Edward was 22 years old, he was just married in Oxford with Florence and he was also graduate in history in London, but he didn't find a job. Before marriage, he lived with his family in a cottage at Beacon Hill. His father, Lionel Mayhew, was the headmaster of a primary school in Henley. Lionel was a mild man and he rarely raised his voice, but he expected to be obeyed by his children.
When Edward was only fourteen, he discovered that there was something wrong with his mother. She was a ghostly figure, sometimes communicative and even affectionate, at others remote, absorbed in her hobbies and projects. He always believed this behaviour was normal, but in fact, it isn't: she was brain-damaged.
At the beginning, he didn't believe this and he perceived this as an insult, a blasphemous invitation to disloyalty. If anyone else had said that about his mother, Edward would have been obliged to get in a flight, but this person was his father; so he believed that his father wanted to calumniate his mother. But finally he had always known that there was something wrong with her brain.
It was December 1944 and his mother went to buy the Christmas presents. When she went back with the train, a man opened the carriage door just before the train has stopped. The heavy metal edge struck Marjorie's forehead with sufficient force to fracture her skull and dislocated in an instant her personality, intelligence and memory.