A Passion for Poison
Page 4
Nonetheless, there were signs Graham was experiencing some inner turmoil. His psychiatric notes record that he regularly ‘rocked himself to sleep at night and he wet the bed until ten years’.43 Winifred remembered this behaviour, of her brother’s habit of rocking backwards and forwards in his cot: ‘He would do this even in his sleep, creating such a thumping sort of noise that the man next door lodged a complaint (incidentally, we saw a TV programme about deprived Vietnamese children fairly recently and they, too, rocked backwards and forwards in their cot and immediately we all thought of Graham).’44 Otherwise, he appeared to be ‘a loving child who showed positive emotional reactions’.45
Aware that her stepson was devoted to his aunt and uncle, Molly visited the Jouvenats regularly with him. The three children got along together well, and the two girls would take Graham across to play at the Welsh Harp reservoir. Apart from the busy roads, it was a pleasant area for children. Graham’s peers would get into mischief, running over the North Circular Road to jump on the steam trains at Charrington’s and playing on the railway land near an iron bridge later occupied by a vast Ikea outlet. Graham disliked physical activity and never joined the neighbourhood children for a weekend swim at the Willesden lido or in Gladstone Park’s sloping, kidney-shaped pool. He was happy with just his sister and cousin, who had a penchant for writing and performing their own plays. Graham would take any role assigned to him even if, on one memorable occasion, it involved standing on ‘stage’ for half an hour, playing a Belisha beacon streetlamp.
Winifred and Sandra had already left Braintcroft primary school when Graham joined. Situated on Warren Road, half a mile from his home, it opened in 1928 as a council school. The ‘chubby little boy . . . with dark brown hair, a little round face and freckles’ made few friends at his new school, pointedly ignoring all playground games.46 He had no interest in learning and even less in sports, although he was an avid reader. His fellow pupils seemed to regard him as part of the furniture; he was never bullied or deliberately excluded, but he made it clear he preferred his own company or that of a book. Photographs from a school trip to Swanage in Dorset show him as an awkward six-year-old, neat in school cap and blazer but sitting hunched among his peers, a rictus grin plastered to his face.
Fred Young remembered one bright spot during Graham’s later years at Braintcroft, fostered by his recreational time with Winifred and Sandra: ‘Graham was a quiet, withdrawn boy at school. He wasn’t all that brilliant as a scholar. But he was a brilliant actor. I remember going to see him in a school play in which he had the part of a wicked baron. He was stupendous – he brought the house down.’47 Another performance – this time as an ugly sister in the Braintcroft Christmas pantomime – was likewise inspired. His family knew that he could be extremely comical in the right mood, capable of poking fun at his own fastidiousness and with a keen eye for other people’s foibles.
At home, life was quiet. Fred liked to go to the pub once a week but rarely drank to excess. Molly usually joined him, leaving Graham at Links Road with his grandmother, aunt and uncle, whom he visited every day without fail. Win later questioned whether Graham’s crimes were due to having ‘lost two mothers by the age of three’, and certainly a deep-seated unhappiness was beginning to surface.48 While on remand in 1962, Graham reflected: ‘I am not very emotional. I used to be until I was about seven. I used to start crying when I thought of my mother dying.’49 He would sob himself to sleep, wondering what his life would have been like had his birth mother survived. These unhappy thoughts led to nightmares, punctuated by sleepwalking. His sister recalled: ‘Once Molly, our stepmother, heard a noise during the night and ran into the living room where Graham slept on a put-u-up, just in time to catch him before he fell off the sideboard. Apparently he had clambered up at one end, walked right across it and was just about to step out into space when she caught him.’50 Graham told a psychiatrist who examined him years later how he would lie awake in bed at that age, experiencing ‘alterations of consciousness characterised by perceiving things as exceptionally near or distant, by a pulsating and slowing of his thinking and by a feeling of “automatism” and being outside himself’.51 He never mentioned it to anyone at the time.
If the premature loss of his mother caused Graham a great deal of emotional trauma as a child, then so too did his father’s behaviour, according to both professionals and family members. Frank Walker – ‘Uncle Frank’ to Graham and his sister – had been a family friend for many years and had a lot of affection for the two children. He suspected that Fred blamed his son for Bessie’s death and felt him to be an unnecessarily stern father to Graham. The relationship troubled Frank, who regarded it as strangely formal: ‘His father, as far as I knew, had no time for him whatsoever. He never cherished him as he should, or anything like that.’52
During his interviews with Graham in 1972, consultant psychiatrist Dr Peter Scott observed: ‘The defendant did not get on well with his father, who was independently described as “not easy to get on with”. Rightly or wrongly, the defendant felt as a boy that his individuality had been “smothered” and that he was not understood.’53 A staff member in Broadmoor during the mid-1960s found Fred Young was ‘unable to see any point of view but his own and to be incapable of understanding anyone else’s problems’.54 Dr Patrick McGrath, then medical superintendent at Broadmoor, surprisingly named Win as a source, albeit at a point where her sympathies lay far more with her nephew: ‘Accounts by Graham’s aunt suggested that the father, her brother, was a callous and selfish man, indifferent to the feelings of those around him and tended to belittle Graham because of the boy’s poor mathematical ability.’55
The authorities were similarly unforgiving in their assessment of Molly Young. Another Broadmoor report posthumously described her as ‘domineering, house-proud and overbearing’.56 Dr McGrath felt that she had been ‘a hoarder, almost miserly . . . over-protective’, while Dr Peter Scott recorded that Graham was ‘markedly ambivalent about his stepmother, defending her at some points but expressing deep resentment at others. He remembers her cane and her parsimonious and hoarding habits, her lack of friends and discouragement of allowing him to have his friends home; all these points are confirmed from independent sources.’57
If Fred’s feelings towards his young son were complicated, leaving him unable to express normal affection, in the years to come he conveyed both love and forgiveness where many other parents may have found it impossible. The same was also true of Molly Young. During her police interviews prior to Graham’s 1962 trial, Win made no criticism of her brother or her sister-in-law, stating simply: ‘My sister-in-law was a good mother to them, was very house-proud and my brother Fred was very happy.’58
But the few friends Graham made at school recall that he complained Molly was too strict, kept him short of funds (‘I have given him pocket money ever since he was a nipper,’ Win told the police) and destroyed his collection of model aeroplanes after some minor misdemeanour.59 He also claimed that one of the reasons he called to see his aunt after school each day was because Molly locked him out of the house while Fred was at work, to prevent him from snacking. He also resented the fact that he wasn’t allowed a dog, but Molly, who loved animals as much as the rest of the family, understandably worried about traffic on the thundering artery where they lived. She did agree to a budgie; named Lemon, the little yellow bird spent hours perched on Graham’s finger. But when Molly grumbled that her stepson spoke more to Lemon than anyone else in the family and she might have the bird destroyed, Graham interpreted her words as a threat rather than an exasperated joke.
Molly’s concern over the dangers of the North Circular Road was borne out in 1955 when Graham himself was knocked down by a car ‘but not seriously hurt’.60 Apart from Dr Peter Scott’s note about the accident, there are no further records available. Nonetheless, Graham’s character underwent a series of changes thereafter; subtle at first, these soon became ever more pernicious.
Chapter Two
O
MINOUS DARK CLOUDS heralded the perfect storm, primed to burst over the ordinary-looking house on the North Circular Road. After his accident, Graham’s love of reading deepened, taking him back repeatedly to certain shelves of his local library. His interests were specific: history, the occult and pharmacy. He read volumes of biography: Julius and Tiberius Caesar, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Oliver Cromwell, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Graham was barely nine years old. The war had ended only a decade before and was a sensitive subject, but his imagination flared at the spectacle of Nazi torchlit mass rallies and the thunder of Hitler’s incandescent raging speeches. Where other boys collected stamps or stickers, he gathered clippings about Germany’s war and fashioned himself a swastika armband. His family made little fuss, thinking him silly rather than sinister. Win shook her head when asked about it: ‘Hitler? I think [Graham] could even tell you what he had for breakfast.’61
Molly grew more worried. She visited the library, pleaded with the head librarian to keep an eye on Graham’s reading materials, asking if it might be possible for them to forbid him certain books. The librarian reassured her that it was not necessarily a bad thing to read about recent history and that any obsessions were almost certainly a phase. Annoyed at her intervention, Graham carted his books over to the Welsh Harp, reading peaceably away from Molly’s watchful gaze. Fred Young said nothing about it but admitted afterwards that it was this stage when he first became aware that his son definitely seemed different to other boys: ‘He did not mix well or show any interest in normal youthful activities, but spent a lot of his time reading.’62 Win doted on her nephew as much as ever, but realised to her consternation that although he was ‘a well-behaved lad, good-mannered but withdrawn’, he had developed ‘morbid tastes, reading books on poisons, death, voodoo and anything horrific’.63
Despite his family’s attempts to nullify his interests by ignoring them, there were signs of something more serious emerging. A later psychiatric report records that at the age of ten, Graham was ‘taken successively to every form in his school and made to apologise for organising an anti-Jewish movement’.64 The school’s attitude is commendable, but they, too, were beginning to sense that he was falling out of reach; his form master described him as ‘borderline Grammar School standard but underhanded, sly, frequently in trouble but slipping out of punishment’.65
Graham’s fascination with the occult deepened. He asked Sandra if she had read much about it. She replied that she had no interest in the subject, which prompted him to launch into an explanation of what he found so fascinating about it. He told her he had learned a lot from a chap who frequented the library; the man claimed to be part of a Willesden coven. Sandra looked at him sceptically but was alarmed when she and her mother found a tiny plasticine figure, rust-coloured with green legs and pierced through with darning needles, in one of Graham’s jacket pockets.
One subject began to emerge above all else in Graham’s small world. Fred had encouraged him to think about becoming an engineer, but in his last year at primary school, Graham told his father bluntly that he found it boring. He admitted to being fascinated by all things chemical, however. Sandra found him perusing the small bottles on his grandmother’s dressing table in Links Road. ‘He started showing an interest in queer things,’ she recalled. ‘He was always collecting empty perfume bottles and other odd bottles, bottles which smelled, especially nail varnish.’66 Her mother also noticed Graham’s penchant for such things: ‘He was always interested in little bottles and kept them in his pockets. We used to find them and throw them out.’67 They realised that he inhaled the vapours, using ether and acetone as stimulants. Sometimes he produced a bottle from his pockets and asked his sister, aunt or cousin to guess at the contents before listing the ingredients himself. He talked about the effects different poisons had on the body. Once, when Sandra encountered him near home, he stopped to tell her what happened when you ingested an aspirin on an empty stomach. Suddenly, when anyone felt a bit off-colour, Graham would question them about their symptoms as a doctor would before advising on a remedy. He referred to every ailment by its medical name and demonstrated an outstanding memory for detail.
Poison was his passion. He borrowed book after book on the subject from the library, disguising the covers with ones filched from other, less contentious books in order to avoid upsetting his stepmother. As his 11-plus exams approached, he did hardly any revision and no one was more surprised than him when he passed. As a reward, his father bought him a chemistry set.
As the 1950s came to a close, living in Neasden had its advantages. Close to ‘swinging’ London, it was home to Twiggy, the first supermodel, chart-toppers Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, and also boasted a thriving hub of youth culture on its doorstep in the shape of the Ace Café, which thrummed to the beat of rock ’n’ roll and revving motorbikes. The pubs, most bearing mock-Tudor beams, were always busy, and there was an influx of new people as the building boom got underway again. And yet, despite its potential, Neasden slipped further into decline. The New Statesman cited the suburb as a prime example of what goes wrong when a large road ‘both carves up and strangles an area’.68
Graham had zero interest in the cultural revolution swirling about him. His head was filled with poison and its practitioners, even as he travelled into town with Molly to buy his new uniform from Myers, the outfitters on Neasden High Road. He had lost weight since leaving primary school, and when Molly took him to the barber shop on the opposite side of the street, his dark-haired reflection was all sharp angles, deep-set eyes and a narrow mouth.
Graham was one of the first pupils to attend the John Kelly secondary school on Willesden’s Tanfield Avenue. Founded in 1958, it was a hulking, modern glass building with extensive playing fields and a separate school for girls, and it rose behind the residential street like a ship in harbour. Headmaster Henry Merkel, nicknamed ‘Harry’ by the pupils, was a quirky but strict figure. His assembly speech, ‘Box out is box out’, used the metaphor of someone knocking an object from another person’s grasp to remind pupils to be vigilant about their person, thoughts and possessions.
Graham established himself as a fairly mediocre student apart from in science, where teacher Geoffrey Hughes placed him in the ‘A’ stream for chemistry. Rather than conceal his obsession with poison, he chose to flaunt it, gaining him two nicknames: ‘Acid’ and the ‘Mad Professor’. He remained fairly insular, but for the first time in his life found two friends who tolerated his idiosyncrasies with good humour: classmates Clive Creager and Chris Williams. ‘I don’t know why we were mates,’ Chris reflected. ‘He had no one else really and I suppose I felt sorry for him. Graham wasn’t like me or like any of the boys. He was always grown up, with an adult’s mentality but always warped [and] peculiar in many ways.’69
All three shared an interest in chemistry. Left alone together in the school lab, Chris and Clive watched as Graham fed various substances to mice in order to study the process of death. Afterwards, he would perform elaborate post-mortems, talking his friends through the procedure as if he were a regular pathologist. He hid a mouse in his satchel, intending to carry out an autopsy in his bedroom, but when Molly discovered the dead rodent, she made him dispose of it immediately.
Enraged, Graham shut himself into his bedroom. Taking out a large sheet of paper, he drew a grave, surrounded by snakes, spiders and bats. On the headstone he wrote: ‘In Hateful Memory of Molly Young, Rest in Peace’. The incident might have remained no more than an unpleasant childish reaction, but in context it became something far darker. Winifred remembered Molly being terribly upset when she found the picture, where Graham had deliberately left it for her; furthermore, she believed it was around this time when her brother’s mind ‘began to split’.70
Graham himself admitted that by then he was ‘obsessed with the macabre’.71 Clive Creager sat next to him in the classroom and watched with disturbed amusement as Graham’s pencil
flew across his schoolbooks, depicting his friends: ‘I would be hanging from some gallows over a vat of acid. Graham would be holding a flame to the rope. He liked drawing people on gallows with syringes marked “poison” sticking into them.’72 Similarly, when Uncle Jack made Aunt Win a clipboard for bingo, Graham covered it with doodles of skulls, monsters and bottles of poison. The original sketch of Molly’s headstone was the first in a series of images: coffins engraved ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’, nightmarish creatures, death’s heads, devils and vampires. ‘Uncle’ Frank Walker remembered that Molly brought a couple of the sketches along to show him on a visit, asking in a troubled voice, ‘What do you think of these?’ Frank responded sharply, ‘Well, he’s your boy, isn’t he?’73 He had little sympathy with the Youngs, believing that they had a duty to sit down with Graham and talk through the issues that led to his behaviour. At one stage, Graham tried switching from sketches to short stories, but set aside any dreams of literary stardom when the Reader’s Digest failed to respond to his written flights of Gothic fancy.
The onset of puberty left Graham tongue-tied around the female friends of his sister and cousin. He developed a habit of blurting out strange comments, either due to nerves or – as Sandra suspected – he enjoyed embarrassing people. When Jack was having treatment in Manor House hospital, Graham took the bus with Sandra. She asked the conductor for the correct fare, which included a child’s ticket for her cousin, only to notice that Graham had lit a cigarette and was blowing smoke rings down the aisle. On the way home, after she pointed out a friend’s boyfriend, Graham spent the rest of journey parroting the line, driving her to distraction. She reluctantly agreed to let him accompany her again to hospital and regretted it when Graham sat directly opposite a female passenger, leaning forward to glare silently at her until she moved hastily away. On another occasion when the two of them visited a café, Graham knocked a drink from the waitress’ hand, triumphantly yelling Harry Merkel’s line, ‘Box out is box out!’ The only time he behaved normally was around elderly people, whose company he seemed to find comforting. He often visited nearby Gladstone Park, where he would sit on a bench and strike up a conversation with any aged people relaxing there.