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

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. I remember sitting outside her classroom once, hearing the pupils kicking off and making a noise in a way we would never have done at our school. She did say once or twice she wouldn’t want to live in Wolverhampton, even though it would be more convenient for travelling, because she would always be bumping into kids in the town centre and they were more than likely to be shouting abuse. I suppose that sort of behaviour happens in most schools but Alex and I never came across it in our own school because we were always in the top sets for everything, where kids tend to be more motivated to learn and better behaved as a result.

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.