by Ralph Bulger
Today I am seeking to move forward with my life. For the last three years I have shared my life with a new partner after my relationship with Eileen ended. Natalie is on every part of this journey with me and she keeps me grounded. She encourages me and helps me to rebuild my shattered confidence. She is kind and loving and I feel very lucky to have her. I hope she continues to be part of my life for many years to come. It’s not easy for any woman to take on a partner who is so damaged and consumed by the murder of his son, but she has compassion and kindness in heaps. While I was working on this book, Natalie fell pregnant and we were both overjoyed, but sadly a few months into the pregnancy she miscarried and we lost our baby. We were both devastated, and on a very minute scale, it showed her a window into my world of grief. God willing, we will have a chance to have a family of our own one day too.
In 2013 Natalie and I will move into our own home. It was a house that needed quite a lot of work and so I have spent months doing it up myself. I plastered the walls throughout, painted the place and am generally putting it together so we can make a comfortable and happy home. It’s a lovely little place in Kirkby, close to family and friends as ever. I’m feeling positive about the future, and am in a strong place.
As for my family, I would never have got through this without them. I am so grateful that Jimmy and Karen contributed to this book because they have both played vital roles on this journey. Jimmy has suffered so much because he chose to support me when he could have walked away. His own family has borne the brunt of his torture, but he couldn’t have been a better or more loving brother to me if he had tried. He pledged to be with me all the way and he has never let me down. Karen has also struggled as she tried to hold her family together and care for her husbands tormented mind. She too has been a shoulder for me to cry on, and they both know how much I love them.
Above all, this book keeps me closely connected to James. I really wanted to share as much of James’s short life as possible. I wanted people to know exactly what he was like and how adorable and loveable he was. But what that amazing little boy brought to all our lives in those three years was nothing less than miraculous. Talking about him and sharing his love and joy in this book has given me one of the first opportunities since his murder to celebrate all that he was. It has been painful to revisit because it is a very sharp reminder that he has gone, but it has taught me to hold on to those memories tightly. I try to let them bring me comfort in the small hours of the morning when nightmares invade my sleep.
I can’t rid myself of the pain and I would be lying if I said the anger had gone. It hasn’t, and I don’t know if it ever will. I am trying hard to change. I am trying to get more joy from life, but it still doesn’t sit well beside my sorrow and sadness. I think I will have to take Father Mick’s advice and try to give myself permission to move on. I have to try to forgive myself for the deep shame and guilt that I carry for failing to save James. My one small consolation is that I know I loved and cherished James with all my heart and soul while he was still alive. I am grateful that I spent every day of his life with him. There is a James-shaped hole in my heart that can never be filled and he will never be forgotten. I have saved my last words for him.
‘My sweet and beautiful baby James. Thank you for being the best son I could ever have wished for. You brought me so much happiness and joy before you left us and I will never forget you. I am always with you in your heart and I am only ever a thought away when you need me. Daddy still loves and misses you so much every day and I think about you all the time. I hope you are safe and warm up there with your new friends and still laughing away. Heaven is very lucky to have you. Please stay happy, my special little boy. Until we meet again, son.
All my love, as always, your Ralph xxxx’
Appendix:
The Story of MAMAA
A very special charity called MAMAA — Mothers Against Murder and Aggression — was set up as a direct result of James’s murder. From small and humble beginnings, it now helps thousands of people who have had the terrible misfortune to lose a loved one to murder, or anyone who is the victim of serious violent crime. It is a registered charity that does incredible work and it deserves to be celebrated as a positive move forward from a terrible crime.
As Denise and I would find out, there are few places that relatives can go to for help and support when their lives are turned upside down. MAMAA has been on this long journey with us from the very beginning and it is an important part of James’s legacy. I would like to say a huge thank you to Lyn Costello and her small team who have shown so much passion and commitment to helping others. They have not had an easy ride and at times they struggled to keep going because of the appalling lack of financial support. I am so proud of what they have achieved and of the vital role that they play in our world that has become increasingly brutal. I have asked Lyn, the founder of MAMAA, to share her experiences in this book. Here she tells her story:
I was thirty-nine when James was murdered and I had just become a grandparent, after my daughter Shelley gave birth to a baby boy. I was working full-time selling advertising in Kentish Town and lived nearby with my husband, Roger, and our four kids. Roger worked for Whitbread, the brewery, and we did a lot of charity work through them in inner-city London, especially raising money for ChildLine.
I was pretty switched on to the media because of the nature of my job and so I was used to reading about gruesome murders, but, like so many of us, I would read articles, turn the page and go about my business. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, but because it hadn’t affected me directly, I would move on. I remember seeing the reports on the TV news when James was taken. My first thought was, ‘Oh no, not another child.’ And then the images of the CCTV footage were released as the hunt for James continued and, like a lot of people, I felt relief. If this little boy had gone off with a pair of kids, I felt certain that it was some kind of prank and that he would turn up safe and well. When the news took a turn for the worse and James was found murdered, I was shocked. I assumed it must be some awful accident or that something had gone terribly wrong by mistake. It didn’t cross my mind that two children had killed this little boy.
My son Jay was eleven years old at the time, just a year older than the boys who had taken James, and I couldn’t imagine that a boy so young could be capable of deliberately causing hurt to an innocent baby like James. You don’t want to believe it. With children and grandchildren of my own, living in a tough inner-city area, I know how much trouble kids can get into, but nothing like this. I won’t deny that my own kids could be little sods when they were growing up, getting into all sorts of mischief. I had to keep my eye on them all the time, as I know how easy it is for children to go down the wrong path in life; I wasn’t the first parent to wring my hands when they got into trouble. But I also remember looking at Jay and thinking, ‘Is it possible that he could do that sort of thing to a child so small and vulnerable?’
It was so extreme and so in your face that even tough kids were shocked and devastated by James’s murder. People up and down the country were really feeling the impact of this wicked crime. Everything you ever believed in was turned upside down. My kids had been taught never to talk to strangers, or get into their cars, but never before were we faced with a situation in which you didn’t want your children to talk to other kids they didn’t know. Who was safe any more? Like many people in the country, I asked myself, ‘What have we done as a society to breed two boys capable of such evil acts?’
James’s murder was a huge wake-up call to everyone in Britain. It really held a mirror up to the kind of society we were living in. The country was morally lost, with crime rates running out of control. Youth crime went to the top of the political agenda.
I knew I wanted to do something in response to a crime so shocking and appalling, but I had no idea what I could do or what I should be doing. It began to nag away at me, and Roger and I talked about it constantly. We wanted to find even the simplest way to show that
we cared and that the future of all our children meant something.
At the time a lot of youth clubs were being closed, and so outside of the home and school there was nothing for kids to do and nowhere for them to go. I am not knocking people with money, but it was a very different kettle of fish for middle-class, affluent families who could afford to take their children to private activities and groups. That wasn’t the case for the families with little or no spare money, having to go to work all hours and struggling to make ends meet. My initial thought was to set up a youth club and so Roger and I established a kids’ group in Kentish Town under the MAMAA umbrella. We hoped it would be the first of many contributions we could make to help change things for kids on the streets.
My family set-up was what you might call dysfunctional. Both Roger and I had been married before, we both had kids with previous partners and we were bringing them up together in the tough inner-city communities. It was far from perfect, but we were not breeding killer kids. I was also struck by the general misconception held by a lot of people, who judged all kids the same if they were from a rough council estate. If you’re from an estate, then you obviously must be rotten through and through, but that just isn’t the case. If you came from an impoverished background and didn’t have pots of money, there was a stigma attached to you, and that made me furious. I didn’t want my kids to be judged like that. If you have lived on a tough estate — generally full of normal, decent people — you can very easily pick out and identify the kids who are likely to go off the rails, but it still doesn’t mean they will end up as child killers. I knew some of the biggest rogues in our area, but even the most hardened scallywags and tearaways were shocked by the murder of James. When I set up MAMAA, it was from some unlikely quarters that I ended up getting my greatest support.
Some of the toughest youngsters would stop me in the street and say, ‘Well done, girl, well done. We’re behind you all the way.’
When we held a community street party, a couple of well-known drug dealers couldn’t wait to get involved to help. Here were two hardened criminals who were horrified at the murder of James, and so it seemed that this terrible crime had united people on all fronts.
We wanted the parents of the local neighbourhood to run the youth group and, in turn, we would become more involved with the community’s kids and their lives. Roger and I ended up running it most of the time, and while a lot of families were very supportive of the idea, the reality was that it turned out to be nothing more than a free babysitting facility.
It was never going to last. Roger and I were both working full time, we had several children of our own, and here we were optimistically trying to run a full-time youth project with little backing from other parents in the community. In the end we were forced to close it down. Of course it was a body blow, a huge disappointment, but I think it clearly showed our own naivety back then.
That is how our involvement in MAMAA started, and the group just began to evolve in its own way. The next step we took was to organize a vigil on the streets of Liverpool, again to show support and raise public awareness — not that there were many people in the country who didn’t know what had happened to James Bulger. We certainly got the measure of the strength of feeling in Merseyside, with huge support and empathy. They were very slow beginnings but, even then, I knew I wouldn’t give up trying to do something to bring about changes, to make a difference.
I was an ordinary mum, having the odd holiday to a caravan park once a year and that was it. I have always been someone who has great ideas, but by my own admission, I have never stuck to anything in my life. I have started courses and ditched them, set up organizations and closed them down, but MAM A A would change all that. For the first time, this was something I couldn’t get out of my head and I refused to let it drop.
A lot of people came forward to help us with MAMAA, but inevitably, as time wore on, folk slackened off and few remained with the cause.To make MAMAA work, we needed to raise funds. It is impossible to do anything properly with no money, as any charity or voluntary group will tell you. And so we needed to keep our commitment but also start finding practical ways to make our cause work. One of my first projects for MAMAA was a petition. I had been doing some research on how many kids had killed kids, and it was not many. I didn’t have the luxuries of Google and the Internet back then, and so I had to go to the library to do things the old-fashioned way. I learned that there had been child killers before, but nothing was as brutal as James’s murder. The petition aimed to make it the law that anyone who murders a child, no matter what age, must go to prison for life, as there could never be an excuse for the premeditated slaughter of an innocent child. The petition garnered loads of support and it really encouraged me.
We had been campaigning for a while when I received a phone call at home one night. I had always been aware that when we set up MAMAA, we had never sought the permission of James’s family. We had acted on instinct and from the heart, but even so, I was extremely nervous of talking to the family. They had their own grief to deal with and I would never have dreamt of bothering them with what we were trying to do. So when I answered that call, it was a complete shock to me. There was a quiet voice on the other end of the receiver, speaking in a Liverpudlian accent.
‘Hello, can I speak to Lyn Costello please?’
‘Lyn speaking.’
‘This is Ralph Bulger.’
‘Pardon?’ I spluttered.
Then again: ‘It’s Ralph Bulger.’
I froze on the spot. Not only did I find his accent quite difficult to understand, I also went to pieces. I knew exactly who he was but, for all my bravado, I couldn’t find the right words to say.
‘Hello, Ralph, thanks for ringing. Can you leave me your number and I will call you straight back?’
I was deeply ashamed and embarrassed, but I kept thinking, ‘What do I say to a man who has lost his son in such appalling circumstances?’
It was my lovely husband Roger who called Ralph back, and they spoke for many hours into the night. Ralph totally backed MAMAA and asked if there was any way he could help us. It was the most amazing generosity of spirit from a man who had lost so much. This was the beginning of a special and long-lasting friendship with Ralph, his brother Jimmy and sister-in-law Karen. But it still didn’t stop me being terrified the first time I went to Liverpool to meet them all. I found the family so open, warm and honest about everything they had been through. I will never forget Jimmy describing how he had identified James’s tortured body. I was simply lost for words. It hit me really hard, and I thought I was going to faint hearing the terrible reality of what this child had suffered. I also grasped the enormity of what we had taken on and I knew that we had done the right thing in setting up MAMAA to continue supporting the victims of violent crime.
Ralph also made me realize one very important thing: that a man, a father, could feel just as desperate and devastated as a mother. It made us consider changing the name of our charity, but we were established and starting to be recognized, and it was felt we would lose our momentum. But meeting Ralph for the first time brought everything home to me so acutely. From that point on, we made a point of stressing that we didn’t just support mums who had lost a child, but any relative. I had seen for myself just how devastated this father was to lose his son.
Times are changing. Traditionally and historically, in times of mourning our society has always focused on a mother’s grief and her loss. Mum was always at the forefront while dad stayed in the background, but that is no longer the case. I have learned that a father’s love is just as deep and binding as a mother’s is for their child. I also viewed at close quarters what Jimmy went through for his brother, not just in identifying that poor, innocent child in the mortuary that day, but in supporting Ralph for so many years, and it takes its toll.
It was a very humbling experience to meet Ralph and his family. They taught me so much about dignity and what it really means to lose a loved one in suc
h terrible circumstances. Before MAMAA, I wrongly assumed that families like Ralph’s would be properly cared for and looked after by the Government, the state and the National Health Service. I really believed that all their needs, down to the simplest things like getting financial help and counselling, would be automatically provided for. But it was only when I got really involved and started to help other bereaved families that I realized how little assistance there is for people in this position. We wanted to provide that help, and so MAMAA evolved to become the missing link for families as they started the journey after murder. We began to put victims in touch with other organizations that could help them, and the work quickly snowballed, giving MAMAA a real sense of direction and purpose.
Other times, victims may just want to talk, and so many hours were spent on the telephone, just listening and providing a shoulder to cry on. It becomes a constant part of your life, because you don’t just turn off when you have spent hours talking to family members in their darkest moments. It took a lot of years to learn not to talk about MAMAA constantly. It does take over your life and you become drained.