She had a dream, which was not all a dream, she said.

The devil was making love to her. He had black shiny skin, a muscled body, tightly-curled hair and his eyes were two balls of fire.

He pinned her down, she said, then he tilted his head to one side and looked at her pityingly.  Crazily, for a second, she felt safe.  Then she noticed two little horns on his forehead….

Ruth was not speaking calmly.  She was beside herself, panicky and the words were cascading from her lips-disorganised thoughts frantically given voice.

But there was some sense being made- if you get a word in edgeways to ask about it.  Ruth tended to – as the expression is – “go all around Oldham to get to Manchester,”

She was ringing in a state of shock, having read the story of Phil in the Echo’s “Can You Hear Our Children Weeping.” Campaign against child abuse.

Phil, a man of 38 with a history of depression and psychiatric treatment, had, under hypnosis, revealed how he had been abused as a child by his father and another man.

The experience had been buried in his subconscious – until psychoanalyst Michael Whitenburgh forced it to the surface.

Ruth had been stunned by the story, feeling an inexplicable identification with Phil.  Regression may be the answer for her, she said when she phoned, and pleaded for details about the therapy.
Then Ruth poured out the miseries of her life.

She was an Indian from Singapore.  Her mother died when she was seven and she believed that her father, who used to beat her mother regularly, was responsible for her death.  Ruth was sleeping next to her mother just before she died.

When she was 15, her father tried to get into her bed, but left the room without assaulting her.

Never the less, Ruth, now 29, feels that her father might have sexually abused her as a child.  Having read the articles in the Echo during the week of our campaign, her conviction that “something happened to her” was strengthened.

Almost 13 years ago the family moved to England and Ruth, desperate to escape her tyrannical father, met and married a Liverpudlian.  It was a mistake.

The man was violent and a gambler.  He lashed out at her frequently and abused her verbally, destroying her confidence and self esteem.

Two children and a suicide attempt later, Ruth is alone, adoring her two sons, aged 10 and 8, but plagued with anxiety, depression and the dreams which are not dreams.

“I keep seeing a figure of a man in my room. He is faceless, but I know it’s my father.”
She said.

She feels something touching her when she is trying to sleep at nights. Then there is the terrifying dream of the devil. “It is so real.”

Ruth went to see her doctor, “He laughed when I told him about the devil and said I should be exorcised.  But to this day I am so haunted by something.”

“I was in tears reading that Echo article because I really felt for that man.”

Mr Whitenburgh agreed to treat her.  He would allow me to sit in on his first discussion with Ruth, but once the actual psychoanalytical treatment sessions were started, it would be unethical for me to be present, he said.

However, there was nothing to prevent Ruth herself from relating what had happened, and she was eager to do this.

He introduced himself as Mike when we met at Ruth’s terraced house on the outskirts of the city.  It was neat and homely.  Photographs of Ruth’s two sons stand proudly on view to visitors, and soon the boys came in.

They are beautiful children, with short dark hair and black eyes.  They stand solemnly in their blue pyjamas and politely say goodnight.  Ruth’s pride in them is evident – and understandable.  She and her husband are now divorced and she has raised her boys alone for seven years.

But she is not concentrating on the present this evening, she is turning the pages of her memory for Mike, who listens and asks an occasional question.

“I hate to think of that man as my father.” She says, and relates how he used to rule the house hold – her brother and her mother as well as herself – with violence.  When they came to England and she began work, she had to hand over all her wages and he returned a pittance to her.

“He was spending my money on taking girls out to pubs.”  She says, bitterly, and then remembers his similar behaviour in Singapore, before her mother died.

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