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; things that were just never mentioned because they were felt to be too personal and private or possibly even too painful. Alex and I knew instinctively not to ask questions, that Mum didn’t want to talk about any personal things. None of it really mattered to us as long as she was around anyway. Children only really care about their own little worlds and because she took care of everything in our lives we never had any reason to delve into the shadows of our family history.
By the time we were old enough to want to understand more about the past, it was too late because Mum and Nan and Granddad were all dead. As long as we were small we didn’t have to question why anything was how it was because Mum made sure everything worked out okay. We knew her world revolved around us and that she would do anything for us, so there was no need for soul searching, no need to try to poke our noses into corners of our family business that she obviously preferred to ignore. We had enough to occupy and stimulate our minds as it was. Children are usually happy to accept life at face value as long as they feel secure and loved and know where they stand. We always knew exactly where we stood with Mum.
I was about ten when Granddad died, and Alex was seven. Nan moved to King’s Lynn and died not long afterwards herself. It must have been a blow to Mum despite her difficult relationship with her father, because the trips to Torquay had been an escape for her and us, allowing us to get away from Dad and all the problems at home. Although Granddad was a joyless man, he was still a lot nicer to her than Dad, and Nan was always sweet and friendly. Apart from anything else they had provided us with holiday accommodation and there was no way Mum could afford to take us away so often once we didn’t have somewhere free to stay.
I think Dad’s family background must have been very different to Mum’s, although we never met anyone who knew anything about him or his childhood. It was almost as though he had arrived in our house fully formed as a reclusive middle-aged man, with no history and no past that was ever spoken about. Mum never talked about him and we certainly wouldn’t have asked him any direct questions. We knew a few basic facts, and we found out a few more at his trial, but nothing that actually shed any light on how he became the man we knew.
He was from the north-east, Newcastle I think, born in 1948, and we have been told he was one of a family of twelve, but we have never met his parents or any of his brothers or sisters so we have no way of knowing if that is true. Even when one of his brothers came to work in Redditch, the town south of Birmingham where we lived at the time, we still didn’t get to meet him. I don’t know if he and Dad saw each other then, but Dad would never have introduced him to us anyway. He liked to keep each part of his life secret and separate from every other part, as if that gave him some sort of illusion of control. He hated Mum and me, for reasons I have never fully understood, so why would he want to introduce us to his brother? He probably hated his brother as well, although I never remember him even mentioning him. He hated pretty much everyone, except Alex.
Every so often Mum would say something that gave us the tiniest glimpse into the past, but we were too young to find out more. I know that Dad had already been in trouble with the law by the time he met Mum, although I’m not sure what for. I believe he had run away from home and had spent some time in borstal for stealing. He always claimed that that spell in borstal was ‘the best time of his life’, as if he was remembering happy school days. I can imagine that was true, because he never liked having responsibility for anything, or taking decisions, or looking after himself. Being locked up in an institution that took care of every decision for him would have suited him perfectly. He was never any good at dealing with money or paying bills or any of the mundane chores that the outside world demands of you. So although we never knew the details of the crime he had committed to be locked up in such a place, we got the impression he was a bit of a tearaway from the start. That certainly wouldn’t have appealed to a disciplined and authoritative military man like Granddad.
Dad said a few things at his trial about how hard his childhood had been, claiming that was why he was the way he was, but the judge didn’t seem to take any notice. Nothing that could have happened to him as a child in the nineteen-fifties could justify what he did that afternoon in January 2002.
I suspect that even as a girl Mum was always bright and hard-working. I expect she was eager to please Granddad to begin with and that he put pressure on her to do her best at school. She went to university a little bit later than most people, when she was already well into her twenties. She never told us what happened in those intervening years, but once she was set on her life’s course to graduate and become a science teacher, nothing would distract or deter her.
She went from her home in Manchester to university in London and it was while she was there that she met Dad, who had come down from Newcastle around the same time to work as a computer repairman. Maybe they found they had common ground because both of them had escaped from their families and were living alone in a big, strange city. Maybe because she was a bit older than most of the other students on her course she didn’t have many friends in the university, and Dad was almost certainly a bit of a loner himself. Whatever the reasons, they moved in together in Finsbury Park, north London, and embarked on their doomed relationship.
Once she had her degree Mum went to work in a school in Wolverhampton and they got married in 1979. They bought a house in Redditch, a town about an hour’s drive from Wolverhampton. I’ve no idea how they came to choose Redditch and why they didn’t live nearer to the school where Mum worked, but they were still there when I was born in 1986. I never questioned it because that was just the way things were. All our lives the routine was the same, with Alex and me going to school locally, Mum commuting to Wolverhampton and Dad locked inside his bedroom in the house. The hour’s commute meant Mum had to get up early every morning in order to drive herself to work for the start of school, but she would always be back in time to take Alex and me to our evening activities, and she was always there with us during the school holidays. So, apart from her not being around to get us to school in the mornings, she was there for us whenever we wanted her and we had no reason to want things to be any different. Small children are very accepting of the status quo as long as they feel loved and cared for. However bad our parents’ relationship was, we had no reason to feel insecure ourselves.
All the driving Mum had to do at the beginning and end of each working day must have been horribly tiring for her, although she never complained about it. She hardly ever complained about anything when we were young, never discussed anything to do with emotions or feelings, just got on with the practical matters of life in the most efficient way possible. It was only as we got into our teens that the strain began to show, the exhaustion wearing away her patience more and more frequently. If we had only known about the pressure she was under during those years we might have taken more care of her, but she never told us anything, just soldiered grimly on.
She definitely enjoyed her work, maybe because she knew she was good at it and had the respect of all her colleagues. We didn’t really think about what she might be like as a teacher, but I remember that she always seemed to know everything about her pupils – about their hopes and ambitions and the progress they made towards realising them. She seemed to take a genuine interest and to have their best interests at heart almost as much as she had ours.
We went to her school a few times when there was some special event, like a piano exam we had to attend, and it always seemed to me to have a pretty tough atmosphere.
