‘How d’you spell ‘killed’?” Lilly asks. “Is it curly-C or kicking-K?”
She needs to know, does Lilly, because she’s writing down her memories of the night her father stabbed her mother to death. And because spelling’s difficult when you’re only six.
It was a moment so perfect in its innocence and horror that you wouldn’t dare make it up. If last night’s A Killing in My Family (Channel 4) had been drama, that would have been a mawkish, overengineered moment that made you roll your eyes and think about going to make a cup of tea.
Oh, to have been able to roll your eyes and think about going to make a cup of tea. A Killing in My Family was pure fact, a documentary about children who have lost close family members to murder or manslaughter as they take part in a residential weekend designed to help them and their remaining family begin to process what has happened.
Four of them have lost their mothers, two a dad or stepdad, one a brother, and a trio of sisters – Chloe, 13, Chelsea, 10, and Lottie, nine – have lost both parents. They piece their story together on a large sheet of paper. “They split up … Dad was jealous. He came up with a plan. He parked the car round the corner so the dogs woudn’t bark … just stabbed her several times. She tried to run up the stairs but it was too late …” He said goodnight to the girls, but they were so scared they pretended to be asleep. Then there was silence, and they fell asleep for real. Their father killed himself downstairs. When Lottie woke up, she found herself being carried out of the house by a policeman.
The staff of Winston’s Wish, the charity supporting this small group of the 350 children a year who suffer these grievous losses in the most grievous of ways, use the proper words for things. Murdered. Stabbed. Shot. Others can struggle. When Lottie, Chloe and Chelsea’s grandmother remembers the night her daughter was killed by her son-in-law, it’s the fact that he left his body for the children to find that she finds hardest to contemplate. “That’s why I … dislike him,” she says.
By and large, the children love their parents still, the living and the dead. Most of them are too young – yet – to be racked by contradictions. They might want to know why Dad killed Mum or the stranger shot Dad (the gender disparity between domestic and other murders is a topic for another time and the film-makers rightly chose not to dwell on it here), but they are mostly too young for horror or hatred to blot out everything that went before. Lilly is going to see her Dad in prison (“not with bars – a different kind”) on Friday. “I’m really excited to see him!”
Later, when the children are writing wishes to attach to balloons that they will release on their final day together, she tells a helper: “I wish my mum could come back alive.” “I can understand that,” says the helper, after only the briefest of pauses. Lilly’s grandmother, over in the adults’ counselling session, says helplessly that she still loves her son, who left Lilly and her sister Leah motherless and then lied that she had run away. “I can’t switch that off.”
The concern, of course, with such a programme is that it is voyeuristic at best, exploitative at worst. I can only say that, although I worry that now the door on to this new roomful of content has been pushed on, other, lesser programmes will – because television is a gaping maw, commissioning editors are weak and no one is to be trusted – follow, this particular one felt as free as it could be of such taint. Calm, rigorous, compassionate and unsentimental, it felt absolutely of a piece with the ethos of the work the charity was doing with the children; part of the belief that the savagery they have witnessed must be brought into the light, examined, talked about, given shape, the further awful violence killing-with-a-kicking-k will do to tender minds tamed, not allowed to rampage unchecked.
The oldest child – young man, almost – was 15-year-old O’Shae, whose father was shot dead. His younger brother, Mikeal, suffers from stomach aches and anxiety and writes “terfied” on the list they are compiling of how losing loved ones makes you feel. “Could it make you feel ‘aggressive’?” O’Shae wants to know. It could, a counsellor assures him. It definitely could.
“There’s no magic wand,” says a counsellor as the children release their balloons. “We know we haven’t fixed it. We just hope to continue the conversation.” If they are happy with this documentary as part of that conversation, that is good. Time enough to deal with the door-pushers, if and when they come.
