No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other. Alex Kerr
of anger and partly out of fear, I would be screaming at him to leave her alone and threatening to call the police. He found the thought that I would dare to stand up to him almost unbearable and Mum would become desperate that I was winding him up even more by challenging him, but I couldn’t just stand by and watch him hitting her without saying anything. Perhaps her approach was more intelligent than mine. Maybe she already sensed just what he might be capable of if he was pushed too far, but to me at the time, with all the recklessness and ignorance of youth, it looked as though she was giving in to him, being a complete doormat, and my pride wouldn’t let me do the same.
On several occasions as I went to pick up the phone to call the police, Dad pushed me out of the way, threw an ornament at me, or lunged past me and ripped it out of the wall. He didn’t always manage to get there in time, however, and when I was eleven or twelve years old I managed to call them out on two separate occasions. Both times I truly believed that Mum was in real danger and needed grown-up help. Once I heard noises from my bedroom and came downstairs to find him punching her and throwing her around the room. I intervened and he swung a punch at me as well. I managed to get a call through to the police but in the few minutes it took them to turn up he had wrecked the house in his frustration and fury.
Even when the police were standing there in the room and she had a chance to tell them what he was like, Mum would never make a formal complaint or agree to press charges, so there was nothing they could do apart from warn him to calm down. On one occasion when he was particularly wild they took him down to the cells for a few hours to give him time to settle down, only allowing him home once they felt he was calm again. I remember we were all terrified that they would release him in the middle of the night. Alex and I were literally shaking with fear so all three of us slept in my bed till morning. Locking him up served the purpose at the time but did nothing to help our overall situation. His was a vendetta of hate that would outlast any short-term measures the police might be able to impose.
When he got home after his night in the cells we were out at our swimming practice with Mum and by the time we arrived back he had changed all the locks on the house so our keys didn’t work. Mum had to beg him through the letterbox to let us in, trying to avoid provoking a scene on the doorstep that the neighbours would hear. I suppose ultimately he had to let Mum back into the house because she was his only source of income, but he had made his point, showing that he could take control, lock us out and disrupt our lives whenever he chose if we displeased him or challenged him.
On one of the occasions when I called the police Dad ran upstairs and started stabbing himself in the arm with a fork so that when they arrived he could tell them that Mum had attacked him first, and show them the wounds to prove it. When they got there the police left Alex and me sitting on the stairs, just watching and listening and taking it all in. They didn’t ask us for our version of what had gone on, but just ignored us as if we were part of the furniture. Maybe they get called to so many domestic disturbances every day that they have a set method of dealing with them, but they never made us feel that they would be able to offer us or Mum any real protection from Dad should we need it. Later, when we were in court for Dad’s trial, a policeman read out his notes of the incident that night, talking about ‘two young and clearly very disturbed children’ being on the scene. If we were so clearly disturbed, why didn’t anyone do anything to help us, or even talk to us? Why did no one come back the next day after one of these fights to check we were okay? I suppose by not pressing charges Mum forced them to assume that she had the whole situation under control.
Most of the arguments happened late at night, when Dad would emerge from his room and expect to have the house to himself, or perhaps he would decide to go and waken Mum to raise some grudge he had been mulling over all day. Looking back, Dad was getting through a lot of whisky and I suspect the worst arguments probably happened when he was drunk. Alex was usually fast asleep by the time they started to shout and often didn’t wake up, allowing Dad to believe that he could still control him and keep him on his side, even if I was becoming openly rebellious to his tyranny.
If Mum was still up and about when Dad got downstairs it was almost inevitable that he would start picking a fight with her. Most of the time our routines meant that we were able to avoid him, but if something went differently it would make him feel threatened and he would immediately become aggressive. Sometimes, if he had fuelled himself up enough on whisky, he would keep the arguments going all night, forcing Mum to stay awake just so that he could shout at her, and me as well when I came downstairs to investigate. It didn’t bother him how long the fights went on for because he could just sleep through the next day, but we were exhausted and needed our sleep. He knew perfectly well how tired Mum got and exploited it sadistically. I think sometimes he picked fights simply to alleviate the boredom of his existence.
As he got older Alex started to be woken by the shouting as well and we would all end up only getting a couple of hours sleep, but however tired we were in the morning Mum would never consider for a second that we should be allowed a day off school. It was almost like a religious belief to her. She would never take a day off work, however ill or exhausted she felt, and she expected the same level of dedication, determination and discipline from us. We didn’t even bother to ask because we knew what her answer would be. I think my attendance rate was pretty close to a hundred per cent and Alex only managed to bunk off once or twice before Mum found out and put a stop to it. To be honest we were always pretty keen to get out of the house after a night of rowing anyway. We certainly didn’t want to be trapped there on our own with Dad if we could help it. Once we were with our friends at school, or concentrating in lessons, we could forget for a few hours the unpleasant things we had been forced to listen to in the small hours.
Even when Mum was left with bruises or marks on her face and arms from his beatings she would still go to work, telling colleagues that she had walked into a door or some such excuse, and we later discovered from Jillian that no one ever doubted her for a moment. No one at her school had the slightest idea that she was in an abusive relationship. Jillian and a couple of others knew she was married to a man who was odd, but most of them thought she was a single mother and never enquired any further. I suppose she just wasn’t the sort of person you would ever expect to be in that position, because she always seemed so vibrant and in control of every detail of her life.
The only people who I believe knew there was violence going on, and suspected that it was much worse than Mum was saying, were my godmother Helen and the lady vicar at our local church. They were the only two people Mum talked to about it and we discovered that both of them tried to persuade her to leave Dad before things got any worse. Near neighbours later testified that they could hear arguments going on all the time, but none of them wanted to interfere because Dad was such a frightening figure and because Mum seemed to be so capable and seemed to want to keep everything private. When our next-door neighbour on the other side from the old lady was asked why she had never called the police during any of the rows she said that it was because she and her husband were having their own marital problems at the time. Mum never wanted to make a fuss about anything. Perhaps if she had been a little less strong-willed and a little more willing to accept help she would still be alive today.
Mum was a keen churchgoer and would attend every Sunday. When Alex and I were both in the choir we spent even more time there, which could be boring at times although we had a lot of friends there. The biggest bonus to being in the choir was that occasionally we would get paid a few pounds for singing at a wedding. Mum was very proud of us because we got to visit all sorts of cathedrals around the country and once even went on a choir holiday to Wales. We both sang solos so I suppose we must have had pretty good voices.
I think Mum had strong Christian beliefs, although she didn’t talk about them much, and maybe that was another reason why she believed she had to soldier on with the marriage ‘for better or worse’. In her eyes she had made a commitment to my Dad and she was never one to weaken once she had done that. When I started to learn more about religion at school I would sometimes challenge her on her beliefs, like a typical teenager, but she never rose to the bait. Maybe she just went to church because she always had done and she liked the discipline and routine of it.
Although she and Dad hadn’t done anything about having us baptised when we were born, she wanted us to be able to get confirmed at the same time as our friends