Look at the Limey Crawl

A memoir

Synopsis

A kind, intelligent girl is born to a mother with violent schizophrenia and a delusional disorder that makes her believe that, from the age of seven, I am a harlot intent on stealing her men. The academic challenges of Bridgwater School, along with my love of music and my dream of becoming a concert pianist, are the things that bring me joy and make life bearable.

Then Mother meets a handsome Scottish islander. She falls in love with him, and so do we children. I pray he will marry my mother and save me from her abuse, but instead he leaves us to go back to his wife and children.

Mother decides to move my brothers and me from our life in Manchester, England—funded by our absent, seafaring father—to a remote Scottish island, fifty-six miles off the northern coast of Scotland. It is 1972, and the Isle of Lewis and Harris feels like a step back in time.

At first, we live with Madame Moncrieff, a wealthy English widow with a large white mansion out on the moor. Mother is Madame’s private secretary, and James and I meet Mrs Macleod, Madame’s housekeeper, who becomes the grandmother we always wanted. But then Mother falls out with Madame and moves us to a rented house. My father cuts off her money until she takes his children home, and everything goes terribly wrong. Without his financial support, Mother cannot manage, and after a year on the island, social services workers find us starving and living in a ruin.

Mother is charged with criminal neglect of her children. To evade the law, she flees with us to the United States —to the home of her sister, Miriam, an evil woman who has abused her youngest adopted son so severely that he now lives in a home for deeply disturbed children.

I am twelve and placed in the eighth grade at Catherine Blaine Jr. High in Seattle, where I am a bullied, hunted immigrant. So homesick and terrorized, it is hard to breathe. Then my mother commits suicide, and I am terrified Miriam will send my older brother and me to an orphanage while subjecting my five-year-old little brother, James, to horrific abuse.

Consumed by white-hot grief and crippling worry, I discover that my mother is alive and well. Her feigning suicide was all part of a sick game played by her and Miriam to make me believe my mother was dead. It is too much—my mind breaks.

Alone, I must fight for my sanity, and to do that, I have to commit murder.