When a father kills at home

Press, 11 April 1978, Page 12

When a father kills at home

WHITEHORNS WORLD

Katharine Whitehorn

London. Not all murders come as the fine exciting climax to a cop chase, preferably with muscular heroes leaping over the roofs of glossy cars and plenty of satisfying gunfire. A scene played out recently in Peterborough, in the English Midlands, shows a different pattern; at first sight one drearily familiar to social workers — but this time with a twist. The children have been playing up: it’s been a bad day;, the baby won’t take its bottle, it turns its head away in rejection; the par-

ent is fed up, overburdened, wretched; and in one flash of terrible temper hurls the baby to the floor. And it is dead. What makes the case of the Byron-Evans family different, though, was simply that the person who did this was the father: a father who describes himself on forms as a “househusband.”

His wife goes out to work, being not only one of the innumerable women who can’t stand housework or being cooped up at home, but one of the few who has admitted it, and done a deal with her mate (in this case a musician) that he should be the one to sit on the nest. He has now been put inside for a life sentence; she is suffering understandable agonies of selfreproach, and determined to hold the family together as best she can till he gets out again; which, life sentences being what they are in this country, may mercifully not be all that long. So what’s so special

about all this?- An estimated 300 kids a year are supposed to be rubbed out by their ever-loving parents; this time it was the father, but it quite often is — or more often — the step-father, which is often just a polite way of des-

cribing a deserted mother’s new boy-friend, who didn’t stay the night just to listen to the baby’s wails.

No-one who knows about it denies that violence, in a household, flows like a dark tide across all the barriers of sex and age. But what intrigues — no, lets be honest, enrages me, — is the way the comment has gone; even and especially from the lawyer for John ByronEvans. He noted that Mrs Byron-Evans had a domi-

neering personality and was better educated than her husbanl.

“She rejected traditional values and became liberated. That was the beginning of the downfall.” It’s all her fault, in fact, because she ought to have been the one to be driven crazy by the baby’s rejection; she ought to have been the one to suffer what she says her wretched husband was suffering — a sense that he couldn’t fulfil his own career, that he was living in a sort of vacuum. You might think, perhaps, that having a man find out what it is like to spend the whole day coping with small children, with not one single job uninterrupted for more than a few minutes, with worries about money, with nagging tiredness and a feeling of isolation might help to highlight what it is like for the women who do it all the time.

You might think it might throw a bit of sympathy in the direction

of the women who have to cope on their own in a way that no women in the world’s history have had to do; without the teeming, quarerlsome, friendly, supporting world of women round them; without mothers and aunts and neighbours to share it all. You might — if you’re the sort who believes the moon is made of green cheese. O.F.N.S. Copyyright.