Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  He brought her a lace dress and a fur coat. The first secret between them.

  *

  A day or two after their first date, Fred West and Rose Letts arranged to see each other again. They got in the camper van with the stolen tax disc on the windscreen and drove the few miles north of Bishop’s Cleeve to Tewkesbury and a country pub there called the Odessa. The Odessa was the kind of place young couples like them would drive to for a quiet evening. It was a nice class of person that got in the Odessa, and she was pleased and impressed.

  The year was just on the turn. They were going into autumn. And after a quiet and pleasant drink it was still warm enough to go for a walk. They set off on a short walk. And that was when he kissed her. He pulled her in towards the gate of a field and it was a romantic moment. Later, he remembered that moment as a turning point in his life. In both his and Rose’s lives, he felt sure.

  ‘We stood at that gate and something happened to us both,’ he said years later. ‘We clashed in to each other and just locked so solid in each other’s minds, it was just unreal. Rose knew that something had happened at that gate, and so did I. We weren’t a hundred per cent sure what had gone on. And from that time we have absolutely been locked into each other’s thoughts. We can virtually read each other’s minds at all times.’

  She wanted to commemorate the moment, he said, by taking the gate home; lifting it off its hinges and carting the gate away then and there: ‘Rose always wanted that gate, a big farm gate. To have as an ornament at home. A big five-bar gate! It was a couple of years later before we went back there and the gateway was filled in and the gate was gone, and Rose actually stood there and cried. It was only a farm gate, you know, but it meant so much to her because she realized that was the start of our life together.’

  Like the dress and the coat, which were the bearers of meanings they would have found it difficult to put into words, the gate, the crux of their second meeting, became part of the private language they started to evolve. A private and complex, and eventually almost subliminal, language of signals and cues.

  They would make night-time visits to another five-bar gate outside the village of Minchinhampton, south of Gloucester, in the years to come. At her request, he would tie her to the gate and whip her and make love to her there. It was something she enjoyed doing with other men as well, and she would come home on those occasions with the marks of the crossbars from the gate on her body, as well as deep weals and cuts where she had been whipped and tied. A farm gate becoming lit up in their headlamps would be the signal for the restraining and gagging of Caroline Raine to begin.

  But it is probably significant that Fred West attributed the sentimental, ‘feminine’ feelings about the gate near the Odessa in Tewkesbury to Rose, rather than to himself. All through his life he would invest his deepest and most complicated emotions – all his most difficult and disturbing thoughts – not in people, but in things. Places and things. People as things.

  He always preferred inanimate objects to breathing, responding – and therefore threateningly dangerous and unpredictable – people. The deadened and dehumanized over the alive and responding. That would be his choice every time.

  Many years later, when Fred and Rose had a son, Stephen, and Stephen was old enough to go with his father on nighttime bicycle-stealing raids around Gloucester and Tewkesbury and Cheltenham, his father would make a big point one night of showing him where he had met his mother at a bus stop in Cheltenham. There was a whole row of stands, wind traps set around in a circle, and he told Stephen he had first seen his mum when they were standing together at number 13.

  They were driving around in the converted Group 4 security van, looking for bicycles to lift, and his father stopped the van and insisted that Stephen get out and come and stand with him at the exact spot where he first saw Rose. As if there was some magic or mystery or something around it. This bog-ordinary, prefabricated, pebble-finished stand; windowless where there should have been windows, and busted open in places so that the twisted metal of the interior support frame was exposed and showing; the insides showing out. They stood in this faintly rank and urine-smelling place, and his father tried to convey to Stephen the deep significance it had for him. These pavements. This bus stand which, as far as Stephen could tell, was just an old clapped-out pile of junk.

  It was always objects over people. Activity over closeness. He could never be comfortable with what he called ‘loving and cuddling’. It wasn’t his thing. He could never feel easy and unselfconscious and comfortable when he was out on his own in public with Rose. He wouldn’t know how to behave or what to say.

  The hour or two they spent together in the Swallow and their night out at the Odessa in Tewkesbury would be more or less their only conventional nights out with each other in a relationship that lasted for twenty-four years. A more normal night out would involve a variety of sexual partners, elements of sadism and bondage and, in the later years, a video camera which he had bolted into the back of the van. He put carpet down in the van and even installed a little gas fire for the winter. One of Rose’s men friends would come round and they would take some rope and a whip, some vibrators and a flask of tea and all go together off in the van. Some rough sex. Some new footage to add to a growing video collection. It was their idea of a good night out.

  After those first two times in Bishop’s Cleeve and Tewkesbury, on the few occasions they ever went out together after that, his attention was always elsewhere. On other men. He was always scouting for other men he wanted her to go with. They were usually black. Almost without exception black. In the end it was an obsession. Fred and his other men.

  Chapter Five

  Then it was one short street standing in the middle of nowhere. A donkey on a hill; some chickens or some kind of farm in the front. Big skies making it an exposed and wind-whipped place. Water in three directions: broad rivers to the east and north; the sea to the west. All of this water visible and within walking distance. Northam, the village in north Devon where Rose Letts grew up, is out on a limb and so a weather-blasted place. Baked in the summer months; windswept and apt to be wet throughout the rest of the year. Built on a hill sloping upwards from the sea.

  Northam Burrows, standing between the village and the sea, is half water, half land. Thousands of tough, springy islets, micro-islands, which go on for miles and are dark and treacherous-looking. A dark, flat wilderness, intersected with dykes and mounds, with scattered horses feeding on it.

  For all the drowning space, this is a part of the world that has a trapped and cornered feel. There is nowhere to go but back to Bideford in the direction in which you came. There is a bridge across the river at Bideford. A ferry in the season to Instow, a beach hamlet dominated by a white wedding-cake-style hotel, commodore class and not really the Letts’s sort of place. Bill Letts’s sort of place maybe; a place to walk his uniform of the Royal Navy. His summer whites. A smart-looking man. Immaculately turned out always. The rest of the family stayed on their side of the water where few holidaymakers came. Westward Ho! and Appledore were holiday destinations. Northam was apart and dislocated and slightly doomy like the Burrows. The village square remains a dark and unquaint place today, with the small council estate where the Letts used to live hidden away out of sight just off it, the stumpy tower blocks built on the decline of the hill to prevent their tops showing. Although then it was one short street standing in the middle of nowhere. A donkey on a hill; some chickens.

  Rose Letts was the youngest of the Letts’ four daughters. Pat was ten years older, Joyce was eight years older, Glenys was three years older, and Rose. She was born in 1953. She had one older brother, Andrew, and the two babies, Graham and Gordon. Her mother always called her Rosie. Rhymes with ‘dozy’. So that’s what she got and would probably have got whether the name fitted or not. It was a nickname she wore with pride and lived down to whenever she could. Rosie-proud-to-be-Dozy.

  It seems that she probably wasn’t really stupid. A teacher a
t Northam village school would remember her as being ‘just like any other happy, ordinary little girl. She didn’t excel at anything, neither was she a troublemaker.’ ‘Keen’, ‘steady’, ‘polite’, ‘sensible’ are some of the things she would be called by other teachers over the years, right up to her last term at school in Bishop’s Cleeve.

  Academically she was never going to be brilliant. At Northam she would be made to wear a dunce’s hat and stand in the corner. She would be kept back a year and made to squeeze into a seat that was biting and too small. She wasn’t the full cup of tea in her brother Andrew’s opinion. That was based partly on this habit she had of rocking. Andrew called it her ‘wiggling’. In bed she was always wiggling. Lying asleep with her head rocking from side to side. Wherever in the house you were you could hear it. Rose rocking; the bed creaking hour on hour. But no sign of the glowering vindicatrix, the heavy-set prisoner, is yet discernible in the shiny-haired, olive-skinned schoolgirl, skipping along Morwenna Park Road to buy her mum a bag of sugar from the shop in the square.

  Rosie could have been forgiven for wondering how she had ended up in this quiet, edge-of-the-earth place. But she never stirred herself to find out. She knew that her mother from time to time made trips back to visit her own family in Essex. But it never occurred to her to wonder how she had got from there to here.

  The short answer was the war. Daisy Fuller, as she was, had left school when she was fourteen and made a life for herself. She had gone into service, and worked in pubs in the Brick Lane area of east London in the thirties before taking up domestic work for a local Jewish family in Wanstead. When the war came, they wanted to get their children away from London. And Daisy decided to stay with the Greens, as her employers were called, when they moved to north Devon. She went with them to live in Lime Grove in Bideford in Devon. And when they wanted electrical work done, Bill Letts was the man they got to do it. His mother and father were in Northam. They were Northam-born, and so was he. He had a daytime job working for an electrical shop in Bideford, and he’d go out again in the evening just to earn a few shillings, wiring up farmyards and farms. He came to the Greens’ house where Daisy was working on several occasions. And although they were both shy and not in any way outgoing, they started going girlfriend and boyfriend together, the parlour maid and the electrician.

  She had transplanted herself from Chadwell Heath, which is near Ilford and Romford in Essex, and found the shock of the changed way of life to be no shock at all. Her father was a Cambridgeshire man, and the Essex she grew up in was quite country-like, not factories and shopping centres; quiet and rural. As a girl, she used to run into the house when she saw the cows coming. They used to kill the cattle behind the shop then, and she used to run away when she saw the cows and the man coming behind them with a stick. So the pace of life and the way of life in Devon suited her quite nicely.

  Bill Letts’s father had been with the Yeomanry out in Australia in the First World War. His mother nursed the soldiers at the front in France. Then she did district nursing in north Devon. Mrs Letts – Bertha – was very well known around Bideford and Northam. What her husband – he was another Bill – did wasn’t so easily described. Many years later, Graham, Rose’s brother, would be told by both his father and his mother that his grandfather got by seeing to the needs of rich women in Devon. He was a paid companion and, more than that, a kind of gigolo. And he certainly remained spritely into his seventies and even eighties. Bill Letts’s father would live with them in Bishop’s Cleeve for periods in his later years, and Graham remembers him having relationships with local women. He was good to be with, he liked things tidy, liked his plants, a bit of gardening. He’d become their partner, really. There was a woman at the end of Tobyfield Road used to give Graham and Gordon cakes and treats on the way to school and their grandfather moved in with her. Graham used to see them on the way to school in the mornings: Whoa, you should be slowing down at your age! But he didn’t. His grandfather kept on going. Graham’s feeling was that his father never seemed comfortable when his own father was around, as if possibly he was a reminder of something.

  Rose’s mother and father got married in Ilford in 1942. and moved in with Bill Letts’s parents in their small house in Castle Street in Northam. For the rest of the war, Daisy Letts divided her time between Essex and north Devon. Pat, their first child, was born in 1943; Joyce was born eighteen months later. Shortly after that, Bill Letts joined the Navy as a radio operator and, when the war ended in 1945, he volunteered to stay on. Although it meant that his oldest children grew up without him being there, he remained in the Navy until 1952.

  Daisy Letts had four children and an established way of living by then. She had a council house and her routines, and they were thrown into total chaos when Bill tried to impose naval rules and practices on to them. Used to bulkheads and ships’ galleys, he would bleach carpets and steam rooms in the house as if he was on a ship. He used to have a scrub-out, shutting himself in a room and cleaning it. Many carpets were ruined that way. Any room failing to meet his standards would have to be started on again and cleaned from top to bottom. Shoes would be inspected. Hair and nails. He could be really bloody-minded. The lavatory could be bleached as many as four times a day.

  Mealtimes were an ordeal. All meals were to be eaten in absolute silence. The sound of a knife on a plate counted as breaking the silence. He would lash out. Just go berserk. Scalps were opened, eyes blackened. If they had been arguing he wouldn’t give Daisy any wages, and when she somehow found money to put food on the table, he would throw the food away so they couldn’t have it. They would be made to sit in silence and watch him breaking eggs into the dustbin and pouring out tea and sugar from their packets.

  To get away, their mother would take the children on long walks across the Burrows to the sea and along the cliffs, or inland through the country. They would come back happy and exhausted, and then they would be made aware by the silence that he had one of his black moods on him. He was too controlled. He’d never oversleep in the mornings. He couldn’t bear to be late for work. He’d go out and come home. He was ticking. Waiting for it to happen was worse than when it happened. It put them on edge. And then bang.

  His wife was seen in the village with bruising and black eyes. There was an occasion when the police were brought, when he knocked her down the concrete steps at the front of the house and dragged her along the path by her hair. He was always looking for a reason to lock the children out. They only had to come home seconds after he told them to – his watch would be in his hand – and it didn’t matter what the weather he would lock them out. He threw boiling water at his wife. He didn’t just lose his temper. He used to flip. Blow. He would just blow.

  Eventually Daisy, so compliant and submissive in character, a slave to his whims, broke down. She suffered a nervous collapse, and electro-convulsive therapy was prescribed. ECT. A very controversial treatment even now. She was given six treatments, the last of them being just before Rose was born at the Highfield Maternity Home in Northam, in November 1953.

  Rose was four when her mother had Graham. And although she was closer in age to the next ones up, Andrew and Glenys, it was with Graham and his younger brother Gordon that she made a special bond. She always played with younger children. She would laugh at little things that they did. She would play with them like a young child, whooping and laughing. She was babyish herself.

  Rose was always happy looking after her baby brothers. Then as they grew older the three of them became kind of her little gang. They shared a bed. The three of them became familiar figures in the more disreputable parts of Plymouth when the family moved there. Then in the non-tourist parts of Cheltenham. Graham was a child alcoholic. He started drinking heavily as a young teenager and would have drink and psychological problems all his life. He was drinking twelve pints of lager and a bottle of Scotch or vodka on almost a daily basis when he was fourteen. There were also drugs. He would be in and out of prison for burglary, theft
and fraud. Gordon would put himself into care at the age of twelve. He would be in borstals, and then prisons and mental hospitals, all through his life. He would come to his father’s funeral in 1979 handcuffed between two prison guards. Gordon was always very disturbed.

  Rosie and Graham and Gordon. Rosie and the boys. It was as though they consciously cast themselves as outsiders. An undermining confederacy within this outwardly god-fearing and respectable house. A commitment to the sadness of being white trash. ‘We just thought she was trying to make the little ones happy,’ Rose’s mother says now. ‘But it’s as if they couldn’t cope with life. That’s how I see them. Mind you, there’s a lot of their father there. The big difference is that he always worked hard. But there’s the same weakness of character. I always felt I upheld Dad in a lot of ways. I always felt he needed me as a leaning post. To blame me for everything. He would always put the money on me, for me to sort out. Bills. But Rosie and the boys, I’m almost frightened to talk about them. They don’t seem to want to live how we live. I blame Dad really for most things that went on.’

  Home from the Navy, Bill Letts got a job as a television engineer. He had his own van. But there weren’t many televisions around then or even people who could afford to have electricity in their houses in Northam in the fifties. In Northam you were either a farmer or a fisherman and you made your own entertainment at night. So when Rose was eight, the family packed up and moved to south Devon where her father had found work in the Naval Dockyards at Plymouth. That lasted two years, and then they were on the move again, this time to Chipping Campden in what is known as the ‘haute Cotswolds’, near Stratford-on-Avon, where he had got a job as a cook in a private school. But this didn’t last either and there was a brief stopover in a flat in Cheltenham before he landed the position with Smith’s Industries and the house in Tobyfield Road on Smith’s Estate, in 1964. The job was low-ranking – he was an electronics engineer working on flight simulators – but it was top secret according to him.