My brother Patrick remembers my first beating, of which I assume I was completely unaware. He was just five years old when he watched our mother punching herself again and again in her pregnant stomach while shouting at the top of her voice, ‘I don’t want this fucking child!’Ken and Patrick Doyle grew up in a family of nine children. For sixteen years their home was a place of suffering. Behind the doors of their ordinary, three-bedroomed house they were subjected to deprivation, cruelty and humiliation at the hands of the one person who should have loved and protected them – their own mother. Starved, savagely beaten, locked up for days on end and sent out to steal, their story is a catalogue of abuse. Yet, despite numerous official reports of abuse from social workers and health boards, their suffering continued … In Mummy from Hell, the victims tell the horrifying true story of their childhood and how they survived it.