Anna ran pell-mell home one crisp September day to alert her mother to the impending doom that her brother and his friend Craig faced.  She puffed and panted:

            “Mum, Hollowhead and his mates are after David.  They’re pelting him with stones down the bottom of our road.”

            Sarah flew out of the door to find her son hobbling up the hill holding his limp, swollen wrist.  His face was distorted with pain.  Craig was at his side in sombre mood touching David’s back reassuringly.  The gang had gone.

            Grimacing in pain, David explained, “Hollowhead and Onion were chucking stones at us.  One hit me on the back of my leg and I fell to the floor.  They were swearing and saying that we’re done for.  Next minute Hollowhead and another lad picked me up and rammed me into the wall.  I put out my arm to protect my head and I felt my wrist bending back.  Then I heard a click.  My hand looks like a football now and it hurts like hell.”

            Craig added, “We didn’t know four of the boys.  They were all laughing and swearing and one of them said Greg had given them a fiver to duff David up.”

            Sarah was sizzling with rage, “Effing bastard, Effing police, Effing sodding everything.  Evil, orrible effing WORLD.”

            Statements were given to the police.  ‘For what its worth,’ thought Sarah, scathingly.  Then they spent the next five hours in hospital waiting to see a doctor.  David had x-rays, was given painkillers and waited….  ‘Welcome to third world Britain!’ Sarah muttered under her breath.

            Jason and Jessica busied themselves with an amalgamation of toys and Anna tried her hand at a 200 bit puzzle.  Eventually a doctor discovered that David’s wrist was broken and it was set in plaster.

            The next day further statements were given including one by Craig.  Sarah found herself warming to the WPC dealing with the case.  Andrea Gillenski seemed to genuinely want to bring the boys to book.  She knew the gang well and had dealt with the two main culprits many times before. 

            Over the next couple of weeks Andrea kept Sarah posted.  She had interviewed Onion [real name Owen Smith] under caution.  He admitted chasing David and Craig, swearing and holding rocks, but he denied hurtling any.  He said Hollowhead [real name Jeremy Hill] had been with them but he doesn’t know how David came to break his arm.  He wouldn’t reveal the other boys’ identity. 

            Hollowhead proved to be more difficult to track down.  Andrea told Sarah that he lived with his father and stepmother in Winterton and that he visited his mother in Caroline Bay during some weekends.  Andrea was eventually able to interview him under caution in Winterton.  Hollowhead denied being in Caroline Bay on the day of the attack and he used his stepmother and other family members as an alibi.  It transpired that the father was in prison. 

            Hill was charged with assault and over the next few months he had to make various appearances in court.  Sarah was kept aware of the proceedings.

Meanwhile she and her children had to endure endless meetings with the psychiatrists.  It peeved Sarah to realise that Meg had written to them stating that David and Anna were “experiencing difficulties.”  Why couldn’t she at least be honest and state that conference members had requested that the family be assessed by psychiatrists?  The facts were that the psychiatrists were supposed to aid children and adolescents who were experiencing

emotional problems.  David and Anna did not need help with their behaviour and did not need to make changes themselves.  Their ‘difficulties’ were the injustices.  The solution was not going to be found in psychiatrists!  But this was not about truth or fairness....

            The first encounter was an all-group affair with Dr Dennis and Dr Knowles.  Sarah and the kids had to explain how it all started i.e. the first awareness of God and then all the spiritual paraphernalia.  Sarah had to give intimate detail of the life they’d suffered whilst she’d been engaged to Greg.  She and her kids spoke freely and honestly about all the happenings, supernatural and otherwise to date. 

            She’d told David and Anna not to be guarded or it might go against them.  She herself took the opportunity to use such sessions to recap her experiences thus far with the authorities and to express her views about corruption, concealment and shifty goings on.  David and Anna copped the brunt of the psychiatrists’ attention. She managed to get away with only a handful of meetings.  Most of the time it was a case of Sarah and the little ones being shunted out of the way into the kitchen whilst David and Anna were cross-examined in the living room, either together or separately. 

            Sarah got a horrible cynical feeling that the psychiatrists were under orders to search for something…. anything to trip her kids up; they were to find something of ‘concern’ and thus find an apt excuse to have her family displaced one way or another.  Her little tape recorder was whirring away faithfully behind the scenes and every now and again she’d pop in with refreshments hoping to catch a snippet of the conversation.

            It was hard to tell really how it was all going.  She wouldn’t know that until the whole assessment was finished, reports filed and council conferences called.  The psychiatrists seemed amiable enough; polite and easy going but then again she didn’t expect them to be any other way.  They were a bit like politicians - smiling and friendly with you on the one hand whilst robbing and knifing you with the other. 

            The grilling dragged on for many tense months, festering many fears.  Sarah felt she was sitting on a tinderbox.  So much rested on the psychiatrists’ reports, more so even than of the social workers’. 

            And even at their tender years David and Anna realised that so much hung on their ‘performance’.  It was so unfair to have that kind of burden resting on such young shoulders.  How weak and nasty of the panel to do it to them.

            The irony of the situation was that Sarah wanted to talk to the psychiatrist but not about imagined problematic behaviours, she wanted to discuss real psychological problems.  She wanted advice and something done about the damaging emotional effects, not of David and Anna but of Jason and Jessica.  But as expected they had no time for the little ones who needed their intervention.  They could only offer to stick her on a six to nine months waiting list instead!

At christmastime, more than a year after dumping the slug, Sarah was told that Hollowhead’s trial was set for the following March but neither she nor her son had been asked to attend court.  Also at Christmas, David was confronted by the lad and his army of mates who were milling about close by on their bikes.  David was threatened to back off with the court proceedings “or else”, but he refused, shoved his way past Hill and ran hell-for-leather home.

            A day before the trial, Sarah got a call from a police woman asking if David could testify.  She received no explanation as to why she hadn’t been given more notice and she found out that Craig’s mother had also been given just one day’s notice.  Not that Craig had any intention of being a witness in Court; he was far too worried about some sort of

retribution. 

            In the juvenile court, Sarah was soon made aware, to her distress, that it was going to be a case of Hill’s testimony versus David’s only.  She questioned the prosecutor:

            “Where’s WPC Gillenski?”

            “She couldn’t make it.”

            “Well, where’s her stand-in then?”

            “There is no representative from the police here but I have all of WPC Gillenski’s evidence.  I am in possession of all the taped transcripts....”

            “Oh, well that’s alright then.”

            “But unfortunately we’re not allowed to use them in the absence of the police.”

            “What?” Sarah shrieked incredulously.  “So WPC Gillenski went to all that trouble, getting evidence from those thugs…. for nothing?  She even had to drive hundreds of miles to interview and then charge Hill.”

            “Those are the rules, I’m afraid.  They’ve been there over five hundred years.”

            “Well that is disgusting.  No wonder crime pays.  You should resign your position in protest.  Where are your scruples?  How can you have any respect for yourself knowing that this sort of thing goes on?  It’s the same old story, isn’t it?  Dirty, dishonourable, hoggish men refusing to modernise for the sake of justice and righteousness?  Men like you just want to keep the old boys network.  Well if you were the victim of crime you wouldn’t be so smug then standing here telling me about ancient, illegal, immoral laws.  Shame on you.”

            Needless to say that despite David giving an excellent account of events and despite irregularities in Hill’s testimony and that of his alibis, Hollowhead was later found to be not guilty.  Sarah received the news in a letter from police headquarters.  But to retrieve the letter she was stunned to discover that she had to pay fifty pence to the sorting office, plus the two pence postage shortfall.  She had a sneaky feeling that it’d been done deliberately because it was franked at seventeen pence and the cheapest stamp going is worth nineteen pence!

            Sarah spoke with Andrea and was gob-smacked to learn that the policewoman had not been invited to attend court and that she didn’t even know that the trial had been and gone.  Sarah was also dumbstruck to learn that the CPS had written to the WPC wanting to drop the proceedings; suggesting that it was a case of mistaken identity of his attacker.  WPC Gillenski had written back in robust terms stating that she had enough evidence to find Jeremy Hill guilty.

            Sarah’s solicitor Davina Harris ascertained that the prosecutor had applied for an adjournment to secure the attendance of the witnesses but that the magistrate had refused.  Sarah gasped.  That was a lie.  They knew the trial date three months in advance.  The fact was that no one was told to attend until the day before and she could only hazard a guess as to whether or not Onion had even been invited to attend at any stage in the proceedings.  Her instincts told her that that was highly unlikely.  Davina learned from the CPS that the police evidence could not be used because Smith was not in court to testify.  Sarah cried out in disbelief at her solicitor:

            “No lad will testify against his own pal if he doesn’t have to.  Owen Smith should’ve been forced to give evidence and the police evidence should’ve been used regardless of who does or doesn’t bother to turn up.”

            Davina agreed and although she thought the whole business a little odd there was nothing further that she could do to challenge it legally.

            Sarah stormed, “For cryin’ out loud.  If I was a kid and I’d attacked someone; broken a couple of arms or something and I was found not guilty in a court by a magistrate, I would assume that I’d done nothing wrong and that I could continue such behaviour.  What’s to stop Hollowhead half killing David next time?  He knows that powerful men in court have condoned his actions.  He knows that those men in authority are calling my son a liar.  He also knows that the police have no powers - he has seen the police collecting lots of evidence, getting interviews on tape and various statements - for it all to come to nothing; the magistrate effectively preferring to believe him rather than a police officer.  What message does that send out to the public and to children growing up looking to the authorities to set an example of correct behaviour?

            Magistrates, judges, prosecutors etc etc who pick and choose their evidence which has nothing at all to do with hard facts should be charged with professional misconduct or neglect of duty.  But who’s going to put them on trial?  Obviously that lad is protected.  I wonder why.  Are they scared of his father or is all this part of the conspiratorial game that we are having to suffer?”

She tried writing to the local rag to try and expose such reprehensible practices but came up against a brick wall there too.  Whenever she phoned, she was fobbed off with a multitude of excuses....  

            Approximately a year after Sarah had given hideous Gregory Potter the old heave-ho, she began to be aware that her mail was being tampered with.  Strangely it was only the envelopes from Literary agents that arrived open and the odd ones which looked ‘interesting’ such as those sent by educational support organisations.  She’d been sending her first fifty pages of her book to agents to try her luck.  But every reply was being intercepted.  It was startling.  Sarah feared that if she was lucky enough to find an agent that was prepared to take her on, her unknown enemies would make sure that they did everything necessary to thwart such an alliance. 

            She complained to Royal Mail and was politely reassured that the problem would be investigated.  But the tampering continued.  Mr Rowlands of the Security Suite assured her on several occasions that investigations had been done, but still her mail arrived open.  Sarah soon learned that the inspector had been unable [or unwilling to divulge to her] to determine who was responsible.  She also found out that although three different postmen were aware that they had delivered opened mail, no one had been questioned as part of an investigation.  Obviously somebody didn’t want her book being published. 

            The social workers, psychiatrists and even her dad effectively accused her of lying and suggested that if she found her mail open she should look no further than her eldest son to find the culprit.