Arrrghhhhh. This is such a terrible story. Harry was my brother Tom's son; his parents split when he was 7, my brother's input after that was minimal. His mother Heather is a materialistic nitwit, obsessed with appearances, she always preferred his younger sister Suzy and as a result of this, and her very limited nuturing skills, Harry was a very neglected child. He left home at 18 and never had any higher education. He started taking drugs quite early and his mother's family blame all his problems on that. They prefer not to ask why a child would want to seek comfort and relief in drugs. He was not an addict, he took them when he needed comfort or when he wanted to, for fun.
For several years he tried to get going as a music producer/creator but it was hard work and he was often sofa-surfing and didn't really have a proper base. He made a great friend called Leroy and together they went back to Leroy's native Bradford and Harry got into various bits of sales work, etc. up there. In summer 2015 he and Leroy had an argument, Leroy threw himself out of a second floor window and died immediately. The police responded by tasering Harry and arresting him for his murder (although he wasn't actually there at the time). For 6 months he was a suspect, and Leroy's family and friends blamed him and basically ran him out of Bradford. He went home to his mother. This wasn't very convenient, as, having just divorced her second husband, she was starting a relationship with a wealthy medical consultant, approaching retirement age (she is 52) who was clearly shopping for a future nurse. He has a house in Italy, took her to Barbados, bought her a fur coat etc etc. While Heather is swanking around the place, Harry is doing another grim telelsales job and taking anti-depressants and not getting proper treatment for the trauma of losing his best friend, of seeing his mutilated body outside their flat, and of being under suspicion of murder. Heather starts to demand more council tax money off him and Harry sees the fur coat, the Jag and the holidays and he flips. One night, when he's working on his motorbike in the garage he takes his clawhammer to her car and then he goes in and burns one/all? of her fur coats. (He swore to me that he had not been taking drugs prior to this, apart from the anti-depressants). He goes upstairs with all the kitchen knives and nails his door shut, intending to kill himself.
When his mother came home she called the police who went upstairs and tasered him and took him into custody. His mother then did what all mothers would naturally do, she took out an injunction against him which prevented him contacting her except via solicitors, or coming within 50m of his home. Harry went to prison on remand.
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| Harry whizzes past on the dodgems - right |
Where we come into it, is that I wrote to Harry in prison, expressing sympathy, but he didn't get the letter. I assumed wrongly, that some member of the family, Tom perhaps, would be in court to hear his case (I had no idea when it was and that weekend I discovered that Ned was having an anxiety crisis and we needed to go to Norwich in a hurry). About a fortnight later I got an email from my youngest sister begging us (my siblings and I) to try and speak to Tom and to persuade him to take on his paternal role and give Harry a home as he was currently living rough and had been seen begging outside Tesco's in Southampton...He had been found guilty of criminal damage with an 18 month suspended sentence and set free, on probation, with nowhere to go except the streets.
I didn't think Tom would provide a particularly loving or supportive home for Harry, so I called his other grandparents and found out where he was and went to get him. That was in July and he's lived here ever since. He was absolutely charming although with a tendency to tell fibs, a necessity from childhood I suspect, like his habit of hiding broken crockery. He wanted to get himself sorted out, but was frequently depressed. He got a job almost immediately and seemed all set, but it was a sales job and he didn't make his targets during his probationary period so he was sacked. He then began to look for more manual work, and was hoping to go on a Railtrack training course. In the meantime he was in his room, watching endless films and making more music, trying to perfect a particular piece that he'd been working on since he came here. Finn spent a lot of time chatting with him, and we all had supper together in the evenings and had a chance to talk. I realised quite early on that although we could provide a fixed address and stability for him there wasn't much we could do about his state of mind, but he told his other grandparents how he wished he'd been brought up in our family and how I was a much better mother than his ("Of course, he didn't mean that" she told me). I did try to nudge him towards drug counselling and so on, but when he first came, I don't think he was doing drugs at that time and while he was working, only on "party" basis, rather than habitually. I suspected his drug use had increased a bit in January, he began to keep strange hours and would have intensive bouts of hoovering in the middle of the night. He went to one session with a local drug counsellor (who is a friend of mine) but didn't continue. He was doing bereavement counselling to cope with Leroy's death, but a couple of days before he died he was wondering whether it was worth continuing, he wasn't sure if he had anything more to say. Actually, he probably needed about 10 years of therapy to say all he needed to say, and I was hoping to win the lottery so I could pay for it.
On Sunday I was admitted to hospital with a rather awful infection in my abdomen, related to gall stones. On Monday Mark rang me and said he was coming in to see me and I said "Just go and have a chat with Harry and see how it all went on Sunday" (he had met up with his sister, Tom, my father and my sister C - a very rare event which had been brokered by C as part of her campaign to get Tom to behave like a father). Mark went up and found Harry lying naked on his bed with his laptop on his chest, he called Finn, Finn's friends rang 999, M and F tried to find a pulse, without success. The paramedics arrived, but clearly Harry had been dead for about an hour before they arrived. There's been a post-mortem, we don't have the results yet; my suspicion is that his early use of cocaine, crack and heroine when he was younger, coupled with a phase of anorexia where he took drugs instead of eating, may have weakened his heart.
Last week felt like the longest week of my life, and his, presumably guilt-stricken, mother immediately took charge as next of kin and has arranged the funeral and so on and not told us anything (apart from giving Mark a self-justifying spiel about "if you had seen the damage he did to my house and car"). I am extremely angry with her, Finn has been absolutely traumatised by it and is distraught and Mark is feeling very shaken. I want to ring her up and scream at her "My husband and son tried to revive his lifeless corpse, and now you are pretending it's nothing to do with us."
There are so many other poignant details I could add, but this is quite enough really. I should say, when we took him in, I hardly knew him, I used to see him at Christmas, and at the summer birthday do, so it really was great to have had the opportunity to get to know him better, even though it has greatly added to the sense of loss we all feel.
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| Harry, Ned and Finn at Dreamland summer 2016 |
