Steve Mallen thinks the signs first started to show when his son stopped playing the piano. Edward, then 18, was a gifted musician and had long since passed his Grade 8 exams. Playing had been a passion for most of his life. But as adulthood beckoned, the boy had never been busier. He had won a place to read geography at the University of Cambridge and was revising hard for his A levels. At his school, Edward was head boy and popular among pupils and teachers. His younger brother and sister idolised him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t attach any particular significance to it,\u201d says Mallen of what he saw as merely a musical pause. \u201cI think we just thought, \u2018Well, the poor lad\u2019s been at the piano for years and years. He\u2019s so busy\u2026\u2019 But these are the small things \u2013 the ripples in the fabric of normal life \u2013 that you don\u2019t necessarily notice but which, as I know now, can be very significant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three months after Edward stopped playing, and just two weeks after he handed in an English essay his teacher would later describe as among the best he had read, police knocked at the door\u00a0of the family home in Meldreth, a village ten miles south of Cambridge. Steve Mallen was at home, alone. \u201cYou become painfully aware that something appalling has happened,\u201d he recalls. \u201cYou go through the description, they offer commiserations and a booklet, and then they leave. And that\u2019s it. Suddenly you are staring into the most appalling abyss you can ever imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next time Mallen heard his son play the piano, the music filled Holy Trinity Parish Church, a mile from the station where Edward caught the train to school every morning, and where he died by suicide on 9 February 2015. Steve says 500 people came to the funeral. Friends had organised a sound system to play a performance of Edward\u2019s filmed on a mobile phone. \u201cMy son played the music at his own funeral,\u201d Mallen says as he remembers that day over a mug of tea in a caf\u00e9 in central London. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t dream this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n