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parents would listen to the BBC Light Programme’s Family Favorites together. Peggy’s most beloved song was “O for the Wings of a Dove,” sung by soprano boy singer Ernest Lough, and she would sing along with him, transported.
    “Her voice would soar in ambitious unison, effortlessly matching Ernest note for note as she delivered the gravy boat to the table,” said David, who went on to remember that his mother told him: “ ‘All our family could sing. We couldn’t do much else but we all loved music. It was thought I’d have a career in music at one time.’ ”
    Apart from sharing her son’s musical talent, he and Peggy had something else strikingly in common: Throughout her life, Peggy composed poems—lush, introspective poems—which, even though she left school at fourteen, were quite literate. In addition to writing poetry, like John, she also read a great deal. Sometimes it seemed to visitors that she was so involved in whatever book she was reading that it was as if she were alone in the room and David wasn’t there at all. Terminally self-involved, Peggy didn’t bother herself with encouraging David’s burgeoning artistic talents. “A compliment from her was very hard to come by. I would get my paints out and all she would say was, ‘I hope you’re not going to make a mess,’ ” David remembered.
    According to Ken Pitt, David confided that his mother never kissed him. “There was no sign of affection any time,” Dudley Chapman, one of David’s childhood friends, confirmed. “It was a very cold household. She’d feed him, clothe him, do all the mother’s things, but there was no cuddling.”
    Peggy’s lack of warmth toward David would take its toll on his emotions for her. So that when he grew up and left home, he would virtually sever contact with her and his family. In 1992 David’s aunt Pat, Peggy’s youngest sister, tracked his unhappy relationship with his mother and recalled, “David started out as a fun-loving, beautiful little child. But he grew up in a cold atmosphere and by the time he was five he was extremely quiet and serious.
    “I remember David coming home from school when he was fourteen upset by something which had happened that day. He ran upstairs and threw himself onto his bed sobbing his heart out. I asked Peggy if she was going to see what was wrong. She went up, but, being suchan unemotional person, she was unable to give him a hug or a cuddle to make him feel better.
    “David turned to her and said quietly, ‘You know, Mum, sometimes I think you hate me,’ ” his aunt Pat said.
    Although Peggy did do the requisite amount of cooking and cleaning and washed David’s clothes into his teens, her deep-seated remoteness, her strangeness, her inability to relate closely to David are highly likely to have been a slight manifestation of the schizophrenia from which her sisters Una, Nora, and Vivienne also all suffered. For as much as David might try and joke about it, cracking of his family, “Most of them are nutty—just out of, or going into an institution,” the reality was dark and serious.
    In September 1950, Una was sent to a mental hospital, Park Prewett, where she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. She was thereafter subjected to archaic treatments for the condition, and died in her thirties. Vivienne suffered from schizophrenia. Nora was also hospitalized, diagnosed with manic-depressive psychosis, and, most horrifying of all, underwent a lobotomy. Then there was Terry, David’s half brother, whom David idolized, but who would also be felled by the family curse of schizophrenia.
    It was inevitable, then, that David would grow up haunted by the specter of mental illness and petrified of losing his wits. “He told me so, quite often and quite clearly,” his first wife, Angie, confided.
    “He told me about the insanity that ran through his family and that it scared him,” model Winona Williams, who had a two-year relationship with him in the