The Treadaway curse

The Treadaway curse is a family saying about the eldest Treadaway son’s supposed tendency to come to a violent or untimely end. Ollie Treadaway introduces it to Edwina as a joke, and insists that ordinary recklessness, not fate, explains the family’s earlier tragedy. But his own death, less than a year after he laughs off the legend, gives the joke a grim afterlife. The narrative never settles whether the curse is real: it lets family history, remembered words, and the timing of loss make the possibility difficult to dismiss.

Origin and Family History

Ollie describes the Treadaways as a family with land, a declining estate, and a reputation for drink and romantic disorder. The curse belongs to this history of glamour mixed with decline: it gives a memorable shape to stories of the family’s troubles, without offering a reliable account of what caused them. Its reach is especially specific. Ollie says the eldest son has a habit of meeting a sticky end, turning separate deaths into an apparent pattern attached to one position in the family.

The story’s first example is Ollie’s uncle and aunt, killed in a car accident. The version circulating around their deaths links fog, whisky, and a cliff, but Ollie later supplies a less supernatural explanation: his uncle was drunk and a bad driver, while his aunt got into the car with him; the fog, he allows, was real. His account does not remove the accident or its violence. It changes the emphasis from inherited doom to human decisions made under dangerous conditions.

The family’s material history also resists the idea that it is simply a dynasty in decline. After the uncle and aunt’s deaths, Ollie’s sensible father restores the estate’s fortunes, though the family never becomes extravagantly rich again. The Treadaways retain broad Irish pasture and hundreds of cows producing milk for cheese. The legend thus coexists with a practical history of loss and recovery: the family can suffer catastrophe and still carry on, even as the story of catastrophe becomes part of its inheritance.

Ollie’s Joke and Edwina’s Memory

Ollie gives the saying its memorable form when he tells Edwina there is “a curse” and calls it “the terrible, terrible Treadaway curse.” He laughs as he says it, and Edwina does not take him seriously. Later, while recalling the portraits in the hallway, she remembers him hanging them with a new hammer and checking whether they were level. The scene brings the family legend into domestic life: it is spoken not as a solemn warning, but as part of a shared moment between husband and wife.

Ollie’s fuller explanation is openly dismissive. He calls the curse “Silly mumbo-jumbo” and describes the deaths as the result of drunkenness, bad driving, and the aunt’s decision to get into the car. His account makes the legend a story that can be challenged from within the family itself. Yet the portraits preserve the people and the accident in Edwina’s daily surroundings. She regards the paintings of the dead uncle and aunt as among the things she would try to save if the house caught fire. The supposed curse is therefore bound not only to a phrase, but to images that keep the family dead present in the home.

The Saying Against Ollie’s Death

The remembered conversation acquires its force from what follows it. Less than a year after Edwina agrees that the curse is nonsense, Ollie’s sweater is left behind on a Cornish beach while the eldest Treadaway son’s body is taken to the mortuary. The detail turns a piece of clothing associated with Ollie into an uneasy trace of his absence, and gives the earlier joke a consequence neither speaker treats as imminent. The resemblance to the family story is stark; the narrative does not need to prove that a supernatural force has acted for the coincidence to feel ominous.

Edwina’s later recollection ends in uncertainty rather than an explanation: “Curse, misadventure, accident, inevitability, who knew?” The alternatives matter. Misadventure and accident offer ordinary causes; inevitability gives those events the shape of fate; the curse supplies the family’s name for that shape. Setting them beside one another keeps the question open while showing how a legend can influence the meaning assigned to a death, even when the people who repeat it reject its literal truth.

Narrative Function

The curse works as a compact frame through which the novel links generations and makes an earlier conversation return with altered meaning. At first, it is Ollie’s amusing account of family folklore; in Edwina’s recollection, the same words sit beside the fate they seemed to predict. That retrospective structure creates dramatic irony without establishing that the curse caused anything. Ollie’s explanation remains plausible, while the pattern he mocks remains emotionally persuasive.

The portraits, the hammer, and the abandoned sweater give the legend physical counterparts: the portraits preserve the dead relatives, the hammer recalls Ollie arranging their place in the house, and the sweater marks the circumstances of his own loss. These details make the curse less a rule with verifiable supernatural power than a language for noticing recurrence and anticipating further loss. Its uncertainty is the point. The story can be dismissed as superstition, understood as a warning about reckless behavior, or remembered as an uncanny family pattern; Edwina’s final question leaves all three readings in view.