Читать книгу No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other - Alex Kerr - Страница 5

The greatest mystery is why Mum and Dad ever got together in the first place because Alex and I never saw the slightest sign of any bond of affection or attraction between them. Even when couples have been worn down by years of money worries, job worries and family worries, you can usually see some remnants of the love that must once have been there – but not with our Mum and Dad. You could see that Mum wanted to please him, but only because she was frightened of what he would do if she didn’t, and because she wanted a quiet life more than anything else. He, on the other hand, could never hide his loathing of her for even a second and took great pleasure in making her life as difficult as possible.

If there was any sort of romance or love story in their background, neither of them ever mentioned it to Alex or me, and there’s no one else we can ask because there are no other family members who knew them when they were young. Our family was never very good at talking about emotions or soul-searching. We all just got on with the business of daily life, pushing unpleasant thoughts to the backs of our minds in the hope they would go away if we ignored them for long enough.

The only source of information we have about the past is Jillian, who was Mum’s good friend at the school where she taught for twenty-three years, and one of the very few people to whom she ever confided any of those sorts of secrets. Mum didn’t believe in sharing personal information with anyone unless she had to. She kept everything locked inside her head, probably trying to forget most of it herself. Several teaching colleagues who had known her for twenty years or more didn’t even realise she was married, although they knew all about Alex and me and our achievements. She wouldn’t have encouraged conversations about her marriage and there certainly wasn’t anything nice she could say about Dad. I know she wouldn’t have wanted to let anyone else know that her personal life was a horrible nightmare.

As far as we could see, Mum and Dad were totally unsuited to one another, and Dad was totally unsuited to family life in any form at all. He should probably never have married and he should certainly never have had children. Of course we didn’t realise that when we were young; we assumed lots of fathers behaved the way he did. Our friends’ dads were at work most of the time so we didn’t have much contact with them; our social world was largely made up of other children and their mothers, so the fact that our Dad remained locked inside his bedroom most of the time didn’t seem particularly odd to start with. It was just the way things were done in our house.

We do know that when Mum and Dad first met, her parents weren’t at all happy about the match. Maybe that was part of the attraction for Mum – her one and only act of rebellion against Granddad, who was the big authority figure in her life. She had come from a very disciplined background and it may be she wanted to prove to my grandfather, who was in the military police, that she could make her own decisions, that she wasn’t going to be under his thumb all her life. If that is the case, it was a very bad decision and one she must have regretted bitterly. But once Mum had made a commitment to something there was no way she would ever go back on it. She had agreed to marry Dad and to stay with him ‘for better and for worse’, and she never for a second wavered from that path even though the places it led her were always ‘worse’ and never ‘better’. Maybe she just wanted to have children and Dad was the first person to propose to her. I’ll never know now.

Nan and Granddad lived in a bungalow in Torquay and we would go with Mum to visit them every half term and during the holidays, but Dad never came with us. They wanted nothing to do with him and I imagine he wanted nothing to do with them either. There must have been something about him right from the beginning that made it obvious he wouldn’t make a good husband for Mum, or for anyone come to that. Neither Granddad nor Nan ever said anything about him in front of us; in fact I don’t remember his name ever being mentioned in their company. As far as they were concerned, it was as if he didn’t exist.

Even once he’d retired from the army, Granddad was still incredibly strict and humourless, constantly barking out orders and finding fault with everything we did, as if he was inspecting us on the parade ground. By the time we knew him he was already an old man who spent most of his time sitting in a chair puffing on his pipe and glowering at us if we made a sound, but it was easy to imagine how fierce he must have been with Mum when she was young. We were never allowed to play when he was around; we had to sit still and keep quiet. We could only have fun if we went out somewhere with Mum and Nan, or played outside with the other kids in the area with whom we had made friends during our visits. Alex and I were always quite good at making friends in new places, never troubled with shyness.

Granddad didn’t seem to care much for any of us, and Alex and I certainly didn’t like him. Maybe he was disappointed with the way Mum’s life had turned out, but he didn’t seem to make any effort to improve things for her, apart from letting us come to stay with him in the holidays. If he was as irritated by our invasion of his peace and quiet as he seemed to be then I suppose that was a sacrifice we should be grateful to him for making.

Nan was Mum’s stepmother. Her real mother had died very young, while Mum was still a teenager, but as far as Alex and I were concerned Granddad’s wife was our real grandma; she was the only one we ever knew and no one told us that our real grandma was dead until we were much older. It was another of those things that wasn’t talked about. Our family was full of secrets like that; things that were just never mentioned because they were felt to be too personal and private or possibly even too painful. Alex and I knew instinctively not to ask questions, that Mum didn’t want to talk about any personal things. None of it really mattered to us as long as she was around anyway. Children only really care about their own little worlds and because she took care of everything in our lives we never had any reason to delve into the shadows of our family history.

By the time we were old enough to want to understand more about the past, it was too late because Mum and Nan and Granddad were all dead. As long as we were small we didn’t have to question why anything was how it was because Mum made sure everything worked out okay. We knew her world revolved around us and that she would do anything for us, so there was no need for soul searching, no need to try to poke our noses into corners of our family business that she obviously preferred to ignore. We had enough to occupy and stimulate our minds as it was. Children are usually happy to accept life at face value as long as they feel secure and loved and know where they stand. We always knew exactly where we stood with Mum.

I was about ten when Granddad died, and Alex was seven. Nan moved to King’s Lynn and died not long afterwards herself. It must have been a blow to Mum despite her difficult relationship with her father, because the trips to Torquay had been an escape for her and us, allowing us to get away from Dad and all the problems at home. Although Granddad was a joyless man, he was still a lot nicer to her than Dad, and Nan was always sweet and friendly. Apart from anything else they had provided us with holiday accommodation and there was no way Mum could afford to take us away so often once we didn’t have somewhere free to stay.

I think Dad’s family background must have been very different to Mum’s, although we never met anyone who knew anything about him or his childhood. It was almost as though he had arrived in our house fully formed as a reclusive middle-aged man, with no history and no past that was ever spoken about. Mum never talked about him and we certainly wouldn’t have asked him any direct questions. We knew a few basic facts, and we found out a few more at his trial, but nothing that actually shed any light on how he became the man we knew.

He was from the north-east, Newcastle I think, born in 1948, and we have been told he was one of a family of twelve, but we have never met his parents or any of his brothers or sisters so we have no way of knowing if that is true. Even when one of his brothers came to work in Redditch, the town south of Birmingham where we lived at the time, we still didn’t get to meet him. I don’t know if he and Dad saw each other then, but Dad would never have introduced him to us anyway. He liked to keep each part of his life secret and separate from every other part, as if that gave him some sort of illusion of control. He hated Mum and me, for reasons I have never fully understood, so why would he want to introduce us to his brother? He probably hated his brother as well, although I never remember him even mentioning him. He hated pretty much everyone, except Alex.

Every so often Mum would say something that gave us the tiniest glimpse into the past, but we were too young to find out more. I know that Dad had already been in trouble with the law by the time he met Mum, although I’m not sure what for. I believe he had run away from home and had spent some time in borstal for stealing. He always claimed that that spell in borstal was ‘the best time of his life’, as if he was remembering happy school days. I can imagine that was true, because he never liked having responsibility for anything, or taking decisions, or looking after himself. Being locked up in an institution that took care of every decision for him would have suited him perfectly. He was never any good at dealing with money or paying bills or any of the mundane chores that the outside world demands of you. So although we never knew the details of the crime he had committed to be locked up in such a place, we got the impression he was a bit of a tearaway from the start. That certainly wouldn’t have appealed to a disciplined and authoritative military man like Granddad.

Dad said a few things at his trial about how hard his childhood had been, claiming that was why he was the way he was, but the judge didn’t seem to take any notice. Nothing that could have happened to him as a child in the nineteen-fifties could justify what he did that afternoon in January 2002.

I suspect that even as a girl Mum was always bright and hard-working. I expect she was eager to please Granddad to begin with and that he put pressure on her to do her best at school. She went to university a little bit later than most people, when she was already well into her twenties. She never told us what happened in those intervening years, but once she was set on her life’s course to graduate and become a science teacher, nothing would distract or deter her.

She went from her home in Manchester to university in London and it was while she was there that she met Dad, who had come down from Newcastle around the same time to work as a computer repairman. Maybe they found they had common ground because both of them had escaped from their families and were living alone in a big, strange city. Maybe because she was a bit older than most of the other students on her course she didn’t have many friends in the university, and Dad was almost certainly a bit of a loner himself. Whatever the reasons, they moved in together in Finsbury Park, north London, and embarked on their doomed relationship.

Once she had her degree Mum went to work in a school in Wolverhampton and they got married in 1979. They bought a house in Redditch, a town about an hour’s drive from Wolverhampton. I’ve no idea how they came to choose Redditch and why they didn’t live nearer to the school where Mum worked, but they were still there when I was born in 1986. I never questioned it because that was just the way things were. All our lives the routine was the same, with Alex and me going to school locally, Mum commuting to Wolverhampton and Dad locked inside his bedroom in the house. The hour’s commute meant Mum had to get up early every morning in order to drive herself to work for the start of school, but she would always be back in time to take Alex and me to our evening activities, and she was always there with us during the school holidays. So, apart from her not being around to get us to school in the mornings, she was there for us whenever we wanted her and we had no reason to want things to be any different. Small children are very accepting of the status quo as long as they feel loved and cared for. However bad our parents’ relationship was, we had no reason to feel insecure ourselves.

All the driving Mum had to do at the beginning and end of each working day must have been horribly tiring for her, although she never complained about it. She hardly ever complained about anything when we were young, never discussed anything to do with emotions or feelings, just got on with the practical matters of life in the most efficient way possible. It was only as we got into our teens that the strain began to show, the exhaustion wearing away her patience more and more frequently. If we had only known about the pressure she was under during those years we might have taken more care of her, but she never told us anything, just soldiered grimly on.

She definitely enjoyed her work, maybe because she knew she was good at it and had the respect of all her colleagues. We didn’t really think about what she might be like as a teacher, but I remember that she always seemed to know everything about her pupils – about their hopes and ambitions and the progress they made towards realising them. She seemed to take a genuine interest and to have their best interests at heart almost as much as she had ours.

We went to her school a few times when there was some special event, like a piano exam we had to attend, and it always seemed to me to have a pretty tough atmosphere. I remember sitting outside her classroom once, hearing the pupils kicking off and making a noise in a way we would never have done at our school. She did say once or twice she wouldn’t want to live in Wolverhampton, even though it would be more convenient for travelling, because she would always be bumping into kids in the town centre and they were more than likely to be shouting abuse. I suppose that sort of behaviour happens in most schools but Alex and I never came across it in our own school because we were always in the top sets for everything, where kids tend to be more motivated to learn and better behaved as a result.

Mum was already head of the science department by the time I was aware of what she did for a living, and her friend Jillian was her personal laboratory technician. She didn’t talk to us about events at the school much, but I remember the skin on her hands had become stained and thickened over the years from constant contact with a variety of chemicals. It grew so thick eventually that she was able to lift baking trays and casseroles in and out of ovens without even feeling the heat. Her appearance never concerned her; she was too busy all the time rushing to get on with whatever she had to do next, whether it was driving us somewhere, shopping or marking school work, to even think about it. She had a short, easy-to-keep haircut and wore smart, practical skirts and blouses with low-heeled shoes for work. I don’t ever remember her dressing up for an evening out; she wasn’t the dressy type.

Mum was already working with Jillian and her other colleagues at the time Alex and I were born, so she had been talking to them about us all our lives. They knew all about us even though we knew nothing about them. Her office was covered in pictures of us, and we were never in any doubt how much she loved us and how proud she was of our achievements; it just felt strange to think of her talking about us to virtual strangers.

She can’t have talked much to anyone about Dad because they didn’t seem to know anything about him. Jillian told us later that Mum had tried inviting a few of her closest work friends back home for supper when she first joined the school, before I was born, but Dad obviously hadn’t been keen.

‘Once we were all there,’ she told me, ‘he came walking into the room completely naked. Your poor mother didn’t know what to say. It was as if he was doing everything in his power to make us feel uncomfortable and threatened, to make sure that Mum would never ask us or anyone else back.’

I guess he was trying to demonstrate that his house was his private kingdom and that he resented the fact he had to share it with Mum, let alone with complete strangers. He probably felt threatened by the thought of a bunch of teachers talking about the sort of things that interested them, and felt as if he was being deliberately excluded in some way. He wanted to keep Mum all to himself. He was happy enough for her to go out and earn money to keep him but he didn’t want her working life encroaching on his territory. Mum must have got the message pretty quickly because she stopped inviting people to the house after that – not that any of them were likely to want to come back once they had experienced the full weirdness of being in a confined space with Dad. We were used to his oddities, like leaving all the doors and windows open in mid-winter, or threatening to hang himself, or walking round naked, or leaving rude messages for Mum on the white board that hung in the kitchen, but other people found it quite intimidating.

Some women would have realised at that early stage that they had made a mistake in their choice of husband and would have got themselves out of the relationship as quickly as they could, but Mum had made a commitment and she was going to stick to it, however hard Dad might make it for her.

They got married in a registry office and from the few photographs that survive it doesn’t look as though any of their families or friends attended the ceremony. The only other people pictured apart from the happy couple themselves are their two witnesses, neither of whom we recognise. It’s possible they were strangers brought in off the street to make the process legal. It seems that Dad had already cut himself off completely from his family by then and that Granddad was not willing to relent in his disapproval of the match, not even on the wedding day itself. It must have been sad for Mum that it was such a low-key affair but, knowing Dad, it probably suited him right down to the ground.

By going through with a marriage to a man her father hated, Mum had shown that she was willing and able to stand up to him. I imagine in most cases where the parents disapprove of their children’s choice of partner, they relent and put a brave face on it during the actual wedding day, but it doesn’t look as if anyone in our family was willing to climb down from their high horse and compromise. For Mum it must have seemed like a bleak start to their married life, but maybe she convinced herself that she liked it, that it was her choice too, that she ‘didn’t want any fuss’. That would have been entirely in character.

She looks happy in those early photos, quite normal really. Dad looks a bit of a sinister presence in the background, wearing a black suit and shades, but maybe that’s just with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe because we know how disturbed and dangerous he later became we assume the signs were all there to start with. It’s strange for us looking at old pictures of him before he lost his hair and before he started to bulk up and become heavy-looking. To the casual glance they look like a normal young couple starting out on life’s journey together.

When they moved to Redditch and bought the house, they put it into their joint names. With that simple and normal marital action, Mum entrapped herself still further. To escape from Dad after that would have meant giving up her home as well as her marriage, an option that became impossible for her to countenance once she had one, and then two children.

Our home was a very normal, three-bedroom, semidetached Victorian house with an extraordinarily long garden behind it, just like a million others up and down the country – but most of them house perfectly normal, happy families. No one walking past on the quiet street outside and glancing up at our windows would have been able to imagine that there was anything sinister or out of the ordinary developing behind its façade.

Mum didn’t have me until she was thirty-five. I don’t know why she waited so long or why she finally decided to start a family then, when there must already have been problems in their relationship. Maybe she wanted to get to a certain point in her career first, or maybe she got pregnant by mistake, or maybe she was trying to get pregnant all those years and it just took a long time. We never talked about such personal matters with her, so now we will never know. Whatever the reasons, from the moment Alex and I arrived in the world she was completely focused and dedicated to guiding us to fulfil every ounce of potential we might possess. Perhaps that was when the cracks in the marriage really started to show, when Dad no longer had her undivided attention and he realised he was going to have to share her with two demanding little newcomers.

There are pictures of Dad holding me as a baby and smiling. It seems unbelievable to me that such a scene could ever have happened because I have no memory of a time when he didn’t hate me and Mum. In fact by the end he hated almost everyone to some degree. We didn’t know the full extent of it until his trial, but even before Alex and I were born Dad was creating trouble in the street and getting a reputation with the neighbours for being a nightmare. There were times when he would wander into people’s gardens uninvited and move everything around, digging up and replanting flowers and bushes. No one could work out whether he thought he was being helpful to his neighbours or if he was deliberately trying to annoy them. Few liked to challenge him because he was a frightening-looking man – tall, aggressive and unkempt, with a mean face. Most normal people were intimidated by him. He didn’t care what anyone thought of him, but he wanted them to know just how much he hated them. He had a citizen’s band radio fitted into his van and he connected it to loudspeakers and drove up and down the street shouting and swearing, broadcasting his views to the world, like a foul-mouthed politician on some bizarre mutation of an election battle bus. He had big bull bars fitted to the front so that he could push and bully his way into parking spaces, making everyone hate him even more. He was antisocial in every possible way.

He particularly terrorised the old lady next door to us, shooting water pistols at her through the fence when she was out in her garden and shouting abuse at her. One night her garage caught fire in mysterious circumstances and the fire brigade had to be called to extinguish it. To my amazement Alex didn’t even wake up amidst the clamour of bells and shouting. The fire officers said the fire had definitely been started deliberately but there was no proof it was Dad so nobody had the nerve to accuse him to his face.

There was a family living opposite us whom Mum, Alex and I became very friendly with, despite Dad’s antics. Mum asked the couple, Helen and Steve, to be our godparents when we were baptised. They had four children ranging from our age upwards and were a normal happy family, so we always liked going over there to visit. For the first fifteen or so years of my life we all grew up together and I know Mum looked on them as the people she would have wanted us to go to if anything happened to her and Dad, since we had no close relatives. In fact, she told us so on several occasions. Their kids went to the same school as us, and did many of the same after-school activities, so Mum and Helen spent a lot of time together, often combining resources and driving one another’s children along with their own. I think Mum confided more to Helen than she did to anyone else in our neighbourhood, although I never overheard them talking about anything very personal.

I was friendly with one of their daughters, who was roughly the same age as me, and when we were young she came to our house for tea a few times. She even stayed to have a bath with me once, but Dad liked to bath us at that stage and my friend didn’t feel comfortable with that, which was hardly surprising. She didn’t come round much after that occasion, which was fine with me because it meant I got to go to her house instead or to play outside more. Any excuse to get out of the house and away from Dad’s silent, scowling presence was always welcome. Even when he was locked in his room we could sense his malevolence all over the house, all of us waiting nervously for him to emerge unexpectedly somewhere, shouting at us to get out of his sight.