Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  The postman used to bring the mail, and then he’d tell Fred’s mother all the news of the village. Nosey-parkering. Fred couldn’t stand that. And if you did anything wrong, you were reported. The policeman would come with your parents and give you a good lecture. The vicar would come, the headmaster would come if it was something out of the ordinary where it was touch and go whether they charged you or not.

  Community strangles. Girls used to be run out of the village because of being pregnant. Their mothers ran them up the Marcle Straight, right out of the village. If a girl was expecting, then she wasn’t wanted in the village. That was another thing that got him with village life: how hypocritical they could be. He had a strong inclination to be private and unobserved. Community throttles.

  For his fifteenth birthday, his mother and father brought him to Gloucester and bought him a suit. It was brown, double-breasted, from Burton’s up on the Cross. That was when the old tramlines used to be up there. A boxy British style, wide-lapelled and boxy, in the age of the Teddy Boy and narrow Italian-American fashions. Later he would remember wearing the suit to the local dance, and the attention it brought. To see a young lad in the country with a suit on was something very rarely ever seen. But it was sort of a family thing, a tradition among the Wests. One of many traditions and bits of lore rooted in the Wests’ deep peasant background. When you were fourteen, you got a gun. A twelve-bore shotgun for rabbiting. Crows. Squirrels. At that time, you got sixpence or a shilling for the tails of squirrels. Grey squirrels, which were becoming a pest. The squirrel carcasses were usually chucked into the trees for the crows, then blam! It was a tradition. Everyone had a gun at that age. When you were fourteen, you got a gun. When you were fifteen, you got a suit.

  As far as he could see it, village life meant you were programmed and wound up. You got up in the morning and you did the same routine. A key turned in your back like a toy. Moorcourt Cottage, tied to Moorcourt Farm, the cottage where he grew up, had no electricity or gas, and water came from a well in the yard. The toilet was a bucket which was emptied in a sewage pit. Bath night was waiting your turn for a tin bath in the hearth. Hygiene was basic.

  As soon as they could walk, the West children would go with their mother and father into the fields to help with the lambing, droving the cows, sheaving the corn. Whisky was a badger dog, then there was a fox dog, cattle dog, sheep dog. They all had different jobs. Whisky, Brandy, Ben, Lassie, Lad … By the time Freddie West got to Much Marcle school in 1946 he stunk of pigs. Reeked of pigs. But he didn’t go to school a lot in the last. He was too busy farming, look, bringing home half-a-crown a week and keeping sixpence of it for himself. He was nine when he started driving a tractor. Your father used to take the tractor up and put him in the field. A little Fergie – a Massey-Ferguson. The pigs, the sheep. Feeding them, lambing them down. He could draw lambs when he was about eleven. Lambing ewes down, you always had your mother or father with you because they were strong. He used to drive the cattle through the bluebell woods just by them with his dad and his mam. Pigs, sheep, chickens, cows. That was their life. They were tied to the land. They didn’t do anything else.

  And then, as the seasons changed, you just did the same things. You didn’t have to think. If it was haymaking, then you went and got the mowers out and you did the mowing and turned the hay. Stood by with sticks to brain the rabbits as they fled for cover, and then took them home to skin and make into pies or stew. Some used broken pickaxe handles, others walking-sticks. In the spring they would gather wild daffodils from the fields to sell at the side of the road. Coming up to Easter was the time to slaughter the family pig. It might have become a pet and acquired a pet name but it still had to go. The pig they killed was always kept at home and fed off the house scraps and it had usually been a ‘nisgrow’ – the runt. And of course that was fed up until it was bigger and you had got very attached to it, and it always had a name like ‘Sally’ or something like that. There would be tears, but it always had to go. The main thing was to get the blood out of the animal, or the meat was no good. Every spot of blood had to be got out. There was so much of the pig had to be used within days – liver, lights, belly fat, belly meat. So the local children used to come up when word got about. And when the pig was killed and hung up on the ladder to drain, then they made what they used to call fry-ups in those days. There used to be a fight over the bladder to make a football. Arthur Price, the local butcher, used to come around, and Fred used to help. He helped to kill the last pig at home when he was fifteen by cutting its throat and hanging it to drain. And then they made it that you had to have a humane killer; a gun. The pig would be salted and hung up to make bacon, which would be made to last for a year.

  In the summer there was hop-picking and in the autumn apple-picking for Weston’s cider factory at the crossroads in Much Marcle. Fred’s father, Walter, helped to organize the day trip to Barry Island on the South Wales coast in May every year. And every year, on the last Saturday in August, there was the Much Marcle Fair. Walter West, a widower, had met Fred’s mother, Daisy, there in 1939, and they had married at the beginning of the following year. A strapping, rather moon-faced girl from Cowleas, a tied cottage on Cow Lane near the cider works, minding the needlework stall. Most of the girls married and stayed in the village at that time. It was the tradition again. Everybody who knew him envisioned Freddie West walking behind a cow with a stick for the rest of his life. He left school barely able to read and unable to write even his name. All he knew was the seasons of the year. And yet before the age of fifteen he decided to cease being the boy he was; to break the line and start over again as some other boy instead.

  They had their local blacksmith by the pub. Weston’s garage with the showground at the back of it. You had the big pond where all the frogs used to be, then the village shop and Western’s garage and then the pub. Western’s cider works. Past the Wallwyn Arms and then you turned uphill for home. Peter Evans the blacksmith used to make all their shoes. He’d have the horse there and he’d be shoeing in there, and you’d sit on the what’s-her-name and he’d make your boots and shoes. Herefordshire Hounds, Ledbury Hunt used to meet up at the Wallwyn Arms, then they’d move off into the woods. Anvil, was it? Fred liked the pomp that went with that, the horses and their dress. And the dogs theirselves. But he decided to turn away from all that. He wanted to be more adventurous, and get out and see what was about. He had always loved Gloucester from that day, the day of the suit.

  The day he made the break with home, though, he didn’t head for Gloucester but for Hereford, which was to the west. Gloucester was east and Hereford was west, and he started out in the Hereford direction on his old bike. If he had said he was going to leave there would have been one mass of tears. So he got up during the night and, saying nothing to nobody, just went. Much Marcle–Kempley–Upton Bishop–Ross-on- Wye–Howard End. Beyond the landscape he had explored on foot to the furthest point he had ever been alone. Along dark empty roads between big empty fields and into Hereford sleeping rough in hedgerows and woods, a ride of about two days.

  He left in what he stood up in and in Hereford he found a job labouring on a building site. He stayed on late at the site and in order to save all he earned slept in a half-made house there when everybody had gone. Bedded down with his tools amid the rubble and, for a month or more, never bathed or washed. He put on layers of town dust in place of his customary country dirt, never washing. Accumulated it like a veneer until he was like an African tribesman when he eventually stripped off. Black and matt. And, like a primitive, he returned home bearing gifts which he offered as evidence of the other life to be lived. He reappeared as abruptly as he had left them with gifts of watches all round. He bought his oldest brother John a wristwatch; his oldest sister, Little Daisy, a nurse’s watch; his mother, Big Daisy, a locket watch that his brother Doug still has, and his father a pocket watch in a rubber case – one of those Ingersoll watches with the hands that glow in the dark, enough of an innovation to sti
ll be a talking point then.

  It was to be a recurring pattern: Freddie returning to his Munchkin, place-based family in Much Marcle with evidence of the life being lived elsewhere. Sometimes it was consumer goods like motorbikes and watches. And sometimes it was city girls on high white shoes with fruity perfumes and piled-up or peroxided hair. Fresh city girls with drink and tobacco on their breath and loud, careless city ways.

  Returning as a fifteen-year-old, though, in 1956, he was set about by his mother who had spent the weeks of his disappearance going around trying to get news of where he was. She used to wear a big thick leather belt with laces on and she whipped that off and gave him a good hiding as he came up the path. Then, when she was finished, she tied it back on and said, ‘Welcome home, son – we’re level.’ The other thing about the time he pushbiked from Hereford back home was that when he stripped off, his body underneath was black.

  Walter West, Fred’s father, was an ugly man. Daisy, his mother, was also ugly. In pictures she looks like a snow shifter from Belorussia or the Russian steppes. A bandit chief. A very tough woman. Very big in the bones. Big all round. In Walter and Daisy, ugliness had come to ugliness for mutual support. The first child she had had was a girl, Mary, and she had died at birth. And Walter West had hit the drink over that. He took to drink and he was letting everything go, and Daisy had to step in and stop it. That was how Fred’s mother had first come to take charge of the family, and she had stayed in charge ever since. From that day onward Mother was always boss. That’s the way the family was run. ‘A pillar of steel’ was how Fred West described his mother. ‘There was no messing. She’d sort anything out. Sixteen or sixty, didn’t matter. No problem.’ She would fly down to the village school the minute she heard the teacher had been strapping her Freddie. A formidable figure with jaw set and vast apron flapping. Nobody wanted to cross her.

  There were other children. John, Little Daisy, Douglas, Kitty, Gwen. Five younger Wests in addition to Freddie. But Freddie remained his mammy’s favourite. She doted on him. They were close. How close nobody now can really say. But almost certainly closer than they would have wanted anybody to know. There are rumours that he lost his virginity to his mother when he was twelve. ‘You’ll soon be ready to sleep with your mum’ is something Fred West used to say to his own son, Stephen, when he got to that age. Incest was still common in rural communities like Much Marcle in the years after the war. Mother–son incest was less common than incest between fathers and daughters. Father–son incest was rarer still. But there are still rumours in the village that Fred West was abused by his father as well as his mother when he was living at home. If it’s on offer, take it. That was what his father taught. Whatever you enjoy, do, only don’t get caught doing it. Walter West took it for granted that it was his right to begin his daughters’ sexual life. ‘Boys don’t do it properly,’ Fred West would tell his own daughters when they were growing up. ‘Dads know how to do it right.’ He said that his father had done it to his sisters and made it clear that he intended doing the same to them. He’d say, ‘Your first baby should be your Dad’s.’

  He found life at home after he came back from Hereford exceptionally slow. He was back working with his father on the farm, rising before dawn to do the milking and roll the urns up to the main road for collection. Then silage and mud and milking again at night. What you did yesterday, you did the next day. Changeless and monotonous. Five Woodbines and a pint of cider on a wall outside the Wallwyn Arms of a Saturday dinnertime was all the social life. His father had first told him that it was possible to have sex with a sheep by putting its rear legs down the front of your own Wellington boots. A sheep tied to a tree in a field was the Much Marcle social club. That was the joke.

  Fred’s brother, John, was just a year younger and the two of them hung around together. At the Wallwyn Arms. Under the Market Hall, a Tudor structure raised on wooden columns in the centre of Ledbury sometimes at weekends. A seventeenth-century bus shelter open on all sides. Sons of the soil. Yokels. The big night out in Ledbury, all of five miles away. Any sex that happened came under the heading of horseplay and was hush-hush. They used to dive in the hay, take pot luck and go for it. They didn’t have girlfriends and boyfriends in the sense of getting paired off. They were just one massive village gang, and whichever one you went with was the one you went with, and that was that. Nobody actually settled with anybody as such. Because you weren’t allowed to do that in those days. You weren’t allowed a girlfriend until you were twenty-one. Whenever the opportunity came up, in the woods, or anywhere quiet in a field, you just went with them and enjoyed yourself that time, and that was it finished until you met them again. And that was the whole village way of life.

  In September 1957 Fred West bought himself a 98 cc. Bantam motorbike, registration number RVJ199. Something to quicken the pace of country life. The dead life. The slow movement of time.

  His mother didn’t like it. She wasn’t happy. It took him out of her orbit and brought him closer to girls. She was possessive. Some people in the village would have said jealous. She wanted to keep a hold. Fred got a new job at Weston’s cider factory, which paid more than farm labouring and allowed him to make the payments on his bike. He was also able to keep himself cleaner and he got a new girlfriend from along the Dymock road in the hamlet of Preston. Elsie Piner. Whose father, Art Piner, Daisy West had had an entanglement with when she was younger and in service in Ledbury. That had ended badly. And so of course it was: he’s bad, she’s bad. Daisy hated Elsie and used to give Fred some stick over her.

  It was one night while he was coming home from visiting Elsie that he had the accident on a bend in the Dymock road that nearly killed him. He came off the bike and was splattered, to use his word, the word that for thirty years he would go on using. The Iron Duke motorbike suit he was wearing – a complete leather motorbike suit – didn’t offer much protection. It was ripped open. His crash helmet was split straight down the middle. He opened the bike up and let go, and he came round a sharp bend on the Dymock road, hit a pushbike that had been laid there by his brother John’s girlfriend, Pat Mann, and went through a nine-inch wall. Pat Mann had stopped to drop her knickers out of sight of the road. She was crouched down on the verge by a gate and her bike had sent him into orbit. Her front wheel had skyed him.

  Over the years he would embroider around it, work it up into one of his yarns; one of the bits of conversational business he would use when starting a charm offensive with a young girl. His near-death experience; the one noteworthy experience of his life to then. He had had a metal plate put in his head as a result of the accident (false). He had been paralysed from the waist down for the twelve months following the accident (false). He had been lying in the ditch for eight hours before anybody found him (false). He had been pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital and only the cold of the mortuary slab had shocked him back to life (a favourite lie). He was a story-telling cowboy.

  He had been taken unconscious to Ledbury Cottage Hospital and then transferred immediately to Hereford Hospital, where he did lie unconscious for seven days. His nose was broken and he had a fracture and severe lacerations of the skull; his right leg was so severely broken that he was given metal callipers and told to wear a special metal shoe. From then on he always dropped one leg harder than the other when he walked. His right leg came back slightly shorter than the left one, and he walked with a slight but noticeable limp. You could always tell by the footfall that it was Fred who was coming after that.

  His mother was waiting by the bed when he regained consciousness. She visited him every day while he was recovering from his injuries, and she took him with her back to Moorcourt Cottage when he was ready to go home. She had banned Elsie from seeing him when he was in hospital, and she wouldn’t allow him to have Elsie to the house. So that broke up.

  He stayed at home for twelve months getting the use of his legs back. He worked for a short while for Godfrey Brace, a small farm by the church in Much Marcl
e. And then he was gone. Once he got his strength back he was gone for about two years then. Off on his bracing, seafaring life.

  In those days you used to have a board up outside the docks showing where the ships were going and what hands they wanted on them. You didn’t pay tax or nothing and you just signed on in any name. Signed with an ‘X’ or other identifying mark if you couldn’t sign. Already walking with a sailor’s rolling walk because of the accident and the inactivity and the callipers, aged seventeen, nearly eighteen. Looked back over his shoulder and called his mother an old cunt as he went.

  *

  There may have been the trips to Kenya and Jamaica, as he said. Australia, the Pacific, Hong Kong. But he started short-haul. Portsmouth, Clydeside, Bristol. On the waste boats taking sludge out of Sharpness to the dumping grounds. On the oil boats down to the Bristol Channel. Blackface jobs shifting fertilizer and waste.

  It was between jobs that he worked as a bread roundsman for Sunblest bakeries for a while, delivering around Bishop’s Cleeve. He moved up from the Bantam to a 1000 cc. Triumph motorbike and lived above the Rendezvous café in Newent during his brief stopovers from the sea. The Rendezvous, between Ledbury and Gloucester, was popular with the motorcycle gangs. The Scorpions and the Vampires from Gloucester; the Wolves from Cheltenham; the Desperadoes and their closest allies the Cycletramps from the Forest of Dean; the Pariah and the Pagans from further afield.