Angel of Death (12 page)

The locals had seen her walking with her family to the village church of St John the Evangelist where they remembered her taking her confirmation vows when she was fourteen. They had seen her fall in love with village boy Steve Biggs, a strapping 6ft 2ins roadworker who was to become her fiancé.

Corby Glen lies in the valley of the River Glen, set in some of the finest sheep-farming country in Lincolnshire. Around 450 men, women and children live in this unspoiled corner of England. It's a place where everyone knows everyone else, and people stick together in times of trouble. There's the tiny junior school where Beverley had been a pupil until she was eleven, a post office, Pauline's store as well as a Co-op supermarket, a large village square which has stood unchanged for centuries, a church dating back to 1319 and three pubs, the Glaziers Arms, the Woodhouse Arms and the Fighting Cocks.

The council's travelling library van stops in the village square every Monday, and the mobile fish and chip shop parks there on a Tuesday night. On the hill above the village stands the comprehensive school where Beverley Allitt first spoke of being a nurse.

Jobs no longer abound on the local farms where only a handful of men can count on earning a living from the land. Beverley Allitt's father, Richard, worked for the Hay Wine Co. which has its warehouse round the corner from the village square. Otherwise, most of the villagers commute to and from local towns.

Locals still boast there's a community spirit in Corby Glen that's alive and kicking. That sense of belonging is evident every October when farmers gather from all over the country for the annual village sheep fair and auction. The whole village turns out to see the spectacle. There's a sheep-fair dance, a fun-fair for the children, military bands, clay-pigeon shooting, tug-o-war competitions, art and craft displays, pony rides and sheep by the thousand.

The village celebrated the 750th sheep fair on 10 October 1988 and, to mark the event, the entire population gathered in the village square to be photographed for posterity. It was a unique historical occasion and every single one of the villagers, all 446 of them, were there. Beverley Allitt stood beside her fiancé, Steve Biggs, to the right of the picture, with Steve sporting the moustache she had insisted he grew.

The framed photograph still hangs in the entrance of the Woodhouse Arms. A separate photograph was taken of forty-six people who had lived in the village for at least fifty years. Among them was Beverley's grandmother.

Beverley Allitt was a popular figure in Corby Glen
where her parents were respected by all; there had never been a hint of scandal in the family.

Her father's boss at the Hay Wine Co., Jeremy Marshall-Roberts, recalled: ‘Beverley used to babysit for us when she was younger. She always had this affinity with children. She loved them, they liked her.'

Round the corner from the Allitts's tidy, red-brick semi, with its blue, glass-panelled front door, net curtains upstairs and down, and neat garden on three sides, lies Pauline's village store where Beverley had helped out at weekends when she was a teenager. Pauline recalled: ‘Everyone always knew that Beverley wanted to go into nursing. She was always a popular girl. She'd worked here at the shop and knew a lot of people.'

Her grandmother, Dorothy Burrows, got used to the sight of Beverley arriving at her home in Bourne, Lincolnshire, with children, toddlers, and even babies, from the village of Corby Glen. On Sundays when Beverley's parents, Richard and Lillian, visited Grandma Burrows, Beverley would often take along a neighbour's child.

Dorothy had seen many of the children grow up. Some of them had even continued to visit with Richard and Lillian when, to her grandmother's delight, Beverley finally realised her ambition to start work at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital. There had been months of training, studies and exams to pass, duty on the geriatric ward, then, at last, the chance to fulfil her dreams and start on the Children's Ward.

Dorothy knew how much Beverley loved the job, treasured every moment, revelled in the contact with infants and their parents. It had been more than a job to Beverley, it had been a way of life.

Her grandmother sighed as she glanced at a photograph of Beverley, taken when she was a baby, which still hangs proudly on her front-room wall. ‘You see, Beverley always had this way with children. She used to come with her mum and dad every Sunday afternoon without fail. She would bring children with her, they were neighbours' and friends' children from Corby Glen. Some were only babies, two or three months old. Sometimes she would bring two along, she'd take them for a walk, play with them, feed them at tea-time and even bath them sometimes. One little boy she used to get ready for bed before they went home. She always had this wonderful way with them.'

She went on: ‘People in Corby Glen trusted Beverley with their children and some of the youngsters still go to Richard and Lillian's even now. If she'd got a bad name, then nobody would have let her have their kids. But they knew they could rely on her. I've heard people say she was the nicest girl in Corby Glen.'

Rachel Smith was Beverley's closest childhood friend. They grew up in the same street. Rachel lived with her mother and father at 16 Barleycroft, a smart terraced house just round the corner from the Fighting Cocks. Beverley lived across the cul-de-sac with her family at number 24. The two girls
started on the same day at the village primary school.

Rachel noticed how Beverley took to mothering the local children even when she was only little herself. Rachel's first memory is of Beverley pushing her baby brother, Darren, in his pram when her friend was no older than six or seven. Rachel got used to seeing Beverley playing with younger children from around the village.

‘She used to mother the little kids. You got used to seeing Beverley playing with the toddlers, pushing their prams or walking them up and down the road. We were in the same class at the primary school. Even then Beverley was on the chubby side, but she was always one of the brightest kids. She had plenty of ability so it was a bit of a surprise when she failed the test to go to the Girls' High School in Grantham. Mrs Thatcher was a pupil there once and, like me, I suppose Beverley was disappointed at missing out. She only failed by four points.'

The two girls found themselves drawn together from the day they started at Charles Read, the secondary-modern school on the hill above the village. ‘I remember the night we went up to school with our parents. Beverley's mum and dad are smashing people. They put the girls from the primary school in one form, and the boys in another, so the two of us stayed together. From the beginning we got on fine.'

Rachel always knew that Beverley was going to be a nurse. When their class did a project on child
care, and was told to monitor the progress of a toddler week by week, Beverley was in her element.

‘She used to love home economics and child care was a part of that. I chose to spend time with the people at the Fighting Cocks who'd got a little baby. Bev picked the Warburtons who'd got a two-year-old son. It involved going to see the kids a couple of times every week, playing with them, taking them out for walks, babysitting for them, everything on a one-to-one basis. Bev was fourteen then; I think it was the first time I heard her talk seriously about being a nurse. It wasn't a surprise. I mean, it was obvious then that it would suit her although she never liked the sight of blood and I used to tease her about that.'

Beverley joined the Girl Guides and, in the summer, she would pack a picnic and walk for miles through the fields and woods with fellow guides Rachel and Dawn Greetham. Once the three girls spent the whole day trekking from one village to another, visiting seven neighbouring parish churches in all.

There wasn't much night life for young girls in Corby Glen but, once a month on a Friday night, the village came alive with a disco in the village hall near the church. The three pals would save up their pocket money, spend 50p on a ticket, buy cans of coke and a few bags of crisps, and let their hair down dancing to Bananarama and Duran Duran.

‘We were fourteen or fifteen at the time and it was the highlight of our social calendar,' recalls
Dawn. ‘It would go on until midnight, but the three of us would normally leave around 11pm. We didn't have boyfriends, but we'd dance, and the boys would just stand around and watch. Eventually, after the vicar complained about the noise, they stopped having the discos altogether.'

Beverley and her friends weren't the kind to get into trouble. The nearest she, Rachel and Dawn ever got to breaking the law was pinching the odd apple when the orchards were full in mid summer. Dawn remembers clambering over garden walls and scaling apple trees in search of fresh fruit. ‘We'd do a bit of scrumping, the three of us, borrowing the odd apple here and there. On mischievous nights we used to have a bit of fun tapping on windows in the village, then running off, but we were all just ordinary kids. We never misbehaved much. If we went out in the village we'd always be home on time.'

At school, Beverley hated sports lessons and managed to escape the cross-country runs and the hockey in the winter. Rachel said: ‘She used to get out of it as much as she could. Bev was OK doing indoor sport but, if she had to do the cross-country running with the rest of us, she was always one of the last to finish. They had us going round the school field ten times, it was awful, and with Bev being a bit on the heavy side she hated it more than most of us.'

She became conscious of her weight. All her friends were slim and she was the biggest of the bunch, a good two stones too heavy, but she
never bothered to cut down on her eating. She wore baggy clothes, jeans and jumpers away from school, and nobody ever saw her wearing a short skirt.

Rachel recalls how her friend lived a ‘charmed life' at school. If she was messing about then it was always someone else the teacher caught. She would be the one with the idea for a prank or a bit of fun, but it was always someone else who did it.

Beverley never had a boyfriend while she was at school though she and Rachel did take on the job of scoring for the boys' basketball team.

‘We used to have a laugh with the boys, but none of them would dare to tease Bev about her weight. I got the feeling they were actually a bit frightened of her. Most of the boys were smaller than her. Bev could always take care of herself. She wouldn't want to get into fights, she would always back off, but you got the impression she could handle herself.'

School headmaster John Gleeson remembers her dreams of wanting to become a nurse and her joy when she finally made it.

As he recalls: ‘She was always on the chubby side, but a helpful, pleasant girl. It's a small school with around 240 pupils. We don't have the problems that exist in inner cities. We try to develop a warm atmosphere and, by and large, the children respond. Beverley was above average as a pupil and she did particularly well in home economics which dealt with child development and nursing,
among other things. Nursing was always her chosen path and it really was no surprise when she left school and started a pre-nursing course at Grantham college.'

She had always been so pleasant, responsible and determined to realise her ambition. She left school in June 1985 with seven CSEs: French, English language, English literature, maths, biology, history and home economics. Her marks in home economics were so good she was awarded an O level pass.

Rachel became a regular visitor to her friend's home, which she remembers as a warm, loving environment, although Beverley would sometimes argue with her two sisters who shared her bedroom. The two friends would go babysitting together and Rachel noticed how Beverley was delighted when the baby woke up, seeing it as a bonus, a chance to cuddle and to play. ‘When you're babysitting all you want is for the baby to stay asleep, but Bev loved them to wake up. It never bothered her, she had so much patience with kids, and she always got them back to sleep. She used to babysit for the Latters, the Warburtons and Sue Binner, who lived across from the Fighting Cocks. She wasn't that interested in making money out of it, it was more the opportunity to be with kids.'

In her spare time teenager Beverley worked at the village store or served bar meals at the pub to earn a few extra pounds. She had also become an accomplished pool player, capable of beating
many of the lads at the Fighting Cocks; she could also play a mean game of darts.

Rachel had wanted to join the RAF to train as an air-traffic controller, but she failed the entrance exam. While she waited to re-sit the test she joined Beverley at Grantham college, travelling back and forth by bus each morning and night. It was there that Rachel met her future husband and when they married at Edenham parish church, just a few miles from Corby Glen, on 4 July 1987, Beverley made the day memorable by abandoning her baggy jumpers and jeans, and wearing a dress.

Eighteen-year-old Rachel moved to Scotland but returned frequently to Corby Glen. When baby son Garry was born Beverley fussed over him like an aunt. ‘She always gave Garry a lot of attention when I went back to Corby Glen,' said Rachel. ‘She would send me cardigans for him.' The girls lost touch but then, in September 1990, they met by chance when Rachel's sister gave birth at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital. The baby arrived prematurely and was in the special baby care unit. Beverley was there to see a fellow nurse who had given birth to twins. She was working on the Children's Ward by then and was delighted to see Rachel.

‘I said she had done well getting the job she wanted. She asked where I was living and hadn't realised I had moved back to Grantham with my husband. We chatted, it was good to see her again.'

Beverley had to wait for her dream to come true. When her college course finished there had been
no vacancies for student nurses at the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital; Beverley joined many of her friends on the dole. She hated being out of work, living on her Giro from the state, and she had to wait six months before she got the news that a job was finally hers. It was a moment to treasure and Beverley, by now eighteen, threw herself into her new life on the wards.