Let This Be Our Secret

by Deric Henderson

  Howell had just one potentially serious girlfriend before he met Lesley. She was someone he met shortly after he started university but she two-timed him at a summer camp. She pleaded for a reconciliation afterwards but the young dental student was hurt and wanted nothing more to do with her.

  As a young man Howell’s religious beliefs left him frustrated and sexually repressed. Perhaps it was no great surprise then that he developed a preoccupation with pornography, buying his first top-shelf magazine when he was nineteen and a student in Belfast. He would go on to battle with pornography all his adult life as the fascination soon developed into an obsession about which, as a strict Christian, he was tormented with guilt. In later life he made numerous attempts to break a compulsion to spend hours sitting alone at night watching pornographic images on his computer: he even went so far as to enlist the help of church elders and some fairly sophisticated computer software – but all to no avail.

  When it came to girls, the young Howell was intense and possessive. He first met Lesley at a church gathering. In March 1980 when friends presented him with a bicycle for his twenty-first birthday at a party at the Queen’s Halls of Residence she and some of the girls with whom she shared a house were among the guests.

  Lesley, a very attractive and gregarious girl who was a student nurse at Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital, was popular with men and had been on dates with various suitors before meeting Colin. The first of them worked for the BBC but the relationship lasted no more than a month. She once got talking to a man she met on the bus going home to Hillsborough, County Down, but he ended up asking out one of Lesley’s friends. And finally, just around the time she met Howell but before things had got serious between them, she went out with a junior doctor. She liked him and thought him a bit special. But Howell, who clearly was more serious about Lesley than she was about him, was not best pleased. He turned up at her house and waited for her to return with her new friend. When the two arrived Howell ended up physically ejecting the young man from the building in a fit of jealous rage. It was perhaps an early indication of his intense and controlling instincts when it came to women.

  She was born Lesley Anne Elizabeth Clarke, on 24 February 1960 in Plymouth, England, where her father Harry (who originally came from Waringstown in County Armagh) was based with the Royal Marines at the time. Mrs May Clarke (née Marshall) had given birth to her only other child, Christopher, in Lurgan, County Armagh, some eighteen months earlier. After Mr Clarke left the Marines and went into business, working for a pet food company, the family moved first to Eaglesham in Scotland and then to west Kilbride, before settling for a number of years in Gosworth Park, Dalkey, south Dublin. This is where Lesley spent the happiest years of her childhood.

  She attended Wesley College for a year and then switched to Newpark Comprehensive, then a new and innovative co-educational school in Blackrock. Lesley was bright and intelligent, and a very good student. She became part of a small circle of friends who attended an evangelical youth club, the Highway Club, at Merrion Hall in the centre of Dublin. This was around 1971. She was already friendly with a girl called Hilary Scargill, who lived just doors away from her family home, when she met Valerie Allen from Silchester Park, Glenageary. Valerie had been a pupil at Glengara Girls and then moved to Newpark. Being comprehensive schools under the patronage of the Church of Ireland, both Newpark and Mount Temple were open to all denominations.

  Lesley and Valerie would go to the youth club every Saturday night, and later they sang together in a choir called ‘Daybreak’. During the Easter school holidays they would sometimes stay in Lesley’s family caravan at Roundwood, near Glendalough in the Wicklow Mountains. During the day they played Monopoly and ate bacon sandwiches; at night, after dressing up to disguise their teenage years, they would slip off to a nearby pub. One weekend, as Valerie recalls, the girls went for a walk and found a pregnant sheep in danger of drowning in a bog. They eventually managed to pull it free, and the rescue operation confirmed Lesley’s love of animals. At the time she had a cocker spaniel called Patsi, and had also doted on the family’s previous dog, Pip, also a cocker spaniel. In later years, when she was married and living in Coleraine, she would have another spaniel, Kerrie.

  After sitting their Leaving Cert. school exams, Valerie went to Dublin’s Trinity College and Lesley to Belfast to take up a career in nursing which was part of a family tradition. It seemed that Lesley was always destined for the wards, according to Valerie, now a professor in the English Department at John Jay College, City University of New York: ‘She was demonstrative and very caring to her parents. She was also very affectionate. She had a lovely way. She would compliment us about how we looked. She was very sweet, intelligent, not quick-tempered or jealous.’

  After a short spell working in a shop in Dublin, Lesley moved to Belfast to take up a place as a student nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital. Belfast was a dark and dangerous city: eighty-eight people died in a year which also saw an escalating protest inside the Maze Prison by 250 Republicans who were demanding political status. The prisoners’ campaign took the form of refusing to slop out and smearing excrement around their cells. The then all-Ireland Catholic Primate, Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich, who visited the jail at the time, said the cells reminded him of a Calcutta slum.

  The new arrival from the Irish Republic was apolitical, but she quickly realized that life in west Belfast, where she nursed, was very different from the cosseted environment of the fashionable and wealthy Dublin suburb in which she had spent so many of her formative years. Her type of evangelicalism kept her away from the sectarian politics of Northern Ireland, but friends remember that she once voted for a Unionist candidate because she was upset at having to treat young British soldiers with perforated stomachs: the result, it was said, of accepting sandwiches laced with ground glass which had been offered to them by seemingly friendly locals on the nationalist Falls Road.

  Initially Lesley missed Dublin and even though there were about fifteen other trainees, including two from County Monaghan, she admitted that she felt lonely for the first few months, living in nursing accommodation on the city’s Whitewell Road. The training on the wards was demanding, and at night the student nurses would have to study in preparation for a test every Friday. More often than not, Lesley would finish top of the class. She once won a silver medal for being the top student in her year.

  With Lesley dressed as a cheeky schoolgirl, the student nurses held a party to mark their departure from the accommodation at Whitewell Road to the nursing home at the Royal. By this time, Lesley had developed a close circle of good friends. There were half a dozen in the group, all of them Christians, who enjoyed each other’s company. Some of them went home at weekends, while Lesley took time out to visit relatives from her father’s side of the family in mid-Ulster. She worried about her grandmother, Elizabeth Marshall, who lived on the Banbridge Road in Lurgan, County Armagh: Elizabeth suffered from high blood pressure and died in 1981, just five years before Lesley’s mum passed away from poor health brought on by heart-related problems.

  Lesley was an outstanding nurse. Her early days at the Royal were spent in the geriatric unit. The work was hard and demanding, both physically and emotionally. Some of the nurses found it depressing, but Lesley got on remarkably well with the elderly women, sometimes cleaning and polishing their fingernails and putting on their perfume in readiness for visiting time. A former colleague, a junior doctor at the time, remembers Lesley on the haematology ward, nursing an elderly lady who had undergone a bone marrow transplant. This patient later died, but Lesley had gone out of her way to make her final days as comfortable as possible. The ex-colleague recalls: ‘She was extremely good to that lady, but then all the patients liked her. She was exceptionally considerate, a very caring nurse, and you would be hard pressed to say anything negative about her. She was a very nice girl, bubbly, with beautiful eyes. I didn’t know her for very long. She was a born-again Christian. I remember having our photograph
taken with that lady, Lesley sitting on one side of the bed, me on the other. The hospital, and working in medicine, was a lot different in those days. We used to play tennis on the courts outside the wards, and if you walked in still wearing your tennis gear, then nobody took a blind bit of notice. It was all so much more relaxed and civilized, and that was the type of regime Lesley worked in.’

  Keen to move out of nursing accommodation, Lesley and her friends decided to check out the ads in the Belfast Telegraph for rented accommodation, quickly finding a house which looked suitable for them. It was a warm summer’s evening when they went to investigate No. 108 University Avenue. Lesley and her friends liked the location because the road was tree-lined and away from the other students, who generally preferred accommodation closer to the hospital on the Donegall Road and off the lower end of Lisburn Road. The landlord was not hugely impressed, however, when six student nurses said they wanted to rent his property. As well as Lesley, there was Ruth Allison from Belfast, Ann Kempton from Dungannon, County Tyrone, Linda Patterson from Lifford, County Donegal, Janet Torbitt from Whitehead, County Antrim, and Carolyn Walker from Londonderry. Carolyn would later become one of Lesley’s three bridesmaids. At first the landlord was very reluctant but Lesley assured him that they were girls of high standing who didn’t drink alcohol, and she promised him there would be no wild parties. It was her negotiating skills which secured the lease. She moved into the first-floor front room, which was bright, with a dining table by the window.

  It was around this time that Lesley’s parents moved to Hillsborough. They thought she would be pleased to be closer to the new family home, but it effectively signalled the end of her days in Dublin. Just as her mother had been sorry to leave Scotland, Lesley was heartbroken to no longer have a permanent base in the city she loved, and would now be living 100 miles away from her two close friends from school, Valerie Allen and Hilary Scargill. She talked a lot about her time in Dublin. Her recall was impressive, if somewhat romantic, and when she went back from time to time, she felt it wasn’t the same somehow. After the family move to Hillsborough, her mother May’s health began to deteriorate. She had to have a coronary artery bypass, but problems developed in the healing process after a vein was removed from her leg. Then one night, while at singing practice in Windsor Baptist Church, Lesley heard that her mum had suffered a small stroke and immediately feared that a much bigger one lay ahead.

  The young nurse would make the short journey to the wards on an old bicycle which she had brought up from Dublin. It was a bit of a bone-shaker. Maroon in colour with a basket in front, it rattled as she pedalled along the Donegall Road before the morning rush-hour traffic. When it rained she pulled on waterproofs over her uniform and wore red wellington boots. One morning, she came across a wounded pigeon trying to get to its feet after being struck by a passing car. She stopped and lifted the bird on to the footpath. There was nothing she could do to save it but she didn’t want it to be run over again. Her fondness for animals was as strong as ever. She refused to buy any cosmetics if the brands had been animal tested. Friends remember how Lesley had once insisted on bringing Patsi, her spaniel dog – who was generally kept in Hillsborough with her parents – to stay with her for a few days in the house on University Avenue. Patsi had a great time, with Lesley letting her run wild in the nearby Botanic Gardens.

  The girls had plenty of callers to No. 108, including a now friendly landlord who always got his rent on time and would sometimes drop by for supper. Of the six housemates, it was Lesley who invariably attracted the most attention. With her gentle voice, warm smile, shiny dark hair, sparkling eyes and beautiful grasp of the English language, she could disarm most men, even the rudest. She was a hopeless romantic. According to some of her inner circle of friends in Belfast, she radiated warmth and personality. She could also be self-deprecating and she made fun of herself all the time, once posing for a photograph wearing a huge set of green false teeth.

  Late-night meals often meant the dishes going unwashed, and it was left to the girl who was on late duty the next day to clean and dry. Lesley wasn’t slow to lift the drying cloth and did her part to make sure the kitchen was kept neat and tidy. She wasn’t in the least vain but she was particular about her appearance, especially her hair, and would spend a lot of time trying to get rid of the curls. She would go to the hairdresser for a blow dry, only to wash and dry her hair again herself as soon as she was back at home because she considered it hadn’t been straightened enough by the session at the salon. She loved spending ages relaxing in the bath and pampering herself afterwards with rich, scented, body moisturizers. She would make sure her nails were always beautifully manicured. The day she showed off her engagement ring they were especially well done.

  Lesley’s first holiday with her student nursing friends was to Europe – first to Rome and then Florence, where they fell in with a crowd who regularly went drinking. But being more or less teetotal themselves they soon had enough of the sleazy bars, loud singing and leering men, and decided they preferred their own company. Their next stop was Venice, where they stayed in an apartment and spent hours lying under a hot sun, eating melon and ice cream. They went swimming, and one day Lesley and a friend were swept away by strong currents on to some rocks. The two managed to climb to safety and pick their way back to the shore, relieved but somewhat embarrassed to be met by a reception committee of noisy Italians.

  One year they went on an overland trip to Greece. On the train journey they found themselves short of food and shared their carriage with Yugoslavian soldiers and farmers carrying cages of chickens. It was Lesley’s idea for them to hire couchettes as they travelled through Switzerland. By the time they arrived in Athens they were filthy and desperate for a wash. There they stayed in a hostel and were taken on a tour of all the city’s most famous sites by a young man they had met on the train who had taken a shine to one of the tourists from Belfast. Then they got a boat to the island of Paxos and stayed in a little fishing village. Lesley loved the climate but she had developed what she described at the time as a ‘stunted palate’. She drank only tea and Coke and could not bring herself to eat the local specialities of lasagne, moussaka and fish dishes, or the garlic, yoghurt, tomatoes and cheese. She tried meatballs once but pushed the plate away in disgust declaring that they tasted horrible.

  They moved on to Naxos and another apartment, this time on the beach and much more modern than the first. It was early May, cold and windy. They had been joined by an American girl who complained about everything, from the weather to the food to the restaurant waiters. They hired motorcycles, riding without safety helmets, and got lost. She read a lot and would sit with her book on the balcony, well wrapped up, with a pair of knickers on her head.

  Her first big night out with Howell was to the dentists’ formal at Queen’s University. Howell excitedly told friends he would be taking her to the event, but girlfriends remember how she quickly issued a gentle reprimand, telling him: ‘You don’t take me to anything. I come.’ She bought an expensive evening dress for the occasion at one of Belfast’s top boutiques: Howell cringed when she told him what it had cost. Before they set off from Lesley’s, Howell presented her with a red rose.

  There was no doubt that he was making all the running, and there was a time when Lesley wasn’t convinced that the dental student was really the man for her. In a letter to Valerie dated October 1981, she wrote: ‘Every time I write to you, I think about trying to explain clearly my relationship with Colin, but then I can never make the effort. But I assure you that we have no intention of walking up the aisle together and I still think in terms of making decisions on my own. Colin is not considered.’ Valerie recalls: ‘Lesley told me the relationship was problematic. Colin was much hotter on her than she was on him. I don’t remember the nature of their issues, but she’d write to me to say he wasn’t a serious item for quite a long time.’

  But things changed. In another letter to Valerie, dated August 1982, Lesley confirme
d that her feelings for Colin were developing in a positive way. The couple had gone together on holiday to Greece with friends, and she wrote: ‘Colin didn’t turn nut-brown on the beach, but I must admit I had eyes for none other than him, despite the fact he had a large, red hooter. Things are going very well between us and we have had a great time together this summer.’ However, she was not afraid to poke gentle fun at her boyfriend. Another of her postcards home read: ‘Dear Val, I’m sitting in the village square after enjoying a hearty breakfast. Sad to say, the heat has not impaired my appetite. Colin is beside me, looking typically Irish, wearing a white sun hat with nylon ankle socks. Most attractive!’

  By November 1982 Lesley’s feelings for the man in her life had strengthened considerably. She wrote to Valerie: ‘Things are going pretty well as planned, or should I say, as dreamed … From the way I am talking, you can gather that I’m assuming that I have found the right one. Well, I think that I have. I am no longer lukewarm about Colin. I think the world of him. It’s a good feeling. Colin and I are still getting along famously and I sometimes marvel at how funny it feels to know someone as well as I know him and yet he isn’t a member of my family.’

  So in spite of doubts on both sides the marriage went ahead. After the big day in July 1983, the young couple moved as planned to the North Coast where Colin had already secured his first job in dentistry in a firm headed up by Terry Boyd and Alan Logue at their Waterside branch in Coleraine, as well as one day a week in nearby Ballycastle, County Antrim. When they first moved, the Howells rented a house in Portballintrae for nine months. Overlooking the harbour in one of the prettiest villages in Northern Ireland, it was an idyllic and romantic setting which seemed to bode well for the Howells’ new life together.

  3.

  Trouble in paradise