No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other. Alex Kerr
a few minutes nothing happened and then the eerie quiet of the afternoon was shattered by screeching tyres and brakes as another squad car arrived and disgorged four more officers. I could hear further vehicles arriving behind them, stopping wherever they could, filling the street. Now there was a real sense of urgency buzzing all around me as I sat on the wall and waited for someone to tell me what I should do. I kept wondering where Mum was, but at the same time not wanting to think about the possible answer to that question. Please no.
Dad was still standing in the doorway as if he had been expecting the police all along and he didn’t protest as one of the policemen read him his rights. ‘You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.’ Dad didn’t struggle as they searched him; he raised his arms to let them pat down his jeans and t-shirt top. They removed a knife from his jeans pocket, handling it carefully as if it was something precious.
‘Can I say something to my son?’ Dad asked them, glancing over towards me for the first time.
‘You should have thought of that before,’ the senior officer said and I was quite relieved. I couldn’t imagine that I would want to hear anything he might have to say to me at that stage. I never wanted to hear anything he said, in fact. It felt good to have the protection of the policemen, but I just wished I understood why they were swarming all over us now when they had never done anything to help us before, on any of the occasions when Isobel had called them because Dad was being violent.
I watched from the wall as they led Dad out of the house. Several policemen formed a kind of ring around me and I got the impression that they thought I might try to go with him, but they needn’t have worried; I wasn’t intending to go anywhere, certainly not with Dad. They led him to the second police car and bent him down so he could slide into the back seat. I watched as the shiny bald crown of his head disappeared inside. By that stage seven more police cars had arrived, as well as five unmarked cars, two ambulances and a paramedic car. It was hard to imagine where they could all have come from to get there so quickly. Had they just been sitting around waiting for something to do? The whole street was jammed solid with vehicles.
None of the police said anything to me, all of them apparently too busy trying to work out what they should be doing. I was just waiting for Isobel to get there because she would know what we should do; she would talk to them and find out what was going on. I could always rely on Isobel. Where on earth was she? A few minutes later, I was filled with relief when I saw her familiar figure turning into the road.
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;