Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  It was important to keep Fred West alive until he could be brought to trial. But he had always been devious and thorough and very patient and from nothing he managed to get enough scraps together to make the device that he would use to hang himself. On the one hand he was unravelling. One of his few visitors, Stephen, could see that. His personality was coming apart. He was often incoherent. Tearful and rambling on these visits. On the other hand he was focused enough to write letters that when he saw them Stephen couldn’t believe the writing. He found it hard to believe that these had been written by his father who couldn’t write. Who just a few months earlier had been writing ‘Rose Luckd Well’ and ‘had Watt she wonted’. ‘Will Boy Been a father is no so easy.’

  ‘We will always be in love,’ Fred wrote to Rose on her forty-first birthday in November 1994, a month before he killed himself. ‘The most wonderful thing in my life is that I met you. How our love was special to us. So love, keep your promises to me. You know what they are.’ This letter ended, ‘Well Rose, you will be Mrs West all over the world. That’s wonderful for me and you. I have not got you a present, but all I have is my life. I will give it to you my darling. When you are ready, come to me. I will be waiting for you.’

  A few weeks later and only days before he died, he wrote: ‘To Rose. I loved you forever. I made mistakes. I am so upset about you being in prison. Please keep your promise to me. I have kept mine.’ The letter ended: ‘I can’t tell what I know. You are all free to go on with whatever you want to, but think of what I did for you all, and never complain. I love all of my children. They were all mine.’ He signed it: ‘All my love and kisses to you darling, Fred.’

  It seemed just perfect to Stephen. ‘It was spelled correctly, it was just … It was like he was so relaxed and he just wanted to go so much that he was just like … It was all off his shoulders then. Because there was no doubt that he couldn’t wait to tell people … He drew his gravestone and he wrote what he wanted on there and everything.’ He drew a gravestone at the bottom of his birthday letter to Rose with the inscription: ‘Fred West and Rose West. Rest in peace where no shadow falls. In perfect peace, he waits for Rose, his wife.’

  He wrote these letters but he never sent them. They were found in his cell after his death along with a razor blade that had been concealed in the leg joint of a table. He could have used the razor blade to kill himself but he didn’t. He saw another opportunity. A more protracted opportunity that involved pulling the wool over, making a monkey of and raising himself to a position of power over the people who felt they had power over him. He made an opportunity by volunteering to mend the shirts of the other prisoners at Winson Green prison in Birmingham where he was being held on remand. His previous prison experience coming in useful. He was an old con. He knew how to be patient. He could be tirelessly patient. He was rigid in his routines.

  He volunteered for shirt-mending duties at Winson Green. And having volunteered he started cutting off and collecting strong cotton tapes from the laundry bags the shirts arrived in. At the same time he was also stealing narrow strips of material from the hems of his prison blankets and twisting and sewing them together to make a noose. A ligature measuring eighty-eight inches by seven-and-a-half inches thick when he finished, put together from slyly snipped off, scavenged, stored and plaited bits. Innocuous pieces and fragments collected and concealed over days and probably weeks and made into the means by which to take his own life.

  He chose his moment with care. New Year’s Day was a public holiday and many prison officers weren’t at work. Lunchtime was the changeover time for shifts and there was a natural lull then. He had had his morning exercise in the yard and when he was back in his cell had written a note to Rose: ‘To Rose West. Happy New Year darling. All my love Fred West. All my love for ever and ever.’ Shortly after eleven thirty he had collected his ‘special’ meal of soup and pork chops and gone back to his cell. He knew he would be left alone for at least an hour to eat. Instead he retrieved the rope he had made which, like the blankets it was twisted together from, was bright acid green. The reinforced ties he had stolen from the laundry bags were sewed on to one end. And it was the ties he threaded through the bars in front of the ventilating window directly above the door of his cell. He could have used the chair to stand on. Every cell on D3 landing had a chair. But he used the filled laundry bag to stand on to make the knots. And it was the laundry bag he kicked away from when he secured the ligature around his neck. The chair would have made a noise and brought people running so he didn’t use the chair. The laundry bag was soft and silent and would have made only a small disturbance of dust falling over on the floor. The dust lifting and settling again before he had time to be found.

  *

  His death was a silent event. The demolition was a full media event; a public spectacle that Gloucester Council who organized it hoped would have a cleansing effect on the city. There was a consensus about demolition. Obliteration. The feeling was that people wanted to see the site made anonymous and ordinary. Demolition started on 7 October 1996 and it was packaged and press-conferenced and shown via live links and cut-aways on breakfast television.

  The contents had been removed and taken away for storage at an early stage. The four-poster bed and the bar and the black-and-white-painted wrought-iron signs from these and the ‘25 Cromwell Street’ sign from the front of the house had been put in vans along with 1,300 other inventoried items and transported to RAF Quedgeley where most of them were eventually destroyed in controlled conditions to cheat souvenir hunters.

  The job of taking the house down was given to the local family firm of the Bishops whose lorries carry the slogan ‘We’ll bring it down to earth’. The doors and windows were unbricked and unboarded and as this happened the glass of the windows could be seen to be still intact in the jungle-green frames. The Bishops had been commissioned not only to remove all the materials from the site but to destroy them. There was a crushing machine at the Gloucester tip in Hempstead by the docks. And every brick and piece of rubble was dismantled and driven to Hempstead and crushed to dust. Timber and everything flammable was taken to RAF Innsworth and put in an incinerator and burned there and the ashes crushed. The cellar was backfilled with the bricks off the walls and sealed with quick-drying concrete.

  Anne Marie had been allowed a final visit to the cellar shortly after dawn. And soon after that Mae and Stephen had laid flowers by the front gate on the pavement with a handwritten card attached containing a poem for Heather,

  It seems we lived a seven year con

  since we came home to find you gone

  For all those years we tried in vain

  In hope we could ease the pain

  But how were we to have ever known

  That someone close and in our home

  Took you from us that sad day

  In such a sad and awful way

  No-one could love you the way we do

  And know how much we miss you.

  I hope one day we meet again

  And then at last there would be no pain –

  ‘The sad memories of this house will go with it. But the memories of you will always stay – Love Stephen, Mae and Tara.’

  *

  After a long consultation process, the decision was made to turn the site into a walkway or cut-through connecting the street to St Michael’s Square and the busy centre of Gloucester. Other alternatives were considered and rejected: a commemorative plaque at the site, a memorial garden. But nobody wanted to keep those memories. A permanent reminder.

  When the house had been levelled and the cellar filled in, block paving was brought and laid in a herring-bone pattern, three small trees planted, edging cobbles set in thick-grade concrete: ST4 concrete on 150-mm.-type figure-1 granular material. They installed ‘Urbis’-model lamp columns painted gloss black and ‘Son-T’ lanterns on five-metre steel columns. Four of those. They put in cast-iron bollards across the entrances at both ends to prevent vehicle access – sev
en at the Cromwell Street end; four at the St Michael’s Square end; five down the middle to discourage ball games. They laid a blue-brick on-edge soldier course channel and feature between the block-paved areas and the grass verge. They fixed close-boarded fencing to a height of twelve feet on the exposed flank wall at 21 Cromwell Street and the flank wall of the church where the Wests’ tongue-and-groove teak-look panelling used to be. Larch close-boarded fencing stained chestnut brown. Tough spiked pyracantha bushes were planted to run the length of it and discourage graffiti-writers and vandals. A country lane introduced to the city. The bends and shadows in the narrow road. The country-lane effect familiar from shopping-centre corridors and the rest areas on motorways.

  The intention is that it will be impossible to distinguish between parts that have been added and those that already exist. Underneath is the cellar void. And under the cellar five cores of concrete buried in Severn clay. The fact of something behind. Something that is inaccessible, unknown. Beyond a doubt there is something behind. It imposes itself and won’t go away. You look at the walls. You listen to the space.

  Acknowledgements

  I couldn’t have written the book without the help and in many cases the friendship and encouragement of the following people:

  Caroline Raine (now Caroline Roberts), Ian Roberts, Mrs Daisy Letts, Andrew Letts and Jacquie Letts, Graham Letts, Gordon Letts, Stephen West, Leo Goatley, Katherine Goatley, Chris Davis, Brian Fry, Eddie Fry, Derek Thomson, Wendy Thomson, Ron Cooper, Colin Price, Syd Mills, Costadinos (‘Nicki’) Neocleous, Joyce Dickins and Iris, Tracy Green, Phil Green.

  Duncan Campbell, Will Bennett, Brian Masters, Geoffrey Wansell.

  Richard Clegg, John Tennant, Marcus Harvey, Paul Green, Allan Jenkins, Alicja Kobiernicka, Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst, Maia Norman.

  Fanny Blake who originally commissioned the book. Gillon Aitken, my agent.

  At Faber: Jonathan Riley, Joanna Mackle, Chris McLaren, Sarah Hulbert, Rachel Alexander, Jill Burrows.

  Carol Gorner.

  The second paragraph on p. 280 is a quotation from Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain.

  Other books that have been indispensable in various ways, and which I have quoted either directly or indirectly, are:

  Anne Marie West, with Virginia Hill, Out of The Shadows

  Stephen and Mae West, Inside 25 Cromwell Street

  Geoffrey Wansell, An Evil Love

  Brian Masters, She Must Have Known

  Andrew O’Hagan, The Missing

  Howard Sounes, Fred and Rose

  Also:

  Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned

  Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions

  Linda Williams, Hard Core

  Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion

  Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy

  Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City

  Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight

  Rachel Whiteread, House

  Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny

  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

  Maria Tatar, Lustmord

  William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust

  Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty

  Arthur Mee, The King’s England: Gloucestershire

  Marina Warner, Richard Wentworth

  Graham Fuller (ed.), Potter on Potter

  V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival

  Norman Mailer, Oswald’s Tale

  Phillip Roth, Sabbath’s Theatre

  About the Author

  Gordon Burn was the author of four novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove, The North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday. He was also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers, On The Way to Work (with Damien Hirst) and Best and Edwards. His last book, Sex & Violence, Death and Silence, was a collection of his essays on art. Gordon Burn was the author of four novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove, The North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday. He was also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers, On The Way to Work (with Damien Hirst) and Best and Edwards. His last book, Sex & Violence, Death and Silence, was a collection of his essays on art.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition published in 2011

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Gordon Burn, 1998

  The right of Gordon Burn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26506–0