Mummy, Come Home: The True Story of a Mother Kidnapped and Torn from Her Children

‘No.’

‘You’re a whore.’

He gripped my head tighter as he rammed into me.

‘Say it.’

Anger hardened inside me.

‘Say it.’

‘No.’

‘Just say it,’ he screamed.

He was hurting me so much. My body kept slamming into the side of the table. I just wanted him to stop—for the shouts to be silent. My anger died.

‘I’m a whore,’ I said.

‘Again,’ he shouted.

‘I’m a bitch.’ My voice was utterly expressionless.

With a moan he stopped moving on top of me and I reached back to take the condom, push him away and pick up my dress. The boy didn’t look at me as he walked towards the shower. Later, after he’d got out and put his clothes on, he turned to give me £5.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his eyes not meeting mine.

‘Just go,’ I said. ‘I don’t want your money.’

The boy said nothing as he left. I sat down quickly, feeling my legs lose their strength.

‘I cannot stand it,’ I whispered, my head in my hands. ‘I cannot bear this life much longer. I would rather be dead than suffer this.’ I could see blood in my mind, feel aggression in my heart and, for the first time, feared I wouldn’t be able to control whatever was trying to rip out from inside me. I wasn’t sure what I might do if I saw the boy again. I sat in silence and stared at the wall, trying to push down the animal which was clawing to get out from inside me.

I knew I had to win the struggle for control. My desire for survival was still strong. It had to be. I had to get home to my children. They were all that had kept me going through all the terrible hardships and abuses I had suffered. I had told them that Mummy would come home and I knew I had to survive if I was ever going to keep my promise.

Chapter One (#ufa4a3453-0c84-5275-a7b4-23fcfcc44ac9)

I believe your birth is like your life and you are born with good or bad luck which follows you forever. I weighed just over two pounds when I was born three months prematurely and no one thought I would live. But I fought, held on to my life and survived just as I have done ever since.

I came into the world in Ukraine at about 6pm on 16 January 1976, after my mother Alexandra slipped on an icy street as she ran for the bus. Her waters broke and I had been born by the time my father Panteley arrived at the hospital. The doctors warned my parents I would not survive but my father had me moved to another hospital where I spent three months until I was well enough to go home. They called me Oxana.

We lived in a town called Simferopol in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, and my parents were rich compared with many in the Communist country. My father was a lorry driver and my mother worked in a nursery. They’d met at college and my mother was just seventeen when they married and my brother Vitalik was born. Six years later I arrived and together we lived in a huge apartment block of more than six hundred flats. We were lucky because we had two bedrooms and a large balcony and could afford to eat meat every day. My mother, who was small, beautiful and smelled of a perfume called Red Moscow, was an excellent cook, and Sunday was the best because we would have chicken livers or lamb with white sauce and onions followed by biscuits or cakes. That was my favourite day of the week, when we were all laughing together and my parents weren’t working.

But things started to change when my father gave up his driving job to run his own car repair business. Suddenly my world wasn’t quite as happy. I don’t know what came first—my father’s jealousy or my mother’s nights out—but after that the beatings started. I would lie in bed listening and praying to God to protect me. Papa was like a bull who couldn’t control himself, while Mamma couldn’t stop her tongue. I listened to the awful noise of their rows, wishing that they would stop and terrified that it was my fault they were no longer happy.

The noise from our flat must have been horrendous, but no one ever got involved in the arguments between my parents because anything between a husband and wife was considered private. Besides, there were plenty of other families like mine in our apartment block and if you got married then it was no one else’s business what your husband did to you. Women were the ones who provoked men after all—if they answered back they were hit, if they wore a short skirt they were a slapper who deserved what they got. One day a policeman came and sat with my father in the kitchen. By the time he had left, Papa had signed a document saying he wouldn’t touch my mother but what good is a piece of paper against a powerful fist? Nothing could heal the rift between my parents.

‘He’s a bastard,’ my mother would tell me as we lay in the bedroom we shared. Vitalik had the other while my father slept in the living room. ‘I’m going to leave him. You can come with me, Oxana, and we’ll be happy together.’

I wanted us all to be happy but I wished that we could stay together too. I loved my papa, even though he was so angry all the time with my mother. I was also frightened of my mother because she had drunken rages of her own and could turn against me in an instant. Sometimes she would scream at me after one of Papa’s beatings that I hadn’t protected her, and she would hit me. Once she beat me with a bunch of roses; I was covered in scratches and had to stay off school for a week.

Maybe it was because of all this that my brother Vitalik changed. We’d always been friends when we were young but he lost interest in me as he became a teenager and soon the arguments between my parents often included him. He started smoking, stopped going to school and hung around with a bad crowd which worried my father. Then when I was nine, my parents’ wedding rings and a gold necklace disappeared. Papa was furious; he was convinced that Vitalik had stolen them and it was the first time I realised that it wasn’t just my mother he could hit.

‘Why are you doing this?’ my father screamed. ‘I’m working hard to make a better future for you and your sister and you do this to me.’

Then one day, the police arrived at our home. A car had been stolen and there had been an accident. After that Vitalik disappeared. He was just fifteen.

After my brother had left, I felt almost invisible. I was a good girl who never caused my parents any trouble but I was also a very sensitive child. Every day I would write in my diary how many bad things my mother or teachers had said to me and it made me sad that nobody liked me because I was the clever girl at school. Things got worse when Vitalik went away.

‘There’s the thief’s sister,’ my classmates would snigger as I walked by.

People would turn their backs as I walked into the playground and teachers would mark my homework down for no reason. At that time, Ukraine was a Soviet country where many things weren’t accepted. Religion was one. Lenin was our god and people who believed otherwise could get into trouble. I remember one day when a girl came into school wearing a cross. We didn’t see her for a whole year after that. There were some churches of course and I was baptised into the Greek faith but my family never practised their religion openly. We celebrated Christian festivals but there was no Bible at home or trips to church.

In Ukraine, difference wasn’t trusted. Children were taught to hate homosexuality, black skin and anything foreign. Everybody had to be the same. There was just one big supermarket where everyone shopped and it didn’t sell any luxury goods or foreign foods—things like tampons and disposable nappies were unheard of. Instead we ate simple meat and vegetables, women used pads of gauze every month to stop their blood and children drank milk. When Coca-Cola arrived in Ukraine there were a lot of people who believed it would make them sick and I didn’t have my first sip until I was thirteen—the same day I tried chewing gum.

My country was hard in other ways too—it wasn’t wealthy and everyone had to work. Just a dollar a day could mean the difference between eating and starving, and I always knew that some people had a lot less than my family.

What I loved more than anything else was Bollywood films. The singing, the dancing, the colour, the costumes—everything about them was beautiful and I was convinced that India must be heaven on earth. My favourite one was called Disco Dancer and starred Mithun Chakrabarti. He was so tall and handsome that I saw it twenty-three times and couldn’t stop crying when it finally stopped being shown. I loved the way that Bollywood films always had a happy ending full of love. They made me believe that one day my prince would find me and we would live together happily ever after. I just had to wait patiently for that day to come.

Then something happened that turned all the colour in my dreams to grey.

Chapter Two (#ufa4a3453-0c84-5275-a7b4-23fcfcc44ac9)

It was the summer of 1990,I was fourteen and on a secret day out at the beach with two friends, Natasha and Alina. I knew I’d be in trouble if Papa found out, but I had had a wonderful time sunbathing and chatting with my girlfriends. Now we were going to buy some food before walking to the station ready for the hour’s train journey home.

As we stood in the queue for pastries, a handsome boy waited behind. He looked about eighteen and was wearing shorts, no shirt and good sunglasses.

‘Excuse me, could you tell us what time it is, please?’ Natasha asked as she turned towards him.

He looked at his watch. ‘Nearly six o’clock,’ he replied.

I was worried. It was much later than I’d thought. ‘We have to go,’ I said urgently. ‘We’ll miss the train and we’ll never be home in time. I have to get back before Mama comes home from work.’

‘Don’t worry, Oxana,’ said Natasha breezily. ‘There’s plenty of time.’

She didn’t seem at all worried as she started chatting and laughing with the older boy. I didn’t like it—she seemed so open and free with him, and it wasn’t how I’d been taught to behave.

‘Why don’t you come and meet my friends?’ he asked, when we’d bought our pastries.

‘Sure,’ replied Natasha, and she began walking off with our new friend.

‘But we’ve got to get home,’ I cut in, looking at Alina.

‘Not yet,’ she said as she turned to follow Natasha and the boy. ‘We can always catch the next train. Don’t be a scaredy cat, Oxana.’

I stood for a moment. What should I do? I could go on my own to the station or for once try to fit in with my friends. I didn’t want to be left alone. I turned to follow as the boy led us behind the shops to the edge of a small wood.

‘My friends are in there,’ he said, gesturing at the trees.