It’s easy to demonise and make cut-outs of characters never met, it’s easy to say Enid was bad and Joan good and Douglas hopeless, but it wouldn’t be the truth, and letting them live here again, giving them voice, has allowed that black and white picture to colour. They were like us – flawed, vulnerable to circumstance, well-intentioned sometimes, trying and failing and trying again to live with themselves. He was a child and damaged by it; they were adults and should have known better, yet the failure was there in the apple unbitten in the palm – their course was set through circumstance and luck, or lack of it: a war, favouritism, wealth and mental health – that Enid suffered depression became clear to me in the writing. I set out to vindicate her – a way of giving my father a version of her that wasn’t so awful, excusing her in some way that would allow him to love her – and gave it up when the facts revealed an impossible to comprehend network of choices. Yet I find now that I do understand, without needing to say what she did was acceptable. It was not, and yet she had no one. Both of these are true, and both have weight. She wasn’t made for children. They were forced upon her, and everyone suffered as a consequence. She suffered post-natal depression – a heightening of the grief she already felt from life itself. She was pinpointed as mad and unacceptable, she was vilified and left alone, she became someone cold.

And then there was Fagus, born with hydrocephalus, diagnosed with Sleeping Sickness, tied to a chair and sent to a home on the south coast. He is at the centre of this book. It was his death that brought home the neglect. The boy shoved out, the brother my father talked about, the body whose grave was gone. When my father told me it had been built over by flats, I took the address and plot number and went in search. I found it, not inaccessible, but as an unmarked mound among hundreds of gravestones in a cemetery in Eastbourne. I had a headstone made, and before my father died, I took him there to see it.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

I’ve been dreaming of writing these acknowledgements for a decade. Now here I am, and as with so many aspects of becoming published for the first time, I can’t quite believe it. Yet here goes . . .