I read Murder At White House Farm by Claire Powell earlier in the year over one day. I've now read it again at a leisurely pace and found the following excerpt telling and sad:
Excerpt from above:
"June’s expectations of her daughter were fulfilled in one respect: Sheila had matured into a graceful and very feminine young woman. She was also attractive to and attracted to men. There was nothing unusual in that, but June found it difficult to cope with what a modern teenager considered to be normal fun. The years spent in boarding school with infrequent visits to White House Farm had turned Sheila into a stranger in Tolleshunt D’Arcy. She could not adapt to a rural way of life, and likewise her own habits were totally alien to her parents. June, born and bred in the country, expected her daughter to accede to the strict regime which she had established both for the farm and for her personal conduct. June could be a hard task-master and the time spent at home, between boarding school and finishing school, became increasingly fraught.
There was tension on both sides, and June and Sheila no longer understood each other. Her daughter’s day-dreaming exasperated June, and for her part Sheila chafed at her mother’s restrictions on how and with whom she spent her time. Shortly after her seventeenth birthday, in July 1974, Sheila and June clashed head-on in an incident which was to scar both women for the rest of their lives.
During her solitary walks about the farm, Sheila met a good-looking young man helping out in the fields. They began to see a lot of each other but Sheila was careful to keep the relationship secret, aware that her mother would never permit a liaison with a farm labourer. Instead she would creep out of the farmhouse and slip unseen through the fields to a remote spot for a clandestine meeting. Sheila was inexperienced with men of her own age and her physical development far outstripped her emotional understanding. The pair became lovers quickly and recklessly. For Sheila, completely swept off her feet by passion, this was the first outpouring of love and tenderness she had ever received. Her guard was down and the pair became more audacious. It was only a matter of time before June noticed a change in Sheila’s usually docile manner. She began to watch the young woman closely.
Late one afternoon June set off in pursuit of Sheila, who once again had seized a quiet moment to steal away from the house to find her lover. After a long, fruitless search, June decided to give up and take a short cut through the fields back to the house. Two minutes later she almost stumbled over the pair as they lay – her daughter and a young farmhand making love in a ditch.
Even a sophisticated young woman would have found it difficult to talk her way out of that situation, and Sheila did not even try. June was hysterical: the incident was a catastrophe almost beyond comprehension. She hauled Sheila back to the farm, screaming all the way. She was completely devastated by her daughter’s behaviour, nothing she had ever known could have ever prepared her for such a crippling blow. Then, quite suddenly, she realised she knew the truth. Turning to her terrified daughter, June calmly explained it over and over again: Sheila was the child of the Devil, she was the Devil’s child on earth, spreading evil around her. The words sank deep into Sheila, who was almost out of her mind with fear and confusion.
It was a phrase that Sheila would never forget and which would become the root of her latent paranoia. She did not have the ability to defend herself against her mother’s frenzied outburst. Neither woman had any real idea about normal human desires and expectations: June thought Sheila’s sexual development was ungodly, the work of the Devil; Sheila disturbed by the power of her newly awakened sexuality, guiltily acknowledged that her behaviour was the result of an evil mind. Nevill was informed of the episode and reprimanded Sheila but could do little to alleviate the incredible ferocity of his wife’s reaction. The incident was kept within the family, and so there was no confidant to reassure Sheila that her actions were not evil but merely ill advised.
June Bamber had already suffered one nervous break-down and would within a few years succumb to another. Unlike most parents who catch their teenage children petting on sofas or in bus shelters, June was not able to take the incident in her stride and content herself with a stern reprimand. She unwittingly planted a seed of foreboding in her daughter that in time would grow too great for Sheila to conquer. The teenager was dangerously impressionable and did not possess the ability to vanquish superstition with logic. Her self-esteem was tenuous and had been so ever since her childhood, when she had been coldly informed of her adoption. The sense of alienation had inevitably increased when she was dispatched to boarding school and now she was more than ever an outcast in her surrogate home.
Sheila would never shake off the repercussions of that brief affair, but there was yet another, more immediate consequence to be dealt with. Sheila was pregnant, and in June’s eyes her disgrace was complete. Marriage was completely out of the question, and Sheila was clearly ill equipped to be a mother even with support of her parents. After much heart-searching Nevill and June decided there could be only one solution. Sheila did not object – she simply wanted to please her parents after causing them so much pain. The pregnancy was terminated".
