Cry and You Cry Alone

Taken from the idyllic childhood paradise of Virginia Water, Surrey, Linda's life falls into poverty and chaos as her struggling Irish immigrant parents' marriage crumbles and her unstable mother's sanity declines with dramatic consequences. She is forced to live as a feral child, first lost among the multitude of kids in rural, Catholic Ireland, then again on the insular, leafy streets of Surrey. Captured by the authorities, Linda experiences a brief sojourn of comfort and normality in a caring foster home before being plunged into the dark, terrifying world of a 1960s institution. St Anne's Convent, Orpington, was a Catholic children's home run by the infamous Sisters of Mercy and a former monk who openly practised and inflicted the bizarre and barbaric beliefs of Opus Dei on the children in his care. Linda resolved to remember everything, her memories stored carefully, with the words 'one day' inscribed on her heart. Cry and You Cry Alone is the achingly honest story of a survivor of shocking child abuse that took place in the heart of an English suburb.