by Gordon Burn
There were tools everywhere in the trailer, on the chairs, on the floors and counter tops, and even on the beds. Mallets, hammers, soldering irons, drill bits, jemmy bars, plumbing joints, monkey wrenches, power drills, angle files. Like everything else of any value there – the record-player, the television, the Polaroid camera – all the tools were stolen. The trailer had the appearance of being a work shed or a tool room with the basic domestic necessities like a sink and a bed and a hot plate just barely squeezed in.
Rose started to change that straightaway. Started to make inroads on the mess. Drew back the curtains so that she could see it. She didn’t know that the tools were fetish objects that he had to keep near him in order to perform. He probably didn’t know that was why he had them, and if he did, he didn’t tell her; he probably hadn’t admitted it to himself. Spanners, starting cranks, hacksaws, circular saws, electric cable, cold chisels, car jacks, planes. There was a shed on the site where they were supposed to be stored. And she kept gathering them up and putting them there. She was determined to make inroads into the mess that was the result of there being no woman around to look after things. But no matter how hard she worked, the tools would keep creeping back. All over, on every surface, even on the bed. He had stolen them and they were his trophies and he found it difficult to become sexually excited unless he knew they were somewhere near. Greasy spanners, blowtorch nozzles, spirit levels, pipe cutters, copper fittings, grease guns, jump leads.
All his life he would make the places where he lived look like work places by filling them with these things. Rubble and sand and cement and tools. And all his life he would add carpets, mattresses and other domestic touches to his work vans to make them suitable places for Rose to have sex. Comfortable for Rose and her men. And comfortable for himself and Anna-Marie.
Once, in a different caravan in a different part of Gloucester, Rena’s friend, Margaret Mackintosh, had seen him rubbing and sexually exciting Charmaine against his groin. Charmaine had been little more than a baby then and she had been naked. And he had lain there among the usual mess and rubble, grinning up at her wearing only his trousers and telling Margaret that if he carried on she would come.
He believed his children were his to do what he liked with. They were sex toys. Showing a daughter what sex was was ‘a father’s job’. Her virginity was his to take. He would force Anna-Marie to have sex with him on a regular basis from the age of eight to the age of fifteen, and most of the sex would take place among the pots of paint and bags of cement and work things in the back of his van. There in the back of the van or on building sites or at the houses where she would have gone to help her father, who she adored, with his work. Whenever she was with him in the van on their way to or from a job and the van stopped, she always knew what was going to happen next.
His favourite location for his voyeuristic activities with Rose would be the various ‘rolling homes’ and ‘love wagons’, carpeted and decorated by him to be used as a travelling bordello at night, but fitted out to be work vans in the day. The neighbours in Cromwell Street would often see them carrying lengths of wood and other building materials into the house when they returned from their late-night jaunts. The tools and building materials eventually removed by the police from 25 Cromwell Street would fill dozens of inventory pages and several vans. ‘The first time I had sex with Rose was in a caravan,’ he would blurt out and tell people for no apparent reason. Sex and work. Work and sex. The two mutually contaminating; continually cross-feeding. This constant two-way current, to the point where everything important in Fred West’s life became sexualized. There was always this blurring. Always this confusion of uses between where he worked and where he lived. No matter how hard she worked at getting rid of them, the crowbars, the plumb lines, the sanders, the wheel braces, the lengths of hose and the drill bits kept creeping back. Tools for fixing things. Rusty tubes and rods and corkscrew-like devices. Tools for fixing women. All over, on every surface, even on the bed.
Her priority, though, top of her list of the things that had to go, weren’t the things that couldn’t argue or talk back, the greasy inanimate objects, but the things that could. Girls from Cleeve School still occasionally turned up at the trailer at Lakehouse looking for Fred. But Rose’s school reputation for being somebody not to be messed with soon put a stop to that.
Next to go was a box she uncovered at the back of the trailer filled with girls’ underwear and clothes. She took them and the other women’s clothes that were strewn around and put them all in a tea-chest and said to him: ‘Dump that.’ The lace dress and fur coat that he had brought her as a present she left hanging alongside what she took to be Rena’s clothes.
But the discovery that would certainly have done the most to stir her interest was one she made while she was clearing out the ’van with him. They had decided to gut it out and alter it a bit, and there was a stove that had never been used. And when he took the bottom out, it was full of letters. Packed full. Letters from customers of Rena’s. There was a whole pack of them in there, and the ad from the paper that she had taken out. Rena had started to call herself by the working name of ‘Mandy James’, and she had paid for an advertisement in the local newspaper saying: ‘Young, attractive lady looking for employment. Anything considered …’ She had received a load of letters, many from people actually offering jobs. Which had given him a laugh. But most of them were from actual men. Punters. The punters used to pick her up in Stoke Road and she had had quite a round going on. And it was all hid underneath this stove. Which he claimed had come as a surprise to him, the twenty-eight-year-old opening the doors of the dirty world, the secret realm of thrills and concealment, to the not-quite-sixteen-year-old; although he almost certainly knew.
So his wife was a prostitute. He had black-and-white pornographic pictures of Rena – pictures of Rena in explicit poses. And some of the men who went with her were local men from Bishop’s Cleeve. Men Rose knew by sight or to say hello to and who she never would have guessed were that type of man. Men with wives and families and jobs. Nice houses. Nice cars. Your kids aren’t good enough for mine, my dogs are better bred than yours, we’ve got a bigger and better car kind of man. They were so bloody superior. The owner of the market garden about a hundred yards up the road from the Lakehouse site, who had turfed Rose’s father’s garden in Tobyfield Road. He was one of Rena’s most regular clients. Everybody’s at it. When she needed it, he used to lend Rena his car.
Sometimes Rena used to bring customers back to the ’van. And when she did, Fred used to listen or watch. Listen mostly. But when circumstances allowed it, and the punter was too drunk or into doing business with Rena to care, he would watch. What he enjoyed was to see how they were by themselves. When they allowed themselves to abandon themselves, that was what he found exciting. That’s what he liked best – watching them lose control.
Rena was a goer. A wild woman when she wanted to be. A bottle a day was her medicine. Rena could drink. She had taken him to parties where it was no holds barred. Rena had taken him places and shown him things and now he would show Rose. She had taken him to a party where he had had to be blindfolded to be taken there. Rena and her bodyguard, a Greek, six foot tall and four foot across. Massive man this. Huge. They had gone down some steps and into the basement of a house, and when Rena took the blindfold off he still couldn’t see. It was so dark. There were flashing lights, red, blue and yellow. It was full of black people and a smell of drugs. There were four small tables in two rooms with what looked like Christmas cakes made with Christmas paper on them. Two spotlights came on. The paper was ripped off. There was young girls in them. They were drugged. They were handed round to drugged and drunken men. They had stayed at the party for fourteen hours.
Slowly painting the portrait of Rena as a woman actively seeking her sexual pleasure and being rewarded rather than punished for it. An enticing idea for a guilt-ridden girl who has grown up in a household where sex is still something forbidden, furtive and neve
r to be spoken about.
And, being the kind of combative character Rose was, we can guess that she would almost certainly feel the need to offer something back at this point. Something to tease and titillate him. Something that would give him the green light for further disclosure. The fact that she had sex with her brothers, perhaps. Or Gordon’s cross-dressing. Or the story of her rape just a few months earlier by a powerful, hypermasculine man in Pittville Park. (Although there has to be a strong suspicion that this rape, never mentioned until their arrests in 1994, was something that happened after 1969; that it was the acting out of a sadomasochistic fantasy in which Fred West was the pursuer and she was only pretending that she was being coerced into sex.) Something anyway to indicate that she understood the game they were playing. Something to show that she was not quite the unformed girl that he supposed. That she could be, and was in fact on her way to becoming, a highly valued, sexually exciting woman and a worthy successor to Rena.
An indication of how little catching up Rose had to do, in spite of an age difference between them of ten years, is the fact that she had had a string of sexual encounters with lorry drivers and building labourers while running the mobile snack bar at Seven Springs for Glenys and Jim Tyler at the beginning of the year. And now, as it happened, just six months later, Rena, the wife of Fred West and the mother of Charmaine and Anna-Marie, was driving the catering Land-Rover that provided Costain’s workers building the section of the M5 motorway near Tewkesbury with sandwiches and tea. Rena had moved in with the site foreman in his caravan in Gloucester, but she was continuing to offer her services as a prostitute to a number of Costain’s men. She would be arrested for soliciting in Gloucester in early December 1969.
It’s not hard to see how Rose would be excited and aroused by the things she was finding out, or why he would be excited and turned on by telling her. He enjoyed talking sex. Talking sex and watching sex. Increasingly rarely would he enjoy performing sex. To be what she wanted to be (to be what he needed her to be), what she needed from Fred West was yes. He was giving her permission to pursue her pleasure. Making a foundation for the nagging insupportable erotic excitement that would be the hallmark of their years together. It was exciting to them both. If she had to give up her friends and her family and her home to stay with him, she would. And that is exactly what she proceeded to do. Do as you like, Fred West was telling her, and she did.
She decided to have his baby. She was going to be sixteen on 29 November 1969 and she wanted to have his baby. The minute she was sixteen she would start trying for a baby with Fred. And one morning she slipped out of the house when it was still dark. It was very cold and there was a fine layer of snow on the ground. Frost or it might even have been snow on the fields she had to cross. Fred started work at the gravel pit at six, and she was waiting for him there at six when he turned up for work. The foreman took her into their cabin and gave her a cup of tea. It was late in the year. It was the tail end of the year. It was early in the morning and very cold. Fred was really surprised when he saw her. But when she told him what she was there for, he walked straight up to the foreman and said, ‘I’ve jacked.’ The foreman said, ‘You can’t.’ But Fred said, ‘Sorry, mate. I’ve jacked.’
They went back to the trailer together. Charmaine and Anna-Marie had been taken into care at this point and so the trailer was empty. They went back to the trailer through the dark and she would be sure that was when she got Heather. She would remember getting Heather.
But no matter how hard she worked in the trailer, the tools kept creeping back.
*
She wrote him a letter. ‘Dear Fred,’ she wrote. ‘Last night made me realize we are two people, not two soft chairs to be sat on … I love you, Fred, but if anything goes wrong it will be the end of both of us for good. We will have to go far away where nobody knows us. I will always love you, Rose.’
Her father of course had gone berserk. A number of single men who worked at Smith’s Industries lived on the Lakehouse site. And when word had got back to him through them what was going on, he flipped. He would just blow.
He waited for them outside the Swallow in Bishop’s Cleeve one night and flew at Fred when they came out. He had a crash helmet on and was wanting to fight him. He landed a few punches but Fred turned and walked away. Another night her father went to the caravan and threatened to burn it down with Fred in it if he didn’t stay away from Rose.
Fred spent three days in prison in the middle of November. He was arrested for the non-payment of two sets of fines that had been imposed on him earlier in the year for thieving, and given three days. When he came out he found that Social Services had contacted Rena, who had returned to the caravan at the Lakehouse site, and the children. Three days later, though, Rena went off on her travels again, and Charmaine and Anna-Marie were returned to care. They were put into a children’s home, a big mansion with farm animals and massive grounds, not far away in a postcard village called Whitminster.
They spent that Christmas in a home. Rose spent it locked into her room at Tobyfield Road by her father. She wasn’t allowed to give or be given any presents. She passed the time making rag dolls for Fred’s girls, and then a few days into the New Year it was confirmed that she was pregnant. The balloon really did go up then. Her father told her either to forget that dirty gypsy and have an abortion or be bombed out of the family for ever. And that meant for ever. Forgotten about. If he saw them in the street he would pass them as if he had never seen them in his life. If he ever saw them in the street, he would knife them. Her and that gypsy.
Fred West had a reputation dating back to his childhood for being a runner; for being somebody who would always back away from trouble. And, nervous perhaps that Bill Letts might carry out one of his threats, he vacated the caravan in Bishop’s Cleeve and moved to Cheltenham. He took a job at Cotswold Tyres in Cheltenham, and moved into a flat in a large house close to the city centre. The flat was a bedsit. Just one big room sharing a bathroom and toilet, and a sink in the corner. But Social Services allowed him to have the children back, and Rose moved in to look after them. And they lived there in a family situation until the police caught up with her and took her back to her parents and Tobyfield Road.
Not knowing what else to do with her, they put Rose in a home. They put her in a home in Cheltenham with little babies, to let them scream at her, in the hope of bringing her to her senses. This was a bad girls’ home for girls like her who had got themselves in trouble. Bad girls who had got in with the wrong crowd and brought trouble down on their families. Her mother was telling her she was going to have to have an abortion. Her father was telling her she was going to have to have an abortion. There was no way she was going to have an abortion. She was beginning to show then, and she wanted her baby.
She was in the children’s home for about three weeks. And then they let her out to go home on a Friday, on the understanding that she would go into hospital to have the pregnancy terminated on the Sunday. The termination would take place on the Monday but they wanted her in the night before.
The home was about a hundred yards from where Fred worked. She had been a hundred yards from him all the time and he didn’t know. She went straight to where Fred was at Cotswold Tyres, and they hatched a plan. Her father was going to take her in on the Sunday night. Fred had a Vauxhall VX490 then, and he would be waiting, parked just around the corner. When they tried to take her, she would run for it and come to him and he’d burn it out for her. It was a twin-carb and it could move. He would lay some rubber. And then they would hide until she had the baby. They would head for Scotland with the girls.
In the end none of it was necessary. A reconciliation of sorts took place over the weekend between Rose and her family. On the Saturday night her father came up to her room and told her she could go. They were letting her go, but on the understanding that she wasn’t just walking out of the house if she went. She was walking out of their lives and out of the family.
‘She
came down the stairs with her little bits and pieces,’ her mother remembers, ‘and my sister who was staying with me then, she looked at Rosie and said, “You’re not going, are you, Rose?” She laughed. “Yeah, I am.” She looked lovely, her hair was lovely. And now when I see these horrible pictures of her, it doesn’t look like Rosie. She looked so lovely on the day she left … So to listen to Rosie going into this sex world … She went straight from school to him.’
*
Fred had a night job at a pub called the Gamecock in Cheltenham. And on Saturday night Rose turned up looking for him there with her belongings packed up in a bag. His floozy or his bimbo, the landlady at the Gamecock called her. ‘Your floozy’s at the door,’ she came in and told him. And that was enough for him. He gave her a mouthful and told her to stick her job and went. The pub was on Clarence Square, just around the corner from the flat, and they set off along the road to start again properly together.
Chapter Six
The freedom conferred by masks. The freedom conferred by cities. In the city the forbidden – what is most feared and desired – becomes possible. And Fred and Rose, both born in houses with uninterrupted views across open countryside to the horizon – light places, poking up in the light – had found themselves separately drawn to the dark recesses of urban life. Instead of fixed community and the slow turning of the seasons – pleasure, deviation, anonymity, disruption.
These were freedoms that Fred West made himself familiar with from an early age. A country boy from a long line of country people, he quickly became restless to break the line and escape from that way of living. He was naturally secretive and sly and there were no well-kept secrets in a community as small and closely knit as Much Marcle. He hated the fact that everybody knew what was going on in the village all the time. He especially disliked the postman, who always knew what was in every letter he brought. The postman, Jim Southers. The Marcle policeman, PC Rock. Mr John Rock, a personal friend of the family. Of every family in the village.