There's nothing like good neighbours - again

A mother and her two children were discovered dead this week in their apartment in the southern French city of Marseille.

It's a sad story - the sort which frequently seems to make the headlines and one that would otherwise probably go relatively unnoticed had it not been for one particular aspect.

According to preliminary investigations the three bodies had been lying undetected in the flat for the best part of a month.

Just as in the case of a 70-year-old man, whose mummified body was discovered in his apartment after three years last August, so this latest incident surely makes anyone wonder "where were the neighbours?"

The body of the 39-year-old woman was found on her bed, and next to it those of her two children, her eight-year-old daughter and a baby girl of a couple of months.

The decomposing bodies were discovered by the woman's former partner and father of the two children. The couple had been estranged for almost a year.

According to local police the bodies were in a state of "advanced decomposition" and an autopsy to be carried out on all three would reveal the exact cause of death.

For the moment, investigators are following three different paths. Either the mother killed her two children and then committed suicide, or all three were murdered, or the deaths were accidental.

Police said that the woman had been in severe financial difficulty and the rent on the apartment had not been paid for several months.

The father has been taken in for questioning and is being held in custody for "failure to render assistance to a person in danger."

But whatever the outcome of those investigations, there still remains the question of why neither neighbours nor anyone in the local community noticed.

Perhaps the report carried on Wednesday's lunchtime news on France 2 television sheds some light on how a woman, living in this country as an illegal immigrant (sans papiers) who by all accounts very much kept herself to herself, and her two children could die and their bodies remain undetected without anyone realising.

"I knew she had been pregnant and had given birth. I heard the baby crying from time to time," a neighbour living on the same floor told reporters.

"After that we heard nothing and we simply thought she had left, preferring to flee the apartment with all the financial problems she had."

Not surprisingly perhaps the woman didn't want to show her face to the cameras.

And from a local shopkeeper who had seen the daughter a couple of times when she had come into his store and tried to pay with a cheque, there was a similar sort of "explanation".

"As she was a young girl of around eight years of age I told her I couldn't accept the cheque and she would have to return home and ask an adult - one of her parents - to come along with the cheque and proof of identity. Neither she nor one of her parents returned," he said.

"We didn't realise," said another shopkeeper. "We lead our lives without realising the dramas that go on around us."

It's certainly not the first time this sort of sad story has occurred, and it probably won't be the last - either here in France are elsewhere.

But it surely still leaves more than just a bad taste in the mouth.

Once again it's probably worth reflecting on a campaign that began here in France back in 1999 "La Fête des voisins" or "Neighbours day".

From humble beginnings with just 10,000 participants taking part in 80 buildings dotted around the country's capital, the event has grown to more than six million people in 600 local authorities throughout France, according to organisers' figures for 2008.

Since 2004 the concept has been exported to many other parts of Europe with Journée européenne des voisins (European neighbours' day) in around 150 towns and cities.

Sadly, for the mother and her two children such neighbourliness isn't "celebrated" until May.