by David Smith
* * *
In the summer of 1966, actor and dramatist Emlyn Williams became a familiar figure about Hattersley. During the research for his book about the crimes of Brady and Hindley, he spoke to scores of residents, police and several members of the victims’ families. Williams’s main source of information was Elsie Masterton, whose young daughter Patty had led the police to the burial ground at Hollin Brown Knoll. He visited her frequently, curious about David and the aftermath of the trial but seemingly reluctant to make the approach himself.
It wasn’t long before David heard that Williams was in the neighbourhood and making enquiries about him. ‘Elsie kept turning up at our flat,’ he recalls, ‘asking all sorts of questions. I knew Elsie and her family from my visits to Wardle Brook Avenue, but I was a bit pissed off with her constant appearances at our door. In the end, I asked her, “What are you bothering me with all this for?” She admitted, “Well, I talk a lot to Mr Williams.” So I told her, “Right. Well, in future, if Mr bloody Williams wants to know anything about me, he can come and bloody ask me himself.” I knew he was writing a book about the case and I didn’t like the idea of not having a say over what was written about me. Elsie must have passed on the message because he wrote to request a little chat with me. I’ve got to admit that once I was in touch with him, we were all excited – me, Dad and Maureen. He was in the films and a well-known name. So we spring-cleaned the flat, dolled ourselves up and waited for him.’
Emlyn Williams was not alone when he called at Underwood Court; nor was he quite what David had expected. ‘This funny little voice came over the intercom,’ David remembers. ‘“Mr Williams and son Brook.” I thought: oh, a son as well, and imagined him turning up with a toddler. Then the buzzer went and I opened the door to this raving queen and his equally “flamboyant” grown-up son. Williams was the campest thing I’d ever seen – no one was openly homosexual in Gorton or Hattersley! But here was this madly theatrical chap with pomaded white hair and a scarlet cravat, flinging his hands about. Everything was cuffs and drama. We sat down for a chat. Whenever he asked a question, he would lean in close and I would almost topple over backwards trying to put some distance between us. The son was cut from the same cloth – all melodramatic sympathy.’
Williams and his son remained at Underwood Court for a couple of hours, asking many of the questions David had grown used to answering. ‘When we’d run out of things to say, he asked if we’d like to have a drink with them and said very coyly, “Treat’s on me.”’ David grins, ‘Of course, me and Dad never turned down a free drink. Then Mr Williams said, “I’d like to take you to a hotel, where we can relax.” Now, the only hotel we knew was the Spinners Arms in Hyde, which was like Gorton’s Steelworks Tavern – rough-and-ready and only used by locals. It had the same rules as the Steelie: ladies weren’t allowed in the vault, which was strictly for professional boozers who liked the dark atmosphere and spent their nights gambling, playing cards or skittles.’
His grin widens. ‘We turned up in the vault, the four of us. God only knows what the local hard men thought, but their eyes were out on stalks. My future father-in-law was in there, and I think he offered to buy Mr Williams a pint, but dear Emlyn couldn’t lift a pint, never mind drink one. Maybe if it had a pretty little umbrella in it . . . He wasn’t a bad chap, though. He certainly liked the local colour and spent the evening floating up and down, saying, “Well, isn’t this splendid?” He was generous with his money. And there weren’t any fights that night.’ He laughs at the memory: ‘I think Mr Williams and son Brook floored the locals.’
There was no further contact for a year or two, until David received a letter explaining that the book was almost complete. ‘Mr Williams had one last question for me,’ he recalls. ‘He wanted to know if I thought Brady was “queer”. You know me, I can never give a straightforward yes or no, so I wrote him a fairly long letter. I told him that I didn’t think he was “queer” in the way that he himself – Mr Williams – was, but that he was “queerer than queer”. And he used that phrase as the title of the book’s last chapter.’
David was unaware that from their prison cells, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were also exchanging letters – frequently and written in code. In one, Hindley made a heartfelt vow: ‘Smith must die. Maureen too.’ Neither had forgotten their hatred of him; both regretted not killing David when the chance had presented itself. But there were other, slower methods of ruining his life.
* * *
From David Smith’s memoir:
Dad needs to get away from Underwood Court two or three times a week just to get his head straight. The atmosphere within the flat is like a greenhouse where all the plants have been poisoned. It’s suffocating and tense. We argue a lot, Dad and me, just like the bad old days, our fights turning from verbal to physical. Dad leaves the flat with black eyes and split lips on a too-regular basis, slinking back to his old haunt, the Hyde Road Hotel in Ardwick. But the strange thing is, no matter how vicious our rucks are, we always part as friends.
He washes and shaves before leaving, and wearing his one good suit he looks a hell of a lot more dapper than the price of a one-way ticket, which is all he has in his pocket. In Ardwick, he meets his friends, listens for any news about jobs and usually manages to blag a few quid off a mate. But first he has to bum his ‘entrance fee’. To do that, he stands outside reading the Daily Mirror (he’s just pretending to read it, having already scanned the ink off the page during the day) and it’s never long before he spies an old crony who’s happy to slip him enough for that first drink. Once inside, he starts his patter like the professional Jack the Lad he is, and it’s always late when he arrives home, chuffed with himself, loaded with a bellyful of Chesters Best Dark Mild, head full of gossip and pockets as empty as the day he was born. The yawningly empty packet of 20 Senior Service he took out with him will be full to bursting with every brand of cigarette available. But it goes both ways: Dad is generous with a loan or a few pints himself whenever he’s ‘carrying’ – usually after a win on the horses. He often assures me we’ll be ‘all right tomorrow’ because he’s off to the Hyde Road to do a spot of ‘debt collecting’ . . . but he finds it easier to let his debtors buy him a few pints than settle the score. I don’t mind, because if he’s in a good mood, we don’t fight.
One morning I get up to find Dad sat in his new chair next to the electric fire, both bars burning brightly. He’s turned up the under-floor heating to its fullest and as I enter the room it scorches my socks. I shake my head, exasperated. He doesn’t have a clue how to set the temperature – he just winds it up like a bloody clock. He’s in good humour despite looking rough from his ‘debt collecting’ expedition the night before. I wrinkle my nose: the sweltering heat, Dad’s farts, and the reek of stale beer are a bit too much for me to manage a ‘good morning’.
I turn down the temperature and open the balcony doors, gulping in fresh air while Maureen makes a pot of tea. Today I get my dole money; a few bottles of beer, a half of whisky and a good dose of Dylan strike me as the way to go. I light a cigarette, feeling the urge to drink to oblivion.
Maureen is heavily pregnant now and waddles as she crosses the sitting room to hand me my tea. She smiles, but there is no truth in it; the struggle just to keep going shows in her eyes and the dark emptiness behind them. None of us are living any more – we’re all filling time. Maureen never leaves the flat except to walk to the shops. The short journey is always harrowing: women go out of their way to spit at her and shout ‘whore’, ‘Hindley bitch’ and ‘Hindley cow’ to her face. She has to fight to protect Paul in his pram from the thick phlegm that’s directed at him too, and returns home weeping and terrified. That’s her daily existence.
I sit with Dad beside the fire, expecting to hear about his night’s adventures. But today his news is different: there’s a fiddle going on down near Smithfield Market in the centre of Manchester, and he wants both of us to go there this evening. Apparently a fish factory is taking on casu
al labour – no ‘cards in’, just cash-in-hand and a nice little supplement to the dole. The hours are ten at night until the foreman allows us to clock off; it might be a short shift or a long one, but the wage is a set amount. Dad is well pleased at having heard about the chance of some work and asks me if I’m in. After a moment’s thought I tell him I am, deciding to put my day with Dylan and the bottle on hold.
Later, Dad tells me more about his plan: we’re to turn up clean-shaven and tidy, in freshly laundered work clothes, and hopefully impress the foreman. Maureen gladly gets on with the washing, and by mid-afternoon she has a collection of shirts, trousers and underclothes all clean, ironed and ready to wear. She makes a pack-up of cheese and onion sandwiches for us both, adding a flask she’s bought specially from the chemist and filling it with tea. At the door she hands us each some of our dole money from her purse and wishes us good luck with a smile that almost reaches her eyes.
We hit Manchester a couple of hours earlier than ten o’clock. Dad fancies a couple of pints first and, knowing that it’s casual labour, he wants to weigh up the opposition. Close to the factory is a pub known by locals as the Little George. Dad’s walking accelerates as the lights come into view. He leaves me behind to make my own way through the snug and across the cigarette-strewn wooden floor. The place is packed to the rafters with Friday night career-boozers, laughing and shouting themselves hoarse. I stand by myself for a minute, trying to figure out where Dad’s gone, until I catch sight of him at the bar, ordering two pints of his beloved Chesters Mild and wearing a wicked, mischievous grin that makes him look like a proper nutcase.
Then I notice the landlady standing behind the bar and my mouth falls open: I love this pub – it’s the best ‘free house’ in the world and a thing of beauty in itself.
The landlady places the pints on the bar and opens the flap-top on the counter, ignoring the punters bellowing for more beer as she comes towards me open-armed. The air is squeezed out of my lungs as she wraps her arms around me and kisses my cheek, taking me straight back to my childhood. When the Duchess steps back to look at me, clutching my face in her hands, I have to hold back tears of pure joy. Behind her, at the pumps, is Uncle Bert, grinning as widely as Dad. I catch my breath and shake my head, delighted at the thought of the Duchess as landlady of the Little George.
She gives my hand a tight squeeze before returning to her station. Dad and Uncle Bert are already deep in conversation, but every minute or so the Duchess glances up from pulling pints to smile at me. Now I understand how Dad got to hear about the fiddle near here – Uncle Bert must have told him.
I join Dad at the bar and we slowly drink three complimentary pints each. As ten o’clock approaches, the Duchess sees us to the door and I get another terrific hug and kiss. Then we’re off, heading down the street, sucking Dad’s Polo mints, which we both hope will hide the smell of beer. I’m expecting to be interviewed beforehand in an office, but when we reach the huge metal roller doors, I realise this is a different kettle of fish (literally) altogether: every single down-on-his-luck deadbeat scruff in the city shuffles close to the shutters, waiting for the foreman to appear.
Suddenly the shutters clatter open and a man comes out, carrying a wooden box and a clipboard. I squint at the neon brightness of the factory. Inside, the floor is stacked with large boxes filled with ice – the freezing air rushes out and catches us all full in the face, forcing our shoulders up to brace against it. But more overwhelming still is the nauseating smell of industrial-strength disinfectant and fish.
Dad grabs me by the wrist and pushes through the crowd, ignoring the shouts of ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ and ‘Arseholes.’
The foreman gets up on his box and surveys us all. We look up at him as if he’s about to deliver the Sermon on the Mount, not a shift in a fish factory. Grasping our desperation, he plays along, massaging his own ego.
‘You,’ he points to an upturned head, then pauses as if considering. ‘You’ to another and ‘you’ to a third. This sadistic employment ritual continues for as long as it pleases him before he finishes quickly, ‘You, you, you and you.’
I count 20 heads chosen to enter the freezing factory. Us two smart-arses with our shiny faces and brand-new flask haven’t even been given a passing glance. My shoulders drop and I feel sorry for Dad, whose plan has crash-landed without a single survivor. I think to myself how among all the deadbeats we must stick out like a couple of sore thumbs, maybe making the foreman suspicious that we’re actually undercover dole investigators waiting to expose the fiddle. Dad’s idea of scrubbing up has had the opposite effect of the one he’d counted on: he’s as well-groomed as if he’s off to a Sunday morning service at church, with polished shoes, neat hair and even his favourite Lester Piggott tie – all this just to lump frozen fish around a factory for 12 hours.
I think longingly of the Duchess and the Little George.
Our crowd of human leftovers grudgingly begins to disperse. I suck on another Polo mint, shuffle my feet with the rest and feel embarrassed enough for everyone. Then I hear a voice shout, ‘’Ere, ’old on a minute, Stan!’ and before I know it, Uncle Bert is heading straight for the foreman. He takes him to one side, out of earshot, and I watch curiously as Stan listens, nodding his head a couple of times and flipping through some papers on his plastic clipboard. Uncle Bert shakes his hand in farewell and walks by, muttering out of the side of his mouth, ‘Behave yourselves.’
Stan is still at the mercy of his own little ego, purposely delaying his next move. He stands with the clipboard under his arm for a good minute or two, looking us up and down. I don’t think I give him much of a problem, but he seems perplexed by the bloke stood next to me in his shiny shoes and souvenir jockey neck-gear. Then he calls us over with a mere crook of his finger and we stand straight to attention while he announces with exaggerated authority: ‘You do ten till finish, get paid at the end, half-hour break at three, no tea breaks. I’ll be round during the night to get your names, now get your heads down and keep at it.’
Dad is bursting with pleasure. The only thing he doesn’t do is bloody salute.
The work turns out to be even harder than I imagined. Throughout the night juggernauts arrive and we unload heavy boxes of ice and fish, sort orders, package them, and load them onto the lorries ready for dispatch. I’ve soon seen enough fish to last me a lifetime and am frozen silly. But Dad is a revelation, finding a strength and energy I never knew he possessed, working like a man half his age. Stan patrols the floor continually, pointing out more boxes to pack or unpack, and Dad answers him with an immediate ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Right away, sir.’ I carry the boxes and grit my teeth: it’s a side of him I don’t wish to see.
Not having a minute to think makes the shift pass quickly. Only once does Stan abandon his patrol, and a regular worker remarks that he’ll be across the road, having a liquid lunch at the Little George.
When morning comes, I’m exhausted. We all have a quick swill under the cold tap and queue up outside the office. I make the mistake of lighting a cigarette and a dozen deadbeats pounce, begging for a nicotine hit. I feel sorry for them, knowing they have another long day ahead like this one. Dad and I add our names to the list on Stan’s desk and the foreman reaches into a tin box, counting out two separate piles of notes. When he speaks to Dad, his tone is friendly and familiar, no doubt thanks to Uncle Bert’s generosity across the road: ‘Right, Jack, what I’ve done is paid you and the lad here at the regular rate, not as casuals. I can fix you up with a couple of weeks’ work starting Monday night. Be here at ten, but come in through the side door – don’t bother waiting outside with that pile of shit. And come in earlier if you fancy a pint.’
I think: 12 hours ago we were stood with ‘that pile of shit’ and, to be honest, it didn’t feel that bad. Even a pile of shit has to do something to get through the day.
Dad and I travel back to Hattersley on the bus. I’m knackered but content, pulling hard on a cigarette while Dad rea
ds the racing page of his beloved Daily Mirror. Now I’ve got a few extra quid in my pocket, I’m glad I gave up my dole day with whisky and Dylan. But ten minutes into the journey I begin to feel nervous. Dad hasn’t noticed, but I’m aware of more people joining the bus and shooting us disgusted looks. Nobody takes the double seat in front of us, or the one behind. Paranoia freezes my blood and I feel tiny beads of sweat forming on my upper lip. I wait for the inevitable jeers and shoves, but then I see a woman screw up her nose and reach into her pocket for a handkerchief as she edges down the aisle. A daft smile spreads across my face as I realise that the problem isn’t the usual, but instead is caused by the work: we stink to high heaven of fish, and between us we’re managing to pollute the entire bus. Relief thaws my veins and I cheer up immediately. As we disembark, Dad tells me he’s going to buy himself a new duffle bag for our pack-ups and we stroll quickly home, whacked but satisfied.
I’m so caught up in being able to work at last that I don’t notice what’s happening to Maureen.
We work our shifts, Dad and I, and then sleep most of the day. It escapes me that my wife is slipping into another world. She doesn’t share what she’s done with me because she hasn’t done anything. While I’m asleep, she heads out to the shops, where she’s clawed at and spat at, told to fuck off and die, and her kid too. Then she returns with Paul in his pram, stepping out of the lift and into the flat as quietly as she can in case anyone is waiting for her. In the evenings, she makes our cheese and onion sandwiches, fills the flask with tea, hands Dad the duffle bag and closes the door behind us. When we’re gone, she turns off the telly and sits on the edge of the chair I insist is mine and thinks into a night that is as empty as it is endless. She stops hearing the men who skulk in from downstairs with their aerosol cans to spray ‘Hindley Cunt’ on the freshly painted door.
The next day she walks past the slogans with our baby son, her eyes blank and unseeing, dead to the hatred that encloses her like a fist.