On the walk to school every morning my children ask for a story, and their tastes – formed by my own – skew towards real-life drama. They like natural disasters; shark attacks; plane and shipwrecks; cases of mistaken identity; gruesome accidents; the paranormal; and stories with an element of revenge, enabling their favourite catchphrase: “That’s what you get.” This week, owing to a dearth of suitable material on my end and an appetite for injustice on theirs, I shared with them, hesitantly, the cold case of a woman murdered by her husband in 1982.
The disappearance of Lynette Dawson is the subject of The Teacher’s Pet, a podcast by the Australian journalist Hedley Thomas that has, to date, been downloaded more than 60m times. It is as brilliant and addictive as any TV show, with a list of witnesses – many of whom were never contacted by the police – so willing to share their memories of Lynette’s husband’s wrongdoing that it can make it hard to believe what you’re hearing. It is also infuriating, revisiting as it does the case of a woman who disappeared from her home in Sydney in January 1982, leaving behind two children under the age of five and a husband who, two days after her disappearance, moved his 16-year-old lover into the house. Despite all the evidence of foul play, Chris Dawson, a former rugby league star and golden boy of the couple’s upscale suburb, lived undisturbed for more than 30 years, while police accepted his story that his wife had run off. It strikes one with the dull familiarity of so many stories – the Yorkshire Ripper, most forcefully – of police failures around the murder of women.
My eight-year-olds were fascinated. “Why didn’t he just divorce her?” asked one.
“He’d have had to sell the house and split the assets, plus she’d have taken the children.”
“How do they know she’s dead if there isn’t a body?”
“She left without taking her clothes, or her jewellery.”
“Or her phone?”
“There weren’t phones, but if there had been, her phone.”
“Oh, there’s no way she’s coming back.”
This was a cheerful conversation, as these conversations tend to be. To my children, “1982” is as mythical a place as medieval times and their main takeaway from the story had, seemingly, nothing to do with police failures, or violence against women, or the world being a frightening place, but rather how mad things were in the olden days. (Primarily, obviously, the fact that no one had phones. But also the absolute conviction that “If that happened today, they’d do an investigation straight away!”) I redacted the domestic violence stuff, and the fact that the 16-year-old was still at school when she started seeing Chris Dawson, who was her teacher. But the rest of the story – right up to Dawson’s arrest and conviction last year – I let stand.
Kids, of course, are interested in cruelty; they experience it the minute they set foot in a classroom. They have a keener, more ferociously patrolled sense of fairness than we do. They’re also capable of moral seriousness that is often missing from modern children’s books. I sometimes think I would love to be the type of parent who, asked by her child to tell a story, whistled up something whimsical and full of delight – magic, and fairies, and things going up into the sky – as I have seen friends do with their kids. It bores me, so I don’t do it, while wondering how deeply these early choices can affect the development of a child’s sensibility. The last book we read together was The Diddakoi, by Rumer Godden, in which seven-year-old Kizzy is picked up by bullies and rammed headfirst into a tree, almost killing her. Unlike the flippant cruelties in Roald Dahl, this is, essentially, an adult novel with child protagonists, the lesson of which, is – some of the bullies come right in the end – that people can be more than one thing. We talked about it for a long time afterwards. It was more gratifying than a slog through the anodyne whimsy of the Magic Tree House.
Still, an anxiety remains that I am bypassing some playful aspect of childhood in which podcasts about men murdering their wives don’t intrude. Chernobyl and the Titanic are one thing, but we’ve done so many plane crashes, plus the Bermuda Triangle, plus when-rollercoasters-go-wrong that I half expect to have ruined air travel and theme parks for them. I can only hope that, while these stories are told purely to interest and entertain, it teaches them the value of reaching outwards to understand the world.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
