FOUL WHISPERINGS
‘So bloody, raw, and sudden it was, it resembled an outbreak of family madness which we took pains to conceal, out of shame and pride, and for the sake of those infected.’
LAURIE LEE, CIDER WITH ROSIE
In the early summer of 1957, without warning and without leaving a note for his parents, Frederick West disappeared. ‘I got up during the night and just went. I got on me fixed-wheel pushbike and went to Hereford.’ The journey took him two days, and he slept in the hedgerows on the way, but quietly he had saved £15 to help him to survive without his parents’ help. He had every intention of striking out on his own, not least because he wanted to make enough money to buy a motorcycle.‘And if I said I was going to leave home, there would have been one mass of tears, ’cause we were that close. I couldn’t just go to Mum and say I was leaving home.’ At sixteen, he was still a little in awe of his mother.
Not that West could write and tell his parents where he was, any more than he could telephone them. Moorcourt Cottage did not have a telephone, and he was still unable to read or write. For the moment the West family would have to wait. He would return home when he was ready and not before.The dark-haired, tousled country boy got a job as a labourer on a Hereford building site, and slept in one of the partially finished houses on the estate each night. He stayed there for almost a month, gradually getting filthier and filthier, as layer upon layer of concrete dust covered his sallow skin. ‘I wasn’t afraid to do the nastiest jobs, ’cause that way I would be paid more, and I could be sure I would keep the job. Nobody else wanted to do them.’ It was another approach to life that he would return to time and time again.
A month after he left Much Marcle, Frederick West returned ‘covered in cement’. He had bought his mother and father a watch each as a present, and had decided that he did not want to spend the rest of his life ‘carrying a stick and walking behind a cow’.The trip to Hereford had opened his eyes to the possibilities a larger town might hold. It had also alerted him to the chance to earn more money. ‘I still love the country,’ West was to say; ‘the only reason I’ve never gone back was because of the wages.’ Instead of returning to the fields, West took a job in the village cider factory, Weston’s, and started to save even more determinedly for a motorbike. It was a means of escape, escape from what he saw as the ‘prying’ of the village that seemed always to know everyone’s business. Frederick West wanted his anonymity, and he had set his heart on finding it in the town that his parents had taken him to for his fifteenth birthday treat, Gloucester.
In the meantime West returned to his old haunts. ‘My favourite place with all my local girlfriends,’ he explained, was in Fingerpost Field less than a mile outside Much Marcle, ‘watching the badgers come down from the set and drink, and the foxes and all that.’ No matter which girl he was with, he would sit with her on a hunting stile at the edge of the field with his back to the wood, and ‘look out over the valley, the woods, Much Marcle and all that’ on a summer evening.‘You could see the church clock.’ It was a field he was to return to time after time after leaving Moorcourt Cottage for good, a field that would eventually hold the remains of the first young woman to die at his hands.
Handsome now, his face stronger and more confident than it had been, and with his hair more carefully combed than when he had been working in the fields, Frederick West began to slip out from beneath the all-pervading influence of his mother and father at Moorcourt Cottage. In the autumn of 1957 Frederick West bought himself his first means of escape from the inquisitive eyes of Much Marcle, a 98-cc Bantam motorbike, registration number RVJ 199. It was to become his one pride and joy, and another means to show off to any young woman who might be impressed by the sight of a motorbike. He took to parking outside the café in Ledbury when he went to the town on Saturdays,‘playing the big man’, and then taking trips into Gloucester on Sundays. Another strand in Frederick West’s life had been formed, a vehicle that would allow him freedom to roam the countryside in search of his own version of prey.
In the next year West drove throughout Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, discovering a world beyond the fields of Much Marcle, but always returning there at night to sleep and work in the cider factory. He took to wearing an elderly leather jacket and a battered helmet, which was just as well: on his way home one evening in late November 1958, he crashed. Driving back in the dark to Moorcourt Cottage, along the road from Dymock, he ran over a bicycle lying at the roadside. It belonged to a girl he knew, Pat Mann, and West said later that he thought she had stopped to ‘drop her knickers’ out of sight of the road.Whatever the reason, he careered off the road and smashed into a brick wall.
In the years to come, Frederick West would romanticise the drama of his accident. At one stage he even suggested that he ‘was paralysed from the waist down for twelve months’, and that he had ‘lain in the ditch for eight hours before anyone found me’, while ‘Pat saved my life, ’cause I was choking myself on me helmet’. Certainly, he was taken unconscious to Ledbury Cottage Hospital, only to be transferred immediately to the larger Hereford Hospital, and a local man ran to Moorcourt Cottage to tell his parents. His brother John later maintained that the family feared ‘Fred would not make it through the night’, and he did lie unconscious in the John Masefield ward at Hereford Hospital for seven days after the crash.
Years later West would tell his children: ‘I woke up on the mortuary slab. If I’d been a minute later I would have been in the fridge.’ In fact, he finally regained consciousness with his mother at his bedside; she had taken to sitting there stoically every day. She came back relentlessly after he had begun the mundane task of recovery from his string of serious injuries.The wound to his skull took weeks to heal, although he did not ‘have to have a steel plate in it’, as he told more than one friend later, while his right leg was so severely broken that he was given metal callipers to support its recovery, and asked to wear a special metal shoe. More wounding to West’s pride, however, was that his nose was also broken. It would remain slightly crooked for the rest of his life, just as he would for ever afterwards have a slight but nevertheless discernible limp.
Most important of all, however, the crash seemed not only to coarsen his features but also to affect his personality.The open-faced, blue-eyed boy turned steadily darker, and sourer, in the aftermath of his accident. His brother John noticed that his personality changed, while his sister Daisy felt he became more of a loner than before. Years afterwards, West himself denied that the crash had affected him at all. Instead, he insisted: ‘Half the bloody problem of what changed me was John, because he kept stirring the shit for me all the time. He was always top monkey, like, couldn’t do anything but he had plenty of talk, and he always reported on everything. If you broke a spade handle and skived off, he would tell the old man “Fred’s gone”.’
The passionate relationship between the two brothers, just a year apart in age, had grown steadily at Moorcourt Cottage, and it was to last the rest of Frederick West’s life. His brother John became friend and ally at one moment, rival and enemy the next. It was a passion that extended into their sexual lives, with one trying to outdo the other when it came to girls. For Fred his brother was ‘too forward . . . hand on the bottom . . . kiss ’em before he even knew their name’, while for John his brother was always the ladies’ man, while he never stood much of a chance. Yet in the years to come they would more often than not find themselves going out together with sisters, or friends, as foursomes, both rivals and allies in the sexual game.
It was the spring of 1959 before Frederick West was strong enough to work again. For a short time he returned toWeston’s cider factory, but he did not settle. The restlessness that the motorbike had satisfied remained, though the bike itself was written off. ‘I wanted to branch out, leave home, go.’ He had lost patience with life as it always had been in Much Marcle. And that summer he packed a small suitcase and set off for Gloucester to find work. But this time he did not choose a building site.
Now almost eighteen, West ‘went to the docks and got a job on the ships’, first as a deck hand on the waste-boats taking sludge out to the dumping-grounds, and then on the oil-boats that plied down the sixteen-mile channel to the estuary and the sea at the Bristol Channel. It was still hard and dirty work, but there was a sense of an adventure, the taste of a different world, a world of his own.‘I’ve always been a loner to a certain extent,’ he would explain years later.‘I enjoy my own company. I don’t like parties and things. I don’t like being clammed up to people.’ During the next two years Frederick West would work on a variety of ships, first out of Gloucester and then out of Bristol, always a willing deck hand, never afraid of hard work, but also happy to hide himself away on the ships.
When he was not at sea he took a job as a bakery roundsman in Cheltenham: ‘You’d have probably a couple of months when you’d be on shore.’ It was the first time he visited the small town of Bishop’s Cleeve, about three miles north of the city. West did not forget the experience. He boasted later that a woman on his round seduced him. ‘She said, “Oh, bring me a brown loaf in.” . . . I went back and got it . . . tapped on the door. She said, “Come in” . . . and I walked in and there’s a big rug in front of the fire and she’s starkers on it . . .Well, I mean I couldn’t refuse . . . Anyway, a couple of months went by and she turned up at the van one morning and said: “What about this? I’m pregnant.” I jacked the job there and then. I was gone. I didn’t finish the round.’
Frederick West took to signing on as crew on the oil-boats under a series of different names,‘So you didn’t pay tax or nothing, like.You could put any name up. I very rarely used to use my own name.’ The trips carrying waste out of Sharpness were gradually succeeded by longer trips to Portsmouth carrying fertiliser,‘horrible smelly stuff ’, and then to the Clyde. And early in 1960 he ventured even further.‘I went to Jamaica twice for bananas and stuff.’
Once again the experience was to change his view of the world. ‘I couldn’t read about this. It was just the pictures I’d seen. So I didn’t actually know what sort of life it was. I just wanted to see.’ There were other voyages, to Hong Kong and the Pacific. ‘It was a great life. Fantastic.You can go round the world and, you know, I mean, you can be who you want to be. I got locked up once in Australia for being drunk and disorderly.’ It was not an experience he enjoyed.
But there were always girls. The attraction of a girl in every port had probably played its part in his decision to go to sea in the first place. Years later he would brag, ‘I’ve got three hundred children around the world’, although, as ever, there was no way to substantiate the claim. One thing had not changed, however. Frederick West believed any woman was fortunate to meet him. He disliked intensely the prostitutes that frequented the docks of every city that he visited, insisting:‘I wasn’t paying for it. I got it for nothing.’ He was also afraid of venereal disease. But that did nothing to inhibit his sexual appetite. ‘These girls loved it. There was times when I slept with three or four girls twice in the same night, all in the same bed, like.That’s what sex is all about – pleasure.’
After every voyage, Fred West would return to Gloucester. He never wanted to be too far from his parents for very long, even though he had taken to living above the Rendezvous café in the nearby town of Newent whenever he was briefly home from the sea. Living there meant he could look up ‘all my old girlfriends’ without incurring the wrath of his mother. Ashore, he bought himself another motorbike, this time a grey 1000-cc Triumph, not least because of the effect it might have on the local girls. For a time he was even a member of a motorcycle gang in the town.‘We used to just bomb up the street and if there was a load of girls or something in the café, bikes up and in.’
It was not until the end of 1960 that Fred West finally returned to Moorcourt Cottage. His parents had heard rumours that he had been seen locally, but he had deliberately avoided them, preferring to ‘duck and dive here and there’ when he was home from the sea. But he decided to go home for Christmas. When Daisy West saw her son at the gate that December morning, she walked out to meet him. ‘She took off her big thick leather belt with laces on and give me a beating in the gateway, then put it back on and said: “Welcome home, son, we’re level”,’ he remembered. ‘All because I called her an old cunt when I went out the gate.’
Life at Moorcourt Cottage had hardly changed, although West’s sisters had grown up considerably in the time he had been away at sea. ‘Little Daisy’ was now sixteen, Kitty was growing quickly, and Gwen was almost ten. Now nineteen, with a motorbike and endless stories about his voyages around the world, Frederick West must have appeared an almost impossibly glamorous figure to his young sisters, who had never travelled further than Hereford in their lives.
Walter West’s attitude to young girls had not changed, and neither had his son’s fascination with sex. Frederick West slipped back into life at home in Moorcourt Cottage, working in the fields with his father again, though now with the possibility of disappearing to Gloucester or Ledbury whenever he wanted to, riding his heavy grey motorbike. Then he passed his car driving-test, and he and his brother John between them bought an old Ford Popular. The years spent travelling had brought him an arrogance that it was impossible to ignore.West had become convinced that he could do what he wanted and get away with it.
Three months after his return home, Frederick West was arrested for the first time, for theft. He and a friend had stolen two ladies’ cigarette cases and a rolled-gold watch-strap from two separate shops in Ledbury. When they were stopped for questioning by the police, he had the cases in his pocket. A week later, in April 1961, at Ledbury Magistrates’ Court Frederick West pleaded guilty to two charges of theft and was fined £4. As he walked out of the court he seemed not to care in the slightest that now he had a criminal record.The boy fined along with him remembers him only as ‘devil may care’.West simply climbed on to his motorbike and went back to Much Marcle, back to work.
Within three months he was in the hands of the police again, but this time on an infinitely more serious charge: incest. His thirteen-year-old sister was pregnant, and it was alleged that Frederick West had had an intimate sexual relationship with her ‘four or possibly five’ times since his return home at Christmas. During questioning, he did not for a moment disguise the fact that he had been having sexual relationships with his sister, any more than he disguised the fact that sometimes other girls he approached objected to his sexual advances.West treated the investigating officers exactly as he treated the girls he attempted to seduce. He simply talked and talked, suggesting in a slightly aggrieved, almost puzzled voice, ‘Doesn’t everyone do it?’
Whatever his attitude to the police, however,West had breached one of the village’s greatest taboos. He had been caught. To his father it was the one cardinal sin, and to Daisy West it meant disgrace. No matter how much she liked her ‘Freddie’, he could not stay under her roof for another night. She arranged for him to go and stay with her sister Violet and her husband at Daisy Cottage in Much Marcle. He could stay there until the trial, which was set to take place at Hereford Assizes in the coming November.
For his part Frederick West showed not the slightest sign of remorse or contrition. He simply stopped working in the fields with his father, and took a job on a building site at Newent, five miles away to the south-east. But the move did nothing to change his attitude. Even before his trial at Hereford, he was in trouble again, this time for stealing materials from the building site he was working on. Charged with ‘larceny as a servant’, he was found guilty at Newent Magistrates’ Court on 18 October 1961 and fined £20. His excuse was all too familiar:‘Everybody else was doing it.’
The approaching trial for incest did nothing to curtail Frederick West’s sexual appetite. Before his arrest by the police, he had started going out with a local fourteen-year-old, whom he had met first at a dance in the Memorial Hall and then at the Rendezvous café in Newent, where she worked as a waitress at the weekends. His brother John had started going out with her sister. On three occasions Fred had even taken the girl home to see his parents, where Daisy West told her that she ‘hoped we weren’t doing anything we shouldn’t’. At that stage they had not become lovers, but Frederick West was not anxious to wait much longer. Shortly after her fifteenth birthday, he started to talk about marrying her and produced an engagement ring, although for once the sweeping gesture did nothing to affect the girl’s attitude. Ring or no ring, she was not going to give in. What she did not know was that she was not Frederick West’s only girlfriend at the time. Without her knowledge he was also seeing another local girl.‘I used to drop one off and then pop round to the other.’
If one girl was unwilling, West was only too happy to find another, and on one Saturday evening that autumn he attempted to do exactly that at the Ledbury youth club. He made a grab for a girl who had taken his fancy on the first-floor landing of the iron fire-escape stairs at the back of the club. She had gone outside with him, but his plan had backfired when he put his hand up her skirt. Instead of being seduced, she hit him, hard, so hard that he lost his balance and fell backwards over the railings, landing head-first on the ground ten feet beneath him. Just as he had been after his crash three years earlier, he was unconscious. He was taken to Ledbury Cottage Hospital, but once again he was quickly transferred to Hereford, although this time he came round after just twenty-four hours.There was no obvious damage, and certainly no broken bones, although his temper seemed to grow a little shorter. But just as his crash had done, the fall seemed only to prove that he was, in some mysterious way, impregnable against injury. It became another of his jokes, a claim that ‘nothing can hurt me – I’ll always survive’.
Frederick West wore his brown double-breasted suit to Hereford Assizes on the morning of Wednesday 9 November 1961. His hair was carefully brushed, and his hands, for once, showed not a sign of dirt or grime as he stood quietly in the dock and pleaded not guilty in a confident voice. He listened carefully to the police evidence against him being presented to the jury, but then smiled slowly as he heard his family’s general practitioner tell the jury that his motorcycle accident three years before might mean that he was possibly an epileptic ‘given to blackouts’. And the sly confident smile broadened still further as Daisy West gave evidence on her son’s behalf. The woman who had berated the teachers at Much Marcle school was not about to see him sent to prison without a fight, no matter what some of the villagers might think. She insisted that he often took the blame for ‘things that weren’t his fault’.
Neither the medical evidence nor the pleas of his mother were necessary to save Frederick West. When his thirteen-year-old sister entered the witness-box she refused to answer any questions whatever. She was asked by Mr Justice Sachs, the trial judge, if it was her boyfriend or her brother who was responsible for her pregnancy. She shook her head. The judge asked her to speak up, and with her voice barely above a whisper, she said simply ‘No’ to both questions. The judge then handed her a piece of paper and a pencil and asked the charming round-faced young girl to write down the name of the person who was responsible.
There was a long pause, and she simply looked down. Mr Justice Sachs asked her again to write down the name of the person responsible for her pregnancy, and again there was a lengthy silence. The judge then sent her out of court for a few minutes ‘to consider her decision’, and retired from the bench to allow her to do so. But when the court re-convened ten minutes later, she still said nothing. She refused utterly to write down the name of any person; instead, she sat silently in the witness-box, her head bowed.
Mr Justice Sachs asked the jury if they ‘felt it was safe’ to continue to hear the case on the basis of a ‘suspicion’ that Frederick West was guilty of incest, and received the only reply that he could have expected.After a brief retirement, the jury announced that they did not wish to go on with the case. As the Hereford Gazette announced the following Friday morning: ‘Farm Worker Not Guilty: Case Stopped at the Assizes’. Incest was another evil love not to be discussed with anyone beyond the family.
The twenty-year-old Frederick Walter Stephen West walked free from Hereford Assizes on that November morning in 1961 convinced in his heart that there was nothing that he could not do, and nothing that he could not get away with. As he boasted years later: ‘It hadn’t lasted many minutes.’ And because the case against him had been dismissed, it did not appear on his criminal record: that still simply showed that he was a petty thief.
Shortly after the trial, Fred West celebrated his victory. He was with the local girl who had refused to be swayed into sex by the offer of an engagement ring. Giving her a lift home through the Herefordshire lanes early one evening in the black Ford Popular, he suddenly stopped at a gate and got out. Not certain what was happening, the fifteen-year-old followed him. West told her that she had to marry him when she was sixteen, but she still steadfastly refused. Suddenly,‘He pushed me back on to the bank and he raped me’, she told a court thirty-three years later.Then he ‘fell over on to his back on the floor’ appearing to be ‘unwell’.When he eventually recovered enough to get to his feet, all Frederick West could think of to say to her was ‘sorry’, and ‘not to be frightened’, because he ‘had blackouts’.
Then, without a moment’s further hesitation, West opened the door of the Ford Popular and climbed back behind the wheel. His passenger still needed a lift home, and he saw no reason not to give her one. His experience at Hereford Assizes had taught him a lesson he would never forget. Whatever he did, the young woman who was the object of his desire would not report him to the police, and if she did she would not repeat the accusation in court.The shame was too great.
In that, as in so many other respects, Frederick West was absolutely correct.The fifteen-year-old part-time waitress from the Rendezvous café would not reveal what happened that evening for more than three decades. He could get away with anything.