October 1938.

“I hate October,” said Odette, “it is the end of autumn and brings in the start of winter and all the coldness and blues and darker evenings and my father’s wrath when things didn’t go his way and it was me who was the butt end of his anger and frustration. Ever since Mother died, he had been like that, especially as Orville had gone off to Spain to fight and left me at home to withstand the worst of things. You will never marry, my father often said in that harsh voice of his, who’d want a wife like you anyway, girl, who’d put up with you and your ways and that slovenly manner of yours. He would sit at the table at meals times reading the newspaper, pouring over the news, reading it out loud if there was something that made him angry, and I would just sit there biting my toast or nibbling my bread and butter, and gazing at him in a forced silence, not wanting to anger him more than he already was, and wishing to hell I’d got out before Orville had left, and wishing I had married that Henry Pooke. However, I never loved Pooke, he made me feel queasy, especially when he kissed me or tried to put his hands up my skirt on those late evenings in the parlour when Father was upstairs in his room reading his Dickens. Father disapproved of Pooke; he said he was a useless skinflint, a spineless species that ought to have been put down at birth. That made it easier for me to give up Pooke when I had had enough of his fingering and kissing; and I told him that I didn’t love him and that my father had forbidden me to see him anymore and he believed me. Now, I was alone with Father and his temper and his Dickens and his bad moods and occasionally his thumps and slaps. Orville would not approve of that; he said father was a bully and a sod, and many times, when he was at home, they came to blows, and Orville would storm out, down to the public house, to drown his sorrows, and leave me behind, to take the beatings he would have got, if he’d been a young child again, and not the strong young man he was. I wish I’d gone to Spain to fight; I would have gladly have fought against Franco beside my brother and have taken up a gun and shot anyone who slightly resembled my father. However, I stayed behind and knitted or crocheted and became my father’s servant girl, his rag doll to pull and push and take up and put down and throw about at whim and such. I hate October. It is a cruel month. October 13th 1938 was a Thursday and a dark day for me, and yet, it was a day of liberation in a sense, because I murder Father that day; hit him over the head with the cold iron, as he was about to beat me for slightly scorching one of his best shirts, and in defence I hit him with the iron and caught his forehead, and then I just kept hitting him, until the iron was drenched in his blood, and he was silent and still, and there was an unknown peace about the room and house, and outside the window, the birds began to sing, and far off a church bell sounded like a peal of laughter in the air, and I smiled for the first time in years since my mother’s death, and looked down at Father’s motionless body without pity or regret that October day in 1938.”1