Evil Relations

by David Smith

  A few days after the fumigator’s visit, I sit in the living room surrounded by rolls of wallpaper and tins of paint. Dad grins at me, rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck in, and over the weekend a major transformation is achieved. He works into the night, stripping walls and mixing paint, a cigarette hanging permanently from his lip as he toils. His vest turns grey with sweat and is splattered with paint. Miss Jones cleans up in his wake, bagging and binning the debris. Every now and then Dad rests for a while in his new chair, a well-earned bottle of beer in his hand, satisfaction etched in the gritty furrows of his forehead. Together, we watch our new television and the house breathes again, becoming lighter and smelling fresher. Dad is happy and rejuvenated, the hideous but kindly Miss Jones becomes house proud at last and we all feel different about ourselves. Only bad-tempered Minnie seems not to notice the phenomenal change that one person has achieved.

  The stink of the locomotives returns gradually, together with the rolling smoke. There’s no plumbed-in hot water either, just a cold tap drizzling into the pot sink. Bath night means boiling water in a pan on the stove and having a scrub-down at the sink. But it’s still better than when I first arrived.

  Dad trusts me now to travel to and from school on my own. In the mornings I leave early with Miss Jones and we walk to a house in nearby Benster Street. I push my hands deep into my pockets, clutching my bus fare and a few extra pennies for spends. I’m happy to make this short journey every weekday morning. Miss Jones opens a door into a backyard and my heart lifts as she leaves me to walk past the outside loo and in through the kitchen door, where a voice is calling me to ‘Come right in.’

  I enter a world of noisy, happy-go-lucky family bedlam. I come here every day to be ‘minded’ before catching the bus to school and it’s always the same. Mrs Cummings stands in her apron, swathed in steam that makes her hair stick to her forehead, busily ironing the creases out of a mountain of newly laundered school clothes. Around her, children of all sizes and ages – proper ragamuffins – dart about in vests, knickers, underpants and socks, reaching for clothes to dress themselves, grooming each other like monkeys, arguing, laughing and teasing. One of the older kids holds a long toasting fork in front of the open coal fire, burning a slice of bread, then passes it to a sibling who splatters it with margarine before pushing it towards the waiting hungry mouth of a toddler.

  I’m mesmerised by this family; I feel like Oliver Twist in Fagin’s chaotic lair and I love it. There are twelve kids – seven boys and five girls – under the roof of a house exactly like the one I’ve just left in Wiles Street, but this hovel teems with happiness, even though Mr Cummings has tuberculosis and doesn’t work. His wife has an occasional job at a local pie factory. The couple, together with their yelling, laughing brood, offer me safety and care – and morning toast that’s never tasted better.

  After school each day I exit the gates, turn left and stand for a while on the corner of Aked Street, daring myself to go ‘home’. But when I eventually find the courage to run down the street and hammer on the door, no one answers. I change my tactics: gulping down my dinner, I sneak past the ‘gate lady’ in the schoolyard and rattle the letterbox of number 39, then stand to one side so that I can’t be seen through the glass door panels. Mum receives me sternly and we go through to the kitchen. She sits opposite me and the firm facade softens as she struggles to explain the situation: I can’t come ‘home’, I’m not a naughty boy but there are new rules to follow. Nonetheless I manage to extract a promise from her that she’ll talk to Dad and ‘sort something out’.

  We return to school, where she speaks quietly to the lady on gate duty. I’m never able to sneak out again, but a few days later I emerge to find Mum standing in her usual spot, alone and apart from the other much younger mums. She’s kept her promise as I knew she would, and I’m allowed to go home to Aked Street every day after school for an hour or two, provided Mum puts me on the bus to Gorton at teatime. I travel back with a bag of goodies and my usual comic books; the order for them is never cancelled. My daily existence has become a lot less dark – I’ve won visiting rights.

  But I don’t know why I’ve got to be back at Wiles Street for teatime. The house is always locked and empty until late. I sink down on the doorstep, day after day, whatever the weather, reading my comics and munching the last of my treats, to await the inebriated Miss Jones.

  Often, the pretty girl from next door but one joins me, keeping me company even in the rain. Her mother sends her out to me with cups of tea and jam butties. We sit shoulder to shoulder, talking quietly. In time, we graduate to holding hands and dare a sweet, secret kiss. She is pure innocence and her name is Pauline Reade.

  * * *

  David’s last year at Ross Place Primary was his most troubled. At home in Wiles Street, he and his father argued regularly, and the fights quickly became physical. ‘Dad had never laid a finger on me before,’ David explains with a frown, ‘but it was a different story once we were living together. There were many, many fights and I always came off worst – I was only eight when he took me away from Mum, remember. But as I got older and learned how to handle myself, the fights started to be less weighed in his favour. When I was about ten or eleven, I got up one morning and couldn’t find a clean shirt to put on, and moaned at Dad. He grabbed a dog-chain and hit me with it, right across my back. I retaliated and punched him in the face. I regret it now because he was my dad, when all’s said and done, but I never lost another fight with him after that.’

  There were other battles, more evenly balanced, at Ross Place. ‘I was rebelling by then and saw myself as the cock of the school,’ David laughs. ‘Us illegitimates were always cock of the school. I suppose we felt we had something to prove. I stopped concentrating in class and started smoking when I was nine. Mum would give me a bag of sweets to take to school and often she’d hand me a two-shilling piece, which was a lot of money in those days. I’d spend it on fags in the school tuck shop, where they used to split packets of cigarettes – you’d buy only what you needed or could afford. It sounds shocking now, smoking from such a young age, but kids then were brought up in a smoker’s world. Everybody smoked.’

  He pauses, remembering. ‘When I wasn’t smoking, I was scrapping. One fight stands out from that last year: me and a boy called Tony Jackson were caught knocking lumps out of each other on the cricket field. The teachers broke it up on the understanding that we’d take part in an “organised” fight against each other, after school. Word went round – anyone who wanted to watch could do. All the kids turned up, of course, and stood around this makeshift ring in the middle of the playground, chanting, “Fight, fight, fight.” One of the teachers stepped forward to act as referee and I was completely dumbfounded when he strapped a pair of boxing gloves on me. Boxing gloves! I’d never worn them before in my life. It was like putting clown shoes on a long-distance runner – a real handicap. Tony Jackson was twice my size anyway, and I wanted to gouge my nails into him, pull his hair and stick my fingers in his eyes. That, to me, was fighting. But Jackson was used to boxing, so he threw me all over the place that afternoon and was declared the winner in front of the whole school. I was gutted, but it didn’t take me long to bounce back.’

  Sticking with his seditious mood, David set his mind resolutely against preparing for his 11-plus exam. Aware that he was expected to pass English with flying colours, he ignored the set questions and scribbled down the lyrics of a Ray Charles song instead, then turned over the paper and waited impatiently for the bell to ring. ‘I didn’t want to push myself or yield to anybody’s expectations of me,’ he admits with a shrug. ‘I couldn’t be bothered with all that. Obviously I realise now just how stupid my attitude was, but aged 11 I saw things from another angle entirely. I upset my English teacher by deliberately fouling up my exams. He knew what I was capable of because he’d read the compositions in my exercise books. But the bottom line was I didn’t give a damn.’

  There was a particularly harrowing elemen
t in his home life that he couldn’t articulate to anyone. Miss Jones’ nephew occasionally stayed overnight, sharing David’s bed. He abused David while the 11-year-old boy lay there terrified and silent, eyes tightly shut, pretending to be asleep. David told no one about the abuse and pushed it to the darkest recesses of his mind. He found unexpected solace in a place far beyond Gorton: ‘I had some good friends back then – Roy and Dennis Cummings, and an older boy called Walter King who I got to know through our mutual love of comics. One afternoon, Roy and Dennis suggested that we should all go camping at Alderley Edge. I’d never been there before, but it soon became a favourite spot for all of us. We had to go by train, but we never paid – we’d sneak on and then jump off before the conductor caught up with us. At Alderley Edge there were woods and water, we’d climb trees, swing on ropes and build fires. I broke my collarbone after falling off a rope-swing and had to travel back on the train in agony. But I also used to go to Alderley Edge by myself and that’s when I found the cave . . . it was my secret hideaway. I’d swim and paddle on my own there. It was somewhere to feel happy, far away from the misery of Gorton.’

  Despite finding an escape route, David’s behaviour spiralled out of control and he ended up in serious trouble, harming someone to whom he’d been close. He and one of the Cummings boys had come to blows and when Dennis Cummings pitched in to defend his younger brother, David retaliated with a knife.

  ‘It was a terrible thing to do,’ David admits, swallowing hard. ‘Dennis recovered fully, but it was an unforgiveable thing that I did. These people had looked after me ever since I moved to Gorton out of sheer kindness and compassion, and that’s how I repaid them.’ He swallows again. ‘Not good. Not good at all.’

  At the age of 11, David was brought before magistrates on an assault and wounding charge. He was put on probation. Ironically, it was his aptitude for fighting that sparked the interest of the headmaster at Stanley Grove, the secondary school he began attending in autumn 1959. Sidney Silver ran a boxing club – and saw David as a potential champion.

  Chapter 3

  ‘He was to found to be a difficult boy . . .’

  – Canon Cecil Lewis, letter, 1968

  School uniform was compulsory at Stanley Grove, but on the number 53 bus up Kirkmanshulme Lane into Longsight, David got out a needle and thread to narrow the regulation brown trousers, and only put on his school blazer when it was time to disembark. He was medium height for his age, of slim build, and out of school he favoured skinny jeans, black or white T-shirts, and winkle-pickers. Occasionally, he was sent home for infringing uniform rules, but Sidney Silver was eager to harness David’s rebellious streak into something that would benefit rather than blight the school’s reputation.

  ‘You didn’t get on at Stanley Grove unless you were able to bring in medals and trophies,’ David recalls with a slight grimace. ‘It was that sort of place. The headmaster was obsessed with accolades, which suited me down to the ground for a while.’ Encouraged by Silver, David took up boxing and acquitted himself extremely well in a number of inter-school matches: ‘I liked it, though the Queensberry Rules weren’t my cup of tea. I just used to keep punching with my right fist until I brought my opponent down. But together with another boy called Willatt, I trained at Stretford Boys Police Club, in a room within the police station itself. We both got drawn in the Manchester Schoolboys Boxing Championships. I didn’t own a pair of proper lace-up boxing boots like everybody else – I wore galoshes. But Dad promised me some boots if I won.’

  The finals were held at Kings Hall in Belle Vue, home of countless amateur boxing matches. Jack Smith yelled himself hoarse among the roaring ringside crowds. ‘Dad wept like a baby with pride when I won,’ David recalls. ‘He grabbed my certificate and was straight down to the pub with it, bursting with pleasure that his boy had come out on top. When I saw him later that night, the certificate was full of beer stains from being passed around his mates. He kept to his word, though, and bought me some proper boxing boots.’

  Questioned about the relationship with his father as he was growing up, David struggles to find the appropriate words. Sensing the difficulty, Mary interjects. ‘Let me answer that. They loved each other to bits, without a shadow of a doubt, but they fought like cat and dog all their lives. Even then, after an explosive row, Dave would chase after his dad as soon as it was over, to apologise and make sure it got sorted quickly.’

  David nods, ‘That’s exactly it. We were all right, weren’t we, when it really came down to it?’

  ‘Very much so,’ Mary replies. ‘Very close, unbelievably close despite everything. Jack was always there for Dave when he needed him. Jack worshipped him.’

  Keen to clarify the relationship, David explains, ‘In all the books that have been written about the case, and in See No Evil: The Story of the Moors Murders, my relationship with Dad was only ever shown as abusive, but there was so much more to us than that. It wasn’t only physical fights and shouting. Did we love each other? Yes, of course. Did we cause each other a lot of pain? Without a doubt. Women caused the biggest ructions between us as I got older because Dad was an out-and-out misogynist and I couldn’t handle that. But that came later. He was beside himself when I won the fight at Kings Hall.’

  Despite being selected to represent Manchester against Oldham in the 11–12 years bracket, David decided to abandon boxing after Annie told him he’d ruin his looks if he continued. ‘She told me I’d end up with a broken nose and cauliflower ears. I was her baby – a substitute for the handsome boy who’d died in Crewe station – but still her baby. I was discovering girls at this point, too, and the combination of not wanting to put them off and my habit of always following Mum’s advice put an end to my boxing career. Funnily enough, Dad wasn’t all that concerned – he wouldn’t push me into something I didn’t want to do. But Sidney Silver was very displeased indeed.’

  The headmaster asked to see David and Jack. It was a broiling hot afternoon as he indicated that Jack should sit opposite him, while David was made to stand. Listening to the headmaster’s barely disguised irritation and watching the beads of sweat gather on the man’s thin moustache, David felt his temper beginning to fray.

  ‘Sidney Silver was well known for his handiness with the strap and slipper,’ he recalls. ‘If you were sent to his office, you knew something wicked was about to happen. But he was in pompous mode that day, harping on about how I was more capable than Dad realised and that he had great expectations of me in the ring. Dad didn’t say a word in his own defence, but I was fuming. Being forced to stand in the hot sunlight in the study while the headmaster prattled on didn’t help. All at once my temper snapped: I lunged across the desk and punched Sidney Silver square on the nose. And that was it. I was expelled on the spot.’

  He gives a lopsided grin: ‘I suppose there’s a certain irony in my boxing career coming to an end after I floored the headmaster who didn’t want me to give it up.’

  Departing Stanley Grove in disgrace, David was taken on as a pupil at All Saints’ School, opposite Gorton Monastery. He hated it there: ‘I couldn’t settle. I still only had one interest at school and that was writing. At home I’d even write short stories and poetry, just for myself. But the rest of the school day meant nothing to me.’ Within a year of enrolling at All Saints, David was again in serious trouble: ‘There was a fight in the playground. A boy called Percy Waddington – whose name always reminds me of a deck of cards – called me a bastard. Now, I never used illegitimacy as an excuse for my behaviour, but this was a period when the word “bastard” would fire me up. I was immature and still smarting at being taken from Mum. In my own eyes, I was never a bastard, but if someone else called me that . . . I couldn’t just turn the other cheek.’ In retaliation, David picked up a cricket bat and broke Percy’s fingers. His strict probation officer, Mr Wright, was appalled when informed about the incident. With one assault and wounding charge already to his name, David was hauled before the courts again.

&n
bsp; ‘Was I scared?’ He nods. ‘Yes. Not scared of the court itself, but really frightened about what the outcome might be.’

  A short, sharp shock was proposed by the magistrates in an effort to bring David into line. Outside the courtroom a police car waited to ferry him to a substantial building set in vast grounds, from which there was to be no unsupervised leave for several weeks: Rose Hill Remand Home.

  * * *

  From David Smith’s memoir:

  I’m Tom Sawyer and the biggest confederate there ever was, Jesse James, rolled into one. Saturday is my day and I have so much to do that it gives me a headache just thinking about it. I’m a ranch-hand on his wild white steed, weaving through the traffic on Stockport Road; I’m a gunslinger holding up stagecoaches on the corner of Aked Street, and run into the hallway singing, ‘Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.’ At night, after I’ve had my bath and been topped and tailed, I spend an hour in the parlour behind the settee with my wooden rifle and handkerchief mask going pom-pom at the bad guys stalking the alleys outside . . .