By late afternoon most weekdays, the living room of Linda Buchwald’s comfortable Oxford home becomes a riot of noisy activity when her twin grandsons pay an after-school visit with their mother, Evelyn. It is the sort of chaotic happy family scene that many will recognise — although this is the most unusual of families, and one for which 65-year-old Linda has paid an unduly heavy price. Eight years ago she and husband Peter Blackwell rescued Evelyn, then 21, and her baby sons, Peter and Simon, from a life of grinding poverty in their native Gambia.
They had met the young mother while they holidayed in West Africa, and moved her into their family home in Britain after pledging to help her raise her boys. It was an act of apparently heart-warming selflessness, reported in the Daily Mail at the time. But within months of Evelyn’s arrival in Britain, Peter, 67, had repeatedly tried to seduce his bewildered African ‘daughter’, all the while playing the part of loving husband and doting grandfather. It was the ultimate betrayal and one which split this unorthodox family apart. Distraught, Evelyn fled back to Gambia, preferring life as an impoverished single mother to the trauma of Peter’s unwanted advances. Meanwhile a humiliated and heartbroken Linda was left to contemplate the wreckage of her once-happy relationship.
