Tower and Town, April 2019 (view the full edition)There Was Once A FamilyThis family lived in Bethnal Green, a multi-cultural part of London. The younger daughter decided to leave, without telling her parents, taking whatever she could cram into a bag along with her savings and passport, seeking a new, exciting life, having been groomed by adults around her to believe that her future lay elsewhere. The authorities intercepted many of these messages and even wrote to her during this time, warning that they were concerned, yet they never contacted her parents. Aged 15, she went to a country far away where she soon wasted any assets that she had, married a stranger and bore him two children, watching and supporting a regime that bore down on the people they overran, committing terrible crimes against humanity. During this time she did not maintain contact with her family or indeed their friends and relatives; she effectively cut herself off and news came back to the community of her new lifestyle which brought them into public focus and notoriety. After some years, the country that she had gone to turned from a place of growing prosperity for the ruling group that she had joined, into a place closer to hell, as the oppressed and their supporters waged war with them. Life became terrible and as food and medical supplies ran out, her two children died, while her husband continued to battle on with the remnants of the elite. She had fallen pregnant again and began to think about some of the life she had given up, but did not want to be seen to have turned away from her husband's position or that of her friends. To do so could also possibly result in terrible retribution. She felt weak when she compared herself to those who remained determined to battle on. Things turned from bad to worse and eventually the forces that fought against them overcame their position. She and her husband were separated and, now eight months pregnant, was forced to walk into an encampment with other women; her husband was held captive elsewhere and she was left alone, with nothing. Having reached this point, a man shouted into the crowd one morning, asking the women if any of them would speak to a British journalist; with nothing to lose, she agreed and was sent to a small room, where she told him her story, which became a news sensation back home. She gave no acknowledgement of changing her attitude, but accepted that now she wanted to come home, for her own sake and for that of her unborn child. She said that she would accept whatever fate the future held and asked for clemency. Back home, people rose up and said "why should we take her back? What reason is there for us to support this wastrel? Let her rot in the hell that she is in". A small group of others took a different view. They suggested that she'd left as a child and that while she had indeed now become a 19 year old, she was 'one of us' and that we had a duty to care for her, to try and show her that even though she would have to subject herself to whatever the State decided, ultimately she could come home. Those against her return asked "why should we do this; we've all stayed here, working, paying our taxes and living inside the laws of our land and those of our beliefs?" All that those people could say was this: "But we have to take her back, because to us she was dead, but now she is alive; she was lost, but now she is found". Keith Fryer |