Knee Deep in Knightsbridge
Kate Sissons

There is no such thing as a common law wife. It simply does not exist in law in England and Wales.

In September 2006 a former Fleet Street journalist takes a call from her partner's accountant. The father of her son owes HMRC three million pounds, having gambled the family fortune on a single biotech share that promised a cure for dementia. In ten weeks she loses her home, her job and the man she loved. She moves her boy into The Hovel, a damp Knightsbridge basement that was once a brothel.

They never married, so the law gives her nothing of her own. For two years she fights through the family courts under the Children Act 1989 to make a multimillionaire house his own son. Then she takes on the Child Support Agency, which had assessed a rich man at nothing. She blogged every word of it. Her ex had her 365,000 words bound into twelve volumes and wheeled into court to have them banned. The judge read them and said, “Knee Deep is witty. I hope you can move on, find an agent and get it published.”

Knee Deep in Knightsbridge is a darkly funny diary memoir of a traumatic separation, and a view from the inside of what happens to an unmarried mother when the money goes. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the MP who took up her case, calls Kate Sissons “a great fighter in a good cause”. Ten per cent of royalties will go to Gingerbread, the charity for single parents.