by Gitta Sereny
Nothing she said or did during that long day changed the impression she had given me two months earlier in Court. There is no doubt—as she would tell me herself—that she had never been able to manage her life, or give to her children what they needed. But there is an honesty about her to which I found myself drawn. I told her right away that I first wanted to talk to her about her own childhood and her life as a girl and young woman, but for the first hour or so she kept swerving back to recent events, above all, of course, to “Bobby”.
“He was difficult, you know, but he was loving,” she said. “If I was watching the telly, he’d come and sit near me, and play with my ear . . . he was always putting his finger in ears, I don’t know why.”
I asked her if Robert had always made the odd hand movements I had noticed in Court, licking his fingers, putting his knuckles or two or three fingers into his mouth; wetting a finger and drawing it around his mouth.
No, she said, she’d never noticed it, but “he often has chapped lips”.
Did he hug her, kiss her, or she him?
“No,” she said. “Not big boys like that. But if I had migraine, he’d say to the others ‘Shut up, mum’s not well . . .’”
Without warning, she swung to the days of the trial.
“One day, downstairs, during a break, he said to me ‘I sometimes feel like crying up there.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t you then?’ and he said, ‘What, cry in front of all those people? They’d think I’m a baby.’
“The newspapers wrote, he didn’t seem to feel anything,” she said. “But they don’t know: his tension showed itself in breathing. He has asthma anyway and sometimes I could hear him wheeze from where I sat.
“Did you know?” she asked, suddenly starting to cry, “that he went to buy a rose and put it down in the grass where people had collected flowers for the baby?”
“Yes,” I said, “I knew.”
“Why would he do that if he didn’t care?” she said.
I told her that Mary Bell, before she was arrested for the murder of two little boys in 1968, had gone to the funeral of one of them.
She looked at me for quite a while then without speaking. Finally, she said, “The day after he was arrested, I went to see him and told him that people were saying I had interfered with him.”
“‘You?’ he asked. ‘What do they mean?’ And I said, ‘They think I touched your private parts.’ ‘You did not!’ he said. He was furious,” she said, sounding pleased.
She went on to ask me what I knew about child abuse. Had I talked with children who had been so abused? Had I ever met anybody who had abused a child?
It preoccupied her a great deal and she came back to it several times. Was it possible, I finally asked, when she raised the subject for the fourth time, that Robbie’s father could have abused him when he was small? “No,” she said. “No, he wouldn’t have . . . well, except of course when he was drunk. God knows what he’d do then.”
I asked whether Ann could think of anyone else who might have hurt Robert, an uncle, male friends – perhaps older boys? She shook her head. Could she think of anything else that might have happened to make him so unhappy?
She shook her head again. “Perhaps there wasn’t anything,” she said then, rather quietly and maturely, I thought. “Have you thought of that? Perhaps it was only because his dad left us.”
Ann Thompson has always lived in Liverpool. Her parents are now 60 and 61. Her father was a lorry driver and has retired. Ann, now 40, is the middle child of three, with an older sister and a younger brother. They had lived simply when she was small. In the first house she remembered, “we had a tiny kitchen, an outside toilet, two bedrooms—one for parents, one for the two girls—a small living-room and a tiny yard.” When Ann’s brother was born, they moved to a three-bedroom house. Ann was frightened of her father for as long as she can remember. “There must have been a time, when I was really small, when he didn’t beat me,” she said, “but I can’t remember it.
“I only remember the beatings, always with a belt; he’d take off his belt, you know, with a big sort of movement, and I had to stand there, waiting; it was the most frightening thing in the whole world.” He only beat her, never the others. “I was a very defiant person, certainly, you know, when I grew . . . in my teens,” she said. “But as a little girl? Well, anyway, it happened and, no, my mother didn’t defend me: she was dead frightened of dad herself: he beat her, too, specially when he was drunk, which was often. I remember once, we were in bed; it was late evening and he came in drunk and started on her and she came running into our room in her nightdress screaming for help and I jumped out of bed and he lifted up the belt and said ‘You make one move and you’ll get it instead of her’, and then he beat her as she lay across my bed. I don’t think my parents knew the meaning of the word love . . .”
On the face of it, they were comparatively well-off because her father was always in work. “There was always food on the table, we had a Christmas tree . . . turkey . . . Easter eggs; you know, we had all the externals of normal life, including church every Sunday in our Sunday best.”
At school “I was thick as two planks,” she said. Her siblings liked school and were very bright. Her brother is now boss of a timber firm; her sister works in a factory, on the assembly line. “But only for a bit,” she said quickly. (It was interesting that although she said she hadn’t seen any of her family since Robert’s arrest, she was careful to ensure that I understood her sister is too good for factory work.) “Just for the moment,” she said again. “They were clever about spelling—but I was always older up there,” she touched her head, “than they could ever be.”
She sounded relieved to go back to her childhood. She’d had friends . . . they played in the street, never in each other’s houses. Much as in the majority of homes now, family life—without any meaningful verbal exchange—took place around the television screen.
“I was all the time unhappy” (the specific use of the phrase “all the time” rather than the more generalized “always” seems to emphasize the conscious continuity of her unhappiness and this is strongly borne out by her next sentence): “I was a bedwetter till 15.”
Did her parents consult anyone about this?
“Oh yes, they sent me to the doctor; he sent me to the hospital, they gave me pills and all that . . . and the next time when it happened, as it always did, my dad beat me. I was so afraid of him, I only had to think of him to wet myself.”
With this, the family was very prudish, she said, never saw each other undressed, any subject touching on anything to do with the body was taboo. “We didn’t have a Childline,” she says bitterly. “Who could we tell if we were beaten? I ran away when I was 16.”
Where did she go?
She laughed, mocking herself. “Nowhere. Just over the road. And then—ha!—he had already caught me, dragged me back and beat me. I still got beaten at 17—a week before I got married.
“I talked to him three or four weeks ago,” she said suddenly. “And I told my mother that he has been carrying on with another woman for 20 years and still is. I told her where she could find and ask her.”
Why had she suddenly called her parents when they hadn’t talked to her since Robbie’s arrest, and in fact very little before that, either?
“There was a piece in the paper” (when she refers to the paper, she always means the Liverpool Echo) “with an interview with my father where he says that I never asked them to mind my kids.” The implication was that if they had had a hand in their upbringing, this wouldn’t have happened. “But it isn’t even true—I did ask them, but they never would . . . the only one [of her boys] they would ever see was Malcolm, and that very rarely.
“Robert and I were married on my 18th birthday.”
Yes, she said, her parents had attended the wedding. “Robert was 18, too, an apprentice electrician. He earned 15 shillings a week then. At the wedding party my dad said ‘Now you’re on your own. I give it 12 months.’
“Well, he was wrong there, wasn’t he?” she said it with a sad kind of pride.
“We stayed married for 17 years.”
Not surprisingly, she keeps coming back to her ex-husband, Robert, who walked out on her and his six children in 1988. He was a hard-working electrician and in the second half of their marriage the money was all right. “I was in love with him,” Ann says. “In a way I still am. But our first nine years were difficult. We were just too young, we had little money and then—of course, now I know we had all these children too quickly. All these babies . . .” she repeated in a tone of wonder.
But why all the babies? I asked.
“I wanted a daughter,” she said, dreamily.
“It’s so hard to know what went wrong,” she went on, searching. “I think we lived too near his parents, and then Robert’s father died and left his wife with eight young children. His mother was a good woman—kind, but I never felt welcome in her house. It seemed to be because my family had more money, more possessions.”
Even so, until Robert left, the various members of the families did see each other. “Afterwards, they were gone.”
According to her, the last seven years of their marriage had been “all right”: Robert was working and earning, and the six boys, too, were doing all right, at least, there were no complaints about them from school. They loved going camping in the summer, which the family had been enjoying for several years. Her husband drank quite a lot, it was true, she said. “But everybody in Liverpool drinks.”
The women too? I asked.
“To be truthful, yes, by comparison with a lot of other places, probably quite a lot.”
So would it be fair to say that even in their best years, the children would have been witness to a lot of drinking?
“I suppose so,” she said. “But you know, because everybody does it, it wasn’t special.”
On these summer camping trips, she said, they swam and played games, people went fishing and even climbing.
However, it was evidently not these pastimes which principally occupied her husband Robert in the summer of 1988.
“We had a lot of friends on the campsite,” Anne said, “among them a very nice, well-off older couple who we saw a lot of. They were grandparents in their fifties.
“But I didn’t think he was seeing her separately,” she said then. “For God’s sake, she was 52 to Robert’s 34. I had no idea there was something between him and her and when somebody suggested it—almost as a joke you know—I tried to ignore it. It was such a lovely summer. The children had such a good time and everybody was nice to everybody else.
“And then, one day, he just came with all her belongings and put them in our van and said if I said one word, just one single word, he’d take the van and go off with her. So I said nothing—he slept with her in a caravan; I slept with the kids in our eight-bed tent.”
After they went back to Liverpool, they had another seven weeks together. “It was bad weeks. He never talked to me, or the kids. He went to work, then stayed out drinking, then came back just to sleep. Later I realized he had long decided to go and was only waiting to hear that she had found them a place to live.”
She didn’t think he saw the other woman during that time—she lived in another town. A personal ad in the Liverpool Echo under the title “Connection” brought things finally to a head. “It must have been a pre-arranged signal,” Anne said. “He saw it, rushed out, came back at 3am, we rowed all night, and then in the morning he was gone. He left £5 on the kitchen table. That’s all I ever had from him for the kids.
“I found out that they had gone to Southport and, later, that woman’s desperate husband told me they had moved to Accrington, Lancs. At one point the older boys had a phone number for him and they used to ring him, but after a few months he must have moved because they couldn’t get him any more. I later told the social services where he was, but they never could find him for child support, I don’t know why.” She snorted bitterly. “Now that the Daily Mirror found him, they’ve got him and now he has to pay. But to me, just for Christopher. I think he should be got for all those back years.
“I thought Robert loved the children,” she said. “But he can’t do, because he walked out and left them. They only saw him once more, when his mother, their grandmother, died three years ago. Then they saw him across her grave, but he never looked at them or said a word to them.”
Some weeks after the murder, when the Daily Mirror had found Robert Thompson and informed him of what had happened to his ten-year-old son who bore his name, Liverpool police officers went to see him in the white-fenced cottage with ruched curtains he shares with the new Mrs Thompson. Detective Sergeant Phil Roberts described it as a “Woman’s Journal home”—spanking clean, with pretty bits and pieces and lots of framed photographs of young couples and children—though none of them Thompson’s boys.
“I asked him why he’d left his family,” Phil Roberts said. “He said that in 1988 he had to make a choice: to let Ann destroy him, or to save himself. He decided to save himself. I asked him about the kids, but he had nothing to say. He obviously had no answer—who would?”
A few weeks later, Robert Thompson telephoned solicitor Dominic Lloyd asking to see him. “We met in a neutral place,” Lloyd said. “I didn’t get the feeling he knew exactly what he wanted, aside from feeling an obligation to get in touch. He asked about the kids, claimed Ann had made it impossible for him to see them after he left the family, and kept saying ‘You know what she’s like’. But he said he wanted to see Robert and also Michael.
“I went back and asked both of them. Michael really did want to see him. Robert went from hot to cold to warm, ‘Yes, no, maybe’. But anyway, I never heard from his father again until after the conviction, when he again said he wanted to see the boy. I told him I’d have to make enquiries; now that he is convicted, the situation about visiting him is different. I did, but again, he hasn’t called me back.”
“I called him three of four weeks ago,” Ann Thompson told me later. “I told him he deserted the boys; he left Robbie. I said there was no way he was going to see him now.”
There certainly seemed to be a bad star over the Thompsons: a week after Robert had left them, on 16 October 1988, the family returned home after visiting their grandfather to find their house had burned down in an accidental fire. They lived for a while in a hostel before being rehoused in the Walton terrace next to the railway yard where, four years and four months later, the tragedy was to happen.
During the 18 months after Robert Thompson’s departure, the family fell apart. “Everything went to pieces,” Ann said. “I went on the booze, and within two weeks the kids, who had never done anything wrong before, were in dead trouble. Once it started, it didn’t stop.” She is amazingly honest about her own inadequacies: “I drank from morning to night, went to bed with a bottle of gin under my pillow and woke up taking a swig from it.” Were there a lot of men in her life? I asked.
“Not the way you mean,” she said, and smiled. “There were, but they were just . . . pals.”
Drinking pals?
“Yeah.” And then she added: “There was one, Roger, I had sex with,” she giggled, “and now there is Bob, Tom’s dad. He’s OK with the other kids, too, so that’s good. And—he’s company. It’s . . . it’s very lonely where we are now. I go to car-boot sales to get stuff to make it more homey,” and she showed me a photo album she had brought, with pictures of the inside of her new house, which she had obviously tried hard to make her own. “I love plants,” she said. “My house was full of them, but when they moved us, they forgot them, and they take so long to grow.”
Those bad 18 months had brought the “Social” in, she said. “They’d never been to us before, but after that, they were around every week, ten of them in five years.
“The first one was a doctor’s daughter, very la-di-da,” she said. “She’d breeze in, not a hair out of place, say ‘Have you paid your bills?’ and
breeze out. I didn’t need that, or rather, I needed something else as much and even more than money.”
It is unlikely that Ann, in deep depression and drink, was clearly aware of this different need then, but she was certainly able to respond when the Liverpool Family Service Unit—a voluntary organization particularly well staffed to deal with complex family situations—sent them a young woman called Jackie.
“She was different,” Ann said. “She kicked her shoes off, asked ‘What’s for tea?’ and settled down to chat.”
By this time, Richard, the second oldest boy then 13, had, very sensibly one might think, run away and gone to live with his paternal grandmother.
“Social services got in touch with me,” Ann said. “And I gave my permission.” Richard has, in fact, gone on to become so far the one well-organized boy in that family. He lives with the family of a “very nice girl”, who, Ann said, he’s in love with.
Except for the Family Service Unit and then the psychiatric social worker who supported Ann throughout the trial and now continues to help her, she is very bitter about all authorities, most of whom, she feels, have let her down.
“One day, while things were at their worst,” she said, “Richard got sent home from school because he didn’t have shoes. Well, it was true. He’d grown out of his and I didn’t have money to buy new ones. But I wanted him back in school at once, so I went straight to the social services either for shoes or for money to buy some. The social worker said no, they couldn’t help me, because I had ‘dealings’ with the Family Service Unit.
“Is that a way to act?” she asked me. “I mean to say, I wasn’t asking for a video or a washing machine, just a pair of shoes so that the kid could go to school.” The Family Service Unit then got her the shoes, she said, “without harassing me or making me feel guilty or talking down at me as if I was dirt.”
There can be little doubt that the Thompson family became a considerable problem to the various services involved with them at that time; not much doubt, either, that Ann Thompson, in her anger over being deserted and her despair over how to cope, became very demanding—people do.