My life as a fugitive: Woman who fled abroad to keep her baby and son, 8, calls the Mail to tell of her ordeal on the run

The woman says she is refusing to return home because she fears her eight-year-old son will be adopted and her baby daughter taken into care.

If caught, she faces seven years in prison for abducting her elder child from his foster home.

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Her husband has already been jailed for 16 months for his role in spiriting the boy, his stepson, out of the country.

The family cannot be identified because of controversial rules governing cases before the secretive Family Courts.

"Being in hiding is like an intricate game of chess, always a question of staying one move ahead of them," the mother told the Mail yesterday.

"It isn't fair on us to be on the run but I love my son and I cannot allow him to be taken from me. All I want is to sort out this mess and go back and have a happy family life.

"I cannot understand why it has escalated to this and why it cannot be sorted out."

She gave birth in November - seven weeks early - after a dramatic airlift to hospital from her mountainside refuge.

"I moved every week at first, now every couple of weeks," she said. "The longest I have stayed anywhere is a month, when the baby was born, but the police found the accommodation and turned up when I was at the hospital.

"I found out when I got back and packed my bags and left."

Judges were told this week that she separated from her son's father, her first husband, in 2004 after a volatile marriage.

The mother - a professional woman in her 40s - claims she was told the boy would be taken into temporary foster care until she "sorted her life out". But when she asked for his return, social services refused.

The mother, who claims she was the victim of domestic violence, said she was then told the boy, Child S, would be returned to her if she fulfilled four conditions. But last year, a Family Court judge ruled that he must be put up for adoption.

"The judge who originally took S away into temporary foster care said it was because I hadn't done enough to protect him from emotional abuse from my ex-husband," the mother said.

"She (the judge) felt I should have got out of the marriage a lot earlier and protected S from seeing all that. He can remember seeing me being backed into a corner and my ex-husband hurling abuse at me, throwing bricks at our animals and breaking our dog's legs.

"But they never said I had mistreated my son."

She says she will not reveal her hiding-place, adding: "I would never give myself up while there is a warrant for my arrest because I would end up in prison, the same as my husband, and they would take my son and the baby away. It would all be for nothing.

"I am not coming back voluntarily because they told such lies in court, I cannot trust them."

Her second husband, a 56-year-old businessman, has never seen their daughter. Last week, his appeal to have his sentence reduced was dismissed and he was told he deserved "real punishment" to deter other parents.

The mother said she decided to flee partly because she risked losing her second child after birth.

"The social worker was threatening to take the baby away as well," she said. "I don't know what her reasons were.

"My health visitor said there were never any concerns about my parenting of S while he was in my sole care. He was described as thriving."

Despite being pregnant, she made up her mind to leave Britain when her son told her he was unhappy at his foster home.

"I decided to go because S had threatened to run away several times and I was really worried about him wandering around by himself," she said.

"At one of my supervised access visits, he said he was going to run away at four in the morning.

"We were in an outdoor play area and I asked him when but he couldn't say because the social worker came back.

"I went to his school the next day and talked to him through the fence. I said I would pick him up. The clinic he was attending had said he was distraught living apart from me, his schoolwork had suffered and he was now below average at school and his behaviour deteriorated.

"He was being aggressive and moody and bursting into tears at school. He kept telling them he was unhappy but no one listened."

The mother, her second husband and S went to Dover and bought one-way tickets to France.

Although an articulate and educated woman from a middleclass professional background, she admits that she did not realise the full consequences of her actions.

"I didn't know it would all blow up, out of proportion," she said.

"I didn't realise everyone would go berserk and the police would get involved. I thought I would be able to look after S and deal with the courts but they went berserk and made up a pack of lies that we had abducted S.

"I have written to the police, saying I want to sort it out, but I haven't heard anything. They broke into my house and took boxes of paperwork and newspaper articles about other children taken into care. They took a letter that my husband and I had written setting out the reasons why we had gone.

"Our situation is horrible and I cannot see a way out of it at the moment. But I do know that it is not just us who are suffering. There are hundreds of people this is happening to."