No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other. Alex Kerr
and before I left the choir we would sometimes go on trips at weekends to sing at weddings in other churches or even cathedrals. Then we got paper rounds, which got us out of the house for a few hours on a Sunday morning and gave us some spending money of our own. Isobel got the round first, being older, and used it as another opportunity to go running, hauling a trolley behind her as she pounded the streets. When her weekend running commitments got too much, she handed the paper round on to me. The people who ran the newsagents were happy with that because it meant they could go on delivering the papers to the same address each week and they knew it was likely I would be reliable because Isobel had never let them down. The Sunday round was the best one to have because we didn’t have to get up as early as the weekday people, who had to finish their deliveries before going to school, but we still got paid the same rate. Part of the job was to insert advertising leaflets before delivering them. I managed to convince Mum that it was harder for me to do that because I was left-handed so she used to help me, much to Isobel’s annoyance.
Although doing so much meant our days often ended up being a bit of a rush, both Isobel and I were always happy to do whatever Mum suggested. It was the only way of life either of us could remember and large parts of our social lives revolved around the activities because that was where we made many of our friendships.
Compared to most boys my acts of rebellion were pretty minor, like talking in class or swearing at the choirmaster. I did bunk off school for a day now and again, but very seldom. To Mum, however, with her strict regime of education and self-improvement, this was a cardinal sin. She couldn’t bear the thought that I was wasting even the smallest opportunity to get a good education. On one of the few occasions I did wander off, she came home early one day to get her car serviced and caught me and my friends outside the school. She marched us all firmly back in through the gates, even though it was nearly the end of the school day by then, which was not good for my street credibility. She almost always came home at the same time, so I couldn’t believe my bad luck when I was caught on that occasion.
The school occasionally sent her letters about my general behaviour. She left before the post arrived in the mornings, so Isobel and I would try to intercept as many as we could before they reached her. Mum knew that I wasn’t concentrating fully on my work, even though I was still in the top set for just about every subject, and she became more and more exasperated with me the further I dug my heels in and rebelled against authority. At one stage she threatened to move me to her school, knowing how embarrassing it would be to have a mother who was on the staff, and knowing that I wouldn’t want to leave my friends. I knew it was an empty threat because she would never have done anything that might have endangered my education, so then she began threatening to send me to boarding school if I didn’t behave better. Even though I knew the cost of it would have been completely beyond her means, I never wanted to call her bluff on that one. She could be very determined when she set her mind on something. As well as not wanting to leave my established group of friends, I wouldn’t have wanted to be separated from Isobel.
‘I’ll go to boarding school,’ Isobel piped up in the middle of the argument about me leaving the choir, which deflected Mum’s wrath away from me for a while. Because of that interruption Isobel got kicked out of the house that night instead of me, even though she didn’t have any shoes on at the time.
Mum must have been bottling up so much anger and resentment that when some little thing like the choir incident happened she would completely lose her cool. She even kicked the dog out with Isobel, as if that would teach us all some sort of lesson. Alfie must have thought it was a bit of an adventure to be allowed out for an extra walk without his lead. At moments like that I think the whole world must suddenly have seemed to be against her and she imagined for a moment that she wanted to be rid of the lot of us. Her moods never lasted long, though – not like Dad’s endless, snarling misery.
Whenever Dad got to hear about me doing anything remotely naughty or rebellious he would be delighted and would encourage me, deliberately going against everything Mum was saying. He seemed determined to make me more like him and less like her and Isobel. I don’t know that his encouragement made much difference to me. I think I would have been behaving the same anyway, but it did give me a bit more courage to be cheeky at school, knowing that it won his approval. Every small boy wants to please his dad, even when he’s as weird as mine was. Once or twice I even went back to the house during the day with my friends when we should have been in school, and Dad seemed to approve, which impressed them. But as soon as Mum came home he told her all about it, wanting to rub her nose in how much she had lost control of me, I guess, and how her children weren’t always the hard-working little angels she would have liked them to be.
The strain on her during those years must have been enormous, and we didn’t know the half of it at that stage. I feel guilty when I look back now, but I was just being a normal, spirited teenage boy. In retrospect I guess her life was hard enough without that additional pressure.
The row started because Alex had got himself thrown out of choir practice and then announced he wanted to leave the choir altogether, but for some reason I was the one who ended up being thrown out of the house by Mum. Things just went completely mad for a few minutes.
As I stood outside on the drive in my socks, holding onto Alfie by the scruff of his neck, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Mum was in such a hysterical state that there didn’t seem to be any point in trying to get back in the house until she had calmed down. The only person I could think of to turn to for help was my godmother, Helen, who had moved away from our street by then but was still living in the area. I don’t think we had mobile phones at that stage – or at least if we did I didn’t have one on me, not having expected to be leaving the house quite so abruptly – so I had to knock on one of the neighbours’ doors and ask if I could use their house phone.
I don’t think they were surprised by the request because everyone in the nearby houses knew about Dad and assumed that our whole family was a bit dysfunctional. I rang Helen, who very kindly came and took Alfie and me back to her house before going to talk to Mum and attempting to calm her down and make her see sense. Helen was a good friend to Mum and one of the few people she allowed to get close to her. I expect Mum was already regretting her outburst by the time Helen got there. These sorts of temper storms always passed quite quickly and we would then return to our normal family routines as if nothing had happened, the hectic pace of our lives helping us to forget any lingering bad feelings. Dad wouldn’t usually come out of his room when Mum was kicking off. He had his own demons to fight in private. He had no interest in anything to do with any of us unless it affected him directly, and if Mum sounded upset that probably pleased him since he spent most of his time trying to achieve exactly that result.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how much Dad hated me. It started because I looked so much like Mum, or at least that was what he kept telling me, but it grew worse as I got older and started speaking out against him more often. He needed to be able to dominate everyone in his life completely, and Mum was mostly willing to let him get away with it in order to protect us and try to maintain a fragile peace in the house. As I entered my teens, however, I became less willing to put up with everything he did in silence. If he was attacking Mum I would often take her side, speaking up for her while she remained silent, and that made him loathe me all the more deeply. Arguments were usually based on him saying how dirty the house was, or that the vacuum cleaner hadn’t been put back in the right way, which was infuriating to me. The house was perfectly clean because Mum spent her weekends cleaning it, but nothing she did was ever right it seemed. It drove me crazy that Dad should have the nerve to complain when he sat around at home all day never lifting a finger.
Sometimes his attacks would escalate beyond mere shouting and he became physically violent. He would slap her and throw things at her while she tried frantically to pacify him by agreeing with everything he said, accepting all the criticism without