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

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; 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.