by Gordon Burn
Dear Judy,
Please, please help me, I am at my wits end, and I’m thinking of putting an end to my rotten worthless life.
My problem is one that I’ve had for almost 2 years now. Since I came into care, (I was 14 almost 15) I have developed bouts of depression. The least little thing makes me cry.
I am also very self-concience about myself too, this is mainly because the girls in the ‘home’ I’m in at present, have all got boyfriends, except one who’s just not interested and me.
I am not ugly, but I’m not brilliantly pretty either, I am big-boned and I’m always complaining that I’m fat, although I exercise each night, I wear fairly fashionable clothes, although I really can’t afford up-to-date clothes, because I am badly paid at work. I am a receptionist-telephonist.
Every time I meet a boy (I am quite shy), and they ask where I live, I am quite honest with them, and say I’m in care, they just clam up, and after one night they don’t want to see me again.
Please help! I am getting desperate, not for boys, but through worry of thinking I’m abnormal.
I’ve known about this problem for ages, but I’ve no-one really close to talk to.
Thank you, Judy
Yours faithfully
Alison Chambers
When Alison Chambers’s remains were recovered from the back garden at 25 Cromwell Street at twenty past five on Monday, 28 February 1994, a wide plastic-leather belt with a square plastic-covered buckle was found strapped under her chin and over the top of her skull. A purple coat belt around her head clamping closed her jaw to stop her screaming, to keep her silent. She had been decapitated and dismembered and many of her toes and fingers had been taken away. The jumbled parts of her body were found buried underneath what had been a paddling pool made of blue engineering bricks immediately under the bathroom window in the garden. ‘All I done was lifted him up and packed her underneath him, and dropped him back on top of her,’ Fred West said. ‘All I done was lifted ’im up and and banged ’er underneath … push parts of her body underneath.’ Out of ‘sheer force of habit’ he had used the sheath knife he carried on his belt. ‘I mean, it’s handy to have a knife with you anyway, for numerous reasons … It wasn’t carried as a weapon. It was carried as a tool.’
*
At the beginning of the summer during which Alison Chambers would be taken to Cromwell Street and bound and gagged and sexually brutalized and finally murdered, Fred West had got Anna-Marie, who was just about to turn fifteen, pregnant. It was an ectopic pregnancy, meaning the baby was developing in her fallopian tubes and, without ever being told what was happening to her, she had been taken into hospital to have the baby aborted. Apart from a brief visit from her father who was always telling her, ‘You don’t want no fucking schoolboy. He won’t know what to do with it’, but who tried to blame her pregnancy on a boy she knew from school, nobody from the family visited during the week she was in Gloucester Hospital. When she came out, her stepmother, as she wasn’t allowed to call her, put her to it doing housework and then set about her using her fists and her feet when she decided she wasn’t doing it the way she had shown her. ‘You’re not doing that right.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘Don’t be fucking sorry. Just do it fucking right.’ She had been out of hospital only a few days. She still had clips and stitches holding the wound together. But Rose was glaring. It had been ten years now, from the ages of five to fifteen. She knew that glare. And she laid straight into her. She got Anna-Marie on the floor and started kicking her. ‘You wait till your fucking father gets home.’
Quite soon after this Anna-Marie was put in the cells at Gloucester police station for knifing a girl. She had been picked up with a nightdress on, heading out on the A40 in the direction of the Forest of Dean. She had a stand-up fight with her father outside in the street when he got her home, and then Anna disappeared two or three mornings after that. When she wasn’t there to prepare the breakfasts as usual, they sent one of the younger children to get her up and she was gone. Her bed was made but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere in the house. Rose said, ‘Cow.’ ‘I don’t think she’ll be a problem, do you?’ Fred asked Rose.
Heather told Anna-Marie this is what had happened the next time they met. She also told her that Fred and Rose had gone into her bedroom later that day and stripped it bare. They tore her Elvis Presley posters off the wall, bundled up her magazines and books of pop lyrics and burned the lot. The rest of her clothes went too, even the ornaments on her shelves were thrown out. It was as if she had never existed.
She had crept out in the middle of the night and slept on a bench in the park until it got light. She would sleep in the park for several nights, washing in the mornings in the toilets where Caroline Raine had been attacked eight years earlier, until she found a friend to take her in. Like the son of the Victorian anti-masturbation zealot Daniel Schreber, who in adult life wrote a book about ‘the tormenting and humiliating bodily sufferings’ performed on him by his father, with ‘the utmost cruelty and disregard as only a beast deals with its prey’, Anna-Marie would one day also put down on paper her account of what it had been like to grow up being constantly preyed upon and sexually humiliated by the people she should have been able to rely on to care for and protect her.
It was only after she ran away that she realized for the first time that ‘other people didn’t live in the way we did at Cromwell Street’. ‘I associated everything with sex … To get love you had to provide sex; if someone gave you something or offered to help you in any way, you repaid them with sex. If you wanted something from someone, you offered them sex. To avoid beatings and provoking Rose, and to please her, you had sex with her or with the men she had chosen … The only kind of love and affection I ever knew came from my father after he had had sex with me.’ Now, in order to survive, to eat, to find a place to sleep, she was going to have to resort to sex. She was going to go looking for love in some wrong places, and sometimes she was going to have to pay for that.
*
Rose knew she was made to have children. This was something she had always known and they always said they would have eight. Barry was born in June 1980. Fred used to take them to Barry Island near Cardiff now and again. They all loved it and that’s where they got Barry’s name from. Heather turned ten that year; May was eight, Stephen seven, Tara two and a half, Louise a year and a half, and then Barry, number-two son. Barry was born at the beginning of the summer. But then, when Rose found herself pregnant again before the summer was over, she did what she had never done before: she had a baby aborted. If that baby was Fred’s, it would have been the last baby she would have had with him. Her next two children – Rosemary junior, born in 1982, and Lucyanna, born in 1983 – shared the same Jamaican father. But Fred considered they were his anyway. They were all his. Lucyanna was baby number eight. They had got their eight and they decided to stop there. Eight children in the house. Eight bodies buried in the garden and the house. Rose decided to be sterilized. She had her tubes clipped after Lucyanna was born and said that was it. No more.
For a house with so many children it stayed very quiet. Any visitor to the house had to be pre-announced and the children were warned in advance not to talk to any of the visitors. Visitors were warned never to answer the door unless Fred or Rose asked, and Fred had wired the phones so that if any extension in the house was picked up it would ring loudly once. They were quiet children and didn’t discuss anything. Anybody who was allowed in the house noticed the silence and extreme docility of the children. Their politeness and quietness were often remarked. They came instantly when they were called. They responded. When this failed to happen they’d yell blue bloody murder at them.
As Stephen grew older, Rose’s attacks on him became more aggressively physical. There was a more openly sadistic aspect to them. On one occasion she lifted him by grabbing him by both hands around his neck and holding him until the blood vessels burst in his eyes. Her fingerprints stayed around his neck for a fortnight and she
had to give him a note to take to school saying he had been fooling around with a rope in a tree and had fallen out. When he was put in the head cage that his father had made at the wagon works and which hooked over the back of the settee so that he couldn’t move, it was his mother who hit him in the face with an ashtray or whatever was handy every time he tried to look away from the pornography that was being shown on the television or even blinked. Sometimes it was a video of people having sex with animals and sometimes it was people having sex with children – adults abusing children the way his mother had been abusing Stephen since he was six years old. She had a habit of walking into the living room out of the shower naked. And on one occasion when Stephen dared to say something cheeky like ‘Oh for Chrissakes cover it up’, she lost her temper, grabbed a wooden spoon and chased him down the road without a stitch on. ‘So I let her catch me and beat me so she would just go in.’
One day in 1983, when Stephen was ten, his mother phoned his school to say that she wanted him home straight away. He rushed home, but when he got there there was no sense of emergency. His mother seemed very calm. She told him to go into the bathroom and take all his clothes off and shut the door. In the bathroom he saw that his father’s wide buckled belt was hanging up and he also noticed electrical wire waiting ready over the bath. Electric flex was something Fred West claimed to have used to strangle several of their victims. ‘I turned round and smacked her straight in the jaw and she went straight on the floor. And then I went and got that piece of flex and tied it round her neck,’ he told the police about Shirley Robinson. ‘There was a piece of electric flex. I believe it was 13 amp. That’s two-point-five wiring,’ he said, describing how he claimed to have murdered Heather and cut her body into pieces in the bathroom. ‘It was a bit I’d cut off when I was rewiring a house. Probably two feet to a metre long. I picked it up and I thought I better make sure she is dead, because I dare not touch her if she’s alive. You know, if there’s any life still left.’
His mother had planned it. It was obvious from the belt and the three-core wire that this was something his mother had spent some time planning. That the anticipation contributed to the pleasure and was part of it. She wasn’t frenzied though, as Stephen had often seen her. Rose in an ecstasy of anger like a performance. Not that. She was calm. She made him hold his hands out in front of him and using the wire she bound them. He was naked. Then she ordered him to lie down face forward on the bathroom floor. Got him to lie on his stomach at almost exactly the spot where Lynda Gough’s remains were buried. He kept asking what he’d done; he didn’t know. What had he done? What was this for? She had had the electric flex there waiting and now she used a second length to secure his wrists and hands to the pedestal of the toilet. When she had him immobilized at full stretch on the floor in this way she started to flay him. She used the buckle part of the belt and brought it down repeatedly at a point near the base of his spine. Saying, what have you done wrong? Tell me. What have you done wrong? Tell me, boy. They always called him that. They both called him that. Heather got ‘big girl’. They called him ‘boy’. What have you done wrong? He kept asking what he’d done; he didn’t know. The buckle striking his spine. Trial, sentence and punishment all in one. The buckle striking his spine. What have you done wrong? He didn’t know so she told him. The answer was blue magazines. She blamed him for stealing blue magazines from one of their private rooms and taking them to school. Beat him until the very painful area at the base of his spine was red and raw. Tried and found wanting. The buckle striking his spine. And when Heather came in with a letter from her teacher saying she had had pornographic magazines confiscated from her at school that day, his mother only laughed and said, well, Stephen’s had your beating. He’s had yours. Put the belt around her waist and did it up.
Rose would just suddenly go bang and you’d dive for cover. Whereas with Fred you could see it slowly build up. The look in his eyes. It would be a general build-up of several things, or his inner moody. He didn’t go very often. But when he did go he definitely had a look about him when you’re thinking – his son-in-law Chris Davis thought this, and he never backed off from a fight – ‘I really shouldn’t be here.’ The perfect way to intimidate him was to do something he couldn’t do. Stephen was fixing his sister’s bike one day and his father told him to leave it until he came home and then he’d sort it out. But Stephen was bored that day and so he thought he’d do him a favour and fix it before he got home. Big mistake, as it turned out. When he saw the bike was fixed his father punched Stephen in the side of the head, knocked one of his back teeth out and walked away. Stephen made a bolt for the back door but his mother locked it before he could get there and his father started punching and kicking him when he was on the ground. Putting the boot in until it was obvious Stephen was hurt. Almost immediately then Fred started almost crying and begging Stephen to forgive him. To make it up he said they would go out tomorrow and get Stephen himself a new bike. ‘Silly me, I thought it meant off to Halfords in Cheltenham.’ But it was into the van with the cutters the next night, cruising round for a bike to steal. The only reason he ever took Stephen to the park was to steal other children’s bikes. His father would walk a hundred yards in front and break the bike lock very quickly without anybody seeing. Then Stephen would ride the bike to the van where they would meet up. They’d get them for the whole family. Like their mother walking into the room naked and their father watching the television wearing only his underpants, it was considered normal. Family life. It was what families did. It was part of family life.
Heather was withdrawn and quiet. She used to rock like her mother used to rock herself in a chair or in bed, backwards and forwards for hours wiggling – rocking. She was growing up sullen – surly even. Heather was difficult. She was known as quite a hard girl at school. She was made to wear her hair in a short back and sides and boys’ shoes because they were harder wearing and she wasn’t popular. Nobody would mess with Heather at school. People just stayed away. At home she was becoming withdrawn and surly. Just being really quiet and awkward, always wanting to do the opposite to what everybody else was wanting to do. Sitting silently staring into space for hours, chewing her nails. Gnawing her nails until they started bleeding. She was always different and Rose’s brothers weren’t the only ones who occasionally wondered if Fred West was really Heather’s father. Andrew Letts always had a suspicion that Heather’s father could have been Graham, who was fourteen when Rose left home. Graham always suspected it might have been their own father. ‘She wasn’t a West,’ Fred’s chargehand, Ronnie Cooper, believes. ‘She was too select for them. I think she was a pain in the neck to them, I think Heather was.’
Her father was raping Heather all her life. And it showed in the way she acted. She was being casually abused by her father’s brother, her uncle John, and others, and raped by her father from an early age. When they were small children their father would put his hands inside Heather’s and May’s clothes and touch them. It would happen frequently, at any time of the day. These were part of their dad’s ‘antics’; his way of playing and being affectionate towards them. He told them that he had created their bodies and that this gave him the right to look at them any time he chose to look at them. He talked about the right of a father to take his daughter’s virginity. He said that his father had done it to his sisters and he made it clear that he intended doing the same to May and Heather. He told them that because they struggled to push his advances away they would become lesbians. ‘I had a good ride last night off your mother,’ he’d tell them. ‘I screwed the arse off her.’ ‘There’s my daughter,’ he’d say to some visitor to the house about Heather. ‘I think she’s a lesbian.’
After their attempt to run away Heather and May and Stephen had been brought upstairs out of the cellar and put to bed at nights behind a curtain in the part of the new living area previously occupied by the kitchen. Their beds were put behind a curtain and the door to their parents’ bedroom was left open at nights so
they could hear what was going on. But this could only be a stopgap arrangement and their father had eventually come up with a longer-lasting solution. He used a machine at the wagon works to stamp out six pairs of metal brackets and he brought them home and attached four of the brackets to each of the older children’s beds. The beds were returned to the cellar and the brackets fitted and every night from then on Heather and May and Stephen were strapped to their beds. Each bracket had a hole in it and rope was pushed in through the holes and Heather and May and Stephen were tied face downwards on the bed. ‘The same way that other kids would go to their mum in their pyjamas and say will you come and tuck us in,’ Stephen says, ‘we used to go and say will you come and fuckin’ tie us in. I still can only sleep on my front.’
May West, who now has changed her name and started a new life, denies that either she or Heather was ever raped by their father. The life-long sexual abuse and pestering she admits. And she also acknowledges that she was raped at the age of seven or eight by one of the men who used to come to the house. But she says that neither she nor Heather was ever raped by their father. ‘Heather and I had decided when Dad had first started touching us that we would never give in and allow him to have intercourse with us. We were both determined about it, and I know that Heather would have never given in to him.’ But Stephen believes that May, who he still sees, is ‘in heavy denial’. That she has been ‘brainwashed’ by her mother, to whom she remains close, to think that many things that did happen to her never happened. May still believes her mother is innocent of the murders of Charmaine and Heather and Shirley Robinson and of the seven other murders of which she was convicted. ‘I block out a lot of things,’ May has admitted. ‘Sometimes it seems as if I never lived at Cromwell Street … I feel I’ve lived a lifetime since [the arrests] and I’ve started a new life, so it feels like it didn’t happen.’ But Stephen was there and he insists it did. ‘He was raping Heather all her life. And May. I was in the same room. So I think I would remember that, yes.’