In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to, but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish Hunter.
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens.
In 1938 my mum was ten years old and attending a primary school in Enfield. Her father was a veteran of WW1 who had been mustard gassed. His health was poor as a result, but each night he rode his bike to Edmonton, where he worked as a baker. My grandparents had three boys and a girl, and struggled to keep them clad and fed during the harsh years of the Depression.
One morning the headmistress approached my mum and told her that because of her exemplary behaviour she had been selected to present a bouquet to the Lady Mayoress, who was attending the school the next day on some civic mission. The headmistress had emphasized that she must look her very best for the curtsey and presentation.
My mum ran home in a state of high excitement. But there was a problem. My mum had only one dress, a plain frock, and she had worn it that day. My grandmother immediately stripped it off her and washed it, along with her socks and her best ribbon. Drying was going to be a challenge, so my grandmother sat up half the night holding the dress in front of the oven, turning it to make sure it didn't scorch, then just before dawn pressing it to within an inch of its life.
My mother set off for school with great expectations. She had practised her curtsey, and was ready for her moment of glory, a just reward for keeping the rules. During morning assembly she sang the hymns with great gusto. After assembly, the headmistress approached her, trailed by Christine Green, a ten year old from another class. Christine was a vision in layers of blue taffeta and a large, shiny matching bow.
Christine lived on what was popularly known as 'millionaire's row'. Of course, the people who lived there weren't millionaires, except by comparison with people like my mother's family. Christine Green's father owned a shop. A dress shop.
Christine had gone home and petulantly announced that Kathleen Ward was to present a bouquet to the Lady Mayoress. Her mother took her to the shop, selected the prettiest dress available, and sent Christine to school in it the next day, presumably with the express intention of catching the eye of the headmistress. It did.
The headmistress told my mum that there had been a change of plans. Christine was to present the bouquet.
When my mum first told me this story she said that her first thought was for her mother, who had worked so hard through the night to make sure her plain dress was a credit to her. She was upset, not by the slight to herself, but to her mother.
The lesson I learnt was that good girls finish last.
I contemplated what my own reaction would have been: I would have torn the ribbon from Christine Green's hair, then shoved her hard into the nearest muddy puddle. But as my mum pointed out, it would have been to no avail, as then I would have been punished for the assault and even less likely to receive any future reward.
My mum also noted that it was highly unlikely that I would have been chosen to present the bouquet in the first place, as there was no way in the world that I would be thought 'a good girl'.
I didn't care. I thought my mum was a doormat, and I knew that in the same situation I would have had the satisfaction of exacting revenge, which is a form of justice. The focus of my outrage should, of course, have been the headmistress. But anger focuses on the most readily available target.
The bottom line was that I couldn't understand why this had happened to my mum: what had she done to deserve such injustice? I kept asking her 'why?': why did Mrs Green deliberately dress Christine in a manner that would show my mum up? Why was the headmistress, who was supposed to provide the children in her charge with a moral education, as well as teaching them the three R's, so ready to expose her own superficial values?
My mum had no answers. She just shrugged; that's what people are like. It wasn't good enough for me. I wanted to know why.
I have never stopped asking.
During twenty years of working as an investigator I've learnt that a simple scenario may involve complex motivations; I always ask myself 'what is really going on here?'
What agenda was the headmistress pursuing? Did the Lady Mayoress hold the purse strings to a vital school improvement, for which the headmistress was prepared to sacrifice my mum's feelings? Did she know the Mayoress would be impressed by blue taffeta? What was Mrs Green's motivation? Was she aware that despite their relative affluence the Green family was a miserable unit and she wanted to bring Christine a little happiness? What about my grandmother? What was she teaching my mum - that domestic slavery was a route to self-fulfilment ?
One thing that became clear to me through poking my nose into other people's business is that you can't rely on an individual's own account of their actions; at best, it's usually only an approximation of the truth. At worst, it's intended to deliberately mislead. The truth is somewhere in between, in the grey.
The investigator's job is to obtain information, but a good investigator goes the extra mile and gives it context. You're providing information so that someone else can make a decision, and aiming to provide not just facts but intelligence: information is just a collection of facts, perceptions and feelings. Subjecting it to a process - sifting, reviewing, collating, eliminating - produces intelligence: actionable knowledge.
There is another way of describing this process. It's exactly what writers - and readers - of crime fiction do all the time. The imagination comes into play not because we're 'making things up', but because we interrogate what we've been told (or for the writer, what we present) all the time: testing it for consistency and plausibility, identifying relationships, appraising character and action without prejudice. That sort of objectivity also requires compassion. It's a creative process (when it works well!) because all the time we're asking 'why?'
A child's sense of injustice - mine and my mother's - taught me two things: first, to look beyond the obvious, because if you can understand why something happened, you may be able to stop it occurring again.
And second: never, ever sit up half the night drying a dress in front of an oven.