Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Sandra Johnson was still only fifteen in 1977 although she looked – could look – a lot older. When he was younger Graham Letts had this charming talk and people would fall for it at the time. And Sandra had become infatuated with Graham. She needed somebody to take her away from her life and Graham was the person she picked to do it. She needed rescuing from a life that up to that point and continuing had been blasted and often unbearable. But Graham had dropped her. She was very domesticated and wanted babies. But she was living in a home with twenty-three of the most difficult and disturbed girls in the country and Graham had ditched her.

  When Sandra found her way to Cromwell Street and Rosemary with the pillowy bosoms and comforting shoulder, it seems to have been a coincidence that Rosemary was also Graham’s sister. It is a strange coincidence, but that does seem to have been the case, certainly as far as Sandra was concerned. You had the runaways coming round. The misfits who were of two different sorts: ones who caused trouble and ones who had trouble. Sandra was both. She was very troubled. She was severely disturbed. When her parents separated she had stayed first with her mother, and then with her father. Her father had raped her when she was young and she had suffered further sexual abuse from her brother. She had had many imagined pregnancies and as she grew older she would have repeated hallucinations of seeing people with other people’s heads on their shoulders, perhaps suggesting a schizophrenic condition. She was so alone. She had been abused out of innocence. And Rose was so caring and pleasant Sandra let her heart out to her.

  Every third weekend the girls in Jordan’s Brook were allowed a paid trip home. Sandra usually visited Cromwell Street on a Friday when she was catching the bus home to Tewkesbury to see her mother. Jordan’s Brook operated a graded system of supervision in which their status – junior, intermediate or senior – determined how much free time the girls enjoyed. During the period of her most frequent visits to Cromwell Street in the early part of 1977, Sandra was a senior. Her visits were legitimate and nobody could stop her. She would arrive at about ten in the morning and leave about one and Rose would come and sit beside her on the sofa and they would talk about periods and sex and things, which seemed pretty normal for that age. Girls’ things. Sandra would particularly remember a dark small notebook Rose used to keep on an occasional table in the living room as if keeping notes or she had another appointment. ‘Do you comb your pubic hair? Do you play with yourself?’ It just seemed as if everything was supposed to be normal. Girls’ things.

  But then Sandra started absconding. Running away from the home and going to Cromwell Street. In the summer of 1977, Sandra and her friend Yvonne ran away and slept rough on the streets of Gloucester for a night. The next night they went to Cromwell Street together and were let into the house by Rose who was dressed in just a bra and pants. Yvonne and Sandra stayed that night on the sofa and Sandra kept up her Friday visits to Cromwell Street throughout the summer, still apparently unaware of the link between her new friends and her old boyfriend Graham Letts. On one of these Fridays she would remember many years later Rose answered the door wearing a see-through blouse and instead of going through into the back living room, which is what normally happened, took Sandra upstairs to the first-floor front bedroom which would one day become the Black Magic bar and was the room where the attack on Caroline Raine had taken place.

  It was the morning. Sandra’s usual time around ten. And the room was filled with people either getting up or getting ready to go to bed, it was difficult to tell. There was considerable nakedness and semi-nakedness. Of course she noticed that. Fred and two young girls. They were both naked. He had some shorts on. One girl was thirteen or fourteen and blonde with bright nail polish on her toenails; the other was a little older with a tattoo on her forearm and dark spiky hair. A whip on the wall. Some strange pictures on the wall depicting animals and people. Saying nothing, Rose West started to remove Sandra’s clothes. She started. Saying it was OK, things like that. We are all girls. It felt like a fairground ride where you’re stuck against the wall. She started. Relax, it’s fun. Enjoy, relax. Sandra was wearing just a sun-dress and a bra. She ended up finishing and she was naked and they were three naked girls. It just seemed as if everything was supposed to be normal. It’s all right to touch. Rose got out of her own clothes and started to caress the young blonde girl, whispering it was OK and things like that. It’s all right to touch, she said, and led her towards the bed. We are all girls. The blonde girl lay face downwards on the bed and Fred West wrapped brown parcel tape around her wrists and thumbs leaving her fingers free as well as across her chest so that it seemed like bandages. The parcel tape was then wound around her ankles and she was rolled over on to her back on the bed so that her feet could be tied far apart. Sandra wasn’t looking but she heard the sound of buzzing. When she looked again she saw that Rose West had a vibrator and a candle and a tube of ointment she presumed was lubricant. Saying relax, enjoy. The girl was crying. There were tears on her face. Fred West removed his shorts and raped her. It was over very quickly. He left the room and soon could be heard downstairs in the kitchen. Rose started aggressively ripping the tape off the girl’s body, soothing her when she started crying. All aggressive one minute, then all motherly again. Then she turned her attention to Sandra. She led her to the bed and taped her wrists when she was on the bed. She used words like, relax, it’s fun. Sandra sat on the side of the bed, her arms crossed at the wrists, level with her breasts. Fred West came back in the room and Sandra was coaxed on to her front and her legs spreadeagled. She felt things going inside her. She felt fingers probing inside her. She was terrified they were going to put something in her or operate or something. A sexual kiss on the neck. ‘Fred, you’re enjoying this.’ This was Rose. ‘Is it turning you on?’ She could see Fred West masturbating beside her. Brushed bright bri-nylon sheets. The next thing she was aware of was Rose crouched between her legs. It seemed like for ever. Rose then Fred. Fred had moved and was having sex with her from behind. It was like being on the Cyclone or the Wonderwall. An island of light and noise surrounded on all sides by intense blackness. A fairground ride where you’re stuck against the wall. This ride is very frightening and fast-moving. People paying to be frightened out of their lives. Volunteering for that. A gravity ride. She used words like relax, it’s fun. Relax. We’re all girls, it’s OK. It seemed like for ever. It’s OK. All aggressive one minute, then all motherly again. It’s OK.

  Blood had gone down her leg. From her anus, she believed. She grabbed her dress and washed her leg and then she just ran down the stairs and went. She fled in her bare feet down Cromwell Street and across the park and started hitch-hiking home via the Hauliers Arms and the Bristol Road and that way. To her mother’s home. She couldn’t go to her mum. She couldn’t go to her dad. Graham was in the flat over the Green Lantern café with Barbara White. There was nobody now. Because you were in care you were bad. There was nobody.

  On another Friday a few weeks later Sandra walked along Cromwell Street carrying matches and a can. There was petrol in the can which she intended to pour through the letterbox of 25 Cromwell Street and set it on fire. Torch the place and burn it to the ground in an act of revenge. But she had forgotten the gates. The high silver painted gates with two opening parts to them and two bells which he would tell them repeatedly it was for their own good they were kept shut up behind and that it was safer and which she found padlocked and closed. She had formed the intention of doing something damaging to the West house and she had gone equipped. She had brought a Castrol GTX can. She had matches with her. She was full of intention. And then these gates. She froze and couldn’t go near the house. It was quiet. And the presence of the gates. She kept the matches but threw the can which she had taken from the shed at Jordan’s Brook in the back of a food store. She wanted to do it so much. But she threw the can away.

  *

  It took them weeks to get the house back to any sort of state where it could be lived in once they got the lodgers out. A
nd Rose thought she had got her house back once they got rid of the dirty hippy lodgers from upstairs. And she had for a while. For most of 1976 while the snoopers from the Council were still snooping about. But in 1977 Fred had decided it was safe to go to bedsits again and had put his two-line ad in the Citizen offering rooms at £7 a week. He said they would try having girls this time and they were a great deal better. At least they nearly always paid their rent and the money from the rents was useful with another baby on the way.

  The Cumngetit as Fred insisted on calling it had opened in the autumn of 1976. But all those Letts together was a shambles and he was back at the wagon works working on his old drill within two or three months. He would remain there without interruption for another seven years. But the café was near enough for him to keep a check on what was happening. And in particular on what Rose’s father was up to with the steady stream of young girls from the Jordan’s Brook home and elsewhere who had started passing through. The café was open from early morning until midnight most nights. And, following his instinct for spotting any directionless or rudderless person, Fred would usually look in at some point during the day.

  The café quickly became absorbed into his fantasy life, as the following paragraph that he wrote in prison shows: ‘I was going home from work one morning. I stopped to see Bill. I went to the back door. I looked up to the roof at the back of the café. There was Bill by the bathroom window. He had sacking over him. I said, “What you doing up there?” He said, “Shhhh.” He came down to me. He said, “I picked up two young girls in Bristol. They were coming to Gloucester. And they stayed the night. And they’re having a bath together. If you get up on the roof you can see them.” I said, “No way. I am not into that.”’

  He met Shirley Robinson, who was to become the seventh person to be buried at Cromwell Street, when he looked into the café one day. She was seventeen and undernourished and spoke with a broad Black Country accent. She came from a broken home. Her father was in the Air Force and she had spent her life being shunted between both parents until in 1974, at the age of fourteen, she had been taken into care in Wolverhampton. Fred West would claim that one of the first things Shirley Robinson told him when he met her was that she was a lesbian and only went with girls, which would have relieved him of some of the anxiety he seemed to feel in the company of all women. At the same time it would have piqued what he liked to regard as his instinct of research into sexual matters. Here was somebody to take home to Rose. A friendless and homeless lemon to take home and put with Rose. He said they would try having girls this time. Shirley Robinson would be eighteen in October and would cease being supervised by Gloucester Social Services, who had taken over on behalf of the Wolverhampton authority, on that date. At Fred’s invitation in April 1977 she moved into the small bedroom at Cromwell Street next to the bathroom on the first floor.

  *

  Around the same time that Shirley Robinson moved into Cromwell Street, and Sandra Johnson was becoming a regular visitor, John West, Fred’s brother who was younger than him by just a year, started stopping by the house most days. John and Fred had stayed out of touch with each other following a row over money for four or five years. But in May 1977 John West started driving what was known as a gulley-sucker for Gloucester Council, and he got into the habit of bringing his sandwiches into Cromwell Street most mornings so Rose could make him a cup of tea to have with his morning lunch. He would start driving a dust cart after a couple of years and would remain a bin man for the centre of Gloucester throughout the eighties and beyond.

  The children got used to their Uncle John bringing them presents – stuffed animals and plastic dolls and floppy Raggedy Ann ragdolls that he had rescued from the rubbish. A glass eye would be missing or a seam would have opened showing the nylon filling; the fur of the rabbits and puppies would already be stained from other people’s hands and spilled food. They were other children’s cast-offs. Dirty toys. But these were their only toys and so they were grateful. Heather and May and Stephen looked forward to these visits from their Uncle John.

  Her Uncle John started having sex with Anna-Marie on his visits almost straightaway. She was twelve and a half and he would make her have sex with him in the bathroom off the living room on the ground floor. Her father had made a board for changing nappies on which half covered the bath, and her Uncle John would make her get up on that. He was the only member of her dad’s side who would visit them and she had to have sex with him several times a week. He’d come into the house, put the kettle on, and take her into the bathroom. It was a baby-changing rack her dad had made. A foam mattress piece with towel. Always a towel on top of it. She went to Rose about it and she said there was nothing to worry about, it was perfectly all right and was a natural function. He was her uncle. She basically laughed it off. Three times a week for three years, from twelve and a half to fifteen and a half when Anna finally packed her things and ran away from home.

  It was her nature at that time to be a violent bully. Anna was a bully at school and had a gang and had started to carry a knife. A gang of them wielding blades. She had come to the attention of the police and was starting to appear to be uncontrollable. She was going out drinking with army blokes and getting absolutely steamed. But then that summer in 1977 when she turned thirteen and the fair came to the park she met Rikki Barnes who was travelling with the Jimmy Rogers Fair and Rikki became her boyfriend. The fair was on the park in Gloucester for three weeks and when it moved on Anna-Marie and Rikki stayed in touch by post. At the end of the season in October Anna invited Rikki to live at 25 Cromwell Street. He was given the room on the first floor at the front, which shared a landing with the small room occupied by Shirley Robinson who was so thin and undernourished Fred used to call her ‘Bones’. Soon after Rikki moved in he agreed to help Fred build an extension on the rear of the house. They needed extra room, and in the winter of 1977, with Rose eight months pregnant, Fred, assisted by Shirley Robinson and Anna-Marie and Anna-Marie’s boyfriend, started the work of pushing the downstairs walls of the house out at the side and the back, out over the garden. It was as if Fred was always building. The children would come home from school and all join in.

  *Not her real name. She was called ‘Miss A’ when she was a witness at Rose West’s trial.

  Chapter Twelve

  The roof of the new extension was held up by a tree. For an RSJ he substituted stolen railway sleepers. They were supported by the trunk of a tree that he had helped himself to from somewhere – a living, growing thing that he had chopped down and stripped of its branches and planted in concrete at about that part of the garden where Mrs Green’s fruit trees used to grow. The evidence of its recent life remained intact: he left the black bark on and the clean white scars of where the limbs used to be were left showing. A tree regarded not in any country way, but as a piece of citified building stuff – dismembered, domesticated, remade. As well as having a useful load-bearing purpose, it formed the centrepiece of the room; a gnarled tree trunk apparently growing up out of the floor of what was the new living room.

  Possibly only to Fred did it have associations with the oak tree that sprayed out like an umbrella in the home field where he used to make love to Rena and under which Rena was buried. There was a hunting stile by the side of it and they used to sit up on this stile and just look out over the valley, the woods, Much Marcle. Or perhaps it connected in his mind with another tree that at the end of his life he chose to remember. ‘We used to have a fir tree by our back door,’ he said, ‘and we had the top cut out where the electric came through and we made a house up in there. When my mother used to get at us we’d shoot straight up this tree. My mother was a big woman, and she used to say, “You’ll come down when you’re hungry.” She wouldn’t bother with you, but when you came down, she’d have you.’

  So anyway he footed it in concrete and it stood there holding up the new part of the house that was on the ground rather than in the ground and set over a damp cellar. He said it
gave a bit of character to the place. He knocked all the notches out of it. It was shaped but it was smart, like. He made a good job out of that. It looked like a tree. It was still recognizably a tree. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he’d say when anybody commented on it. ‘Yeah, it’s a real old-fashioned.’

  When the Sabbath Church was turned from a ramshackle shed into a building made of brick, the new, tall perimeter wall edging his property seemed to offer an opportunity, and opportunities were there to be taken. Without anybody’s permission being asked for, the living-room extension would appropriate the wall of the church on one side and would be fixed to the existing kitchen and bathroom on the other. He didn’t seem to worry. He plastered all the church wall up and faced it with tongue-and-groove teak-look panelling. He added a porch over the part of the path leading to the front door so that none of what he was doing was visible from the street, in the process adding another locking door and yet another security seal. There were a couple of steps up to the original house, and so there were a couple of steps down into the living-room extension. It extended out from the old back wall over the wooden trapdoor access to the cellar. This access was brought into the house; the sash window that had once looked out on to the garden was blocked in, and now the old kitchen door opened into the new room. The back wall was pushed out until it was brought square with the bathroom extension, so that from the outside the added-to parts of the house looked like a single-storey box rather than an ‘L’. The partition wall, which was formed by the extension meeting the existing kitchen, had to be demolished and the hot-water boiler moved from the old scullery kitchen to the new one, which was sited at the garden end of what was going to be an open-plan-style living area emanating from the trunk of a tree.