If my mother had been a literary person one could say she had modelled herself on Mrs. Joe Gargery. Hair drawn sharply back into a bun, hard features, her ruling us by her feared hand — certainly she could be said to have brought us up by hand. In fact she never read — not book nor even newspaper, which our father would often doze over. Her joy was in organising, and she spent all her spare time doing that.
Our only pleasure at home was sometimes listening to the wireless. Not while we were working: That would mean our minds were not on the menial tasks she had ordered us to do. But later, just before we went to bed, she might put on the Home Service, and we might hear part of a play, the news, or a light concert. I formed my love of operetta then. It enchanted me because everybody seemed so happy. If my mother had not been tone deaf she would have turned it off as a bad influence.
And she would have been wise to do so. It was a bad influence from her point of view. It confirmed for me what I had sensed from school, that there was another way, that other families were not organised into a monstrous regiment of children, that happiness in other families, while not constant, was at least possible.
I said this to Annie, my elder sister.
“We’re not like other families,” I said.
“I know.”
“They have fun. They have mothers who love them.”
“I know they do.”
“What should we do about it?”
“I don’t know.”
That was not a very satisfactory conversation, but I remember it because it brought the subject out into the open for the first time. Of course we had had conversations — at night before bed, on the way to school — in which we said how much we hated Mother. But this one aired the possibility that something might be done about it. We considered complaining to the Social Services or the police, but we knew nothing about the former, not even where its offices were, and we thought we might simply be taken “into care,” which sounded vaguely threatening, like the devil you don’t know. We occasionally saw a policeman or woman on the beat, but the thought of going up to him or her and complaining that our mother worked us like slaves every hour of the day, every minute we were home, was too daunting to give serious consideration to: He (or she) would probably laugh at us, and ridicule is something children hate. Or if they did see there was a problem, they would most likely call and talk it over with Mother. The consequences didn’t bear thinking about.
“I don’t see there’s any alternative,” said Annie one day. “We’ll just have to kill her.”
I thought, then nodded, and said nothing more. The idea incubated, took on strange forms, ballooned, but the main thing was, it was there, and the next few weeks saw a great deal of discussion, vague plans.
The plan Annie and I discussed most often was one in which all of us children had some part in the killing, so that no one of us (we thought) could be convicted of the crime of murder. For example, Mother was to be poisoned, and one child was to procure the poison, another to procure the strong drink it was to be administered in, another to put the poison in the drink, another to lure her to taste it. As a discussion topic it was admirable. We realised quite soon that we could not go into a chemist’s and ask for poison over the counter, let alone one unknown to Western science (something I felt was ideal). We then talked about a break-in at the pharmacy (break-in had a nice sound involving physical action rather than a special skill) but the plan fell through when we started to talk about what it was we were trying to get hold of. We had no idea what was a poison and what was not. We might just choose a drug that would give her diarrhea, which would be funny but wouldn’t do anything to change the situation.
“We could push her over a cliff, or out of a high window,” said Annie. That would have been fine if we had not lived in a small town in Lincolnshire — county of low-lying fens. There was a distinct lack of high-rise buildings as well.
We had got no further than deciding we would say our mother had gone to help her sister in Middlesborough who was suffering from an inoperable (we used the word fatal, and had to explain that to the little ones) cancer when it happened. I say “it happened” because that’s how it felt. We had, after all the discussions, no plan, and it may have been that it was that that caused the welling up in me of a sense of frustration, of impotence, of a mother-directed rage...
It was about seven o’clock on an autumn evening. Our father had eaten his “tea,” and after a snooze had gone down to the British Legion Club, which he always did on Friday nights. He asked me to put his tools away in the garden shed, and told my little brother Martin he could put the piles of weeds that were dotted around the flower beds in the back garden onto the compost heap. Martin was — is — the best of us, the most sensible, the most brain-alive. If he had been older he would either have thought up a plan for Mother’s murder or slapped down our plotting as sheer childish delusions.
It was when he was coming back from the compost heap that it happened. He had filthy hands, and not only that: He had slipped, fallen, and his short trousers were brown with leaf-mould. Mother appeared at the kitchen door. Probably she had been looking through the kitchen window, awaiting disaster.
“Just look at you! Filthy child!” She grabbed from the window-ledge where it always lay a little bundle of twigs with which she always beat our bare legs to relieve her feelings. “I’ll teach you to get yourself all over muck.”
She grabbed him to her. He sobbed and worked himself out of her grasp, leaving his pullover in her hands. “You just wait, you little monkey,” she yelled, and started after him.
But she never reached him. I was collecting up Dad’s garden tools and I had just taken from off the path a heavy spade. I was a strong fourteen-year-old — made strong not by athletics or team games but by slavery around the house. I raised the spade and brought it down with all the force at my command on Mother’s head. She fell forward to the ground, then rolled over, her eyes looking vengefully at me. She repeated her last words:
“You just wait, you little—”
Then she died.
I felt nothing as I looked down on her. Not grief, not guilt, not even exhilaration. Annie, as usual, chimed in with my reactions. She appeared at the front door and after a moment, seeing the stillness of the body, she said: “Go and get a blanket and cover her up.”
I fetched a blanket from the top shelf of the wardrobe in our bedroom. We wrapped her in it and pulled her to a dark corner down the side of the house that had never been a home. Then we talked about what we should do when Dad came home (always, in the days and weeks ahead, we talked about our next move, never looked further into the future).
The result of this discussion was that when Dad came home we told him that we’d had a telegram from Auntie Kath in Middlesborough, and Mother had gone by train to nurse her through cancer. Our father thought for a bit, and then said, “Oh aye?” and settled down to read the front pages of the daily newspaper.
Before he went to bed, he said: “It’s funny, your mother never had a good word to say about your Auntie Kath.”
Annie, who was proving a tower of strength, said: “But it’s cancer. That makes it different, doesn’t it?”
Our father thought. “Aye, ’appen,” he said.
That night at 2 a.m., in total silence, Annie and I buried our mother in a patch of earth at the bottom of the garden which my father had tried to turn into a vegetable patch but had given up when the soil proved too poor and too often waterlogged. With her we buried a small suitcase which our mother always kept packed with emergency things for if any of us suddenly had to go to hospital. We added two dresses of hers, a cardigan, blouse, and skirt, and a great deal of unattractive underwear. The parental bedroom was at the front of the house and Dad slept on, as did the scattered neighbours. By three o’clock Annie and I were in the two undersized beds we called ours in the bedroom we shared.