The bond between them was perhaps unnaturally close. ‘Fred came first with Daisy, even in front of Walter. She thought the world of Fred,’ says her sister-in-law, Edna Hill. Partly as a result of this mollycoddling, Fred was a spoilt, dull and introverted child.
He was also scruffy. Daisy did her best to dress him nicely, in baggy shorts held up with braces, cotton shirts and sleeveless Fair Isle sweaters, but Fred always managed to look unkempt. Thick, curly brown hair grew up in a little bush on top of his head – just like his mother, whose looks he had inherited. Doug and John looked more like their father, and also got along with him, which Fred never did. There had been an awkwardness between father and son from the day Daisy brought Freddie into her bed.
Walter was well-liked in the village. He was a regular at the Wallwyn Arms on Saturday nights, and was sociable enough to organise the once- or twice-yearly village outings to the seaside, usually to Barry Island in South Wales. The day trips were the only holiday most of the villagers ever had, and they would pose for group photographs upon arrival to mark the occasion. Fred tends to look happy when he is photographed with his family, as long as his father is not in the frame. One snapshot shows Fred laughing uproariously with brother Doug as his mother clowns about with a neighbour. But when Walter’s stern face was in the picture, as it is in the surviving photograph of the Barry Island trips, Fred looks distinctly uncomfortable.
At the age of five, Fred was enrolled in the village school – the only one he ever attended, serving for both his junior and senior education. The backwaters of Herefordshire were slow in improving education standards after the war, and there was no secondary school in the area until 1961. The West brothers walked the two miles there and back every day, joining up with groups of other local children along the way.
Discipline was strict. Classmates remember Fred as being dim, dirty and ‘always in trouble’ because of his slovenly performance. He was regularly given the slipper. After the age of eight, he was old enough to be caned along with the rest of the children. Daisy was outraged by the regular punishments which Fred tearfully reported back to her. His class squealed in delight at the sight of Mrs West, dressed in one of her big floral frocks with her hands on her hips, haranguing their teacher after Fred had been hit. Fred became known as a mummy’s boy partly because of these scenes, and was repeatedly mocked and bullied.
After school, and at weekends, the children were expected to work. If Fred or his brothers and sisters wanted to buy an ice cream or a bar of chocolate, they had to earn the money to pay for it. There were also regular household chores, like chopping wood for the fire, that they had to carry out for no reward.
The jobs they worked at outside the house followed the seasons of the year. Spring found Fred leading his younger brothers and sisters on an expedition up the Dymock road to Letterbox Field, where they would gather bunches of wild daffodils to sell at the roadside: the countryside around Much Marcle is famous for daffodils and a blaze of colour in the spring. Years later, Fred stole back across the same fields to bury the corpse of his first wife.
In the long dog-days of summer the local women and children rose early to meet the hop truck. This rumbled out of the village along dusty lanes to the pungent hop fields, where they worked until the light faded. They also picked strawberries and other soft fruit. The children, with their own little baskets, toiled alongside the adults, their fingers becoming sticky as they worked.
Harvest promised the exciting summer sport of ‘rabbiting’, which in turn would lead to delicious pies and roasts for the undernourished families. Beaters walked through the wheat just before the harvesting machines began to work; then boys, armed with sticks, followed along the edges of the field and clubbed any rabbits that sprang out. The cull was a necessary part of feeding the poor of the village, and the rabbits were shared out at the end of the day with an extra one or two going to large, needy families like the Wests. ‘They were for eating, oh aye,’ says Doug West, licking his lips. ‘We would take them home, skin them and eat them. My mum was a good cook – rabbit stew, roast rabbit, anything.’
Autumn evenings were spent at home, listening to the Dan Dare adventure series on the radio and playing darts. The Wests owned a wind-up gramophone complete with a collection of scratchy 78s. At one stage, Fred took up the Spanish guitar, but he had little patience and the instrument soon became an ornament hung up on the wall in the front room. During the severe West Country winters, the children pulled on their moth-eaten cardigans and went sledging on Marcle Hill.
Fred was a quiet boy, with few friends of his own, relying on his family, particularly John, for companionship. Although John was a year younger, he was physically stronger than Fred and, probably out of jealousy of his favoured brother, bullied him. The third boy, Doug, who was small enough to be left out of their fights, remembers that ‘John used to beat the hell out of Fred’.
Walter milked the herd morning and evening. On Sunday Daisy would sometimes keep him company, leaving the children on their own, and this is when the trouble often started. Fred developed the habit of going outside the cottage and pulling faces at John through the window, until his younger brother became so enraged that he punched at Fred. The windows were made of small panes and John’s little fists were enough to knock the glass out. Naturally Walter was furious when he returned, warning them not to do it again and threatening a beating if they disobeyed him. Sometimes he would be provoked into taking the thick leather belt from his work trousers to hit the boys.
The Wests were cut off from the world in their lonely cottage, and it is possible they became closer than is natural. There have always been rumours in the village that Daisy West harboured something more than motherly love for Fred – it is said she took her eldest son back into her bed when he was aged about twelve, and that she seduced him. This would not have been such an unusual act for a community like Much Marcle: deviant sex was not uncommon in the Herefordshire countryside. In Cider with Rosie, for example, his account of an idyllic childhood between the wars, Laurie Lee wrote about a community very similar to Much Marcle, pointing out that sexual transgressions ‘flourished where the roads were bad’.
Even if it is true that Daisy seduced Fred – and her family cannot confirm the story – it was probably Walter who was the dominant influence upon Fred’s emerging sexuality. In later life Fred often spoke about his father’s sexual appetites, claiming Walter indulged in one of the greatest taboos of all: having sex with children. Fred claimed that Walter abused young girls, and spoke openly about it, saying that what he did was natural and that he had a right to do so. Fred grew up with exactly the same mentality, never thinking that having intercourse with a child might be wrong. He maintained that ‘everybody did it’.
Away from home, Fred’s first sexual experiences took place in the golden fields around Moorcourt Cottage. Shortly after he entered puberty, Fred was taking part in fumbling sex games here. ‘We used to dive in the hay, take pot luck and go for it,’ he later bragged, saying that he had cared little about the age or identity of the girls involved.
Fred’s formal education was soon over. He had learned little at school, and left at the age of fifteen without taking any exams, being barely numerate and unable to read or write beyond the level of a seven-year-old. He had displayed some talents, though: Fred was artistic and drew with instinctive accuracy; in his final years at school he had taken woodwork classes and showed an aptitude for practical work, constructing a three-legged milking stool and a bench. Both of these were presented to his mother.
He went to work with Walter on Moorcourt Farm and the neighbouring Bridges Farm. The land was a mixture of arable and livestock; corn and potatoes were grown, and cows and sheep reared. As the youngest labourer, Fred had to muck in, doing whatever jobs the older farm hands passed on to him.
It was an unkempt, dull-looking youth who stood in mud up to his Wellington boot tops each day. His brown hair was uncombed and his old checked shirt torn. Tufts
of adolescent beard stuck out from his chin, and his teeth were yellow because he rarely bothered to clean them. When asked a question, Fred would look away and either mumble or gabble his answer, making it hard to understand what he said or thought.
But there was one sight guaranteed to make him pay attention – and that was if a girl walked down the lane. Then Fred’s startling blue eyes would open wide and his young, monkey-like face would break into a gap-toothed, lascivious grin.
2
BRAIN DAMAGE
In 1957 John West left Marcle School and went to work on the farm with Fred and their father. Life as an unskilled labourer was poorly paid, but the West boys could expect nothing better. Their father had been a farm worker all his life, as had their maternal grandfather, William Hill, and his father before him; there was no reason to hope or think that John and Fred would ever do anything else. An acquaintance of Fred’s at the time, Patrick Meredith, says that he fully expected Fred to be ‘walking behind a cow with a stick for the rest of his life’.
It was hard, unforgiving work, and not without its physical hazards, as Fred found out when Walter suffered a serious accident shortly after the boys had started on the farm. The old man was lying under a tractor attempting to mend a part when the handbrake failed, allowing the machine to roll forward and trap his chest. He was freed, but was left with just one functioning lung.
Walter’s eldest sons began to go into the nearby market town of Ledbury at weekends. The town represented Much Marcle’s nearest ‘bright lights’, five and a half miles to the north at the foot of the Malvern Hills. Its high street featured a cinema, chip shop, milk bar and youth club. In the middle of the town, opposite the clock tower, stood the Tudor Market House. Raised up on sixteen oak pillars, this offered a sheltered place for teenagers to meet.
Some of the youths who gathered under the Market House lived in Ledbury, while others, like John and Fred, came in from the surrounding villages, travelling by motorcycle or pushbike. Their average wages were little more than three pounds a week, so entertainment was necessarily simple. Evenings were spent chatting and smoking under the Market House, or lounging in the cheaper seats at the Ledbury Picture House, where Fred enjoyed watching John Wayne films. They did not go to pubs, but drank coffee in the chip shop, which doubled as a café.
One of the few places for teenagers to go in the evenings was the Ledbury Youth Club, run by Ken Stainer, a veteran of the King’s African Rifles who persevered with the club despite considerable opposition. The view expressed in letters to the local newspaper was that the club was part of the then fashionable problem of ‘delinquent youth’, and should be shut down. Its loud rock ‘n’ roll music, smashed windows and noise of motorcycles were apparently constant problems. But, in retrospect, the entertainment was remarkably innocent: with nothing more intoxicating than coffee and Coca-Cola to drink, the teenagers played table tennis and billiards, watched television and listened to records by Adam Faith and Elvis Presley. A few of the girls attempted the jive while the boys, including Fred, slouched in the background dragging on cigarettes.
Now that he was aged sixteen, Fred was taking more of an interest in his appearance. He had started to shave properly, combed his hair before going out and wore clean clothes. The girls who attended the youth club considered him to be one of the best-looking boys around town, and Fred’s future sister-in-law, Christine West, remembers that he was the talk of her school. Fred was ‘always chatting up girls’, she says. But his manner was crude. For every impressionable teenager who had a crush on Fred, there were many more who considered him boorish and unpleasant. These teenagers ridiculed Fred as a ‘country bumpkin’ and called him a ‘dirty Gypsy’, although, contrary to widespread belief, there is no Gypsy blood in his immediate family.
If Fred saw a girl he liked, at the club or at a local dance, he simply grabbed at her – it did not matter to Fred whether she was interested in him or not. He also took a perverse delight in trying to steal girls away from other boys. In the same way that he had goaded John by pulling faces at him through the parlour window, Fred went up to other boys’ dates ‘just for the hell of it’, says his brother Doug. When it came to a fight, John would have to step in to defend his brother, because Fred would never hit back.
John’s willingness to stick up for Fred, no matter how badly he behaved, was part of a fierce code of loyalty that the West family shared. An attack on one would always bring the wrath of the others. ‘We could row amongst ourselves till the cows come home, but nobody else was allowed to pick on the family,’ explains Doug.
Fred often visited H.C. Cecil’s motorcycle shop off the High Street in Ledbury. He found motorcycles exciting and knew that, if he had his own transport, he would also have some freedom from Moorcourt Cottage. A small machine was within his reach if he saved carefully.
The motorcycle that took Fred’s fancy was a 125cc James with a mauve-coloured tank. His mother was against the idea, but relented on the condition that Fred promise to sell it if he had a crash. He agreed and took delivery of a brand new James around the time of his seventeenth birthday. A photograph shows Fred proudly straddling his new machine, while his brothers and sisters gather round grinning: little Gwen perched on the tank between her brother’s arms, and sister Daisy resting against his shoulders.
Brian Hill was a country boy who, like Fred, came into Ledbury at weekends and loitered around the Market House. Brian became one of Fred’s few friends and was allowed to ride the motorcycle. At the chip shop, which was among their regular haunts, Brian remembers that Fred would ostentatiously park the James outside before sauntering in – ‘he tried to be the big one for show’. When they were not riding the motorcycle, they often parked it in the alley next to the Plough public house, stripping it down to clean the engine.
On the evening of 28 November 1958, Fred was riding his James 125 home along the Dymock road when he had an accident. He was just a few hundred yards from Moorcourt Cottage when he collided with a local girl named Pat Manns, who had been cycling in the opposite direction, back to the neighbouring hamlet of Preston Cross where she lived with her parents.
There are a number of possible explanations for the accident: there may have been a car involved; the country road was not lit and the lights on both the push-bike and motorcycle were dim by modern standards; at the point where they collided there were also several potholes. It has even been suggested in village gossip that Fred deliberately rode into the girl. Whatever the cause, they were both sent sprawling across the road.
A labourer from Bridges Farm found the teenagers lying in the dark. The girl had cuts and scrapes, but was not seriously injured. Then the labourer turned to the boy. Fred was lying motionless; he was out cold and there was a fair amount of blood. When the ambulance arrived, the patient was judged to be in too serious a condition to be taken to any of the local cottage hospitals, so he was driven fourteen miles to the city of Hereford, in the west of the county.
In the early morning Fred’s battered helmet and Wellington boots were returned to Moorcourt Farm by a friend, who also delivered an alarming account of Fred’s injuries. While an anguished Daisy sat mooning over her son’s belongings, Walter walked up to Preston Cross to apologise to Pat Manns’ family.
Fred lay unconscious in Hereford Hospital. His vivid blue eyes were unfocused, rolled back in their sockets as if he were dead. Daisy held his hand and tearfully blamed herself for allowing him to buy the motorcycle. The wait stretched into days, and there were fears that he would never come round. A full week passed, and then, on the seventh day after the accident, Fred roused himself from the depths of unconsciousness, his befuddled mind slowly cleared and he woke up. He later described the experience as like ‘coming back from the dead’.
The relief felt by his mother was tempered by a sober appraisal of her son’s injuries. Fred was a mess of lacerations and broken bones. He later claimed that a steel plate had to be fitted in his head to keep his shattered skull together.
His nose was broken; injuries to one arm would give him trouble for the rest of his life; and one leg was so severely smashed it had to be held together by a metal brace while the bone mended. Fred was given callipers and a metal shoe. For months after the accident, he stomped about Moorcourt Cottage like Long John Silver, thumping the floor with his foot as he went. ‘You could always tell when Freddie was coming back because he dropped one leg harder than the other. You could hear him coming at night,’ says his brother Doug.
When, after several months, the leg-iron came off, he still had a marked limp and had to use crutches to get around. The accident also altered what good looks he previously had: his nose was crooked and one leg would forever be shorter than the other. The experience also left Fred with a lifelong dislike of hospitals.
Despite these not inconsiderable handicaps, he drifted back into what social life he had enjoyed in Ledbury, hanging around the Market House building and the youth club. Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’ was one of Fred’s favourite records, but his leg was so stiff that his movements looked comical when he tried to dance. He was angry with himself, and for the first time in his life, became aggressive when other boys started making fun of him by saying that he ‘wasn’t any good’.
Fred was also finding life difficult at home. He told his friend June Ledbury that he was unhappy living at Moorcourt Cottage, that he ‘couldn’t hack it’ any more and that his father was getting him down.
It was at this time that Fred met one of the most significant women in his life. Catherine Bernadette Costello, known as Rena or Rene for short, was the girl who would become his first wife. She was a pretty sixteen-year-old with blue eyes, auburn hair and a scar on her brow. They first met at a dance held at the Memorial Hall in Much Marcle, opposite the red-brick village school where Fred had been educated. Rena was staying with relations in the area, having moved down from Scotland in the summer of 1960.
Fred & Rose Page 3