Thousands of young men have had to cope with the same problems and have emerged triumphant from the struggle. Thousands more create a fantasy which often involves the use of mirrors, either for self-admiration or for the masturbatory appeal of an imaginary onlooker. What made Nilsen’s fantasy unusual was the requirement that the body in the mirror be still, that the head not be visible. Dennis Nilsen was aroused by the image of himself, but of himself only as a dead man. Love and death were becoming dangerously mingled in his mind as the remembered image of his adored grandfather surged forward. Quietly in his quarters with his mirror, Dennis was dead, too.
In January 1968, Nilsen returned to England to be posted with the 1st Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, at Seaton Barracks, Plymouth, under the command of Lt.-Col. C.C. Mitchell (the famous silver-haired ‘Mad Mitch’). With them he was part of a spearhead battalion which went to Cyprus in 1969, to be placed thereafter in charge of catering for the officers’ mess at Montgomery Barracks, Berlin, fifty yards from the Communist border, where the new commanding officer was Lt.-Col. ‘Sandy’ Boswell.
In Berlin, fast retrieving its pre-war reputation for licence, Nilsen frequently found himself waking up in a strange bed next to an anonymous German civilian, with little in the way of satisfaction to boast of. He once went out on the town with a group of other soldiers and paid for a few minutes with a female prostitute. ‘I was amazed at how easy it all was, but apart from the wonderful shock of ejaculation I found the whole experience over-rated and depressing.’12
At the beginning of 1970, Dennis Nilsen was selected to cater for the ski-training parties at Bodenmais, Bavaria. The idea was that the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, by report the best infantry battalion in the British army, should train to fight under any conditions, even on ski-slopes. So they left Berlin, drove through East Germany, and settled themselves in for two joyous months in Bavaria. Their accommodation was at an old mountain farmhouse, converted into the Kottinghammer Ski-farm, where Nilsen was required to cook for two officers and thirty N.C.O.s and soldiers every day.
I felt it was important that everyone should get a full English breakfast fry-up every morning. There is nothing more uplifting to a soldier’s morale on a freezing inhospitable morning than fried egg on fried bread, bacon and sausage with baked beans and tomatoes, toast and butter with a steaming hot mug of tea or coffee. My efforts in catering (and my comradeship in drinking) made me the best friend of all ranks who attended the ski-ing school.13
Incidentally, it is worth mentioning, in view of the ‘slaughtering skills’ with which Nilsen was later credited at his trial, that his work did not involve killing animals, but only cutting them up for food. Only once did he kill a goose, for Christmas.
Dennis especially enjoyed the free ambience of equality, which accorded well with his rapidly developing sense of idealism in political matters. His Aden period had left him with a stern refusal to be seduced by the partisan view (‘Arabs die, soldiers die, and bloody governments just shuffle their feet’14), and he was now careful to avoid both press and army propaganda from any side. In Berlin he was as resistant to Soviet exaggerations as he was to the American variety, and saw it as his duty to protect an independent attitude based upon evidence. At Bodenmais, he flirted briefly with fascism. Noticing that the war memorial in the town square bore the date 1946 as marking the end of the war, he soon found that the Bavarians, or some of them, had fought what they regarded as the ‘American occupation’ for some months after the official cessation of hostilities, and had been sturdy supporters of Hitler. The attractions of fascism were not at all difficult to discern. ‘A stable order, national pride, military strength, full employment, unity and the achieving of national greatness’; there were old men in Bodenmais still willing to sing the same song, and Dennis Nilsen was an eager audience. But only for a moment – his radicalism would never again be tempted into such an extreme path.
The two months in Bodenmais coincided with a local beer festival and dance, for which Corporal Nilsen was dressed in lederhosen provided by the garage owner, ‘Mad Hans’. Under the influence of a rollicking band and far too many beers, Nilsen was drawn to the company of a pretty eighteen-year-old local girl, with whom he danced continuously, taking her eventually by the hand to the verandah where they kissed. Her relations intervened and pulled them apart. There were shouts and tears. Dennis returned to the dance, but found that he could not stop thinking about her. A brief episode of potential romance (nothing more) led nowhere.
After returning to Aldershot to pass the Intermediate Management Course examination, Nilsen was sent, still with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, to Fort George in Inverness-shire. Thus he went back to his Scottish roots, not many miles from his Aberdeenshire childhood. He was profoundly affected by Culloden Moor, where Charles Fraser from Inverallochy had fought and died so pointlessly centuries before, and where now he could stand and absorb the vast natural beauties around, seemingly contemptuous of the human follies and braveries they had witnessed. It was, he wrote, ‘one of the holiest and most sacred pieces of ground I have ever stood at. I could almost hear the sounds of battle and action around me. I would always walk from that site in a state of shock.’15
In August of 1970, Nilsen was selected to be in charge of the N.C.O. kitchen for the Queen’s Royal Guard at Ballater, during the period of the Queen’s annual holiday in Balmoral. He was by now an accomplished cook whose range of skills, from English nursery food to elaborate Escoffier concoctions (which he had been required to provide for visiting foreign dignitaries in Berlin), was much appreciated by the officers. At Ballater (Victoria Barracks) the guards, when not on ceremonial parade, would act as grouse beaters for the royal party, and soldiers of all ranks were expected to attend the Gillies Ball at Balmoral.
Early the following year, the battalion was reduced to company strength, to be known thenceforth as the Queen’s Company. There was a strenuous ‘Save the Argylls’ campaign in which Dennis Nilsen took part, but to no avail. When postings were announced, he was instructed to join 242 Signals at Aces High Station in the Shetland Islands, and so he set off on the evening of 24 January 1971 on what would turn out to be the final lap of his army career, and a turning-point in his emotional life.
Social life for 242 Signals centred on the Maybury Club, where soldiers and their wives mixed with local people, some romances flourished, and uncomplicated friendliness prevailed in a corner of the world where people still left their doors open and their cars unlocked. Soldiers took it in turns to run the bar. The evening would start decorously enough, with people turning up in their ‘Sunday best’ and chatting amiably, but alcohol and music soon banished inhibition, and by the end of the evening the Maybury was shaking with Scottish reels and country dancing. The party never degenerated into an ill-tempered rough-and-tumble, which would have insulted the peaceable nature and polite manners of the Shetlanders and embarrassed the offenders themselves. Corporal Nilsen was a regular participant in Maybury Club dances: ‘I would drink a lot of brandy and coke and be dragged from my solitude into the mêlée of the dance. I was quite good at country dancing and we would have good boisterous times while the wind and weather howled loudly outside.’16
That the enjoyment was superficial is suggested by a verse he wrote at the time, one stanza of which reads:
More and more retracting
From the Maybury social scene,
I brood
At night
Behind my iron screen.
The beauty of the location encouraged Dennis to pursue a hobby he had long contemplated. He had been fascinated by the idea of film-making since 1969, and regularly operated the film projector on recreational evenings. With the army’s blessing he took a film projectionist course at Beaconsfield, and when he returned to the Shetlands he was equipped to record on film the land and seascapes which were the scenes of his constant wanderings at every available hour off-duty. The Shetlanders are proud of their Viking ancestry
, which they celebrate yearly in the Viking festival, an evening pageant illuminated by a hundred torches. This occurred shortly after Nilsen’s arrival, suggesting to him that his own Norwegian blood might ally him in kinship with these friendly people. The combination of uncontaminated natural beauty and a sense that perhaps he belonged there more definitely than anywhere else, provoked an affective response with deep subconscious currents that he barely understood:
I had found great beauty, sadness and poetry in the Shetlands, and a wild desolation nearly untouched by man and his civilisation … I felt at one with heaven and its gods and all the earth and its peoples. For one moment in my life I really had roots and I had a warming identity with all things past, present, and future … My feelings were such that I knelt and took some wet island soil in my hand and smeared it all over my face. Was this the earth from which I had sprung? It was cold, harsh and soothing. I had a strange tingling feeling of being, somehow, home.
This is a disquieting passage of recollection for a variety of reasons. To call the earth which he rubbed on his face ‘cold, harsh and soothing’ is an unusual combination of epithets; that which is cold and harsh cannot easily be soothing as well, unless one has already decided that warmth and gentleness are for other people and that coldness and harshness befit one’s scarred nature. Furthermore, the sensation of being ‘home’ appears to be suggested less by the landscape than by the cold earth. Was this worship of the soil a manifestation of his latent idea that death was a going home, a returning to nature and transcendent reality to which mortal life was but an illusory interruption? The same morbid fancies had afflicted his mind as a boy in Fraserburgh, when he imagined himself drowning, swallowed by natural forces and carried back to his source down among the dead men. For a man overtly distrustful of all religions, these are strange metaphysical conceits. His scepticism had by now effectively crushed whatever religious inclinations he may have had and he looked with contempt upon the Church and its doings. That was the result of rational reflection. But there churned well below the surface a primitive religiosity which he forbore to acknowledge and which was alarming in its implications. For Dennis Nilsen’s God was beginning to look like the measureless cycle of life and death, a cycle which had long ago claimed his grandfather and left him stranded on the beach.
A poem which he wrote about this time serves to reinforce suspicions of a morbid sensitivity. Entitled ‘Fitful Head’ after a spot on the Shetland coast to which he repaired frequently, it ends in lines which sound uncomfortably inappropriate for a man who professed to be happy there:
Lives of sorrow,
Bones of the dead,
Given by the sea
To Fitful Head.
A million sea-birds,
White with despair,
Screaming above
In the crisp new air …
A hand, a smooth and empty hand
Always out of reach.
Life, like a sailor’s body
Drowned upon the beach.
An earlier line has ‘flawless’ hand instead of ‘empty’ hand, but it is the couplet hidden in the centre of the poem which strikes alarm, suggesting yet again that, in this man’s mind, the concepts of death and love are entangled:
There is no magic on this earth
But love and death to balance birth.17
To stand on the cliffs at Fitful Head is to feel one is on the edge of the world, and that no feet have stood there before you. R.L. Stevenson had written about it, and it was so far beyond the easy track of the tourist that it was disturbed only by birds. If Dennis Nilsen’s response to this desolate spot was melancholic in the extreme, it may have had something to do with the seismic effect of an unexpected personal event.
In the summer of 1972, during the last few months of Nilsen’s army service, there came on to his staff an eighteen-year-old private named Terry Finch.fn1 Nilsen was just finishing lunch at Maybury when he first saw Finch. ‘As he walked in the door he had the effect upon me of an electric shock.’ In the following weeks the two men became good friends, going for long walks together on the bleak, treeless, rocky terrain, recounting their lives, filming. Finch shared Nilsen’s enthusiasm for film-making, and helped him to plan his films, cut and edit them, and project them. Many of them were footage of each other at Fitful Head, where they sometimes lay exhausted and chatting. All the time Nilsen was reeling with emotions which he dared not divulge. ‘I loved him so much,’ he writes, ‘that it was a source of extreme pain to me when he was not around or when he would go off anywhere without me.’ He trained Finch to use the cinema projection equipment for the regular movie show, thus giving a more professional excuse for their companionship. If they exchanged glances at the dinner-table or the bar, they would make strenuous efforts to avert their eyes, Nilsen because he felt guilty, Finch because he was confused. One of the younger man’s duties was to wake Nilsen in the morning. Nilsen invariably woke before his arrival, and pretended to slumber so that he might feel a hand on his shoulder.
In many of the films they made together, Nilsen was the director and Finch the actor. Nilsen now says that the best scenes are those in which Finch was made to lie still and ‘play dead’, and that he was stimulated by this vision more than by any other. Perhaps he enjoyed the sense of being in control of someone, even if it was only feigned. He also says he masturbated when subsequently watching these scenes. As the films no longer exist, it is impossible to determine how much fantasy may have intruded into these recollections.
Terry Finch was not homosexual, but he was young enough and homesick enough to welcome affection from the corporal, an affection which grew more intense the longer it remained undeclared and unexplored. Nilsen was convinced that the boy was frightened of his own emotions as the friendship developed, and he was probably right. At all events, no overt attempt was ever made to give physical expression to their affection, which would certainly have proved disastrous. On two occasions their muddled sensitivity came close to collapse. After a social dinner in the local guest house the two of them went to the club for a drink. Finch disappeared and Dennis went to look for him. He found him lying on the grass outside, weeping, and brought him back in and helped to get him safely to his accommodation. He said he had been drinking too much, and the matter was left there. On the second occasion Dennis was sitting in an armchair at the club with a late-night drink long after the bar had closed. When the stragglers had all gone, Finch was left alone. He walked over to join Nilsen and began crying, talking of homesickness and isolation. Nilsen comforted him, and for a short moment their hands clasped.
They then drifted apart. Nilsen thought that the boy had made ‘a massive effort against his innermost feelings’, but it is more than likely that these ‘feelings’ were largely in his own imagination. It was when Finch realised the intensity of his friend’s attraction to him that he moved away, knowing well enough that he could not reciprocate. As for Nilsen, there was no doubt that he was entirely overwhelmed. ‘I would have given my life for Terry Finch,’ he wrote, and now as he watched him recede into the distance he became deeply depressed. ‘I knew I was leaving the army in a few weeks and would probably not see him ever again. Every kind of deep emotional pain in those last weeks sorely afflicted me. I wished I were dead.’ He went alone to the high overhang at Fitful Head and thought of throwing himself over, to the sound of the ever-present screeching birds. Then he walked back to base, finally dejected and hopeless.
Dennis Nilsen’s last act in the Shetlands the night before he left amazed his colleagues. All the films which he had made with such care and pride over the last year he threw into the incinerator and destroyed. They included, naturally, the films he and Finch had made together – 15,000 feet of them. The projector he gave to Finch as a farewell gesture. It was an impulsive and dramatic act, and it demonstrated Nilsen’s ability to erase memories by demolishing the evidence which could recall them. The films no longer existed; neither would the misery.
Or so
he thought. The following day, Nilsen’s mind was still preoccupied:
As the Viscount roared off the tarmac at Sumburgh I could see the face of Terry Finch superimposed on the flames of my imprisoned life. I imagined his lone figure standing on the dunes on Quendale Bay looking up at my passage as I flew past, out of his life, and disappeared into those high distant clouds. I never saw him again.
He was, he says, in utter despair, and nearly two years would have to pass before he could consider himself recovered. The account he gives may sound melodramatic to those whose emotional life follows a steadier path, but one cannot resist the suspicion that had he been fortunate enough to choose someone more accessible, his descent towards the ghastly events which began six years later might have been diverted.
Terry Finch married shortly afterwards. Dennis Nilsen went home to Strichen from Aberdeen airport, visualising the inscription on his own tombstone: BORN 1945, DIED 1972 AGED 26. ‘A lifetime of suppressed emotion had suddenly been released, smashed completely, and left me for dead.’18
Killing For Company Page 9
