Her Mother returned from Church, made some tea and toast, put the milk bottles out, then she heard her children’s prayers as she always did every night.

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord, my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord, my soul will take.”  It was muttered monotonously, like the five times tables, the depressing words never thought about.

If the child had shown any signs of distress, her mother didn’t acknowledge it.  She never had, although they were often there.  There was always that unnatural silence at least, and that distant look in her eyes after it.  Anyone could have told that there was something bothering the little girl.  Anyone who cared!  She always thought that her mother cared only for God.  Nobody else mattered.  She had seen the music box on the mantlepiece, asked where it had come from…..That was all.  The child wanted to tell her why she had been given it, but she was far too afraid of the consequences.

Her husband was chastised for “making fish of one and flesh of the other,” because he had bought the girl a toy and her brother nothing.

“You never show any interest in him!  Oh no!  He is too like me for you to be bothered with him.  He’s a good boy, a Godfearing boy who loves the Lord.  Not your kind of son at all.  You want a sinner for a son,” she hissed, “one who would grow up to smoke, drink with you at the pub, gamble away his money and lust after the flesh.  You would never want a good boy.”  The fat man tried to end her nagging with a swift, sharp slap around the left side of her head.

“One day, George Wilson…..One day you will go too far!”  Tears trickled down her red, swollen cheek, but he didn’t care.  It shut her up a bit.  She sat there silently weeping.  She was a martyr and would take it.  She would brag about it being her “cross to bear” and would pride herself in her faithfulness to such a violent tempered man.  In truth, he thought her temper much worse than his own.  She always started it, he always finished it.  That was the pattern!  She seldom shut up with the nagging.  She was always shouting at the children.  She was the one whose moods swung, and sometimes they did so at will, especially whenever her cronies came around.  She would be all sweetness and light around them!  ‘The holier-than-thou act!’