by Gordon Burn
It was Carol, Phil, Chris and Keith at first, all rubbing up against each other, jockeying for position. When they first went to live in Cinderford (‘Zinnerfud’), their mother would put Phil and Carol on the double-decker Red and White bus to Gloucester about once a month. Michael Mahoney would meet them and take them shopping for toys and clothes and generally spoil them. Naturally they couldn’t see why this didn’t go down very well with the have-nots back in ‘the sticks’, as Carol still calls the Forest, although she has lived there now for forty years.
Then something happened and Michael Mahoney stopped seeing them. All they knew was their stepfather told them that their dad didn’t want to see them any more; didn’t want nothing to do with them. Later they would discover that their father had tried to keep in touch with them but all his cards and letters and small presents of money had been intercepted. At the time, though, Carol couldn’t think what bad thing she had done to make him not want to see her. She started to feel life going downhill for her from then on.
Then, only months after getting married, her mother announced that she was expecting a baby. That would turn out to be Suzanne, Carol’s first Harris sister.
Carol was still five when Suzanne was born. She was six when she started spending time with a neighbour, an elderly friend of Alf Harris’s.
She would sometimes be left in his care while her mother and Alf went shopping. He gave her cuddles. She’d sit on his lap and watch TV. Then one day Alf got really angry and he was shouting at the old man and the old man was crying and Carol was dragged out of his house. She would remember feeling very upset about seeing him cry. Later her mum and dad told her she was not to go round there again as they had been doing something very bad, but that the old man couldn’t help it as he was not right in the head. If they’d done something bad and he wasn’t to blame, then she must be. That’s how she figured it. The first time she had been made to feel bad about herself. She takes consoling from an elderly family friend she likes and trusts. He interferes with her. Life going downhill.
About three years later, which would make her ten, there was to be another incident with another man, this time a friend of her mother’s. That is, the father of a friend of her mother’s. Another elderly man. This one’s trick was to keep a bag of sweets in his pocket and invite her to put her hand in his pocket and get one out. As she did, he pushed her hand down on to his penis which was hard, and held it there. This time she didn’t tell anyone about it until years later.
Sometime in 1962, when Suzanne was only a few months old and Betty was already pregnant or about to get pregnant with the twins, Angela and Adrian, she walked out on Alf Harris. Put Suzanne in the pram, sat Carol on the pram, grabbed Phillip by the hand and started walking. They got as far as Westbury-on-Severn, which is six miles, seven miles from Cinderford. Reached the police station there and got sent back. She had nowhere to go, so they brought them back. Some childhood memory of walking.
Quite soon after this – Carol assumed he must have hit her or something – Betty left again and they actually did stay in a caravan on some site in Gloucester somewhere. Carol can remember being there. She can remember being scared of the caravan, being wary of it and having the curtains drawn. She thinks it was because they were waiting for her stepfather to find them.
With Angela and Adrian, it made eight children in the Harris home, three of them under the age of three. Carol noticed a change of smell on her mother. She started to smell of babies. Betty suffered an ectopic pregnancy in 1963, and in 1964 gave birth to another set of twins, Richard and Robert. Five children in four years and a daughter who had started cheeking up the man she refused to think of as her ‘dad’. Carol was very pretty and very bright and always looking for an excuse to tell Alf Harris that she didn’t have to do what he told her to because he wasn’t her real father. Which would earn her a smack. She could be fiery.
Betty was starting to slap Alf’s son, Keith, around and being hard on Christopher, who was in trouble with the police. She was getting quite nasty with Keith and Chrissy. Then Alf would be picking on Carol, and she’d be rebelling against him. He smashed her head into the wall and ruptured her eardrum.
Into this turmoil in the flats – Hill Dene council estate in Cinderford had a bad name for being a rough area – stepped Alf Harris’s oldest boy, Raymond. Raymond was about eighteen and Carol was about eight, and they were at each other’s throats straightaway.
He’d sit in front of the fire when he got home from work and take his socks off and pick the skin off his feet and his pimples and either flick them into the fire or over Carol. Carol’s mother would tell him off but he just did it all the more. So that was gross, even without the smell and the fact that he was monopolizing the heating. In those days the fire was all the heating they had, so they’d all try and huddle round it, but he’d be there with his smelly feet and that would put you off. He’d come in and take his boots off and put his feet up on the range and then the smell would come up from them. ‘Tell Raymond to move his feet, mum.’ The start of another cosy evening in front of the fire.
Raymond and Betty got that they would argue on sight and because Carol was a ‘mummy’s girl’ he’d do what he could to antagonize her so she’d complain to her mother and that would start a fight. He’d push her or whatever, and then Alf Harris would come in on it.
The worst thing Raymond used to do, though, was tell Carol that he’d put bogeys in her porridge. Alf Harris used to make them up porridge, and Carol couldn’t stand it but she had to eat it. It was slimy. And Raymond if he was around would come in and say, ‘I’ve just blown my nose into that.’ And that used to make her feel sick, and sometimes she was sick. Then her stepdad would slap her one for playing up and not eating her food. Then her mum would start on him. This is how it happens in big families.
It got that Carol hardly ate anything. Then she started suffering with heavy nosebleeds nearly every day. It was nothing for her to soak two towelling nappies with the blood she lost. Sometimes it was so profuse that she’d choke. She’d get clots in her nose blocking the air off and her mouth would fill up with blood and she’d panic. If she blew her nose it just got worse. So – and she was aware that it was a filthy habit – she’d remove the clots by hooking them out with a hairgrip.
One day her brother Raymond came in as she was doing this and he gave her a smack around the head and told her off for being a dirty bitch; nothing but a filthy little bitch. He had a fit on her in front of her friend. Slapped her face and made her sit on a chair with a nappy under her nose and if she moved he’d hit her around the head, disgusted by this polluting substance which perhaps in his adolescent’s mind he was associating with menstrual blood. ‘Sit there and don’t move. Move and I’ll hit you again.’ Then she choked coughing and the blood splattered over the carpet and he punched her in the stomach.
That was the last straw for Betty when she found out about it. She said she’d take Carol and Phillip and leave, but she didn’t. She’d just discovered she was pregnant again.
The only one of Alf Harris’s children who hadn’t come home to live was Josephine. She had gone on living with her aunt Marje and her husband uncle Ralph Trigge. In 1963, when Betty’s first set of twins were a year old, Josephine got pregnant and married her long-term boyfriend John Thomas. They took Raymond and his girlfriend on honeymoon on a boat with them. A few days later there was a lot of visitors and the police came to the flat. The honeymoon was cut short. Raymond had gone missing at sea. One night Ray went out on the deck alone to do something, and the sail pole hit him, knocking him out and overboard. He’d had a few drinks. His body was washed up nearly a week later. Carol was about ten years old then and she found her mother crying at a neighbour’s, and she was told Ray was dead. She was so happy she laughed and said ‘good’ and got another good hiding for that too. She couldn’t disguise her happiness that he wasn’t coming back. Did a few ‘yeh!’s and a little dance. She was generally obnoxious. Mrs Mathews, the nei
ghbour, smacked her face and threw her out of the door saying she was a wicked girl. Later that day she got another good hiding off Alf. She was just so relieved that at least one of her bullies was gone. She’d often wished that Alf would just die and that they could all be happy again. The hidings got worse and more frequent.
One thing she hated Alf for was he made her wear a pair of hobnail shoes to school. They were great clumpy things with laces and there were studs under the soles and heels and they made loud clip-clop noises when she walked. It was a sound that had been a familiar one for generations around the villages in the Forest but, with the gradual closure of the pits, it was fast dying out. The clamp, clamp of steel-toed pit boots could be heard minutes before the men came by, and children would rush to the windows in Coleford, Coalpit Hill, Cinderford, Coalway, eager to see the coal-black faces. The miners would walk home from the evening shift with carbide lamps or candles encased in jamjars, often singing hymns or band tunes, their boots ringing out.
But that was history. Carol was eight in 1963; nine in 1964. The Twist had been and gone. The Beatles were making the Liverpool sound international. A Hard Day’s Night had already played at Cinderford’s flea-pit cinema. She wanted something a bit less pre-historic in the shoe department; something more up to date and modern. But every time she raised the subject, Alf said she would have to wear the hobnails until they wore out. That would be when she was an old lady of twenty as far as she was concerned at the time.
Behind where they lived used to be all meadows. There was a field with a pond in it where in the spring they’d go to collect tadpoles. There was a conker tree and a derelict wall, which they’d climb on to watch the big black horse that grazed there. The horse was called Chris. He was quite wild and most people avoided him, but Carol didn’t. She’d sit on the wall for hours trying to entice him over with grass. They got used to each other. Carol felt they had something in common, her with her bullying at home and him with the spiteful boys that threw stones at him. Those boys had made him nervous and then he turned nasty. She started to treat some younger girls nasty, she didn’t know why. Probably because she was too small to hit Alf and so she picked on others even weaker and smaller, needing to take her unhappiness out on somebody.
But she wasn’t miserable all the time. It wasn’t all fighting and abuse at their flat at 95 Hill Dene, later named Grenville House. Whenever anybody brought home a new baby, say, or got married, the whole flats came out to welcome them home or see them off, whichever the case might be. They had decent neighbours, all struggling to keep their heads above water, and there were many laughs and good times.
When Carol was eleven, the family moved to a three-bedroom council house on the same estate. Alf Harris had lost his job the previous year, due to an accident at work down the pit which meant he couldn’t use his hand to grip any more. He had a bedroom to himself in the new house. Carol shared a double bed with one of her sisters and her mother slept in another double bed in the same room with a second sister. Betty had stopped sleeping with Alf by then. There were two doubles and a single bed in the third bedroom for the boys.
In addition, Alf also had his big shed in the garden to retreat to. His workshop. The shed became very popular with the boys in the neighbourhood, who would want to sneak in for a look when he wasn’t there. Alf was a regular reader of Parade magazine, and he had plastered the walls with its pages of pin-ups. They weren’t bad, in the pornographic sense. There was no hair. Just topless. Parade was a kind of working man’s Playboy. But they were in full colour, and at the time that kind of thing was still considered quite racy. Carol would certainly notice her brothers’ mates trying to get in to have a look around there. Cop a look when they thought nobody was watching.
Whenever Carol had to go in the shed herself, to take Alf a cup of tea or something, it would always bring a touch of heat into her face and she would shyly look away from the pictures of oiled and bare-breasted women. In the years to come she would get persistent requests to do glamour modelling herself. She would be crowned Cinderford Carnival Queen in 1977 and ride through the streets on a camel. And that would bring in a steady stream of offers of catalogue and lingerie work, eventually leading to topless modelling and a try-out for Page Three in the Sun.
Up to the age of fourteen, though, she had no body-confidence. She started to worry that her body wasn’t developing at the same speed as everybody else’s. Even Jenny Powell had boobs and she was the tiniest girl in their class. Carol had no boobs and no pubic hair and no periods. She hated the fact that she didn’t even need a 32AA bra yet. She was mates with all the boys in her class. One of the boys. That was her.
Then when she was thirteen she was involved in an incident that further undermined her confidence. It gave her a knock. She had taken the bus from Cinderford into Gloucester to go swimming at Barton Baths. She had gone as part of a group that included one of her brothers and some of his friends and a friend of her own called Dawn from the flats. Instead of going straight back home when they finished swimming, they decided to go to Gloucester Park. While she was with Dawn in the women’s toilet in the park, Carol was assaulted by an older man.
Dawn was inside the cubicle and Carol was waiting and the man suddenly rushed at her, making strange throaty noises and grabbing. They struggled to the floor, his hands grabbing inside her pants, her hands grabbing his, trying to bend his fingers backwards to get him off. She was sliding down the wall and trying to scream but no noise was coming out. Dawn, who was tiny for her age, jumped on his back but she couldn’t pull him off. All the time he was making strange groaning noises, so Dawn ran out and grabbed two passers-by and they dragged him away. By the time the police arrived a crowd had gathered, among them a gang of young men. The man who had attacked her was sobbing and crying, and the men in the gang were jeering and going ‘Gwan, let the poor bugger go.’ The man was charged with indecent assault and found guilty. He was fifty-four years old and a mental patient from Coney Hill hospital and had done this kind of thing before. But once again Carol had been made to feel that it was her fault. She kept reliving the sensation of travelling backwards through the air before hitting the wall and of then being under the man with Dawn on top of the man and the man clawing sharply at her under her skirt. And then the fact that it wasn’t her but the man who was crying and the voices calling out to let him go.
In the immediate aftermath of this attack, two strange but possibly connected things occurred: Carol started to have morbid thoughts about ending up in the papers as a murder victim; obsessively thinking that her picture would be on the front page of some paper because she’d been found dead. ‘I know I’m going to be famous,’ she started telling friends after the incident in the park. ‘But it’s going to be for being a body.’ At the same time, she realized that for the first time ever the older boys at school were taking a bit of notice of her. But when she found herself alone with a boy, in the woods or just innocently walking at the edge of the forest, she’d inevitably end up looking, scrutinizing the shadows and the undergrowth, terrified she was going to find a body.
When she was fourteen, she started going out with a sixteen-year-old, Clive Kibble, and, after a few months, lost her virginity to him. Clive taught her how to ride a motorbike and a scooter and at the beginning they’d spend hours tearing around the tracks in the wood and the green outside his home. After the sex came into it, though, it just seemed to spoil things for her. She was always making him cry by being nasty to him and being jealous. She changed so much she didn’t even like herself.
Puberty, when it happened, came very quickly. She went from nothing straight into a 34A bra. She started getting a great deal of male attention, and by the time she was fifteen was known as ‘Jailbait of the Year’ in Cinderford and the surrounding area. This led to her getting picked on a lot by other girls whose boyfriends found her attractive. One girl had a car pull up, Carol was dragged into it and had the doors slammed on her legs. She was beaten up while in the car and th
en thrown out of it. She was carried home by some of her brothers’ friends and Betty went hysterical.
She was a well-fancied woman – ‘a well-flirted filly’, as she herself puts it. Maybe it was her body language or whatever it was. But from the age of fourteen she started to get an abundance of male attention, and with the male attention you got the girlfriends following behind, like threatening. She couldn’t help it. If Carol went to a disco, nine out of ten times some girl would hit her when she went in the toilets on account of her boyfriend’s wandering eye. If their men looked at her, she’d be the one to blame; the one who’d get the smacked face or the head cracked against the mirror or the lavatory.
At the age of fifteen, she started seeing a local biker. She used to go to work with his mum apple-picking. His name was Graham and he was eighteen and she was the only girl in their crowd when they went to the pictures or to Mallory Park motorbike races. Carol went out with Graham for a year but as soon as they had a sexual relationship going she started getting jealous again and insecure, and that was what finally ruined that relationship, her bad jealousy tantrums.
After it ended, she was in danger of going quite seriously off the rails for a while. A woman called Kate with a house in the woods and a bad name said she wanted Carol to babysit for her. Carol said OK with no thought about what she might be getting herself into. The woman’s husband had left her and she would go out with several different men and they’d come back to her place after the pubs had closed and more often than not it would turn into a party. Of course some of these men or their friends would get after Carol but she was still only fifteen and they were all too old for her. They all tried it on and on one or two occasions she gave in to get rid of their attentions. If she got tired of fighting off a man she would give in just to get rid of him, or she’d have had too much to drink and it just happened.