‘You made a right old row, Rosie,’ says Fred – not as a rebuke, but as if he is complimenting her. Rose is at the sink now, opening a bag of frozen peas with scissors. ‘He enjoyed it, evidently,’ she agrees, nodding to some five-pound notes by her purse. ‘Says he is coming again next week.’ Fred rolls himself a cigarette contentedly.
Dinner is a simple affair: defrosted food with slices of white bread and a glass of tap water. Fred eats quickly, talking to Rose as he does so about all he has done in the day. He has been at Stroud Court, a home for autistic people near the village of Nailsworth. His employers are paid to carry out maintenance work for the institution. Fred says that, when he was driving back to the depot near Stroud, he saw a woman by the side of the road holding her skirt up for him. He could see ‘everything’. Neither Rose nor the children react to this, considering Fred to be ‘off in a world of his own’.
He then asks the family if they can guess who he saw as he was driving along Barton Street that evening. Without a pause he answers his own question: ‘I seen Heather!’ The mention of this name transforms the atmosphere in the room; suddenly, everybody is listening to Fred.
Heather is Fred and Rose’s first-born daughter. None of the children have seen her since she apparently left home several years earlier. It is difficult for the younger ones even to remember what their sister looked like, because all her photographs have disappeared from the house. ‘I come down Barton Street and there she was. She is a working girl now, mind. She is, what’s’name, selling drugs and that. I called out “Hi, Heather!” but I couldn’t stop,’ says Fred.
The children ask, ‘How did she look, Dad?’ making no comment about Fred’s claim that their sister is a prostitute and a drug dealer. He used to say she was a lesbian, because she never had a boyfriend. The children think Fred is ‘sex mad’.
‘She looked rough. But she must be making a good bit of money, mind,’ Fred replies.
Rose’s face becomes flushed, and she glares at Fred angrily. She jumps up from the sofa, snatches his plate and pushes past him into the kitchen, scraping the left-overs into the red pedal-bin by the door. Fred falls silent. He knows how fierce Rose’s temper can be, and that she does not like him talking about Heather.
He sits and watches the back of Rose’s head. She is standing at the glass doors that lead out into the back garden. Rain is falling, making the coloured patio slabs shiny. It was wet like this when Heather died. Fred’s gaze drifts across to the edge of the patio by the fir trees, and then his blue eyes glaze over thoughtfully.
The telephone rings abruptly – it is for Fred. He is called out by one of the local landlords to visit a bedsitter down the street. A bath has overflowed and the ceiling of the room below is ruined; the landlord wants Fred to patch up the damage and then arrange a time to repair the plaster. He will be paid in cash, and Fred is never known to turn down extra work – even on a Friday night – so he goes out.
When he returns home, most of the lights are off and the house is quiet. He turns on the television just in time to watch a late news bulletin. Fred has no patience with most programmes, but always tries to catch the headlines.
Rose is in bed in their room on the top floor of the house. Fred undresses and climbs in beside her, turning off the light. He regrets having mentioned Heather’s name today, upsetting Rose, but he thinks they should try and maintain the fiction that their daughter is still alive.
Thinking of Heather reminds him of all the other girls who have died. Fred puts his arms around Rose and closes his eyes.
Faces flicker in his mind like ghosts, and then there is blackness.
1
THE BLUE-EYED BOY
The village of Much Marcle lies just off the A449 road, halfway between the market towns of Ledbury and Ross-on-Wye, in rich Herefordshire countryside one hundred and twenty miles west of London. The Malvern Hills are to the north, the Wye Valley is to the west and the Forest of Dean to the south. Gloucester, the nearest major city, is fourteen miles away across the River Severn.
At the beginning of the Second World War, Much Marcle was a village of approximately seven hundred people, most of whom were employed on the land. An ancient settlement dating back to the Iron Age, the unusual name of the village derives from Old English, meaning ‘boundary wood’; the prefix ‘Much’ sets it apart from the neighbouring hamlet of Little Marcle. The local accent is distinctive: Gloucester is pronounced ‘Glaaster’ and sentences are often concluded with the word ‘mind’, pronounced ‘minde’.
There are several grand residences in the village, including a Queen Anne rectory and Homme House, the setting for a wedding scene in the Victorian book Kilvert’s Diary. Much Marcle’s other notable buildings are the half-timbered cottages, the redbrick school house, the Memorial Hall and cider factory. Standing on opposite sides of the main road are Weston’s Garage and the Wallwyn Arms public house, and along the lane from the Wallwyn Arms is the thirteenth-century sandstone parish church, St Bartholomew’s, distinguished by its higgledy-piggledy graveyard and imposing, gargoyled tower.
The surrounding countryside is a pleasing sweep of green pasture and golden corn, with orchards of heavy cider apples and venerable perry pear trees left over from the last century, geometric hop fields and ploughed acres of plain red soil.
In fact it is such an uneventful place that a landslide during the reign of Elizabeth I long remained the most fantastical event in Much Marcle’s history. For three days in 1575 there was much fear and excitement in the parish when ‘Marclay Hill … roused itself out of a dead sleep and with a roaring noise removed from the place where it stood’, destroying all in its path, including hedgerows, two highways and a chapel. A wall of earth and stone fifteen feet high was the result of the mysterious upheaval, and it is marked to this day on Ordnance Survey maps as ‘The Wonder’.
The Marcle and Yatton Flower Show and Sports Fair has been held in a field on the edge of the village on the last Saturday in August since the 1890s. It is the main summer event in the area, a descendant of the more ancient Marcle Fayres. Stallholders sell food, fancy goods and clothing; there are also fairground rides, exhibitions and sports, including a five-and-a-half-mile road race between Ledbury and the village.
It was during the August of 1939 when the man who would become Fred West’s father sauntered down the lane from the nearby hamlet of Preston, heading for the Marcle Fair. Walter West, a powerfully built young farm hand, was born in 1914 and had been raised near the town of Ross-on-Wye. He was intimidated as a child by his army sergeant father, a forbidding character who was decorated for his service in the Great War of 1914–18. Walter complained that even when the old man came out of the army, he did not leave its disciplinarian ways behind.
With little education, barely able to read or write, Walter had left school at the age of eleven to work on the land. His maternal grandfather was a wagoner, employed to tend farm horses and their tackle; Walter became the wagoner’s boy.
He had married for the first time when he was twenty-three, to a nurse almost exactly twice his age. One of twin sisters, Gertrude Maddocks was a 45-year-old spinster with a long, kindly face. She married Walter in 1937, and they set up home together in Preston. Walter went to work at Thomas’ Farm nearby.
Gertrude was unable to have children, so the couple decided to foster a one-year-old boy named Bruce from an orphanage. Two years into the marriage, Gertrude met a bizarre death when, on a hot June day, she was stung by a bee, collapsed and died as young Bruce stood helplessly by. Walter found her body sprawled on the garden path when he returned home. After the funeral, he realised that he was unable to care for his adopted son on his own and handed the boy back to the orphanage.
Walter always spoke fondly of his first wife, despite the considerable age gap between them and the brevity of their marriage. He kept her photograph and the brass-bound Maddocks family bible among his most valued possessions for the rest of his life.
It was two and a half months aft
er Gertrude’s funeral when Walter attended the 1939 Marcle Fair. He was loafing along between the attractions when he came to a needlework stall, where a wavy-haired girl was displaying her work. The girl was shy and unforthcoming, but Walter eventually discovered that her name was Daisy Hill and that she was in service in Ledbury. Her parents lived in a tied cottage called Cowleas, on a sloping track known as Cow Lane near Weston’s cider factory in the village. Her father, William Hill, was a familiar figure in the area: a tall, skinny man with a large black moustache who tended a milking herd of Hereford cattle. His family had been in Much Marcle, mostly working the land, for as long as anyone could remember, and were sometimes mocked in the village as being simple-minded. Because they were named Hill, and their home was built on a slight rise, the family were known as ‘The Hillbillies’.
One of four children, Daisy Hannah Hill was only sixteen years old when she met Walter. She was an unworldly young girl, short and squat of figure with a plain face and a gap between her two front teeth. Daisy was flattered and surprised by the attentions of this mature man, and accepted Walter’s invitation to take a turn with him on the swing-boats. They whooped excitedly as they rode through the air above the green countryside, marvelling at how far they could see.
They courted for a while as Walter continued to live at Preston, a half-hour walk from the home of Daisy’s parents. He then took a job as a cow-man, like Daisy’s father.
Walter married Daisy at St Bartholomew’s on 27 January 1940. Before the service, friends and family gathered under the ancient yew tree outside the church porch, making sure their ties were straight and their shoes clean. Where Walter’s first wife had been so much older than himself, there was comment among the guests that the second Mrs Walter West was a girl of only seventeen. Daisy wore a white dress with a veil, gloves, and little silver slippers; she carried tulips and a lucky horseshoe. The groom was a burly man who looked older than his twenty-six years. He was dressed in his good dark suit, draping his pocket-watch and chain across his waistcoat, and wore a carnation in his buttonhole. When it came to signing the parish register, Walter betrayed his lack of education by printing his name in large childish letters.
He had found living in Preston upsetting after Gertrude’s death, so the newly-married couple set up home at Veldt House Cottages, just off the A449 main road. Daisy fell pregnant with their first child almost immediately.
She was eight months into her term, and alone in the house, when there was a knock at the door one evening. Daisy did not like opening up when Walter was out milking, but the visitor would not go away, so she had little choice. Confronting her was a stern-looking policeman in full uniform. Daisy was such a nervous and unsophisticated young girl that she found the sight of the policeman deeply unsettling, even though there was nothing for her to worry about. He explained that there had been a road accident outside the cottage: a man had been knocked off his bicycle and the policeman wanted to know whether she had witnessed anything. Daisy gabbled that she had not, and quickly said goodbye. But the visit had so excited her that, by the time Walter returned home, his wife had gone into labour. A tiny baby daughter was born prematurely later that night and given the name Violet. She died in the cradle a few days later.
Walter and Daisy then moved into a red-brick tied cottage at a lonely but pretty junction in the village known as Saycells’ Corner. The surrounding fields were covered with wild flowers, and a footpath known as the ‘Daffodil Way’ cut across a nearby meadow.
Bickerton Cottage was almost one hundred years old, and very primitive. It had neither electricity nor gas, and its water was drawn from a well in the garden by hand pump. To the left of the front door was a living room with an antiquated iron cooking range; both this room and the scullery had stone floors and low ceilings. A small flight of narrow stairs led up to two box-like bedrooms. The windows of the little house were four tiny squares that looked out over an orchard of apple trees and, on the other side of the lane, a large willow. The Wests kept chickens and a pig in an outhouse behind the cottage; this was also where they emptied the bucket that was their only toilet.
Once settled in, Daisy became pregnant again. She took to her bed in late 1941 to give birth for the second time, groaning with pain throughout a bleak autumn night. A fire was built in her bedroom and water was set to boil on the range downstairs. Daisy could hear the barking of foxes and the hoot of owls as the clock ticked away the hours of darkness. At last, as the sky lightened with the dawn, a healthy baby boy was born, gulping his first breath at 8:30 A.M. on 29 September 1941.
Four weeks later the proud parents carried their son down the lane, through the gate of St Bartholomew’s and into the chill of the nave. The Reverend Alexander Spittall bent to his work over the Norman tub font. He murmured the baptism, as the water trickled through his hands, naming the screaming infant Frederick Walter Stephen West. It would soon be abbreviated to Freddie West and, later on, to Fred West.
The joy and pride that Daisy felt were obvious for all to see. She took little Freddie to her bed each night, where she cuddled and petted the boy, often to the exclusion of her own husband. Hers was a beautiful baby: the curly hair that would later grow so dark was straw-yellow at first, and everybody marvelled at his astonishing blue eyes, shining like two huge sapphires. Daisy displayed Freddie’s christening card in a prominent position in the cottage. Illuminated in gold, red and blue like a page from a sacred book, the card read: ‘He that Believeth and is Baptised shall be Saved.’
Daisy gave birth to six more children over the following decade, in conditions of considerable poverty. For several years it seemed as if she had hardly given birth to one child before falling pregnant with the next.
The Second World War brought the additional hardship of rationing to the village. Walter earned only £6 per week, and the family quite literally had to live off the land. Windfall cooking apples and other fruit could be collected free from the orchard behind the cottage; chickens were kept for eggs and to provide a bird at Christmas. Walter brought pails of unpasteurised milk home from the farm each day, and in the evening and at weekends, tended his vegetable garden. Daisy baked her own bread and worked at her laundry in an iron tub behind the cottage. As she washed, Daisy cooed and fussed over Freddie, who stared back at her from his cradle with his big blue eyes.
The next baby, John Charles Edward, arrived in November 1942, just thirteen months after Fred. The relationship between the two boys would be the closest and most complex of any of the children. Walter and Daisy seldom left their sons alone, and seemed to care for them very much. John Cox, who has lived next door to Bickerton Cottage since 1927, remembers: ‘They thought a lot of the children. If ever they went off, they took the kiddies with them on their bicycles.’
Daisy gave birth to her third son within eleven months of having John. David Henry George was born on 24 October 1943, when Fred was two, but suffered from a heart defect and died a month later. It was partly because of his death that Daisy wanted to move on from Bickerton Cottage.
They went to live at a house named Hill’s Barn in the village. Daisy again fell pregnant. Her first daughter, Daisy Elizabeth Mary, was born in September 1944, and came to look most like her mother: they would be known to the family as ‘Little Daisy’ and ‘Big Daisy’.
In July 1946 the family moved for the last time, to the house where Fred grew up. Moorcourt Cottage was tied to Moorcourt Farm, owned by Frank Brookes, where Walter found work tending to the milking herd and helping with the harvest. Despite being called a ‘cottage’, it is actually quite a large building, semidetached with two chimney stacks and a dormer window set in the tiled roof. It stands on the outskirts of Much Marcle at a bend in the Dymock road, surrounded by open country. Looking out of the front windows there are uninterrupted views of the fields stretching away to May Hill in the distance. Cows low in the meadows, and the spire of St Bartholomew’s, within an embrace of yew trees, is just visible over to the right of the panorama.
Conditions at Moorcourt Cottage were basic. Eight slept in three cramped bedrooms: one for Mr and Mrs West, one for the three girls, and one for the boys, where Doug took the single bed and Fred and John shared the double. A tin bath was set in front of the parlour fire on wash nights, the children bathing under the watch of a pair of crude ornamental Alsatian dogs Walter had won at the Hereford Fair. Toilet facilities consisted of a simple bucket which had to be emptied each morning into a sewage pit, and rats were a constant pest. When Daisy saw one crossing the yard, she would blast at it with Walter’s shotgun – one of Fred’s abiding memories of his mother was of her shooting at ‘varmints’.
Of the six surviving children, Fred was his mother’s favourite. Coming after the tragedy of Violet’s death he was particularly precious; the son that Walter had wanted and the answer to Daisy’s prayers. As the baby grew up he could do no wrong; younger brother Doug described Fred as ‘mammy’s blue-eyed boy’. Daisy believed whatever Fred told her and took his side in squabbles between the children. For his part, Fred adored his mother and did exactly as she said.
Fred & Rose Page 2
