#BookReview ‘The First Day Of Spring’ by Nancy Tucker

About the book…

‘So that was all it took,’ I thought. ‘That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world. One morning, one moment, one yellow-haired boy. It wasn’t so much after all.’

Chrissie knows how to steal sweets from the shop without getting caught, the best hiding place for hide-and-seek, the perfect wall for handstands. Now she has a new secret. It gives her a fizzing, sherbet feeling in her belly. She doesn’t get to feel power like this at home, where food is scarce and attention scarcer. Fifteen years later, Julia is trying to mother her five-year-old daughter, Molly.

She is always worried – about affording food and school shoes, about what the other mothers think of her.

Most of all she worries that the social services are about to take Molly away.

That’s when the phone calls begin, which Julia is too afraid to answer, because it’s clear the caller knows the truth about what happened all those years ago.

And it’s time to face the truth: is forgiveness and redemption ever possible for someone who has killed?

The hugest of thanks to The Tandem Collective for having me on my very first readalong, for the divisive, moving, heart rending work of fiction, ‘The First Day Of Spring’ by Nancy Tucker. This novel is out now in hardcover and e-book formats and asks of it’s reader the most difficult and challenging questions, to which, there are no easy answers.

The murder of a child, by another, is one of the worst things that this mind can envisage, having grown up in the time where the death of James Bulger struck a universal chord of revulsion, disbelief and anger.

And yet…seeing grown adults throwing themselves at the police vans and yelling for them to be hung, it does not sit easily at all. They were 10 year old boys, and the notion of punishment, awareness of the crime which had been committed, and the public response to it, were all questions that no one really wanted to look into. How these children could be culpable of this hideous act was beyond comprehension, and yet, the tax payer was now funding what seemed like a life of luxury and accommodation whilst Jamie’s family were permanently in hell.

In ‘The First Day Of Spring’, the very first page tells you that 8 year old Chrissie has taken, and killed, a small child. She then waits around for the discovery to be made, insinuates herself into the investigation, tells the police, teachers, anyone who will listen things which could not have happened.

How does it make you feel reading that?

As a parent, this made me feel physically ill, a visceral, knee jerk reaction, particularly intense as the narrative has been told through Chrissie’s eyes.

Chrissie’s story alternates with Julia’s, a grown woman with a 5 year old daughter named Molly who she is worried will be taken away on a daily basis. Julia was Chrissie, and also Lucy, until someone worked out who she is and drove her out of her home.

The two storylines are not exploitative, they are investigative in the way that the actions of the child and the behaviour of the grownup are interlinked.

It is an exercise in psychology as you sit there, torn between feeling horrified by Chrissie’s actions and then, her relationship with her mother comes into focus. And your heart tears, and tears again. For hardscrabble children who aren’t fed, aren’t nourished, aren’t raised and aren’t noticed.

To her teachers she is a source of endless annoyance, yet no one stops to think why she has ringworms, nits, dirty clothing and so on. Or why she volunteers to be milk monitor all the time (holidays are the worst as she loses the nutrition from school funded milk, biscuits and so forth). Her mother resents her entire existence, blames her for the intermittent appearances of her father, and holds Chrissie at a distance. As a result, Chrissie is emotionally, possibly intellectually and physically stunted.

As Julia, she constantly is on her guard, her falling pregnant was not a choice, she had grown up in a care home no better than a prison, then turfed out, re-named Lucy and set into a world whose rules she doesn’t understand. Now she has a child for whom she is ultimately responsible and and, not sure if she deserves to enjoy any tiny part of her life, tortures herself with a intricate and implacable daily routine. Everything is done in order, without hesitation or deviation as though she is constantly watched, which, to an extent, she is. When Molly breaks her arm following an accident, convinced she will be taken away, Julia and Molly go on the run.

The journey they take is a literal and metaphorical one as Julia aims to give Molly the best send off possible and create memories to sustain her once Molly is gone.

Chrissie details the hunger which defines her life, her physical and mental hunger to have her needs met, though she can’t really explain it, she feels hollow and pointless. Killing Stephen filled her with a feeling she doesn’t understand, and, as you read further in, you understand that Chrissie’s concept of death and redemption are not the same as anyone else’s.

Your sympathy, empathy and outrage do constant battles as her appalling crime leaves the entire neighbourhood where she and her victim, Stephen, live, devastated and forever changed. Policemen are on the corners, turning up at school, and the wild days of playing in abandoned houses are a thing of the past.

Using a child’s perspective is so clever, Chrissie is 8 so her understanding of some concepts is extremely limited-she has had such little affection shown to her, that her hunger is all consuming and she has so much time to think but no context in which to frame her feelings.

There are no easy answers here, as in life, when considering the death of a child. The First Day Of Spring is meant to be a time of renewal, of hope, and looking forward to what the year has to bring. What it means in this novel is that Chrissie moves from child to murderer, and spring will forever be associated with trauma, hopelessness and despair.

It is wrong to say I enjoyed this book, because of the topic, but I did enjoy the way it challenged me to re-think my notions of punishment, innocence and culpability. It is extremely well written and I hung in to the very last pages because where it goes to is a place of renewed hope and potential. I enjoyed that very much. On this day, Persephone is supposed to return from the underworld and rebirth the spring, and this is dramatically contrasted with the topic of this novel which takes Chrissie’s actions and condemns her friend’s brother to a lonely death. The essence of this story is not dealt with flippantly, but respectfully, and, for a first novel, this is an incredible feat where Nancy makes you care and invest so deeply in such a heinous act.

About the author…

Nancy Tucker was born and raised in West London. She spent most of her adolescence in and out of hospital suffering from anorexia nervosa. On leaving school, she wrote her first book, ‘The Time In Between’ (Icon, 2015) which explored her experience of eating disorders and recovery. Her second book, ‘That Was When People Started To Worry’(Icon, 2018), looked more broadly at mental illness in young women.

Nancy recently graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Experimental Psychology. Since then she has worked in an inpatient psychiatric unit for children and adolescents and in adult mental health services. She now works as an assistant psychologist in an adult eating disorders service. The First Day of Spring is her first work of fiction.

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