A pretty obvious search term, I suppose.
Not much point in providing links: everyone knows which online sources to turn to if they want to read more of the sordid details. I wouldn't advise it. From time to time, I get fascinated by a story, a "truecrime" story that suddenly appears in the News. Jimmy is entirely different, he has no desire whatsoever to find out details of anything gruesome. It's not that he's trying to pretend it hasn't happened, but he'd rather be spared the details.
I have read so much, which is strange because there isn't actually an awful lot to read. Once you've read one paraphrase of a police statement there's nothing more to find out from twenty other paraphrases of the same statement. There isn't really a great deal that a 'comments' feature can add to the more-or-less factual narrative. The odd hand-wringing or the ridiculous 'is there something in the Austrian psyche that compels them to put their children in their cellars?'.
Or the Daily Mail seems most outraged that this crime, like the last-but-one Austrian cellar imprisonment crime, occurred in a cellar built with a government grant. Almost as if, and perhaps this is the truth in Daily Mail land, the utter preposterousness of the all the other aspects fade into insignificance beside the fact that it was taxpayers money that funded the cellars being built. Although perhaps closer to the truth than the 'all Austrians have to search their souls (and then their cellars)' browbeating. Being pretty close to the Iron Curtain, it seems that grants were available during the Cold War to build nuclear bunkers. Perhaps the ability to build easily deep cellars depends on the soil or the type of rock or whatever. But I think it's pretty dangerous to accuse an entire nation of having a propensity based upon three or four recent incidents.
It's not clever to read the Press coverage too much. There is so little in the way of detail that it leaves far too much to the imagination. And the imagination fills in too many details but leaves far to much unanswered.
The woman, the mother of the children, is 42, not much older than me. I think back to August 1984. Without consulting my diaries I can't remember that precise day, but I know I had just got my O-Level results and was about to go into Sixth Form. The football season had started and United were stringing together win after win. I try and think what has happened in my life over that time. Far far far too much - I have lived in different places, progressed through education, worked for a living, travelled abroad to several continents, made and lost friends, and most of all, largely been in charge of my own destiny.
Then I try to think of what the concept of being imprisoned means. I suspect that I am less subject to cabin fever than many people, probably more able to cope with alone and reclusion than the average. Even so, when confined to quarters, through chicken pox and then because of CFS, at least I was able to go out in the garden, see the garden through the window, and I don't think I've ever been at home for more than a week without going at least round the block. Again, I don't suffer from SAD anything like many people but I do feel such a difference in my spirits when the evenings become lighter.
I wonder if it is more difficult to adjust to that hellhole having known 'normality' than it is to have been born into it and lived one's entire childhood. Normal children go out to places; even the local shops are exciting when you're young. normal children mix with a whole variety of random strangers, see new and exciting things, natural and man-made. It was very sad to read of those boys staring awestruck at the moon.
I don't know what's worse, imagining the lives entirely wasted for up to twenty four years, or the privation, or the physical and psychological effects that will last for the rest of their lives. I wonder how they processed information coming from the TV. Did the mother ever tell them that there was a world on the outside. Presumably the older children will remember the upstairs children when they were downstairs - how did the mother explain their disappearance. How much will the Downstairs grow to resent the Upstairs. Will Upstairs feel guilty about having had a relatively normal life or will they in some perverse way resent the Downstairs
And as for their father - well, best not to think about him at all. I can understand an element of the actions - not understand as in 'forgive' but understand as in 'follow a narrative'. Father-daughter rape is neither new nor novel; locking children in a cellar or attic for short periods rarely gets even local news headlines. I suppose I find it easier to understand as in 'empathise' with wrongdoings that happen on the spur of the moment, even wrong doings of the most vile nature. I cannot begin to understand someone who could plan and sustain such an atrocity for such a long period. I sometimes plan bad things in my head - generally acts of revenge, triumph or sabotage. But part of the planning involves an assessment of what might go wrong, would I be found out, and what would be the consequences of that happening. Plus I find it difficult to cause physical harm, even to household pests, so while I might hit someone in anger, I couldn't do that to someone weaker and I couldn't sustain it.
And I can't lie. That's not a boast of virtuosity. I can't create and sustain a falsehood. I can twist facts -exaggerate a truth to provide a post hoc excuse. And I can be insincere without flinching. But I find it an enormous strain to keep even a good time-limited secret (a surprise birthday present, privileged early news of a job-move or pregnancy) so how difficult must it be to maintain a lie for 24 years to build up the evidence to 'prove' it, to have to change it to suit changing circumstances.
No, the whole thing is so horrible. I want it to have a fairy tale magic ending, but I know that the best the downstairs family will ever do is cope and survive - maybe the youngest will be able to socialise normally eventually (BTW, is it just me but is it strange that the mother had a pregnancy every two years or so, then 7 years between the youngest upstairs before the youngest downstairs - is she the mother, or is it the one who's in a coma, which if so just compounds the foulness of the incest).
And all human beings products of our heredity and our environment. The apple doesn't fall far; genes will out; bad blood will out. Imagine having that genetic inheritance.
