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

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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