No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other. Alex Kerr
school rather than her own. Most days Dad’s bedroom door would be closed when we came in and we would have no idea if he was in the house or not. It didn’t worry us as long as the door remained closed, because we were used to living our lives without him. Isobel was still at lower school, so she would have been about seven when Rita stopped escorting us to school in the mornings and Mum told us we were old enough to go back and forth alone as long as we were together. I suppose she needed to save as much money as possible since she was supporting the family on one teaching salary. It wasn’t that far to walk but we did have to cross the main road, which was pretty scary, and I would hold on tightly to Isobel’s hand. From then on, my sister looked after me pretty much all the time that Mum was at work. Even though she was only two years older than me it seemed to come very naturally to her. She hardly ever complained about it because we got on so easily together. I was pretty stubborn about things I felt strongly about, but I wasn’t one to argue or throw tantrums or make her life difficult unnecessarily. We didn’t have much time for anything like that anyway, because there was always so much to do from the moment we woke up to the moment we fell back to sleep.
Isobel and I would usually be woken up by the sound of Mum going out the front door at seven-thirty in the morning. It would then be our job to take our mongrel, Alfie, out for a walk before we left, so that he would be able to hold on till we got back. We all knew Dad wouldn’t be willing to get up and take him out during the day. If anything made Alfie bark, it would drive Dad completely mad.
Sometimes when we got up Isobel and I would come downstairs and find that Mum had overslept and was still curled up on the sofa, completely laid out with exhaustion and we would have to wake her so she could dash out to work.
We have quite a lot of photographs from our childhood, but hardly any of Mum – probably because she was the one holding the camera. Dad would never have agreed to take photographs of her. There are one or two pictures in the old family albums of Dad playing with us when we were young. He looks quite happy and normal in them, but it can’t have happened that often because I have no memory of him doing anything nice with us. I think there used to be more pictures of him but he ripped them up during one of his rampages, when he was thumping around shouting: ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with any of you!’
He destroyed a lot of the pictures of Isobel, too, because he hated her so much. ‘She looks too much like your mother,’ he told me, as if that was explanation enough.
There are still a lot of snaps that have survived despite his worst efforts, so Mum must have been very handy with the camera. It’s more evidence of how proud she was of us and how important we were to her, which was probably why we were able to put up with Dad’s lack of love relatively stoically. He wasn’t able to undermine our feelings of self-worth because Mum had done such a good job of building them up in the first place.
There’s one snap of us all on a beach together, like a normal family, but we don’t know where that could be because neither Isobel or I can remember him ever coming on holiday with us. He built a climbing frame for us in the garden too, so there must have been moments when he did the right thing, but such moments became rarer as time passed and life made him more angry.
I was about seven when Granddad died, meaning that we couldn’t go to Torquay on holiday any more. Mum still took us to Devon or Cornwall in the summer holidays, but there was never any question of Dad coming along. We certainly wouldn’t have wanted him to. We used to spend our time bike riding, swimming in the sea and trying every activity we could find. All of us liked to be busy and stimulated; we were never ones for sitting around and relaxing, whereas Dad did nothing else. When it was just the three of us together we always got on well, all interested in doing the same sorts of things. I nearly always got sunburned because I’m pale-skinned and we were spending virtually all the daylight hours outdoors.
Granddad didn’t leave any money to Mum in his will, which she was very hurt about at the time. I expect he wanted to keep his money out of Dad’s clutches, so he put it in a trust set up so that Isobel and I and Nan’s grandchildren would each receive a few thousand pounds when we turned eighteen. All Mum inherited was his old car, which I think she thought was a bit unfair. It was probably very wise of Granddad considering what happened in the end.
When Dad eventually took against me as well, he would often deny that I was his son, accusing Mum of having had an affair. It was a ridiculous accusation because Mum was the least likely person ever to do such a thing and because I looked just like him. In fact, by then I would have been quite pleased to have found out that I wasn’t anything to do with him. He had an unlimited appetite for unpleasantness. He would make things up just to provoke a fight and to give himself an excuse to be vile to Mum or Isobel, and later on to me as well. In the early days he wanted me to join in with him in everything, even his drinking. I can remember the first time he made me drink whisky when I was about eight or nine, but I hated the taste so much I wouldn’t take more than a few sips. It was as if he was trying to mould me into being more like him and less like Mum and Isobel, goading me on to be a bit of a rebel.
When I was little he liked to take me out into the garage with him while he was fiddling with the cars, making out that we were doing it together although in reality I was just sitting there watching him most of the time. I think he was more interested in separating me from Mum in order to annoy her than in actually trying to teach me anything useful.
I was on my own with him in the house the day he had a stroke. I was just six years old and Mum had taken Isobel to her karate lesson. Dad and I had been messing about with the car in the garage. We came back into the house and as he started to walk upstairs he suddenly collapsed and crashed back down onto the hall floor. I don’t think I panicked; I just went over to shake him and call to him, thinking he had fallen asleep. When I found I couldn’t rouse him, I sat down on top of him to wait until Mum and Isobel got back. I wasn’t particularly scared. I was confident that Mum would know what to do. She always did.
When Mum and I got home on the day of Dad’s stroke, she put her key in the lock as usual and pushed the door, but it immediately hit an obstacle, refusing to open wide enough to let us in. Peering through the gap we could see Dad lying across the hallway where he had fallen down the stairs, motionless. Alex was sitting on top of him, waiting patiently, as he always did for everything.
‘Dad’s asleep,’ he told us, solemnly.
‘We’ll come in the back,’ Mum told him and we hurried round the house to let ourselves in through the kitchen.
Mum knew immediately that Dad wasn’t asleep and an ambulance must have been called, although I don’t remember it arriving. I do remember going to visit him in hospital later, as he recovered. It wasn’t until many years afterwards that we discovered that Mum had told our godmother, Helen, that she had hoped he would die that day. She called Helen to come over before she dialled 999 and apparently said she was considering not calling an ambulance for a while, in the hope that he would just slip peacefully away. It would have been a merciful release for all of us if that had happened, but Mum would never actually have been able to do such a thing, however miserable he was making her life by then. If he had died that day maybe we would still have Mum with us today. Things must already have been very bad between them for her to be thinking such terrible thoughts about him. Not all strokes are fatal, though, so we’ll never know if it would have done much harm to have left him on the hall floor a bit longer.
He recovered almost completely over the coming months, although his movement never came back completely because he refused to have the physiotherapy that the doctors recommended. He wouldn’t have wanted to put himself in someone else’s power like that. He needed to be separate from the world and having someone manipulating him physically would probably have felt too personal. He hardly ever spoke to us so it was hard to tell if his speech had been affected, as it can be after a stroke; as far as I’m