Killing For Company

by Brian Masters

  For Mrs Nilsen the struggle of bringing up three children without a father was at times brutal. She had long since allowed herself to be divorced by Olav Nilsen (in 1948), and was frankly glad to be rid of him. With Andrew Whyte also gone, she turned to the Church to offer penance for her ruined life and rediscovered the missionary zeal which she had inherited from her forebears. She became involved with the Faith Mission and took Dennis with her to faith meetings all over Aberdeenshire. ‘I got quite used to falling asleep in buses,’ is his comment on these days. He was disciplined to attend Sunday School and the Mid Street Congregationalist Church, which had its compensations when the Sunday School took a picnic to the lovely Philorth Woods for the day. He also enjoyed a small part in a Sunday School play. But Dennis had no need for anyone else’s God.

  On Saturdays he and his brother were given 7d each for the matinee at the Picture House, with an additional 2d for wine gums. (This is equivalent to nearly 4p in today’s money, but it had much greater purchasing power.) There was no more pocket money for the week unless a visiting relation happened to drop an occasional coin. Still, the boys looked forward to this weekly treat as an escape from dull reality. Later, there was the television set at the Mission for Deep Sea Fishermen, which hypnotised the youngsters. They were dimly aware that their mother did everything she could to give them a decent life in the face of crippling adversity. It was a miracle she succeeded, thought Dennis.

  After too many years of living with three children in one room, Betty Nilsen eventually persuaded the authorities to give her a flat of her own, and moved to 73 Mid Street, much closer to the centre of Fraserburgh. Part of a corner block of old tenement flats in a depressingly gloomy area, the flat did not lift anyone’s spirits, but at least it was to give them an opportunity to live as a family unit for the first time. It was a pity that it was at the top of the block, and that there were steep stairs to climb. At the back there was a common area shared with other tenement blocks, containing old concrete air-raid shelters which served as a playground for the children. Dennis, however, rarely joined in; still melancholic, still drawn to the sea, he formed no close friendships with the children of his new neighbours.

  Shortly afterwards, Betty Nilsen married again. Her new husband was Adam Scott, a quiet, solid and reliable man in the building trade, who gave her four more children in four years. The added burden of work was almost too much for her, and there were days when she cried with tiredness, probably too preoccupied to notice that the new disruptive element in the home pushed Dennis deeper into his sullen isolation. He was, in the local word, a ‘skowkie’ child, unsmiling and resentful of questioning by adults, to whom he gave a clear impression of distrust and reserve. His mother recalls that something prevented her from cuddling him. She wanted to, but he appeared to repel demonstrations of affection, so she kept her distance. She was an extremely good and caring mother, but, with Dennis at least, not tactile. He confirms that he felt cold towards the family.

  On occasion I was a difficult child to manage. While at 73 Mid Street I had been brought to the attention of police in Fraserburgh. I once took a £1 note from my mother’s purse and went to see the film The Dam Busters. I was taken from the cinema and got a good hiding from Adam Scott, my mother’s new husband. Myself and a couple of schoolboy friends had been in the police station for breaking into an old iron steam drifter boat which was moored in Fraserburgh Harbour and used solely for ‘barking’ herring fishing nets … as kids we would stay out all day missing lunch and when we were hungry we would steal apples from gardens.6

  Exasperated at her increasing inability to control him, Betty Scott once threatened her son that if he could not behave himself she would have to send him away to a ‘home’, to be taken into care.

  In those days I could hate Adam Scott very easily. I was, I suppose, very jealous of him having a relationship with and the attention of my mother. I sometimes felt that we, the Nilsen kids, were an impediment to her fulfilment in her new life and family. I was a very lonely and turbulent child. I inhabited my own secret world full of ideal and imaginary friends. Nature had mismatched me from the flock.7

  One activity he did share with two other boys – the rearing of pigeons. He, Farquhar Mackenzie and Malcolm Rennie would climb on to derelict buildings to find fledgelings to rear, then keep them in fish-boxes on the concrete air-raid shelters behind Mid Street. When they ran out of fish-boxes his mother had to find an old shoe box or two, but she would not let him bring them into the house. Two in particular he cherished – a black one he called Tufty, and another with white tips to his wings named Jockey. Every lunch and teatime he would visit them on top of the shelter. ‘They would fly down from the roof when I called to them. My mother was always shooing them away when they landed on our kitchen window-ledge and tried to come in the open window (looking for food or me or both).’8 One day he came in sobbing uncontrollably; another boy had killed the pigeons. There were no more birds after that, although years later, when he was in the army in the Shetlands, he would rescue young fledgeling gulls which had fallen from their high nests and rear them behind his living accommodation at base. He chewed unbreadcrumbed frozen fish fingers and stuffed the masticated mess down their throats until they were strong enough to be sent back into the wild.

  It was unfortunate that the Scotts could not tolerate animals of any kind, for had Dennis been allowed to devote more attention to them he might have found some relief from the conviction that he was useless. Pity for the animal kingdom gradually supplanted his obsession with the sea, but it was not encouraged.

  I felt close to the land and to all things animated upon it. I would be repelled by the shooting of crows and rabbits. A rabbit, to me, was one of the least offensive creatures which hopped about. I was horrified by the sight of rabbits infected by myxomatosis. I would kill them as they staggered blindly about with swollen eyes and dying of starvation. Adults told me that there were a lot of pests around that had to be destroyed. I was not allowed to have any pets, save once a white rabbit which I had to keep in a very small hutch with a wire window. It died in winter. I was accused by my parent and step-parent of starving it to death. This as a child hurt me deeply. My mother was very house-proud and I suppose she could not tolerate animal hairs around the house on the carpet. (I got the feeling sometimes that she didn’t want me around on her carpet either.)9

  The tension which this recollection suggests must not be laid entirely at Betty Scott’s feet. She had, after all, other pressing concerns, not least among them the need to clothe and feed seven children, and now that Adam Scott was earning good money and she could at last start to build a decent home of which she need not be ashamed, it was natural that she should resist any plan to turn it into a zoo. To Dennis, in his own words ‘a boy who could not hurt a worm or feel a tear’,10such an attitude placed appearances above essentials, and he was entirely out of sympathy with it.

  By the time the incident with the rabbit occurred the family was installed in a comfortable new council house at Strichen, seven miles inland from Fraserburgh in the ‘near country’. They moved there in 1955 when Dennis was ten years old. Betty was relieved to think he would now be out of danger, far away from the treacherous rocks and the sea. Strichen is a small, grey, granite-built town with one main street, quite wide, half a dozen shops and one policeman. It stands on the River Ugie, surrounded by forest and farmland, and watched by the gentle slope of Mormond Hill, half a mile away. Strichen House, now derelict, was once the home of the Lords Lovat, a branch of the same Fraser family which had built Fraserburgh, and on the top of Mormond Hill are the ruins of Hunter’s Lodge, which Lord Lovat used to take for shooting parties. An earlier member of the Fraser clan had entertained Dr Johnson and Boswell at Strichen House on their famous Scottish journey, but now it was no more than a haunt for youngsters. Dennis Nilsen was enrolled at Strichen School, and spent the next five years of his life growing into adolescence in a fairly normal way, making no special mark and causi
ng no profound disturbance. He was, however, slowly maturing the reflections which would confirm his self-vision as an outcast and a radical.

  I began life with an instinct and training for Christian virtue. I believed in the justice of the establishment and in (what I thought to be) the reality of democracy. I felt that the injustice I encountered could only be some terrible mistake to be righted when the causes were exposed. Coupled with injustices which happened to me I felt that somehow it was my fault for being poor and shabby … I felt that poverty was a reflection of character imposed upon me through natural justice while those ‘good’ families were ‘good’ because of their background and deserving of rewards and advancement … I felt I should be grateful for the crumbs from the masters’ table.

  The most telling influence upon his growing social awareness was Robert Ritchie, who had married his Aunt Lily. A design engineer at the Consolidated Pneumatic Tool Company, Ritchie had made his own way through evening classes but had remained an idealistic socialist, despising privilege and power. Dennis would sit with him in front of the fire and listen entranced to his angry flow of information. It was his first education in social issues, and it formed an embryo of cynicism which would fester in the years to come and be distorted by lack of recognition. Ritchie also introduced the boy to the beauties of music on his Leak Hi-Fi system (in those days the most expensive system and most beloved of connoisseurs). Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ was the first recording to stir within Dennis Nilsen a primitive response to the stimulus of music which would one day bring cruel consequences upon those with him. Moreover, it was Ritchie who introduced his nephew to the delights of film-making, a hobby which in adulthood he would develop to the point where it became the refuge of his subconscious. Other important influences were the history lessons of Mr Shanks, and the huge local knowledge of the librarian Bob Bandeen.

  Getting up early in the morning in a cold room to deliver papers and milk with inadequate breakfast weakened me. (I was always a skinny child.) I would feel tired at school and unable to concentrate. I was belted for this slackness. When I was about eleven or twelve I collapsed ill. I was rushed to Aberdeen City Hospital where I stayed for a time suffering from pneumonia and pleurisy. I bitterly resented my stepfather at first but later learned to like him … He was a good provider … an honest uncomplicated labourer with the Aberdeen County Council. I always felt ashamed when I was asked ‘What does your old man do?’ He liked fishing a lot and was a rustic lone fisherman in the rivers around Strichen. My mother was lucky to be his wife as he was kind and not a womaniser or drunk.11

  In spite of his having school-mates – Bruce Rankin, Peter MacDonald, Hugh Harkness, Jimmy Gibb, and Plucky Simpson (crippled by polio), among them – Dennis would more often than not wander the fields and woods alone.

  I would throw down my satchel after school and be out and about until late, often missing my tea (bread and syrup and a cup of tea) … I had the whole wild countryside as a huge magic garden. I loved the wildness of the land and the great ruins of Strichen House … the noise of the house at 16 Baird Road kept me away.12

  His favourite spot was Waughton Hill (a local name for the nether slopes of Mormond Hill) and the high, empty ruin of Hunter’s Lodge. There he could tame his growing wrath against what he saw as the materialistic standards of his mother, her façade of polish and sparkle to impress the neighbours and divert attention from the shoddiness of the children’s clothes. ‘I always felt they [Betty and Adam] were largely the willing architects of their own poverty chains. They were docile to authority and touched the forelock at the appointed moment.’ This is unfair. When the schoolmistress Miss Lee led a school outing to Belmont Camp in Perthshire, Betty paid for Dennis to join. She could afford only ten shillings, which Miss Lee happily accepted.

  At fourteen he joined the Army Cadet Force and frankly revelled in the equality which uniform provided. He also had his first beer and passed out. ‘I felt proud and useful in my battle-dress.’ On the football field he did less well; in fact he played so badly he was made goalkeeper and proceeded to let in six goals. He was not invited to play again. In school his best subject was art, even contriving to earn higher marks than Bruce Rankin, who subsequently became an art teacher. He also did well at English literature, but failed miserably in mathematics. ‘I would go to pieces during those mental arithmetic sessions. I was too flustered and terrified to concentrate. I thought that coming from a poor family I must have been born dim, slow-witted, and unintelligent.’ When the ‘tattie’ season came, Dennis would spend weekends picking potatoes, to be rewarded with a marvellous farmhouse lunch afterwards, better than anything he had eaten except at Christmas. Still, it was back-breaking work, yanking the potatoes from resistant, clammy earth, and he soon had to acknowledge that farm work would not suit him, given his congenitally weak spine and round shoulders.

  Once a year came the excitement of ‘bringing home the peats’. Between the villages of Strichen and New Pitsligo lay areas of peat where families could rent a small plot and dig from it as much as they wanted. Dennis and the other children would help pack the dried blocks of peat into jute sacks ready for delivery to 16 Baird Road, giving enough domestic fuel for the entire winter. It was Adam who did most of the work, and Dennis’s admiration for him deepened and matured. It was tinged also with some mute envy; Dennis would have liked to emulate Adam, but did not feel he belonged to him.

  There was no cinema in Strichen, but once in a while a travelling projectionist would set up a screen in the Town Hall and offer a rare show. Also, when Dennis was about fourteen, two evangelistic young ladies from the Faith Mission, Miss Wilkie and Miss Stafford, arrived in Strichen with their caravan and their squeeze-box music and anchored themselves there for a while. Dennis, his sister Sylvia, Hugh Harkness and James Gibb were immediate converts, singing their bright jolly hymns and enjoying their ‘born again’ sermons. It was not difficult for them to ‘renounce’ the cinema, so the four children converted a shed at the back of Hugh Harkness’s house and had their own faith meetings there by candlelight. Dennis says he felt emotionally warm and good at these meetings, but they did not survive the departure of Miss Wilkie and Miss Stafford by more than two weeks.

  There was one particular schoolday incident which caused Dennis to ruminate. An old man from Strichen, Mr Ironside, went missing. The village turned out in force to look for him. Dennis and another boy, Gordon Barry, searched the banks of the River Ugie behind the school and found his corpse. His sanity had cracked, and he had wandered out of his house in the middle of the night in his pyjamas, fallen into the river and drowned. Other children gathered round as his body was hauled from the river and carried up the hill to a Land-Rover. The boy Nilsen was more perturbed than most by the sight. ‘He reminded me of my grandfather, and the images were fixed firmly in my mind … I could never comprehend the reality of death.’13

  Images of death, and images of love. They were yet a long way apart, but they had begun to form themselves in the subconscious and to make the slow journey towards convergence and calamity. In all his years at school, Dennis Nilsen had no sexual encounter, not even of a minimal kind; this in itself is unusual enough in a pubescent boy to warrant notice. However, there was an emotional experience which burned deeply, never to be released or confessed. In his sister Sylvia’s class at school there was one boy whom Dennis adored from afar. Of the entire school, no other person held this power to make him feel nervous. He was, to Dennis, beautiful, enigmatic, different. Being the son of a local minister, he spoke with a different accent from the other boys, and had about him an air of aloof confidence. Dennis felt inferior and ashamed; he did not dare to approach him, but merely hovered in the playground watching him and trying to get near him, his legs quivering like jelly. He never once spoke to the boy (whose name was Adrian), but did once manage to engage his mother in conversation, even going into her (his) house. Whenever he thought of this boy, guilt invaded him, a vague uneasy guilt without
a reason.

  His next attachment was even less open to declaration. It was for a boy called Pierre Duval, an illustration in the book used for French lessons. Dennis found that his response to this illustration simmered with the same intensity as his earlier response to Adrian. The fact that it was inanimate did not remove its appeal; on the contrary, it enhanced it.

  Throughout his early adolescence, Dennis shared a bed with his brother Olav, two years older. There came a night when his sexual imagination could no longer be restrained, and waiting until he thought his brother was safely asleep, he undid his pyjama cord and began to explore. The body beside him did not move, but remained still, lifeless. Olav must have woken, for when Dennis realised his brother’s sex was aroused, he stopped. Neither of them ever referred to the incident.

  As he lay awake at night, he would sometimes hear the springs creaking in his parents’ room. He felt outrage and repulsion when this happened, and it would take some time for this extreme reaction to fade.

  When Dennis Nilsen left school at the age of fifteen, he was sexually innocent, emotionally untried. He had had no ‘best friend’, no exciting discoveries with other boys, no desire to unravel the mysteries of girls. But his emotions had been aroused three times, in three ways where safety from rejection was ensured; with a distant idol, with an inanimate drawing, and with a sleeping body.

  Nilsen’s scholastic record was decent but not glorious. He had excelled in art and seemed destined for some kind of artistic future if only he could rid himself of a morose lethargy born of an indistinct but persistent belief that he needed above all to escape from the narrowness of Strichen and the complacency of his parents’ unglamorous life. He knew only that he was in some way ‘different’. The family urged him to join the Consolidated Pneumatic Tool Company and work his way up the ladder, as his uncle Robert Ritchie had done, through evening classes. That held little attraction if it meant spending the rest of his life in Aberdeenshire. To fill in for the time being he worked a few weeks at Maconochie’s Fish Cannery in Fraserburgh, where his job was to take tins of herring in tomato sauce from a conveyor belt and stack them in metal drums. All the time he was thinking how best he could lift the restrictions and tedium of existence, as well as banish the shame which he still felt clung to him. The answer came one evening at home.