ASHAMED and frightened Sharon Dick watched her son taken to jail a terrible crime, went home, locked the door and did not leave for two days.

Her son, Craig, well-known on the Teesside music scene as a drummer, was well-liked and never in any trouble with the police before. She had felt pride in him. Now she feels “disgust.”

Disgust at the state he let his home get to, especially the living conditions his children endured, which led to his conviction at Teesside Crown Court for cruelty last month.

Yesterday,The Northern Echo published details of a social workers report which told how her son's partner, Gillian Hendry, failed to take her 12-year-old son to hospital appointments which led him to go blind in one eye. The neglected boy had even written 'help me' on the wall outside his bedroom.

Sitting in her tidy, clean living room, Sharon says she is in a “a living nightmare, a nightmare I can’t wake up from.”

Craig and his partner, Gillian Hendry, allowed their Thornaby home get to a filthy state almost beyond imagining: faeces on bedroom walls; infestations of flies.

Sharon, 53, insists no-one was more shocked than her. As well as the shame, she was scared to leave her home after reading online comments that the family should be hanged.

And yet she believes it would not have taken much for things to have turned out differently. “Craig and Gillian were always making excuses why we couldn’t call round,” she says, “especially in the last few months. Before that the house wasn’t anything like as bad as the pictures in the paper and I’m convinced it got a lot worse in the last period. If they’d only have let us in, we would have helped them, cleaned the place up, taken action.”

Sharon suddenly becomes louder and prouder again. “Craig never grew up like that, to be unclean, people who know us, know that. We haven’t actually had anything but support from people that know us.

“Craig’s upbringing was difficult.

“Craig wasn’t responsible for (the boy) in the same way as Gillian. And it’s wrong when people say, ‘they blinded him and they should now be blinded'. He had a condition that sent him blind. His mother didn’t take him to hospital, terrible, but they didn’t actually blind him, certainly not my son who did not have the same responsibility.

“But I can understand why people write ‘scum.’ I’d feel the same.”

Sharon believes Gillian Hendry should have been offered more support from social services. Told social workers had been alerted to potential problems at least four years before she even met Sharon’s son, she argues Craig should have been informed: “If we'd known, we would have told him, we’d have said, ‘She’ll drag you down.’”

Sharon isn't angry at Hendry. Instead she believes she had “a good heart” but couldn’t cope with ordinary life. Sharon doesn’t say it, but in court her son was described as “an inadequate man with a troubled childhood” himself.

After the children were taken away by social services, Sharon did get in the home. She cleaned up, spending eight hours just cleaning the bathroom. But it was too late.

For Sharon, who seriously considered disowning Craig, there are “good days and bad days.” Craig’s sisters Leanne and Kelly, say they feel “angry” and “lost”. A close family tested to the limit. Scared and ashamed, they are also victims of a crime they had nothing to do with, but for which they receive little public sympathy.

And what of the12-year-old boy who will never see out of one eye again?

That social worker’s report gives cause for hope.

The boy often described in the report as unhygienic and uncommunicative and desperately unhappy became a much happier child when the misery was lifted. His true personality emerged after a year with foster parents. Phrases like “confident,” and “good sense of humour,” and “popular” are used in the report which notes he now has friends, girlfriends and asks for hair gel to make sure his appearance is just right. His academic performance has improved and he loves reading.

A happy, fulfilled, normal life is the very least he deserves.