"I'd just started school and I became very inward-looking," says Janet Dean. "I used to stand in the playground with my head towards the wall and I felt very isolated."Sometimes bereaved children get bullied and teased by other children at school, who are frightened by death, and taunt them. "It's only as I've got older that I can see how nice it would have been to have had someone there to talk with. Everyone tells me she was a lovely lady."Since her mother was only in her thirties when she died giving birth to Janet's sister, Janet felt very peculiar when she reached an age older than her mother. She also worries about her son because he is 18, the age her brother died. The bereavement grows up alongside them, as it were."When I'm with my own daughter, who's a teenager and can be rather cruel, I often say she's lucky to have a mother," says Janet Dean, 52, whose mother died when she was six.
Unresolved grief can last much, much longer than we think. The pattern of loss in early life can be quite distinctive. Children often continue grieving for a lost mother or brother throughout their childhood and into middle age, continually experiencing a new form of loss. Cruse, the organisation for the bereaved, has set up such a line for anyone who suffered bereavement in childhood. They expect callers of all ages, including elderly people who have never come to terms with deaths in childhood. Carr senior promptly died, his widow letting it be known that his son's letter had led to his untimely death.An everyday story of post-colonial folk, except that Matthew Carr has managed to turn it into an unusual, moving and skilful enquiry into the relationship that he never had with the father he never really knew.
This genre, already exploited by Germaine Greer and Blake Morrison, has been in danger of becoming a cliche in the 1990s Yet it has proved to be a rich vein. He joined Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party, wrote about Che Guevara, became involved in the radical politics of the Black Power era and finally drank himself to death. In the colonial shorthand, he had "gone native".As his alcoholic illness grew worse, he expressed a desire to return to England. Matthew Carr, one of his neglected children, wrote to him firmly, and also cruelly, that he would not be welcome.
Soon they found themselves caught up in problems that should have been all too familiar: dissent and rebellion, race and class, and, of course, sun, sex, and drink I should know. I had similar experiences later, though in a fortunately tranquil African ex-colony far removed from the dramatic maelstrom of the West Indies.A talented teacher, Bill Carr in the home was a violent alcoholic He beat his wife and drank himself stupid. In 1967, having moved to Guyana, he packed off his English wife and four children to England and remarried, to a black Guyanese woman. He had set off, like so many graduates of the Suez generation, to spread post-colonial enlightenment and English literature in the universities of the Third World.