Survival against all odds...
Loved by no one and alone in the world, the author's life was a struggle for survival from the moment she took her first breath. Born in postwar Manchester, England as the youngest of 3 daughters of an unhappily married impoverished couple, Judy was barely 2 years old when her mother was caught with a secret lover and in retribution, she was dragged out of the house by her livid father, never to return. As desperate as Judy was to return home to her mother and more importantly her older sisters, I could not believe that no one cared enough to come to her rescue and her longing was not reciprocated.
What followed was 15 years of Hell during which little Judy was beaten senseless by her father and new stepmother on a near daily basis, removed to an orphanage after one such beating nearly killed her only be returned after a few years to the two monsters she is forced to call her parents, worked like a lackey and denied the necessities of life, and robbed of all childhood innocence. While she acts as the resident slave and punching bag, her father, who would not even work in a mattress factory testing mattresses for 100 bucks an hour, runs some sort of metaphysical cult, conning the naive idiots who believe him out of huge sums of money. And as a result, this leads to Judy's father and stepmother plotting and succeeding in illegally absconding from the United Kingdom to South Africa with her at age 11, disguised as a boy. It infuriated me to no end that the only time Judy's mother seemed to genuinely take an interest is when the woman found out her ex-husband had fled the from jurisdiction, alerting the local media and obtaining a court order to have Judy seized from her father's possession when the ship docked in an African port and promptly returned to England. This woman, who does NOT deserve to be called a mother, pulled this off in a matter of days and yet for the past nearly decade had been concerned in the least for what her daughter was enduring while she started a new life with her new man! The seizure order arrived a little too late though and so Judy ended up in South Africa anyway, where once again she was abandoned by all and forced to fend for herself, not in an orphanage or a yard, but on the mean streets of Johannesburg. Through her time in South Africa the only thing that kept Judy going is an unwavering hope for a return to England and everyone she once loved. Unfortunately that long awaited joyous reunion fails to materialize and before long she finds herself right back where she started, alone in the world and estranged in South Africa.
Many memoirs are "Dysfunction For Dollars" whinefests, but this book is truly a story of survival even in the face of the most insurmountable odds.