Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Happy Like Murderers

  GORDON BURN

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Happy Like Murderers

  Chapter One

  Quedgeley is a suburb on the southern edge – the Bristol side – of Gloucester. And Carol lived in Quedgeley until the age of four, in a big house surrounded by several acres. Just before she was born, though, the big house had been broken up into bedsits, and the fields closest to the house had become a caravan park.

  In those days – it was the years following the war; the mid-fifties – box-shaped prefabs had been put down on the bombsites and patches of wasteland to provide accommodation for all the demobilized servicemen and their instant young families; and caravan sites had sprung up in fields adjoining many towns and villages for the same reason.

  The site at Quedgeley Court was one of these. The ’vans, as the occupants called them, weren’t holiday ’vans, but were occupied all the year round by large, unruly, poorer-off families. Although they had no real reason to, the families living in the house, whose interior walls were no thicker than the caravan shells, considered themselves a slight cut above the ’van people, who slept in beds that by day became cabinets and tables, and who had to share facilities for bathing and so on.

  They were circumstances that intrigued Carol, who would go through her whole childhood and teenage years without knowing what it was like to have anywhere to think of as purely her own. Growing, often warring, families, strangers to each other, were squeezed into living spaces in which every intimate sound was overheard, while green fields stretched away on all sides, apparently doing nothing, towards the horizon.

  Carol’s mother’s name was Elizabeth. She would have liked her neighbours at Quedgeley Court and others to call her ‘Liz’, but at this point in her life she always got ‘Betty’, a name apparently better suited to a pub cleaner, which is what she occasionally was, and a single mother.

  Betty Mills had had two children before Carol. The first, Christopher, was what was then known as a ‘blue baby’; he had a hole in the heart and lived for only about a year. He also had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, and for his short life was fostered out to a woman called ‘Nanny’ Munroe who lived on Barnwood Road in Gloucester, close to the Black Dog pub where Betty Mills worked, which made it easy for her to see him. She still got to spend time with Christopher but he couldn’t live with her.

  Her second son, Phillip, was born in 1953, a year and a half before Carol. Because he was overdue, Phil arrived bright red and covered in fine white hair from head to foot, compared to Carol, who was a big bonny baby with beautiful black curly hair. Their mother was always telling them and other people this as a way of showing how they had been different from the word go, and Phil used to hate it. Used to hate her, Carol was sure, for being their mother’s favourite. When she was two, Phil fed her bacon rind and she nearly choked to death. She often wonders now if that was his first show of dislike towards her. In years to come, if it ever happened that they were out at the same place together and his friends were showing an interest, he got that he would pretend to throw up when she walked past him and call her names under his breath. He showed a frightening contempt for her which escalated during her teens. So no closeness there.

  The blue baby’s, Christopher’s, father was not the same as Phillip’s and Carol’s. Phillip and Carol were conceived from the same man, but he was not the man to whom Betty Mills was married at the time.

  Her domestic situation was complicated, but complicated in the straightforward way the system would gear itself to handling in the upheavals of the next twenty or thirty years, in a time of more and more multi-parent and serial-parent, accidental, mongrel families.

  Betty Mills was married to a man called Raine, and this was the name her children had been given. Albert Raine was a merchant seaman. He was also homosexual. She hadn’t known this of course when she married him, but Betty soon deduced it from the friends he brought home. Phillip’s and Carol’s natural father, who Betty had been seeing without Bert Raine knowing, was an Irish roadman called Michael Mahoney.

  Until the opening of the Severn bridge, Gloucester was the lowest crossing point on the river Severn and all traffic from southern England travelling into South Wales passed through the centre of the city. Likewise traffic travelling the north– south route prior to the opening of the M5 motorway. The main shopping streets were permanently choked with tarpaulined, long-haul trucks and lorries, belching fumes, shedding dirt. Michael Mahoney was part of the post-war programme of resurfacing and reconstruction. He was the foreman of a gang of labourers who were laying new roads in Gloucester.

  He had made it clear to Betty Mills when Phillip was on the way in 1953 that he couldn’t marry her because, leaving aside the fact that she was married herself, there was a girl at home in Cork to whom he had given his promise. But Carol came along eighteen months later, and Betty Mills and Michael Mahoney were still on some kind of terms during the years she was living at Quedgeley Court in the late fifties.

  Most of the ’van dwellers were eventually rehoused on the sprawling satellite estates that had been going up at Coney Hill and White City in Gloucester. But, after a brief period doing menial work on a farm in Painswick and living there with the children, in 1959 Betty Mills found herself having to move in for a time with Michael Mahoney in his council flat in Matson.

  It was the kind of rootless and insecure existence that would have bred anxiety in most people. And it is probable that Betty Mills wasn’t as unalive to the sense of perilousness and drift in her life as she liked to appear. But stop-gapping and tiding-over, a total absence of stability or direction – this was the only way of living she had known. It was the kind of scraping by she had grown up to expect. It was what life had handed her. Hanging on to her children was her only object and aim. When times were bad she would swear to them that she would never put them away or leave them. Really swear it. And this puzzled them, because at that time they were ignorant of the details – what they call ‘the roots and shoots’ – of Betty’s background.

  Her own mother had had a string of children by different men. They were born in special homes for unmarried mothers usually adjoined to a workhouse, then passed over to the authorities for rearing. Betty was born in 1928 and she was the youngest. Two brothers, Syd and Ben, were already in an orphanage, and she soon joined them. Hampton Home, 1 Peewitt Lane, Evesham. Eight boys in one house; eight girls in the other. They lived in separate cottages next door to each other and, although the boys knew that Betty was their sister, they never really had anything to do with her, and vice versa.

  As soon as she was old enough, Betty was put to work fetching and carrying, scrubbing floors, skivvying. Every day the same as any other in the flattened landscape of her life. And then, when she was four, an older sister who had gone into service on the Isle of Wight came on a visit. She said she had come to take Betty and her brothers to see their grandparents in Salford Priors in the Vale of Evesham.

  They set out on foot and were still walking in open country when dusk started to come down. Even as an old man Syd Mills would
remember walking for ever until they came to a wood where the two brothers and the two sisters slept outside the fence. When they woke, they crossed a newly ploughed field towards the lighted windows of a house in the distance. Syd, only six then, could remember looking through the window and seeing a small old man, a big old woman and a man with his feet up on the iron range.

  But they were not made welcome. They had walked all the previous night and slept under a hedge before continuing their walk to Gramma’s just to be made to feel unwanted. They were greeted at the door with a ‘What do you want?’ Syd and Betty spent the night on the sofa sleeping spoon fashion and he would always remember waking up in the morning and hearing his mother singing ‘The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill’ as she cleaned the grate in the hearth.

  More than twenty years later, Betty Mills would repeat the trek, only this time by bus and with Phillip and Carol in tow. She had lost contact with all her brothers and sisters as they left the home and went off to the army or wherever was their destination, but she had found her mother and wanted to show her children off to her. Her mother, though, had got married by this time and didn’t want her in-laws to know about her previous life as it could only make trouble for her. They were turned away and the door shut in their faces.

  It would take Carol many years to realize the hardships her mother had endured as a child, never being shown affection, being rejected. She would realize then how lucky she herself had been, having a mother who always told her that she was a beautiful baby and always would be beautiful. Her favourite line, used so often when Carol complained that she had no nice clothes to put on, was ‘Carol, it doesn’t matter what you wear. If you wore a sack you’d still look beautiful.’

  Carol was four in 1959 when she, her mother and her brother moved in with her natural father, Michael Mahoney, in his flat in Matson. Carol knew that this man, and not the man whose name she carried, was her ‘real’ father, and because of that she loved him. He was big, tall and strong with her own thick dark hair, and she thought of Michael as looking like Clint Walker in Cheyenne on the television. He drove a motorbike with a side-car and raced her around the countryside in it. Sometimes she even got to sit up behind him on the pillion. She has always been drawn to motorbikes and the men who ride them, probably because of that connection.

  Among her lasting memories of what she would continue to think of as her dad’s flat were the big picture of Mary and Jesus with the follow-you eyes hanging in the living room, and the accordion in Michael’s room which she was told would be hers one day, but which she was forbidden to touch without him being present.

  And then, through no fault of her own, although she believed it was – there had been a blow-up over some shillings kept in the kitchen for the gas meter which she had taken and which had resulted in Michael being angry enough to raise his voice to her – it was again time to move on. Her dad had said she was a bad girl and that he didn’t want a bad girl living with him. But that wasn’t why they were going. Betty and Michael had had an understanding from the beginning that this living together as a family could only ever, for their own undisclosed reasons, be a temporary arrangement.

  Betty was thirty-one or thirty-two by now. Carol was four; Phillip, six. From Michael Mahoney’s they went to stay with Joan and Jimmy, the Bradys, an Irish Catholic couple they had known back at Quedgeley Court and who, despite the move, were living in what were fast becoming overcrowded conditions. It was while lodging with the Bradys that Betty met the man who was going to be her next husband and the father of her second family. He would also of course be the stepfather of her existing children.

  Alf Harris had fair hair that was turning grey. He was twelve years older than Betty Mills and he wore a trilby hat and a suit, as Carol noticed. She also noticed that her mother spent most of the time in the outside toilet on the afternoon of that first meeting. Carol knew that was where she was because she was out in the garden herself waiting for the trains going past the end of it, into and out of Gloucester station. She enjoyed scaring herself standing so close to the noise. Betty came indoors when the men went along the street to the pub, but she went quiet and shy again when they came back. It was only a couple of weeks, perhaps three, before she told Phillip and Carol that Mr Harris was going to be their new dad, and only six weeks until she married him.

  *

  ‘Imagine you come from the city, and you’re suddenly down here with all these strange people you have to call brothers and sisters and dads an’ that.’

  Having, at the age of five, discovered her ‘real’ father, Carol wasn’t ready to surrender him. The other thing she wasn’t ready for was the fight to get noticed against the competition of a ready-made brood of brothers and sisters. The third was the move from Gloucester out into what, even at her age, she was townie enough to regard as hillbilly country.

  Thanks to the work of Dennis Potter – his television plays and interviews and essays – we have a fuller picture of what it has been like to live in the Forest of Dean in the last half a century than in possibly any other geographically discrete part of England.

  The Forest is about twelve miles by road from Gloucester (‘a city one would always want to get out of as quickly as possible’, Potter wrote), on the other side of the river Severn. The river Wye makes the western boundary of ‘this little country on its own’, and Wales is just across Offa’s Dyke. Throughout his life, Potter circled endlessly around the theme of the Forest’s seclusion and physical isolation and the inwardness it has bred in the people who live there. The muttonheadedness of Foresters resulting from inbreeding and incest (‘couldn’t find his arse with both hands’) was until quite recent times a standing joke in towns in the surrounding area. The closeness to the Welsh borders accounts for a dialect that is more or less unintelligible to non-Foresters.

  The insularity was something that Potter, typically, both celebrated and deplored. (At the age of ten, ‘between VE day and VJ day’, he had been molested – ‘abused out of innocence’ – by an older male relative, an event he didn’t mention to anybody for more than thirty years.)

  The first film Potter made for the BBC was a documentary about the encroachment of the modern world into a way of life that had turned for generations around the same old Forest immutables: chapel, rugby football, the brass band, the pub and the choir. A Woolworths, ‘a new candy-coloured shop called simply “Do It Yourself”’ and a Co-op supermarket had opened in Cinderford; and there was a coffee bar called the ‘Telebar’ at the bottom of the town, down the hill past the war memorial, Potter noted regretfully. Its main draw, a black-and-white television, had recently been superseded by a Sputnik-design juke-box aglow with cheap cascading colours. ‘The young people in the room jigged their feet and snapped their fingers, with something of the saving grace of self-parody, talking spasmodically in broad Forest accents: “If thou’s ask me, thik box could do wi a good butt ash round the back on in.”’

  This was 1961, a year after Betty Mills had married Alf Harris and moved to Cinderford.

  Harris was a miner at the Northern United, one of the deep shaft pits that before the war had provided jobs for almost all able-bodied men in the Forest; pick-and-shovel pits kept going by grinding shiftwork. He would have a wash or shower at work before cycling home along the paths in the thick clumps of forest between pit and village. But there would still be coal dust around his eyes and in his ears, as Carol noticed with her eye for noticing. He never got really clean. His skin was always a kind of yellow. Black circles around his eyes and bright blue eyes shining through.

  Harris had a Forest job and, away from work, followed pastimes that rooted him firmly in the community of the Forest. He had built a shed and made it his workshop. (‘Come in, o’ but, cast thee eyes over my abode.’) He used to build things. Shelves, doors, tables … He’d get a couple of old chairs, take the legs off, put a new top on and make a table. Toboggans. Breakfast bars when they came in. Hen coops. Dog kennels. Even Carol had to admit. He was quit
e handy, actually.

  Harris used to breed white Canadian rabbits. He had chickens; bred chicks. When they moved, from the third-floor flat in Grenville House where he was first living with Betty Mills to a house with a bit of garden, he borrowed two wild ponies from a neighbour to get the grass down. Tied them to poles in the garden so they went round in circles cropping. One of the bastards nearly choked itself on its straps during the night and he had to go out in the dark and unwind it. Bloody kids all hanging out the windows watching.

  Brass. That was another of his interests. He collected brass in all shapes and sizes and worked out a way of getting the kids to keep it polished for him by turning it into a competition. Newspapers out on the table, and ready, steady, rub, who’s got the shiniest?

  Autumn came, he would be out collecting wood from the nearby forest. He had knocked up a little kind of box-buggy thing that ran on pram wheels, and sometimes he would allow Carol to ride in it on the way there if she wasn’t jibing him with not being her real father and he wasn’t lashing out at her and they were enjoying one of their truces. On the way home she’d help drag it if it wasn’t too heavy.

  The marriage between Betty Mills and Alf Harris was a transaction of sorts, and obliquely acknowledged as such by both parties: she had no home; he had children to look after.

  Harris was a widower. His wife had died of cancer in her thirties. The children of that first marriage had been put with relatives after the death of their mother. But now that their father had another woman, they gradually started drifting back home. Chrissy, nine; Keith, eleven; Josephine, fifteen; Raymond, sixteen. Phil and Carol had met Mr Harris only twice and suddenly he was their dad and they had gained three older brothers and a sister. Now they were no longer three, but part of a large family, shut off in the Dean Forest.

  Almost straightaway there were problems. It would have been more surprising had there not been.