Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  At one point in the early sixties, Fred West had got away from Gloucester and had gone to live in Scotland. He drove a Mr Whippy ice-cream van around Glasgow. Twenty years earlier, Eddie Fry had escaped to run a cockles and whelks stall at weekends outside a pub in Wandsworth, in south London. Rented a lock-up garage, managed to find two ice-boxes to keep the shellfish fresh, drove the living van to Billingsgate market in the middle of the night on Thursday mornings for stock. During the week, he did his strongman act in the pubs, sending the hat around afterwards for tokens of appreciation. There was a period selling yo-yos and monkeys on a stick for a couple of men he met in Shepherd’s Bush. That was it. Nothing too steady. Ducking in, ducking out.

  In those days Eddie considered himself a showman. And he lived on caravan sites with showmen. Gypsies and showmen. Travelling people. Pat Kane, seventy-three, a retired Punch and Judy man, and Minnie Mills, widow of Harry Mills, tinker and grinder, were among his neighbours in the ‘caravan colony’ in Manley’s Yard by the railway line in Battersea. He shared his caravan for more than a year with a homeless girl called Renie Richardson who he had met one night when he was busking in a pub in Clapham. He married his second wife while he was living on a tinkers’ site in the East End and eventually moved with her to a site in Barnwood, just outside Gloucester. There were other caravans in Longford, behind Longford Garage, and on a site by Hawkes the Bakers on the Bristol Road.

  These were not caravan ‘parks’ or ‘mobile-home communities’. Just derelict parcels of land with few amenities, hidden away out of sight, sometimes in the countryside, but just as often in the heavy industrial suburbs. Hole-in-the-ground toilets and puddles of sump oil and tools left to rust. For most of the sixties, and virtually up to the time he moved into Cromwell Street in 1972, Fred West lived in trailers and small ‘snailback’ caravans on sites of this type.

  He was itinerant and, although of fixed abode, remained, like Eddie Fry, itinerant throughout his life. After his permanent return to Gloucester in the fifties, Eddie made his living for forty years in the waste trade: collecting, baling and selling cardboard, waste paper, rags, hessian sacks and, eventually, scrap metal.

  He got his start in the business as a young man going around Barton Street collecting cardboard and paper. He stored it in a disused bakehouse close to where he lived. Even in retirement, now a man in his seventies, he couldn’t resist the lure of making money out of junk. He bought a small Mazda pick-up truck and would ride around Gloucester and Stroud and Cheltenham and the villages of the Forest of Dean looking for bits of scrap iron to throw in the back.

  Fred West had this same scavenging eye. He was always stopping to pick up bits of rope and electrical cable from the roadside. Clothes line and rope and bits and pieces of rubbish. He’d pick up stuff and have a lot of rubbish in the house. Like Eddie, he enjoyed cruising, looking to make something out of nothing. He had an eye for spotting use in something that had been discarded by everybody else as useless.

  *

  Eddie Fry never completely lost touch with Brian, the son he had with Doris Green. Brian would occasionally be allowed to visit his father in whatever circumstances he then happened to be living. As head choirboy at St Mary de Crypt in Gloucester, Brian found such things as jaunts to Billingsgate market in the middle of the night and taking the hat round in pubs for his father and Eddie’s alternative way of life very eye-opening.

  But mostly Brian Fry went on living with his grandparents and his mother at their home at 25 Cromwell Street, knowing only that something had gone ‘radically wrong’ between his father and his mother after he came along. When his grandfather died and his mother remarried and moved with her new husband to another house in a different part of Gloucester, Brian would continue living at Cromwell Street with his grandmother, Mrs Green. His mother always worked at RAF Records in Cheltenham Road and his grandmother had brought him up because his mother worked so much. He always thought of his grandmother as his mother. She was the mother figure to him.

  Mrs Green – her first name was Amelia – was the heart of the family. A tough matriarchal presence. Pictures from the time show a substantial woman in a felt hat and flower-patterned pinafore down at the bottom of the garden feeding her chickens. And, for the Greens as a family, number 25 was the main meeting point. Whether it was a birthday, Christmas or whatever, everybody came together at Cromwell Street. There were a lot of sons and daughters, cousins, aunts and uncles, and that’s where they all met.

  Brian had an uncle who was the projectionist at the picture house in Lydney in the Forest of Dean. And it was from this uncle, his uncle Raymond, that he picked up an interest in photography and cameras at an early age. He was bought his first camera when he was about nine, and it got into his system. He moved from still photography to 9.5-millimetre home movie-making, an unusual gauge, now extinct, and soon started to combine this with other interests of his. He was a railway enthusiast. He followed the steam. And he started taking his camera to steam fairs and rallies.

  He captured all the changes that were happening in Gloucester in the fifties and sixties. When the coach station was moved out of King’s Square in the centre of town and replaced with benches and fountains, Brian was there with his camera for the official reopening. Whatever it was – royal visits, falconry displays or dry-stone-walling demonstrations in the park during Carnival Week – the chances are Brian would be somewhere in the crowd, filming.

  The downstairs front room at Cromwell Street was his grandmother’s ‘special room’. She called it this: her ‘special room’, furnished quite formally and kept for special occasions. Even so on the floor there was only oilcloth which it was Brian’s job to keep clean with lavender polish. There were mats in there – rag rugs – but no carpets. Pride of place was reserved for a gypsy caravan that had been made for Mrs Green when she was a young girl; one of the boys she was courting had made it for her to try and woo her into marriage. It was made of fretwork and it was the centrepiece of the stout, bow-fronted little china cabinet.

  The front room, on a level with Cromwell Street and facing out on to it, was on the left as you came in the front door (which of course was actually around the side of the house). On the right as you came in was another room of a similar size. And the Greens lived mostly in there, facing the garden. There was a couch and a door leading down three steps into the kitchen, which was housed in a single-storey brick building jutting out into the garden.

  It was in the back room that Brian started giving his film shows on Sunday evenings. The audience consisted of his family, and for a screen he used a bit of cardboard painted up with a professional-looking black border. In the early days it was all amateur footage, but the equipment he shot it with and showed it on was professional standard: he had a Pathé H camera and a Pathé Son sound projector.

  In 1955, when he was sixteen, Brian was taken on as rewind boy at the Hippodrome cinema, only a short walk from Cromwell Street in the city centre. But he had been there only five months when the Hippodrome burned down. He moved to the Ritz in Barton Street and made steady progress from rewind boy to chief operator. But the Ritz used to share the news with another cinema, the Regal in King’s Square. And at the beginning it was Brian’s job to run between the cinemas carrying reels of Pathé newsreel in a can. The audience at the Ritz would see it, and then Brian would make the dash across town to make second house at the Regal.

  The perk in those mainly televisionless days was that he sometimes got to keep the news over the weekend and so was able to regale his family with footage of the latest world happenings – Derek Ibbotson recapturing the mile record in 1957, the swearing in of President Kennedy in 1961 – instead of the latest of his own hand-shot sequences commemorating the Great Age of Steam.

  Brian slept at the top of the house. The simple layout of two rooms, back and front, a single window in each, was repeated on the two upstairs floors, and Brian slept in the top-floor bedroom overlooking the street. But as a boy, and even later, h
e spent a lot of time at the bottom of the house, in the cellar.

  Immediately under the back-living-room window, in the garden, was a heavy trapdoor made of wood. This opened into a coal hole, and the coalman used to come about once a fortnight, on a Friday, and drop four hundredweight of coal in there. He’d park in the street and carry the bags on his back down the alley, between the mission hall and the front door. Mr Cook, the coalman, came all through the summer so that stocks built up. It was all coal fires in those days, and in the winter months that was the amount that was needed. The coalman would stack the bags as he emptied them so that they could be counted and in that way hope to avoid any misunderstandings.

  There was a flight of stone steps under the trapdoor going down into the cellar and afterwards somebody, usually Brian, used to go in there and shovel the coal off the steps and heap it against the wall. The coal was brought to the upstairs living room as it was needed in a narrow-necked zinc scuttle. There was a door to the right of the stairs in the hall, facing the front door, and Brian would go down into the cellar and carry coal up for his grandmother.

  The coal was in the part of the house immediately under the back living room, which was half of the cellar. Brian’s model railway took up most of the other half, the part under his grandmother’s best room, at the front. He had a model railway permanently set up down there. Hornby Double-o. He had two trains: a small 060 truck, and The Duchess of Atholl. Still has them. The track was set up on a big tabletop measuring eight feet by four that Brian’s uncle had made him. A big chipboard trestle with the legs packed to counter any wobble. This was necessary because the floor in the cellar wasn’t even. The floor was red brick. But it was as if the bricks had been laid and then something had happened – some settling, a small shifting – to cause the bricks to lift a little and the ground to go uneven.

  There was no window, only a narrow vent, but Brian’s uncle Ray had rigged him up a light. And that is where he would spend much of his time, and not only as a boy, but also later.

  He remembers when he was down there being able to hear the piano and the singing from next door at the church. The lusty singing from The Seventh-day Adventists’ Hymnal by the choir of elderly West Indian men and women; the women in dark skirts and white blouses and wide-brimmed black or white hats; the men, even in hot weather, in formal suits, mostly of metallic fabrics, and collars and ties, singing counterpoint. ‘Amazing love!’ Hymn number 198. Being a choirboy himself for eight years, Brian recognized some of the songs. Their Sabbath was actually the Saturday. And sometimes Brian would see them congregating on the pavement outside the church late in the morning, in lively, chattering, nicely dressed family groups.

  Brian wouldn’t get married until he was thirty, in 1969. There were stays at various properties Eddie Fry had acquired in and around Gloucester. But they never amounted to anything. Brian always went back to living with his grandmother at Cromwell Street. There was no real wanderlust there.

  Towards the end of her life, when the stairs became a problem, Mrs Green moved her bedroom into the ground-floor room at the front of the house. Brian moved down a floor to be near by if she needed him in the night. The house was nowhere near as big as it looked from the street. The rooms were very small and his grandmother only had to make a noise turning in bed for him to hear it. When he was little, she would come out into the hallway to get him up for school. She’d call up the stairs to the top room where he was sleeping, and always one call would do it.

  Mrs Green died in what had formerly been her ‘special room’, in February 1971, and was buried from Cromwell Street. She was eighty-four. It ended a connection with the house that had lasted for thirty-six years.

  Many years later, when all its openings have been blocked, the doors and windows walled up as a result of the terrible discoveries that have been made there, petty criminals will give tours of Mrs Green’s old home by torchlight to paying visitors, entering under cover of darkness. More than a few of the visitors, battle-hardened media people, will be afraid to descend the stairs into what was once the place where a boy came to watch his trains go round. The shadows leaping and the floorboards groaning like some cheap, churned-out horror movie.

  Even after he had married and moved away from the area, Brian Fry found himself parking his car in Cromwell Street whenever he went into town to go shopping. He used to park in Cromwell Street or Wellington Street and then walk across what used to be the playground at Tommy Rich’s to the shops around the Cross. And of course he was curious. Many times when he was passing he felt like knocking and asking the people who were living there then if they would mind letting him have a look at the place. His old home. On more than one occasion he took some steps towards the front door. But always something stopped him. The quiet possibly. It was just that quiet. Call it an intuition.

  For some years there was no sign of any structural alteration to 25 Cromwell Street, or none anyway that was visible from the street. Quite quickly a cladding skin did appear, biscuity in colour with a gravelly texture, the cheapest form of cladding. It evened out the old weathered brickwork and pointing, giving the outside of the house an overall blankness and flatness, a featureless uniformity it had never had. Only the stepped sandstone lintels above the windows were left as the slightest decorative interruption.

  After a while an iron gate appeared, silver-painted and worked in scrolls, with only its height perhaps – it was head height – alluding to a bleaker purpose. It was fixed at one side to the wall of the house and at the other to the wall of the church. A double gate with two opening parts to it.

  But Brian Fry can honestly say that he had those feelings even not knowing what he now knows. It was the quiet that disturbed him. And the presence of the gates. In fact two sets of gates. Low black metal ones at the pavement, with spear-tips painted gold; high, arched silver ones with a heavy lock on, some feet behind them, between the house and the church. The door to his grandmother’s house – to virtually all the houses in Cromwell Street – had always been open. In his day the door was open and you’d walk up the alleyway and straight in.

  So there were no major changes. And yet the feeling persisted. And it was stronger than the normal resistance to having the place of your childhood and your first memories meddled with. It was stronger than that. It was the sensation of the homely turned unhomely; the familiar turned strange. A web of strangeness seeming to enclose what had long been unconsciously a part of him.

  By the eighties, Brian had stopped going by his old home altogether. He didn’t want to give himself that feeling. He started using a way into town that took him away from Cromwell Street rather than past it, which had always been his habit.

  You never saw anybody, that was what got him. He believed there were several children living in the house, but you never heard a sound.

  Chapter Three

  Anna-Marie was eight, Heather was two, and the baby, May June, was four months. Anna-Marie was the daughter of Fred West’s first marriage, and Carol found her clinging. If they sat next to each other on the sofa Anna would play with Carol’s hair and when she was standing talking to her she would touch her hair or her arm. Very touchy. Always touching and wanting to cuddle up.

  And Carol had to share a bedroom with Anna-Marie. She really thought she was going to get her own room when she saw the size of the house. Some personal space for the first time in her life at the age of nearly seventeen. And she ended up sharing with Anna-Marie. So that was a let-down for a start.

  Between Mrs Green dying in the winter of 1971 and the Wests moving in in September 1972, 25 Cromwell Street had been let out as bedsits. The King agency had sold the house to an elderly Pole called Frank Zygmunt who had been steadily amassing properties all over Gloucester. The Wests had been living in another of Mr Zygmunt’s houses in Midland Road, on the other side of Gloucester Park, when the offer of Cromwell Street came up. They had had the ground floor of the house. Two rooms and a kitchen.

  Fred West was work
ing in a factory and earning extra money by being on call to Frank Zygmunt as a jobbing builder. There was a bond between the Wests and Mr Zygmunt, and he was trying to do what he could to help them. With Frank Zygmunt’s help (a loan of £500, plus pushing forward the mortgaging process and the paperwork that Fred West was incapable of taking care of himself), West completed the purchase of 25 Cromwell Street in July 1972, and moved in with his family a few weeks later. A few weeks after that Carol Raine joined them as a mother’s help or – the word they preferred, and she wasn’t going to argue – ‘nanny’.

  After Mrs Green’s death, Zygmunt had rented the house to students. He quite quickly evicted them for mess and nuisance and non-payment of rent. He had done the minimum needed to make the house suitable for quick multi-occupation. The walls, the floors, some of the furniture, even the curtains were as Mrs Green had left them. Not able to afford major (or even minor) redecoration, the Wests in turn fitted their few possessions in around the dated wallpapers and faded linos and skimpy floor coverings.

  Fred West had decided that letting out rooms would see them through their short-term but pressing financial difficulties. They were still sometimes living on chips and bread and butter. It seemed like Rose and the children were always hungry.

  He had installed cupboard units and Baby Belling cookers on the top two floors, between the front and back rooms, in order to keep the lodgers out of the way in that part of the house. He put a small ad in the Gloucester Citizen offering double bedsits at £6 a week and found he could have filled them many times over.

  The Wests were just getting on their feet around the time they picked Carol up outside the Gupshill Manor pub in Tewkesbury. But they – that is to say, he – had a way with the chat. Mouth almighty. He was good at putting a spin on things. And so the shabbiness was Carol’s second disappointment. The cold lino and lumpy cushions. Bed springs that stuck in your back. It was just a rather lived-in house. It was quite tatty; nothing had been done. A little man trying to be a big man. That was Carol’s verdict on the husband. All hat and no cattle.