Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  He liked the job at Smith’s. It was reasonably well paid, and he became fixated on his work. The only thing he ever talked to people who came to the house about was his work. Sometimes he would be gone so long that Daisy would have to send Andrew down to the factory at nights to bring him home. The security on the gate knew Andrew and they would let him in and his father would be there working all on his own. Totally tucked up in his work.

  When he was sixteen, Andrew was taken on at Smith’s himself. He was earning only apprentice money, £5 a week, which he was giving to his mother towards his keep. He had a fish-and-chip-shop job at nights in Bishop’s Cleeve. All his life he had been taunted by his father. But it was as if Bill felt he had to ride Andrew more than ever once he was working at the same place. The particular incident that Andrew remembers happened on a Saturday morning after his father came to get him out of bed. ‘He came into the bedroom. This was around nine. This was “lying in”. He made me get up. Absolutely taunting me all the time. So I got some cereal. I took my time on purpose – that was the thing to get him going. If you took your time. I didn’t want to get him going, but I’d had enough. He used to always strike us across the head. Our mum used to say she didn’t mind him hitting us, as long as it was in the right place. I think I got the better of him. He pulled the knife out on me then. The kitchen knife. Cut me several places on my arm. I went to the police who treated it as just a domestic, more or less. Mum snuck my stuff out for me, and I went and got a job and a place in town then. It was mental and physical cruelty, all the time we were there. I have to say I was terrified of him. Scared to breathe.’

  Their father was constantly on the look-out for reasons to give one of them a beating. If he couldn’t find any, he would make them up. He’d accuse them of things they hadn’t done, like touching his radio. He’d pick Graham up by the ears and swing him until his ears turned blood red. He’d bang his head into the wall. He claimed once that a five-pound note had gone missing and made Graham and Gordon go up to their room every night for several nights and strip naked, then he thrashed them with a belt. He would use anything; sticks, belts. He would just flip.

  Pretty soon, probably thinking that if he was going to get beaten he might as well get beaten for a reason, Gordon started stealing money from his mother’s purse. Graham couldn’t stand that. He told Gordon, who was three years younger, that if he was going to do that, he should do it out of the house, which had always been his own code. In his adult life, Graham’s wife would send him out to do jobs: burglaries, shoplifting. But he had a code. ‘I only used to do factories, not ordinary people.’ Eventually he let even that go.

  Graham and Gordon were in trouble with the police from a very young age. They started sleeping rough from being young, in toilets, derelict houses, fields. Graham was found asleep one night by a woman neighbour, covered in ice. But it was preferable to being beaten to a pulp when he got home. It was probably only the alcohol in his body that had kept him alive.

  They used to go and stay in these terrible old dives. And their mother could never find them, no matter how hard she looked. She used to leave the door unlocked for them and sleep on the sofa waiting for them to come home. The police used to come in and wake her up and say, ‘Mrs Letts, we’ve just caught Graham.’ She was pretty sure Graham was involved with drugs. With bad people. But she didn’t know how. She would look around her on her street and in her village, and she didn’t see people who looked bad. She knew one family. There were three boys, and she was told two of these boys were housebreakers. The mum and dad didn’t seem like a bad family. She went round their bungalow and the boys looked clean and smart; you would never believe these were bad boys.

  Graham stole his father’s car while he was still at school, something that was unheard of in those days. Went to the Smith’s car park and took his father’s Toyota and drove out on the motorway. Floored it on the motorway. The older part of the family just couldn’t understand how the two halves of the family could have turned out so entirely different. Andrew used to go round to Jacquie’s, his girlfriend in Cheltenham, and so was saved.

  When Rose was fourteen, Graham was ten and Gordon was seven. And, when she could, she would come in as their protector, protecting them against their father. Andrew used to sleep in a bed with Graham and Gordon. But with Andrew gone, she could come in with them in their double bed. They would huddle together for comfort and protection, and the sexual activity among them started there. She started masturbating Graham and that led to them having full sex together. She had always bathed the boys from them being very young and would masturbate Gordon in the course of drying him although, at the age of six or seven, he was too young to know what was going on. Bathtime would always take a very long time.

  In the late sixties, Daisy Letts took a cleaning job in a brewery. The work kept her out of the house in the afternoons and evenings, and Bill Letts never came home from Smith’s until late. So, with both parents away from the house for long periods, Rose, as the eldest, was put in charge. They had the house to themselves and Rose started to walk around naked when her mother and father weren’t there. She was never shy physically and, in addition to Graham and Gordon, some boys of her own age from school would sometimes be around. She would take off her clothes and invite the boys to what she knew was their first real feel of a girl. She liked holding these ‘parties’. She used to barge her way into the bathroom when she knew Andrew was in there getting ready for the bath or something. He would hear the door open and go to shut it; it didn’t shut easily; there was quite some force there. She had been inquisitive herself. Soon she was running about in her underwear regardless of whoever was in the house.

  Shortly after Rose moved out of Tobyfield Road to live with Fred West, neighbours would start to complain about Gordon exposing himself at an upstairs window. He was aged about nine or ten and had already been caught stealing women’s underwear from washing lines. He liked to wear the underwear and other items of women’s clothing. He enjoyed cross-dressing and going around when it was just the three of them at home in Rose’s clothes. Slipping into bed in lacy bikini briefs, shiny pants. It might partly explain why she didn’t want to keep the dress and coat that Fred West had given her; it wouldn’t suit her to have to share them. It possibly explains why she cut up the first grown-up underwear given to her by her mother. Her mother spent her last pennies getting Rose her first set of underwear that wasn’t either home-made or hand-me-down. And she cut it all up with scissors. Just ripped it all up. But nothing unusual with Rose.

  The heavily eroticized atmosphere in Tobyfield Road seems to have left only Mrs Letts untouched. Because Rose had been having a sexual relationship with her father for two years at least before leaving. Her father had started having sex with Rose when she was only thirteen.

  *

  After their drink at the Odessa in Tewkesbury, Fred West did what he frequently did with the girls he got in his van: he took Rose back to the Lakehouse caravan site to meet his children.

  There was a lake at the site, as the name implied. And it would be landscaped one day. Dredged and filtered and given a pier and ducks and turned by the developers into a feature. Grandfathers and granddaughters feeding bread to the ducks from the pier. But then it didn’t look like that. It was a grey and soupy and unlandscaped lake, and all around it were little rusting snailback caravans and bigger trailers. The trailers were flat-sided and raised on blocks. They were called ‘mobile homes’ but they weren’t. They had travelled from the factory straight to the site – the first and last journey they were going to make. A number of the trailers had chicken-wire fences and low picket fences marking off their space. The roads on the site were unmade and there was quite a lot of car breaking and livestock rearing – chickens, geese, goats – as well as other backyard industries going on. A lot of noise from loud radios and the animals; bawling children. Mud in the winter and tattooed torsos in the summer. Fred had the name ‘Rena’ tattooed at the top of his left arm.
Rena had scratched it in herself with a needle and ballpoint pen one night when she was drunk.

  The sense of people living with a minimum of regulations was strong, and was something that was reflected in the ramshackle, backwoods atmosphere. Lakehouse didn’t have a good reputation among local people. They hadn’t wanted it and many parents warned their children against going there. For that reason the site had a fascination for teenagers of Rose Letts’s age and explained why so many girls from her school before her had been prepared to go back when they were asked.

  There was a fence around Fred West’s trailer in bay 17. He had made a Wendy house for the children in the back of it and there were also acetylene and oxygen bottles and hoses and an acetylene cutter for a van he was cutting up inside the fenced-off area. Also a plastic-lined pond. On her first daytime visit Rose would see that he had put in a pond. But the pond was empty by then because Anna-Marie, the younger girl, had taken the fish that used to be in it and cut them up with a knife and he hadn’t replaced them. There was still water in it but no fish or anything swimming; just rubbish lying on the bottom and oil on the surface and oily nuts and bolts.

  Anna-Marie, named by her mother after a Jim Reeves song, was five in 1969. Charmaine, her half-sister, was six. Rose took to them. One so blonde, one so dark, in their little foldaway beds in their little nighties. They had both been born in Glasgow and it was quaint the way they still spoke with quite pronounced Scottish accents. They had been living in the south half their lives but there was still a strong Scottish twang to their voices. The accent was particularly noticeable with Charmaine because of the fact that she was half Asian.

  Charmaine’s story was a romantic and exotic one, if you believed Fred. Her father was a Pakistani shopkeeper and a Mr Big of the Gorbals. He drove a long limo with two flags flying from the back of him and slept in a round bed with a canopy over it draped in Indian silks. He owned his own ship and all types of shops. You couldn’t turn a corner that he didn’t own a shop. He had a knife, a beautiful knife about that long and the handle all done in red and white what’s-her-names. Not diamonds. He was a beautiful knife, and he wasn’t slow to use him. There was a gangster connection and protection money and a Glasgow gang-war tie-in. He was the big boy. Beautiful clothes. Massive bloke. The biggest Pakistani you’ve ever seen. And Rena was dressed in the finery. She had it all. She was absolutely beautifully dressed. And Rena never ever wore the same clothes twice. She stripped and binned it. Threw it out and put on new. The satins and silks that he brought back aboard his own ship from the Orient.

  If you believed Fred. Charmaine’s father was an Asian bus conductor who had been based at the same depot in Glasgow as Rena. Away from the buses, Rena worked as a street prostitute around the stations and bars in the city centre.

  Rena was the friend of a girl called Margaret Mackintosh Fred West had gone to school with in Much Marcle. The girls had met when they were in a borstal in Greenock on the Clyde. When she was released Rena had followed Margaret south and had got a job working with her in a café in Ledbury, in the High Street opposite the Ledbury cottage hospital. Margaret had introduced her to Freddie West from Marcle. And Fred, as soon as he was told that she was pregnant, had volunteered to get rid of Rena’s baby for her. The father was a bus conductor from back in Glasgow and she didn’t want it. He had learned to do abortions during his time in the ‘Navy’ and he offered to help her out.

  Rena was a ‘suicide’ blonde (dyed from a bottle) and ‘a fair picture’. She was eighteen the year she met Fred West, three years younger than him, fearless and up for anything. Feart of nobody and scared of nothing. Quite soon after Margaret Mackintosh had introduced them, Rena was lying in the open in a place called Dog Hill with Margaret standing as look-out one Sunday afternoon while he used his tools to try and perform an abortion. It didn’t work. But the experience apparently taught them something useful about each other because they married soon afterwards, at the end of 1962. Charmaine was born undamaged in March 1963 and was registered under the name ‘West’.

  Seven years later, Fred West would show a dopehead and petty criminal he had offered a bed to for the night what he claimed was the close-up photograph of a woman’s vagina during an abortion. He had a whole set of Polaroid pictures of what he said were the vaginas of the girls he had operated on. He had bumped into Terry Crick in the Full Moon, the ‘drug pub’ in Cheltenham, and back at the caravan on the Lakehouse site he also showed him the instruments he used for operating on women. The ’van was littered with what looked like machine parts and tools and children’s toys and dirty clothing all jumbled up. And he said he used the rusty tubes and rods and corkscrew-like devices to carry out abortions. Pulled the curtains closed and gave them an imaginary demonstration. Crick and the girl. Crick was with a girl, and Fred told her to come and see him if she ever got herself in trouble.

  When he asked Terry Crick to help him with his ‘work’, Crick went and reported it to the police. But the policeman he reported it to took the view that the pornographic snapshots were Fred’s own business. The officer Terry Crick saw used Fred West as a ‘grass’ on other local villains. Very small-time stuff. Small beer, but useful. No further action was taken.

  The second time Rose visited Fred in the trailer at Lakehouse he had prepared her a meal. He made her the one meal he could make, which was beans, sausage, egg, chips, slice of bread and margarine, tea. The girls liked Dad to cook their dinner because he made it as a face on their plate. He would put the chips as hair, sausage for the mouth, beans for a beard and two eggs as eyes. It is unlikely that he arranged Rose’s dinner for her on her plate like this. But it’s interesting he would make this physically mature but still poorly and schoolgirlishly dressed not-quite-sixteen-year-old the same meal he made six-year-old Charmaine and five-year-old Anna-Marie. She wore white knee-socks then and it was one of the idiosyncrasies of the way she dressed that she would wear them for the rest of her life.

  Rose had walked to the trailer because she didn’t want to attract attention by somebody picking her up. He had sent the children to be looked after by a neighbour, and after they had eaten, they played some records and drank more tea. Nothing too unromantic or loud. He didn’t like loud music. In the years to come, their favourite listening would be film background music. The music from porno movies. Feature-length hard core. That would be the soundtrack of their lives. Music like supermarket Muzak, if you ignored the panting and the snatches of German or Scandinavian dialogue and you weren’t paying attention to the screen.

  He had gone to see one of the top groups at the Barrowlands ballroom in Glasgow with Rena once, and he hadn’t been able to stand the mayhem; he had had to leave. Everybody was on the floor screaming and in hysterics and he had turned to Rena and said, ‘Let’s get out of this, it ain’t my idea of life.’ So nothing too booming or raucous. Nothing too loud. ‘Bobby’s Girl’; ‘Kiss an Angel in the Morning’; ‘Crystal Chandelier’. That was his kind of taste. There was some kissing and she took her clothes off for him that night, her second time at the ’van, but nothing more. They played some more records and drank more tea until it was time for him to go with her along Stoke Road until she was almost home. Out of the dark of Stoke Road into the lights of the village and she was nearly home.

  Before long, she wanted him to meet her mother and father. She had never done this with anybody before. She wanted to stop sneaking about and bring him back to where she lived. Show him off. So this is where the fight began.

  He came to the house in some kind of tipper or digger. He was working for Costain’s on the construction of a section of the M5 not far away, just a mile or two to the west of Bishop’s Cleeve. And he turned up on some tipper thing with his overalls rigid with oil and dirt and his face smeared and blackened. He showed up looking like this for his introduction to Rose’s parents and instantly launched into one of his fantastical stories about being the owner of a big hotel and caravan site in Scotland. Digging hole after hole for himse
lf. Throaty cackle. Maniacal grin. Making a roll-up between the thumb and thick fingers of one hand, a prison habit, as he talked. This owner of a string of hotels. Burying himself deeper and deeper. They hated him. The filthy state of him and the rubbish he was talking and where he was living and his age. It was sad, actually, was what it was. It was a disaster. As soon as he was gone they told her she had to stop seeing him. This filthy older man with two children. The thought of him on their doorstep. He never got any further than the back kitchen. He wasn’t Dad’s company. Dad was quite particular and clean. They were telling her; ordering her. Keep that lot out of here. No arguments. Filthy and living in that filthy place. The way he rolled a cigarette with one hand.

  She stopped going to her job at the bread shop in Cheltenham and started staying all day down at his ’van. She never said anything. ‘If anybody grumbled at her, she’d hold herself tight,’ her mother says. ‘She wouldn’t make a conversation. She never had a lot to say, actually. She’d always hold herself.’

  He gave her the three pounds a week she was used to giving her mother, and she took care of the children when he wasn’t there. She would creep there across the fields in the mornings and meet him without anybody knowing. He threw in his job with Costain’s and started working at a big sandpit, a sand and gravel site, by the Cheltenham North Rugby Club on the Stoke Road to give this arrangement a chance to succeed. That was the only reason he came to take that job. Because Rose was banned from seeing him. You’ve got to work things out.

  There was a house at Lakehouse in addition to the lake, and he did maintenance work and odd jobs for the house’s owner, Mrs Dukes, who was also the owner of the site. Whatever else he was doing, he always tried to have what is known around Gloucester as a ‘cobble’: a job on the side. And while he was at Lakehouse he worked as a maintenance man for Mrs Dukes. Completely self-taught. That was the reason he lived surrounded by his tools.