Gayle Sanders - Mummy's Witness

To the outside world the Sanders family was a respectable one. The father a teacher, the mother a housewife and mother of three. No one could have believed what went on behind the front door of their large detached home.

The only childhood memories Gayle has are of unimaginable terror as she watched her father viciously abuse her mother - smashing her limbs and breaking her spirit. Gayle herself endures physical and sexual abuse. Desperate not to be noticed, she retreated into herself. There was no love, often no food, and no one turn for to support to.

Any semblance of family life came to burial end when, at just twelve years old, she was forced to witness her father kill her mother.

Her father pleaded manslaughter and received a sentence of three years, but served less than fourteen months. With incredulity Gayle learnt after his release that he had become a vicar.

Gayle meanwhile, numb with shock and grief, passed from foster family to psychiatric hospital where she narrowly survived a suicide attempt. Believing herself in safe nursing hands, she was to undergo the further shocking trauma of rape.

This isn't only a book you read, it's a book you feel from the beginning. Honestly, after reading the first 20 pages I had to turn it down for a day.

This is the sad story of Gayle, similar but even worse to Dave Pelzer, she suffered from seeing her mother beaten and in the end killed by her father. Gayle has been raped and beaten by him, too.

During her journey back to a life she creeps out of her inner darkness after multiple suicide attemps, the loss of her whole family which did not stand behind her and offered no help.
She tells about the anxieties she had, that her father would come one day to get her, feelings of guilt, her wish about being dead, her love for a mother who wasn't capable to feel enough for Gayle and herself and died because she finally found the strenght to do something and get away.
A girl, a teenager and as a women with lots of friends, Gayle was always alone with herself and her feelings and could not open up to people who tried to help her.

Encouraging and heartbreaking she lets us know how helpless she was and how helpless the people around her, social services, psychiatrics, were.

Today Gayle Sander's working for and with families where domestic violence is the order of the day.

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ISBN-13: 9780340933497
ISBN-10: 0340933496
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Pages: 280
Book Type: Hardcover