propelled me down the dark corridor. Before me were six doors to six isolation cells. I cried out to the man not to throw me in, but he took no notice, just gave me a hard shake and kneed me in the back as he forced me along. Another man ran ahead, opened one of the heavy pale-blue doors, and it gaped before me, heralding, I knew, the horrors to come: isolation by myself and a long, pitch-dark night.

I refused to go in and tried to hold myself back, my bare feet slipping on the floor, just to receive another knee in the small of my back and a hard cuff across my head to make me move. I sobbed and let my legs collapse under me and flopped on the ground. The two men grasped my arms and dragged me into the room, where I was dumped on the floor. They retreated, slamming the door behind them.

I lifted my head, and beheld the pale small form of a child lying in the middle of the room; I knew who it was, I knew what was to come. I let out a scream, and jerked awake

I had had my nightmare again, the nightmare that has plagued me for nearly thirty-five years, ever since I was ten years old.

When the nights, darkness, and sleep, can take you back to the worst possible nightmare, there is nowhere safe, no one who can help you. Even your waking hours can be terrifying, where the slightest event can precipitate the most dreadful flashbacks, and you become isolated in a crowded room, a prisoner of your own mind.

After my father rescued me from the institution, I was afraid to be with people; I was afraid to be alone; I was afraid to be in a crowd; I was afraid of the dark. I was even afraid of falling asleep. The only place I felt safe was with my father, but he could not be there for me twenty-four hours a day.

Throughout the remainder of my childhood, I slept with the light on. In the days following my rescue I was too mentally damaged to understand too damaged to control the debilitating mental trauma that was a result of my time in the institution. I used to lie in my bed every night taking turns to hold an arm straight above my head, reasoning that if I fell asleep my arm would drop on my head and wake me again. It never really worked; I eventually fell asleep to suffer my nightmare once again. Even now, many years later, the nightmares will sneak up and haunt me when I least expect it, breaking into the happy and stable life I have built for myself. And the person responsible for all this trauma, damage, and terror, was my own mother.

How did I end up locked away in an institution at the tender age of ten? Why did my mother want to separate me from my family and to brand me as severely mentally impaired and emotionally unstable? Why did she hate me so much that my life became one of anguish and despair? It didnt help me that my mother had manipulated and tricked my father and that he believed her lies. In our society women are meant to be nurturers, to uphold family values, but my mother hated me with unrelenting fervour, and ultimately it became all the easier for her to use me as a pawn in the power play against my father.

If it had not been for my mothers campaign of psychological warfare against me, I would have been a normal child, with strengths and weaknesses like anybody else. However, I lived my childhood in a state of constant fear of my mother, and this made me insecure and fearful. When I had problems at school, I was mistakenly labelled backward. Day after day I was told I was mental, autistic, retarded and was destined to end up in more than one mental institution. Yet after my mothers control her abuse of me ended, my true personality began to emerge. I turned out a sensitive and kind person. I took a degree at university, and ultimately became a professional author and married in a loving relationship.

After what I went through as a child it has always been difficult for me to look back on my early life and see myself for what I was: a normal child who was terrorised by the person who is supposed to love and nurture you. Ive since been told by many psychiatrists that no child could go through what my mother put me through and not come out marked in some way.

My story is about what happens to a child who is subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse and mental torture, and how I survived.

ON 7 JUNE , 1963 at a house in Okehampton, Devon, I was born to my mother, Voula Sinclair, ne Giorgios, in a traumatic delivery that my mother always spitefully told me had almost cost her life. She was twenty-seven years old, my father thirty-three.

My mother was Greek by birth, a war-orphan, daughter of Helena and Spiridon Giorgios. Her father had been a Nazi collaborator in the war, and both her parents had died in 1944. After the war ended, life had been difficult for my mother in Greece where mention of Spiridon Giorgios was usually followed by a curse and spit on the floor. So, in 1954, at the age of eighteen, my mother left Greece by train on a journey that brought her across Europe to Britain. For many years this was all my father knew about my mothers childhood, little realising that she harboured a most terrible secret.