Killing For Company

by Brian Masters

  Nevertheless, life at 47 Academy Road was apparently contented, and Dennis Nilsen retains vivid memories of his infancy there:

  1 remember the big china dog (a cocker spaniel) on the sideboard. Mother called it for some reason Tarzan. The wireless played ‘Workers’ Playtime’, ‘Have a Go’, and ‘Music While You Work’, and while Mother went about her seemingly endless washing and housework she sang along with all the popular tunes. The open coal fire burned in the grate with a folding metal guard over it, with always something drying on it – towels or nappies, etc. It was a crowded but happy room.

  Mum being on her own was a dab hand at interior decorating. She had become self-reliant in her daily struggles to make ends meet. There was always lots of washing hanging from the pulley-frame which hung from the ceiling. In the living-room there was a larger open grate with little compartments with doors at each side where ‘kindling’ was kept. There was no wireless in the living-room. Granny was ultra-religious and did not think much of this invention. She always spoke out strongly against worldly things – cinema, drink, smoking, dances, modern music. [After church] we would return to Academy Road for Sunday dinner. Granny would prepare all the food the day before as she was loath to do anything on the ‘Lord’s Day’. I still have not known anyone to make a Scotch broth as good as Granny. I can still see her sitting in the living-room reading her Christian Herald. I never heard any of the adults swear or mention the word ‘sex’. Babies just seemed to arrive late at night without any explanation.

  In the summer, all the family, armed with picnic eats of sandwiches, biscuits, and bottles of lemonade, would descend upon Fraserburgh beach with buckets and spades. The ‘Faith Mission’ would set up their banner in the sand and preach their message to the assembled (mostly the kids). I would take a jam jar to the Kessock (a stream which flowed into the sea) and try to catch eels … on the hill above the waste ground off Dennyduff Road I would lie in the sun on a carpet of buttercups and daisies and look up to watch and listen to the shrill sweet larks rising. Or I would collect frog spawn and watch it slowly develop through the change via tadpole to small black perfectly-formed frogs. I would release them into the tall wet grasses near a pond or stream.

  If there were any of life’s luxuries to be scrounged then Gran was the bountiful source.

  At Christmas, the children would write their notes to Santa Claus, set light to them, and watch them float up the chimney.

  Although Betty Nilsen tried to be mother and father to her family, it was a task beyond her capacity, and not even practically sensible, as she was still young enough to enjoy a night out dancing. Inevitably, it was Lily and Andrew Whyte who became surrogate parents, and between Andrew and his grandson Dennis there grew a bond more precious to them both than any other relationship in the family. Dennis grew to resemble his grandfather (he still does) and to cherish the days when he was home from sea. Andrew Whyte became his only companion, the only person with whom he felt at ease and happy. He looked forward to his grandfather’s coming home, and his going away again left a sense of deprivation which no solace could lift. He was proud to be in his grandfather’s company, and proud of himself too, as it was always Dennis to whom the seafaring man came home. Dennis never asked after his own father, never showed any curiosity about him.

  ‘I can remember nothing of my father but for a brown photograph of a man in army battledress standing with my mother, smiling, on her wedding day. She would try not to mention him.

  ‘I remember being borne aloft on the tall strong shoulders of my great hero and protector, my grandfather.’ Man and boy would go for very long walks down to the harbour, across the wide stretch of beach, up to the sand-dunes which rise thirty feet behind the beach, through the golf-course and on to Inverallochy. It was peaceful and exclusive, the two of them against the world, with only the elements to witness their affection. Eventually, Dennis would fall asleep and be carried home in his grandfather’s arms.

  Andrew would tell him stories of the sea and its dangers, of his own adventures, filling the boy’s head with such tales as he would not divulge to anyone else for fear of contradiction or derision. Dennis, admiring and unquestioning, was his best audience. He went with him to the Fraserburgh dole office when times were bad and sensed his resentment, then with the proceeds was ‘treated to a delicious ice-cream concoction at Joe’s Café or taken to watch football at Belleslea Park or a local playing-fields’. One day a football missed the goal and hit Dennis, almost knocking him out, but Grandpa rescued him with ‘a magic sponge. Taking a football full in the face is surprisingly painless.’

  Olav and Sylvia tended to remain at home with their mother when grandfather and grandson went off for a walk to the golf-course above the dunes.

  Grandad had an uncanny knack of finding lost golf-balls on the course. He would take one apart and unwind the endless thread of sticky rubber and eventually come to the bag of liquid rubber at the centre. He had some friends whom he would meet out on these walks and he would walk and chat a lot to them. I was always exhausted on these long walks and he would have to carry me asleep on the last stretch home. He would also take me to Cairnbulg, Inverallochy and St Combs where we would meet various relatives whom I cannot now remember … I remember the smell of nets and fishing things … I went on the temperance marches between, I think, Inverallochy and St Combs accompanied by a flute band. Grandad sang in a male voice choir. He was a pillar of the religious establishment.

  Andrew Whyte’s stern morality fought hard against the new relaxed values of the post-war generation, and generally lost. ‘It seemed that if you were not broody and miserable then you must be in sin.’ Framed religious texts and pictures on the wall at 47 Academy Road recalled the older, harsher values.

  My grandfather would make me a ‘dragon’ (he called it). It was a kite made from brown paper or newspaper and small, thin, supple branches tied or sewn with string. The balancing tail was made from an old, long thin piece of net. There were open fields beyond Dennyduff Road where we would test and fly the kite. Windy days were frequent up in Fraserburgh. Grandad would also take me around the harbour and on board the herring boats and to the repair slipway. I would see the herring-boats being built (entirely of wood) in the boat-building yards.9

  People were only tangentially aware how deep ran the love of the small boy for his grandfather. For the most part it appeared a warm and cosy relationship for which one had to be grateful, as without it Dennis would have been completely withdrawn. But for Dennis it was the central core of his life, compared with which nothing else mattered. ‘The work of a fisherman at sea was hard,’ he writes, ‘and the harshness of the wild elements tended to age a man long before his time. I would watch him, head down into the driving rain, go off to his boat. Life would be empty until he returned.’10

  In 1951 Andrew Whyte seemed to be more tired than usual. He dropped out of the choir in which he had sung for years because he had not the strength to produce a note, and declared that he would never sing again. Even a little effort exhausted him. Still, there was a chance for work, and he could not afford to miss it, and besides no one had suggested he was ill. He said goodbye to the family, waved to Dennis and set sail. After he had put out the nets, he refused a cup of tea for the first time in his life, saying that he had a bad attack of indigestion. He went to his bunk and slept peacefully. When he failed to appear the next morning, his crew-mates went to rouse him and found him dead. They could scarcely believe it. The date was 31 October 1951, and Andrew Whyte was sixty-two years old. His grandson Dennis, waiting at home in Fraserburgh, was not yet six.

  The body was brought ashore at Yarmouth, where there took place a quayside service and an inquest, always required when death occurs beyond the three-mile limit. Whyte was declared to have died of a heart attack. His body was then sent by train to Fraserburgh, and taken to lie in the house at 47 Academy Road. There was loud grief and tears in the house that day, but no explanations. Visitors came and went, Granny wept c
ontinuously, and nobody thought to tell the children what had happened. Dennis Nilsen never excised his vivid recollection of that day. ‘I remember being in the large bed with my older brother and younger sister in the living-room, and my mother saying, “Do you want to see your Grandad?”’ They were then carried one by one into the small room where they had been born, lifted up in their pyjamas and held to peer into the open coffin set on trestles. ‘Grandad was wearing glasses and expensive long Johns. He was barefooted and needed a shave. He looked as if he was sleeping.’fn2 Indeed, Mrs Nilsen said that he was just asleep. She was afraid to tell the truth lest it be too shocking for the children to contemplate. As it turned out, the shock of not knowing was far greater, for Dennis at least, and would provoke catastrophic consequences in years to come. ‘I could feel my heart beating very fast as I was carried back into the living-room,’ he recalls, yet he did not understand why he should feel such mysterious and fearful excitement. The next time he was carried back into the little room, on the morrow, his grandfather was gone. He was held by the window and watched a long procession of dark-suited men pass below. Someone told him to be a ‘big man’. He did not weep.

  For a long time afterwards, no one so much as mentioned Andrew Whyte’s name. It was as if he had evaporated. The six-year-old boy was not told that he was dead, and was left to form his own impression, that Grandpa must be very ill for some reason which would eventually emerge. He would no doubt tell him himself when he came back. It was months before Dennis finally realised that this time there would be no home-coming, and his retrospective grief was so painful that he submerged it and refused to acknowledge its cause. Now, in the light of his arrest and conviction, he attributes the seed of his disordered personality to the numbing experience of that day. He can never forget the great mental shock of seeing his grandfather asleep for the last time, the light of his life taken from him.

  My troubles started there. It blighted my personality permanently. I have spent all my emotional life searching for my grandfather and in my formative years no one was there to take his place.

  It is the custom up there in Fraserburgh that when there is a death in a household they draw the blinds and curtains. When my grandfather died it seemed that these blinds had been drawn across my life … Relatives would pretend that he had gone to a ‘better place’. ‘Why’, I thought, ‘should he go to a better place and not take me with him?’ ‘So death was a nice thing,’ I thought. ‘Then why does it make me miserable?’ Father and grandfather had walked out on me, probably to a better place, leaving me behind in this not so good place, alone … What storms of reasoning fury must have gone through my mind at that age. The blackness of women in mourning and their cries of triumph at the spiritual resurrection.11

  The repercussions of this event may well be more complex and entangled than Nilsen himself can judge, and other interpretations must in time be weighed against his own recollection. But there can be no doubt that from that awesome day the boy retreated into an existence so fiercely private that no living person would ever be able to penetrate its secrets, and no dead one ever reveal them. Nor can it be questioned that his conception and understanding of death would henceforth remain equivocal, even bizarre: ‘He took the real me with him under the ground and I now rest with him out there under the salt spray and the wind in Inverallochy Cemetery. Nature makes no provision for emotional death.’12

  fn1 The German invasion of Norway took place on 9 April 1940.

  fn2 This picture owes much to Nilsen’s imagination. Others present contend that Whyte was clean-shaven, in a shroud.

  3

  CHILDHOOD

  From 1951 Dennis Nilsen became more moody than ever. His habit of wandering off alone grew compulsive, and when his mother remonstrated with him and attempted to keep him in, he responded defiantly that even horses were not tied up. He would go the short distance to Broadsea village, whose shore was built of forbidding, black igneous rocks constantly lashed by the waves. There was one deep mysterious fissure in the rocks, known as the Rumbling Goite (pronounced ‘Gwite’), which the sea entered through a narrow channel then swirled, rising and falling, as the fissure broadened. It was said that the hole was bottomless (it certainly widens below the water-level) and that anyone who fell into it would never get out. The Rumbling Goite was a magnet for children who liked to challenge the unknown, and has been a grave for more than a few of the intrepid; Billy Skinner, a friend of Dennis’s brother, fell in, bumped his head, and disappeared. Dennis would also go to Kinnaird Head, the promontory at the very tip of Fraserburgh, once the site of Fraserburgh Castle whose remaining tower had since been converted to a lighthouse. This, too, held a mystery, for everyone knew the legend of the laird’s daughter who threw herself from a window to the rocks below with the body of her forbidden lover in her arms.

  But it was mostly to the rocks of Fraserburgh Harbour, and to the vast stretch of beach and sand-dunes to the south, that Dennis went on his solitary walks, a distance of some two miles from Academy Road. He spent a lot of time watching the herring boats sail past the pier or come into harbour, and stood on the pier as the fishermen walked past on their way home. Long after they had gone, he would remain there ‘under the endless screams of the dog-fighting seagulls’. The cacophony of screeching gulls and the pervasive smell of fish still assault the senses today, and the wide expanse of sea has the power to humble.

  On the rocks I stood gazing at the all-powerful restless sea. I felt very akin to that great force, we reciprocated in a spiritual affinity of great love and great fear. I would stand for some time with a tear-filled face looking out there for Andrew Whyte to come and comfort me as he had always done.1

  Dennis felt he could not show his grief at home, where the women (they were all women now – his grandmother, his mother, his aunt) were preoccupied with the re-organisation of their lives. His mother had to take on cleaning work to help make ends meet. So, ‘I sought the silent lonely places where he had taken me, and prayed to my silent god on the horizon of the sea. It was a wonderful bitter pain.’2

  At times, this respectful adoration was coloured by a more sinister current of will, a barely-understood wish to be embraced and cleansed by the sea in a consummation of freedom and sympathy:

  Many years ago I was a boy drowning in the sea. I am always drowning in the sea … down amongst the dead men, deep down. There is peace in the sea back down to our origins … when the last man has taken his last breath the sea will still be remaining. It washes everything clean. It holds within it forever the boy suspended in its body and the streaming hair and the open eyes.3

  This probably refers to the occasion when he may have walked into the sea, aged about eight, and was apparently rescued by an older boy who was then aroused by his prostrate body:

  On one of my treks along the beach to Inverallochy I was feeling pretty miserable. I stopped and took off my shoes and socks and waded up to my knees in the sounding sea. I was hypnotised by its power and enormity. I disregarded that my short trousers were getting wet, I moved steadily forward up to my waist. I could see a much older boy sitting further up the shore poking the sand with a stick. I must have stepped into a hollow because I suddenly disappeared under water. The retreat of the wave carried me out further. I panicked, and waving my arms and shouting I submerged. I could hear a loud buzzing in my head and I kept gasping for air which wasn’t there. I thought that Grandad was bound to arrive and pull me out. I felt at ease, drugged and dreamlike under the silent green weight of water. I felt myself suspended in a void. I could hear a droning slowed-down voice in the distance (a mixture of every voice I had ever known, nothing recognisable). I felt a heavy weight upon me. I felt very cold at first, but this changed to a neutral feeling, then I could feel the warmth of the sun. I was vomiting and gasping. I became aware of blue and air and a breeze in a sandy hollow in the dunes. My clothes were spread out on the long sand grass and the sky was bright blue with wisps of white cloud. I felt a pressure on me a
nd sank into a deep sleep. Later I could feel the dry sand’s comforting support beneath me. I coughed a bit and felt my raw throat. I sat up and covered my nakedness with my hands noticing a white sticky mess on my stomach and thighs. I remember thinking that I had been fouled on by a seagull. I wiped it off with sand. I peered from behind the grass high on the dunes but there was no one about. My clothes were damp but not all that wet. It was quite hot so I put them on and wandered over the dunes and took the golf links road slowly home hoping that my things would soon dry out.4

  He was scolded by his mother, constantly anxious about his disappearance, but he did not tell her what had happened. How could he? There was no one to blame but himself, and he was not even sure what he was to blame for. How to explain the irresistible compulsion to join the sea, to be part of it, to sink into the solace of its company? His mother would think him mad! A love for the sea has never ceased to feed his imagination in the years since he left Scotland. ‘I am at one with visions of breaks in the dark wild sky,’ he writes, ‘with heavenly shafts of light searching the grumbling sea.’ In prison he has found mental release by recalling these scenes of childhood and hearing again the voices of the gulls, ‘the whole glorious sound liberated me from the irrelevant bounds of imprisonment. I stood on that imaginary crest with my arms raised to the sky and the tears of exhilaration of total natural unity.’5 Nilsen now recognises that there is some fantasy, or retrospective editing, in his account of wandering into the sea. Some details are fashioned by imagination. But the basic event was real enough; so too is the strange imagination which has doctored it, probably adding the circumstance of the older boy. Both individuals, victim and rescuer, are self-images.fn1 Oddly enough, Betty Nilsen used to have bad dreams that her son was drowning, and that there was no one to save him.