by Ben Machell
Less than an hour after confronting Beer, Stephen was on a bus heading back to Sidmouth. He sat in silence as the bus rumbled down tight country roads hemmed by tall, dense hedgerows, past fields and farms and patches of woodland. Rather than getting off at Sidmouth, he disembarked a few miles up the road as a precaution and hiked through the countryside, finally arriving back at his home as darkness was falling. His mother and father were both there and wanted to know why he had a swollen, bloodied cheek. Stephen told them he had gotten into a fight, then went to his small room and fell onto his bed.
Stephen’s first attempt at robbing a bank had ended in failure. He had convinced himself that he would enter, come out with a bag full of money, and then make his getaway. The attempted robbery and bomb scare made the local news, and Stephen remembers being relieved to hear that Raymond Beer had not been badly hurt. He would later learn that his knife had left a scratch but nothing more. Nevertheless, Stephen believed that he had now passed a point of no return. “I had crossed the line. There was no going back. And due to the failure, the onus on me was now even stronger to make a successful heist after that,” he says. “Rather than deterring me, it did the opposite.”
Alone in his room, Stephen did what he had always done when trying to process his emotions. He picked up a pen and wrote.
A BANK ROBBER’S DREAM
Deep in this vast sprawling horde, wealth flows into the banks and money counters, flowing like a serpent’s tail through shops and up to corporate boardrooms—for every lump of gold, a grain to the masses. An endless cycle of paper and metal, ruling life for everyone, breaking or making dreams, cementing the status quo. For every Western sunset, the same sun rises halfway round the world, and under those Eastern rays, millions starve and struggle, forced onwards by an invisible hand of money worship. No god of any age bore such allegiance: it is an idol worshiped night and day, an aim of insurmountable immorality.
Inches of steel separating piles of accruing currency, flowing into protected shells of glass and brick. But for some, such barriers can be broken. With the gun and mask as tools, a cunning and ready plan outlayed—the rebels wait in ambush. To take from the rich and scatter to the poor; to pinch the serpent’s tail, to smash the corruption and injustice.
The dream of the RH is to break the status quo and release those in poverty from a hidden slavery established by the rich and powerful. To steal from the rich and give to the poor. To create new possibilities and equality.
The day will usher when the legend of RH will be known across every horizon, when the people of Earth live in a new era of justice and opportunity, no longer to suffer under the yolk of corruption and exploitation.
To fight, to suffer, to die for this dream—this I will do.
Chapter Five
Sidmouth is a quiet seaside town on the South Devon coast. A pretty tourist resort for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has a long shingle beach and distinctive red cliffs, and, to the north, is surrounded by miles of gently rolling hills, fields, and greenery. In the semi-imagined Wessex of Thomas Hardy, Sidmouth provided the inspiration for the town of Idmouth, which, if nothing else, suggests there wasn’t much about it he’d change. And because Sidmouth was never bustling or grand even in its summer season heyday, it doesn’t have too much of the sad, faded pathos you find in so many English seaside towns today. There are narrow streets of pretty whitewashed Georgian buildings leading to half a dozen Victorian-era seafront hotels lining the town’s esplanade. Stephen moved there with his mother and father when he was eight years old. “I can remember the day we arrived,” he says. “We went a scenic route and it looked really beautiful. It was the spring, I think.”
It was just the three of them, and it was not the first time they had relocated to a new town. During his early childhood, Stephen, along with his parents, Peter and Jenny, had moved around Devon several times without ever managing to settle. At Sidmouth, Stephen started at his fourth new elementary school. Prior to this move, they had lived in a small village where he remembered being incredibly happy. “I remember being really upset when we left,” he says. “I didn’t know why they moved so often.”
The Jackleys moved to the north of Sidmouth, a mile or so away from the seafront and historic town center. This was not Thomas Hardy’s Wessex so much as semirural postwar suburbia: a sleepy world of bus stops, bungalows, privet hedges, and cul-de-sacs. Sidmouth is a relatively affluent town thanks to the number of people from across the UK who choose to relocate there for retirement. But the Jackleys had never been wealthy and moved into a house on one of the town’s two council estates, which are a form of public housing in the UK. “We had always lived in council houses,” says Stephen. “It would be fair and accurate to describe my parents as ‘working class.’ ”
For a couple with an eight-year-old child, the Jackleys seemed unusually old. Peter Jackley was almost sixty when they moved to Sidmouth; Jenny was fifty-two. Over the course of his life, Peter had held down various jobs, working in care homes, as a gardener, and in the local motor museum. Stephen thinks his father may have once worked as an engineer of some sort, but isn’t entirely sure. Peter blamed an old back injury for keeping him out of regular work.
His mother went through spells of employment, taking on low-paid menial work now and then, but she would also spend hours engrossed in arts, crafts, and poetry. She painted, sketched, and crocheted. She decorated large pebbles from the beach or from the banks of the nearby River Sid with floral patterns or smiling faces, and much of the Jackleys’ ramshackle interior decor was Jenny’s handiwork. She cared for their indeterminate number of cats. Their new home was a neat two-story, two-bedroom 1960s row house on Manstone Avenue, a quiet street of identical council houses with gardens in front and back. From the end of his new street, Stephen was able to see green hills and meadows.
Stephen began at Sidbury Primary School, a tiny institution located in a village about two miles north of his home. A decade later, he wrote down a definitive list of every school he’d attended over his academic career, rating his overall experience at each one with a mark out of ten. There was an accompanying key that set out this system in more detail. A score of ten, he wrote, meant his experience had been “Excellent.” A score of one meant it was “Totally Awful.” He gave Sidbury Primary a rating of six: “Bearable.”
Upon arriving at Sidbury, he met a boy named Ben Weaver. Like Stephen, he lived in Sidmouth. And like Stephen, his family lived in a council house. “I remember Stephen transferred in a bit late,” says Weaver. “I don’t know where he had come from before, but we were in a really small school with maybe eight people in our year. There weren’t really many others to talk to. We sort of hit it off there.”
Weaver, who is now a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki, would go on to form a ten-year friendship with Stephen. It was a relationship that would not always be straightforward. But to begin with, at least, he remembers a boy who was easygoing and sociable. More than anything, though, he remembers Stephen’s imagination.
“He had this game that he used to play. It was called ‘International,’ I think. It was a space game that he had conjured up and it was incredibly vivid for him. We would go into the woods, or even just in his bedroom, and suddenly the things around us would come to life for him. There might be a spacecraft flying in, or like there might be a peace treaty that needs to be negotiated. So we’d be in the woods and then suddenly we’d have to sit down on the floor and deal with this,” says Weaver, who recounts all this warmly. Stephen, he says, had a way of drawing him into this world with him. “I was kind of enraptured by it. Back then he was very charismatic, and it was just a fun thing to do because I never really had an active imagination. It wasn’t something that I thought was strange. I thought it was fun.”
As the two boys continued their friendship into their early adolescence, however, Weaver began to observe things about th
e Jackleys he found odd. First and foremost was their social isolation. Sidmouth may have been a conservative town with a disproportionate number of elderly inhabitants—at one point Weaver describes it as “a cemetery with streetlights”—but it was still, at the end of the day, a friendly place to live. In 1977, for example, Sidmouth made the Guinness Book of World Records by staging the world’s longest conga line, with 5,562 residents dancing along the Esplanade. Neighbors held conversations over garden fences or stopped to bend your ear if you passed on the street. “It was a very sociable neighborhood,” admits Weaver. But the Jackleys? They seemed to exist apart from it.
“They just never saw anyone,” Weaver continues. “Stephen’s father would sit at home pretty much every day in front of the television. They had this massive wall of VHS videos, and he would watch and rewatch the same things over and over again. His mother would go off into this area of parkland and do her own thing and come back with a new pebble. But Peter isolated himself. I can’t remember there being times when you would see him talking with somebody. They never really spoke to anybody. That was the impression I got as a kid.”
They were unlike other families. In Sidmouth everybody took a degree of pride in their front gardens. But the Jackleys simply allowed theirs to become messy and overgrown. “Which was like a crime against the town,” says Weaver. And the strange thing was that they actually took great care of their back garden. They just ignored the one that needed to be tended in public view. The apparent unwillingness of Peter Jackley, in particular, to show his face invited “distrust.” They carried out unusual bits of home improvement. They threw together a kind of rickety conservatory at the rear of their house that Stephen describes as a “greenhouse,” though Weaver recalls it being made from “some kind of plastic sheeting.” A rumor went around that the Jackleys had converted a small garage at the rear of their home into a spare bedroom, which was in fact true. Later, when Weaver was in his teens, Stephen’s father sometimes encouraged him to use it. “He would say, ‘You can come and stay any time you want. You can sleep in the bedroom and you don’t have to tell Stephen,’ ” he says. “Which, now that I think about it, is a bit weird.”
Weaver says Stephen’s frenetic and intense games of make-believe ceased almost overnight. “I remember when he was about twelve, suddenly he was like, no more. That’s done,” he says. “It was as if this was no longer what we do. I remember being a little bit confused and thinking…well…what do we do?”
Instead, the two boys played on their computers, talked about their shared interest in science and astronomy, or went on fossil-hunting trips. They would set off on long walks, ranging around the countryside that hems Sidmouth or trudging the high coastal footpaths that rise and fall with the cliffs.
It was always just the two of them. This, Weaver began to realize, was nonnegotiable. He had other friends and would sometimes suggest to Stephen that they go and meet them or see if anyone else would be interested in coming on one of their walks. Stephen would always make it clear that he did not want this to happen. “For him, it really did seem that bringing anyone else in would sort of…” He trails off for a moment. “He wasn’t able to cope with it. Looking back, you can see that he wasn’t able to connect with people well, and definitely not in groups.”
* * *
—
By the time he started secondary school, Stephen had become increasingly withdrawn. He began to play truant. He would go whole days barely opening his mouth and spent hour after hour sitting on his own under the sympathetic supervision of a middle-aged home economics teacher named Angela Thompson. “He would come into school in the morning and he’d be wound up like a spring,” she says. “We had a little office, and he would spend most of the day in that. Very often he would go missing in the day and then I would have to go find him.”
As often as not, Thompson would find him sitting alone in a field next to the school. “He often didn’t have lunch money, and we would have to go get him lunch. I remember once he came to school and his glasses were broken. So I took him to get new ones from the opticians in town.” She gives a sad, fond sigh. “He was blind as a bat.”
It was not just Stephen who struggled to settle. A gentle presence, Stephen’s mother, Jenny, was, unlike her husband, generally well liked. “I just remember her being really kind but always really busy,” says Weaver. “She and Peter seemed to be very separate from one another. And she existed quite separately from Stephen as well. She would cook and clean and provide for the family. But she was in her own world.”
As the months passed, however, Jenny became increasingly known around Sidmouth for her erratic behavior. She would do things that left locals unsettled. She went through a spell of posting sinister pictures through the letterboxes of her neighbors—“strange, abstract images based around eyes,” says Stephen—and was sometimes convinced that she was being watched or followed. She visited local shops and purchased as many items as she was able, and then attempted to give them away to people she passed on the street. She would sometimes play records at very high volume or drag furniture around the house at strange times. On one occasion, she was found trying to place a lit firework underneath a parked taxi. When a number of bicycles went missing and were found dumped in a nearby stream, the blame fell upon her.
Weaver describes how, as they entered their teens, he would often go round to see Stephen on weekends only to be greeted by his father. “Peter would say, ‘Oh, come in and have some tea,’ so I would sit down in the living room.” This would be at noon, and Stephen would still be asleep. The whole time, says Weaver, he would be stuck downstairs with Peter, who talked nonstop about how worried he was about his son not fitting in at school or, increasingly, failing to keep regular hours. “He’d be railing against him, going, ‘I don’t know what to do with Stephen’ and off-loading emotionally onto me, a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid.”
* * *
—
Stephen says that he does not know how his mother and father met. “I think I asked them once,” he says, frowning slightly. “But I can’t remember.”
They had, in fact, first encountered each other at an Exeter hospital. They were both patients on the psychiatric ward. Jenny Symons was schizophrenic. Peter Jackley suffered from manic depression. That their relationship began under these circumstances does not seem to have been a secret. Or at least, not by the time the residents of Sidmouth had done some detective work. Angela Thompson, for example, knew all about it. “From what I can gather his father was in a psychiatric hospital, where he met Stephen’s mother,” she explains with a chatty matter-of-factness. “They got together. I think they both had severe mental problems. Stephen was the product of that relationship. So he had interesting genes on both sides.”
Peter’s half brother, Jolyon Jackley, frames things a little more romantically. “They were two kindred spirits,” he says. Jolyon has spent much of his life working as an actor and theater manager. After I approached him several times, he agreed to a brief email correspondence. He confirms that Stephen’s parents had, indeed, met on a psychiatric ward. “Jenny was a long-term resident and Peter had signed himself in following the breakup of his first marriage,” he explains. “Their meeting was the road to recovery, and Stephen was the blessing and happy fruition of their true love for each other.”
“Road to recovery,” though, was perhaps wishful thinking. Both Jenny and Peter struggled badly with their illnesses throughout Stephen’s childhood. Which is not to say that he did not experience the same fierce love and dependency that most young boys feel for their mom and dad. When describing his mother, Stephen always emphasizes her kindness, gentility, and compassion. “She was very creative, she did lots of artwork, she was very into gardening and nature, and she loved animals,” he says. “Honestly, it’s hard to think of many other people who were that kind.”
But she was only like this when she was well. “W
hen she became ill, it was a very chaotic environment. Furniture being moved about randomly usually marked the beginning, followed by loud music, all the windows being left open, and things being chucked out.”
The loud music, in particular, distressed Stephen. She would often play the Beatles at increasingly higher volumes as she built toward a psychotic episode (“which is part of the reason I’m not too keen on their music today”). In addition to the paranoid delusions that saw her fixate on the idea of eyes and the sense that she was being watched, his mother’s episodes involved auditory and visual hallucinations, a distorting of reality that left her fearful, angry, and manic. Listening to Stephen describe it, you get the distinct sense that his younger self was somehow privy to fragments of what his mother was experiencing. That, just as he was able to draw Ben Weaver into his own vivid imaginary world, he couldn’t help but follow his mother into hers.
“A peculiar thing I recall was how some of the music itself had a warped feel to it,” he says. “Does that make sense?” When his mother was ill, he describes sometimes hearing and seeing things as a young child that simply didn’t seem natural. “Banging noises when nobody was there. Once I’m sure a picture frame and cup moved by itself.” And he says that when she would rearrange furniture, she would be able to move heavy cupboards, beds, tables, and dressers around their house with a speed that didn’t seem possible. He would come home after being out for what seemed only a short amount of time to find literally everything had been moved. As a result of his early experiences of his mother’s illness, he says that he remains open-minded when it comes to the supernatural. Looking back, he says, “there was definitely the sense of an energy present.”