by Gordon Burn
She wasn’t capable of dealing with their sexual advances and she earned herself a bad reputation. Which led to more and more unwanted admirers. She didn’t like to say no because she thought they would think she was childish. ‘Then I turned into a wild child,’ she says. ‘I slept around a lot.’ Her brother Phillip, who had never been close to her, her one full blood relative after her mother, started referring to her as a slut. Still life was going in one direction only, and it wasn’t up.
*
A solution seemed to be to get right away from Cinderford and the Forest for a while. Southsea, near Portsmouth, may not have been the perfect destination, and Doreen Bradley certainly wasn’t the ideal companion. But those were the only options available, so Carol left school and went. It was the furthest from home she had ever been before. It was the first time she had ever been away from home by herself.
The Bradleys lived at the end of Northwood Close, the cul-de-sac into which Alf Harris had moved his family in the mid-sixties. But they were anyway unavoidable on the Hill Dene estate. The Bradley family were better known as the ‘Cinderford mafia’, or, sometimes, ‘the most hated family in the Forest of Dean’. So many people in town were said to be on antidepressants because of them. What made them unusual was that they were a female-rather than a male-dominated clan. Sisters, mothers, aunts, nieces: they were all as likely to be weapon-carrying, and as capable of knocking heads together, as men. You wouldn’t want to cross them. One example: a couple of them went into the Miners’ Institute one night, tore this woman’s jewellery from round her neck and stuffed it down her throat. Her crime: letting it be known that she was thinking of sending her son to a fee-paying school out of the district. The Bradleys would fight each other all the time as well as picking on everybody else, even women with pushchairs. Anybody. This was Doreen’s family.
Doreen Bradley had been at school with Carol. She was still fifteen, nearly sixteen, and had yet to start coming up through the family business. She needed a friend of her own age to make the move with her to Southsea, where an older sister, Edith, known as ‘Deedee’, already lived.
Deedee was running a good line in ripping off the Co-op, where she worked. Something to do with milk tokens. She had found Doreen a job working there with her. Carol started working in a textiles shop, and at night she and Doreen ran around and had fun.
Southsea of course was full of sailors. Clubs and cafés and rowdy bars and rowdy, rough-housing sailors. Carol went out with a few and then some, but only fell in love and into bed with one. His name was Steve Riddall, known to his mates as ‘Jimmy Riddle’. They met in a club on the sea front where Carol shouldn’t have been, being still under-age. They were both often in ‘Joanna’s’. He always danced and sang along to the song ‘Little Girl, Please Don’t Wait for Me’, a Diana Ross number. He was short, dark and handsome, and nobody loved him more than he did himself. Carol was never under any illusions: she was always just going to be another notch on the hammock for Steve.
When he was away on patrol with his boat she wrote to him. And then one night the opportunity arose and they slept together in a narrow single bed at Deedee’s. Doreen had got the double. But Deedee found out about them having men back to the house while she was away and there was a flare-up. She tried to stop Carol seeing Steve one last time to say goodbye before he left for sea, and so Carol left Deedee’s place and got a bedsit.
Before long Doreen also got kicked out of Deedee’s for continuing to meet up with Carol against her sister’s orders. By that time, though, Carol had lost her job because of persistent oversleeping, and that led to her losing the bedsit, which left both Carol and Doreen homeless.
A family Doreen knew in Southsea put them up for a while, and then another acquaintance let them stay in his place while he was away for a week. When they were there they steamed open an envelope containing a cheque belonging to another tenant, and used that as the down payment on somewhere to live.
It was the attic floor of a three-storey house. The kitchen was on the landing, with two doors leading from it into a living room and a bedroom. The kitchen consisted of a sink with a gasket heater for hot water which didn’t work. There was a two-door unit under the sink to keep food in which was filthy, a fridge, and two meters for gas and electricity. These needed feeding all the time and there was no money to feed them. The inside of the fridge was covered in fur.
The furniture in the living room consisted of an oil slick of a settee and a broken armchair. In the bedroom were two beds positioned in an L-shape and a listing chest of drawers. When Carol fell into her bed on that first night it collapsed underneath her. She had to stack it back up on its pile of bricks and they ended up laughing themselves to sleep. Laughing until their throats were sore and they were gagging and felt they couldn’t breathe.
The next day they set about cleaning the place up. The water took up all the money they had put into the meter the night before and it still wasn’t that hot. They opened the roof window and it fell in on them and they had to put cardboard up. Carol cut her arm. A cupboard door fell off.
Doreen had got a job in a Kentucky shop. They relied on the chicken Doreen brought home after work as their main meal. Carol still couldn’t find a job, and then Doreen was laid off. They had no income and were running out of food and spent most of their time wrapped up in bed looking at magazines the previous tenants had left behind.
They were down to eating Weetabix spread with margarine and just about at the end of their sense of humour when they were woken one morning by the kind of loud banging at the bedroom door that is made only by the police. They didn’t know what they’d done. A voice ordered them to open up.
But it was all right. It turned out that Carol’s mother was worried about her. She had contacted the Southsea police to ask them to find her and tell her to get in touch. Before she could, though – Betty and Alf weren’t on the telephone, and Carol hadn’t made her mind up what to write – they received a second visit from the police. This time they told them that Doreen’s father had had a stroke and Alf Harris had had a heart attack, both within hours of each other, which Doreen and Carol thought was weird and unbelievable. They were neighbours, living just a few yards from each other, and they were both critical at the same time. They could die.
They got the news at eight at night, and by nine o’clock they were standing with their thumbs out, penniless, and relieved to have an excuse to be hitching home to Cinderford.
In the event, both fathers survived, although Doreen’s would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Carol surprised herself at how badly she wanted Alf to pull through. After all they had spent the whole of the previous twelve years locked in a bitter battle with each other. ‘Hating each other’ wouldn’t be putting it too strongly. And now she found herself praying that he would survive. Literally that: closing her eyes and sending up a prayer. That was June 1972. Carol continued writing to the disco dreamboat, Steve ‘Jimmy Riddle’ Riddall, on his coastal-patrol vessel, and she’d get the occasional letter from him dropping through her door in Cinderford. A letter from Steve would always bring a lift to her day.
*
Just before her sixteenth birthday in October 1971, Carol had cut all her hair off. She had always been known for her hair, which was dark and lustrous and which she had always worn long. People identified her with it, and even years later as a middle-aged woman she’d meet men in Cinderford who would tell her, without the benefit of a few drinks in them, how they had dreamed of touching her pretty black hair. Men will come up to her now, look at her long dark hair, and say, ‘Oh Carol, you’re looking good.’
For a long time between the ages of fifteen and sixteen she had hovered between pretty and brutal. She was aware that the conventional sexiness of tousled-looking, flowing hair got her the attention. At the same time she knew that it didn’t go with the clothes she had started wearing. More to the point, she wasn’t sure she wanted that sort of attention any more, and the problems it inevitably broug
ht. For a while she had tried combining being a skinhead with having long hair and of course it didn’t work. So she had it all cut off. Really short. Brutal, with a spiky hogsback crown and a razor parting. So short her mother didn’t recognize her. Crombie topcoat, pink gingham Ben Sherman shirt, eight-hole Dr Martens, scary hair. That was the new-look Carol.
Emboldened by their Southsea adventure, Carol and Doreen started travelling by thumb to discos in Gloucester and all around the area. Carol loved dancing. Discos were her thing, and she was prepared to travel miles to go to one.
Quite soon after they came home, Doreen’s older sister, Kathy, asked them if they wanted to go with her to meet her new boyfriend Taffy. He worked on a fairground that was then on the Ham at Tewkesbury. It wasn’t a straight run from Cinderford to Tewkesbury. It usually meant going via Gloucester. But it was a route that Doreen and Carol had travelled a number of times before and they had found that it could be done quite easily.
While they were at the fair on that first occasion, saying their hellos to Taffy, Carol and Doreen fell in with two local lads, Tony and Rob. Carol really liked Tony. He was a skinhead. He wore bleached-out cropped-leg trousers, a bomber-style jacket and big cherry-reds. An all-out skin. In addition he had the biggest blue-grey eyes she’d ever seen on a man and full, Mick Jagger lips. Tony had this cool, no-nonsense way about him, and even though he was only sixteen years old he got a lot of respect from the town hardcases both older and younger than himself. He had a rep in town. You don’t mess with Tony. A fair bloke, but you don’t mess with him.
Carol and Doreen started to go out there two, maybe three times a week, just to walk around, go to the café, maybe sometimes the occasional pub disco. It was always them hitching to Tony and Rob in Tewkesbury rather than the other way around because it was a fact that girls could get lifts more easily than boys. How many drivers were going to stop to offer lifts to what looked like two yobs with big boots, bullet heads and braces? Whereas with girls it just wasn’t a problem. Carol even started to get her regulars; people who would recognize her, give her the flashing lights sign and stop to pick her up.
If Doreen couldn’t make it, she had a couple of other friends who would usually go with her. But when they all got themselves local boyfriends, or they didn’t fancy coming, or it was getting colder, Carol used to set off on her own. Whatever it took.
She didn’t like going alone, but she wasn’t worried about it. She always took basic precautions. She always wore trousers, for instance. Rule one: always wear trousers hitch-hiking. When she didn’t, because she was planning on going dancing, she would have a long coat on that covered up her legs; they had what she and her friends called the ‘Nazi coats’ – maxi-coats – as well then. If anything, the return leg to Cinderford late at night was easier than the outward journey to Tewkesbury. There were two men who would be going to work on a nightshift and they usually dropped her off in Gloucester, then she would get a lift home from there easily.
Tony Coates was an apprentice at a place in Tewkesbury where they repaired JCBs, heavy plant, and tractors. He lived with a couple who had children. Their house was a council house and therefore small, so Tony and Carol didn’t go back to his lodgings very often. They didn’t really do anything. Often she just sat in his workshop and watched him do work, and was happy doing that. They were happy enough just to be able to spend time with each other without being held to account.
There was a little park going into the council estate where Tony used to lodge. Directly opposite was a pub called the Gupshill Manor. And it was at this same spot by the park that Tony used to leave Carol between ten thirty and eleven to begin hitching home. He used to leave her there so that if she didn’t get a lift she could easily walk to where he was living. But she was always lucky and was usually on her way within quarter of an hour.
In September 1972, when she got into Fred West’s grey Ford Popular, Carol was still a boyish-looking girl. She had allowed her hair to grow out over the summer that was bringing her to her seventeenth birthday, but not in a uniform way. It was still very short on the top but now long and feathered down the sides and back, copying a hairstyle made popular by Dave Hill of Slade. She had plucked her eyebrows really thin, and her clothes too were influenced by glam rock and Slade. Long hair, short fringe, platform shoes, big flared trousers; garish stripes, Rupert Bear checks, fluffy jackets with jumbo zips. Boyish girls, girlish boys. Carol had always had a small waist and slim hips. Gender-bending. Bolan and Bowie. That was then the thing.
The couple who stopped to pick her up that night, though, looked pretty straight. The woman, Carol would discover in the course of the brief time she was with them, was only two years older than herself, but if anything she looked younger. Too young, it would occur to her, to be partnered with the man who was driving, who looked old enough to be her father. And when the car came to a stop opposite the Gupshill Manor, it was the woman who wound the window down and spoke. She turned and said something to the driver and then she said OK then, they would give her a lift. The woman got out and tipped up her seat for her, tipped it so that the back dropped forward in a skewed way towards the driver, and Carol hopped in the back.
‘Why ain’t your boyfriend took you home?’ the man said, talking to her through the mirror. He was smoking a roll-up and clocking her. ‘Don’t your boyfriend take you home?’ On the journey the woman asked Carol all about herself, what she was doing in Tewkesbury, whether she lived at home and did she have a job. The answers were: Tony, yes, and no because she had just come back to the area after being away in Portsmouth.
‘Ooh – we could do with somebody to help out looking after our children.’ She could see the man had a kind of gypsyish look – tight dark hair and a wide turned-up nose. A bit of a dark gap in the middle of his smiley teeth. ‘Just a bit of housework and helping Rose really round the ’ouse.’
And Carol goes, ‘Ooh, that would be nice’, kind of casual. Her ambition was to be a nanny or a model.
There was a bit of smell coming up off the man, not offensive; tobacco and something else.
The woman told Carol they were married and had three children, all girls. Carol told the woman that they had ten in her family, including two sets of twins. That was always the thing at the time – two sets of twins was quite unusual. So that kind of conversation.
Having babies had already started to thicken the woman’s figure. That explained the slightly pear shape Carol had noticed when this Rose got out of the car; the broadening, the hint of droop. She was quite pretty but she wore her hair in a short, plain, single-parted cut, about down to her collar. A middle-aged style, in other words, for what was still really a pretty young girl.
The couple didn’t drop her when they got to Gloucester, although they lived there. They took the bridge over the river, followed the road up into the high, sloping villages of Dean Forest, and brought her all the way home to Cinderford. By the time they arrived there it had been agreed between them: Carol would move in with them to help look after Anna-Marie, Heather and baby May.
The Wests themselves had only recently moved into their house in Cromwell Street, close to Eastgate market and the main shopping streets in Gloucester. When she turned up there a few days later, Carol was impressed first of all to find herself standing in front of a house in a street full of houses.
Nanny Munroe, the woman who had looked after her mother’s first baby, Christopher, until he died, was the only person she had ever known at that point who lived in a house house. That is, a house that wasn’t owned by the council. Mrs Munroe’s had a great big cellar where she used to keep her labradors. You’d come out of there and go upstairs and upstairs and upstairs, and it was huge. Now this house where she was going to be living gave her the same good feelings. These were of solidness and space. It wasn’t prefabricated or fast built. It was old. You sensed the depth of its foundations and the weight of its thick walls.
It was only eventually that she realized how close it was to
the park; that from the pavement in front of 25 Cromwell Street it was possible to look beyond the spiked railings of Gloucester Park to the lavatories where she had been assaulted by the man from Coney Hill mental hospital, thrown backwards through the air by him, four years earlier; that winded sensation when she struck the wall when she was thirteen. The damp floor.
The toilet building was black and white with black beams running up and across it. It was recently built but had been made to look lumpy like a traditional timber-framed building you would expect to find in a postcard village out in the country somewhere. There was a tree-lined path leading to it.
Although it was the obvious place to take them, Carol would avoid the park, walking past it or around it, when she was out with the pram on her own, treating the West children to some air.
Chapter Two
Gloucester Park runs from Cromwell Street to the roundabout on the main road going south out of Gloucester, a distance of about two hundred yards. It is a Victorian park with a white-stone memorial to the dead of the two wars set in a crescent shape into the north-east corner. Away from the road, looking straight along Wellington Street, the street next to Cromwell Street, is a statue of the founder of the Sunday School movement, Robert Raikes; an unremarkable, weathered public monument standing on a high plinth, and noticed by more or less nobody at all.
The park is bare land. The word ‘field’ probably describes it best. Although it is Victorian, there is none of the dark-green Victorian gloom; no special architectural or landscaping features; no secret places or notorious areas. It is a flat field crossed with paths without very much to break up the flatness. There was a popular café once that stood near the centre but it was closed down some years ago because of the amount of drug-taking and drug-selling going on there.
Every summer since the war, a fair has opened in the park on the last Saturday of July and played for a fortnight. It sets up in the centre and, after dark, becomes an island of light and noise surrounded on all sides by intense blackness. From inside the fair, the house lights in Cromwell Street are only blurrily visible. The brighter lights thrown off by some of the newer rides, laser-like flashes and colours, fail to penetrate the darkness as far as the statue on its plinth or the perimeter railings.