No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other

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.

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