Rose West: The Making of a Monster (4 page)

The regular wage the Navy paid also influenced his decision to stay on, as Bill had a growing family to think about – Daisy
had become pregnant again after his last home leave. Just before the birth of their third child, Glenys, in 1950, Bill and
Daisy moved out to a rented cottage on Bone Hill where the remains of the many slaughtered Danes are laid to rest; an omen
perhaps of Cromwell Street.

Rose’s Childhood Family

Daisy possibly felt a huge sense of relief as she set out from her in-laws’ cottage for the last time with the second-hand
bits and pieces she’d collected for her family’s new home. Not long after this, the couple took possession of a brand-new
local authority house on a tiny estate tacked onto the village. This was 57 Morwenna Park Road: a three-bedroom semi which
backed onto fields and which would be home to all seven children Daisy and Bill would go on to have, including the young Rosemary
– or Rosie, as her family would affectionately call her. The estate, being out of the centre of the village,
was socially as well as geographically distanced from the rest of Northam at the time, with its local authority housing and
young, struggling families like the Letts’. But while some of those who lived in the village might have looked down on Morwenna
families, these were decent, law-abiding people who had aspirations for their children, many of whom would do well in later
years.

In the 1950s, the tiny estate would bustle each morning with young mums pushing Silver Cross prams across their doorsteps.
The prams would bear the latest arrival, while the next in line sat on the pram seat and the other children clung onto the
sides. The mothers would deliver the oldest children to Northam Primary School, then go on to shop at the greengrocer’s and
baker’s in the village.

There was an air of optimism about this tiny estate, a sense of community and purpose: people might be poor, as one former
resident said, but they were pulling together, and most fathers had found work by the 1950s. Two doors away from the Letts
home, at number 61, were the Jubbs. Mr Jubb was the first man in the area to have a vacuum chimney-sweep business, which he
operated from a van. The residents and children were intrigued by this newfangled idea, and more so seeing Mr Jubb on a weekday
without his face and hands being blackened by soot as was normally the case. At number 53, two doors along from the Letts
family on the other side, were the Gourdies. Mr Gourdie was the catering manager at the holiday camp less than a mile away
at Westward Ho!, while the manager of the holiday camp, Mr Mitchell, lived a few doors down from him, at number 29, with his
family. Further along from the Letts’ were the Alfords, the talk of the estate when Mr Alford, an ex-Army man who had returned
from serving abroad, brought back his beautiful Indian bride to settle there. Next to the Alfords were the Glovers, Mr Glover
being a master baker in Westward Ho! Some of the families did exceptionally well in a short space of
time, including the Hoppers, who within a few years moved to the centre of the village, where they set up in business selling
woollen school uniforms and haberdashery.

On Saturday mornings there would be Uncle Mac on the radio, presenting
Children’s Favourites
and playing Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson, Sparky, ‘The Runaway Train’; the following day families would listen to Perry Como
singing ‘Magic Moments’ as they sat at the table waiting for the Sunday roast to be served up. On Sunday afternoons the only
man in the street with a car at the time came out and cleaned it. Later the kids would marvel as he honked his horn while
proceeding in stately procession down the road with his large wife beside him. At the weekends and after school, the streets
would ring with the sound of kids’ laughter as they played outside with bags of marbles and conkers baked in the oven, and
chalked out hopscotch on the pavement. Most kids also went swimming at the Burrows beach with their older siblings, and to
Sunday school at the Congregational Church, to give their parents a break. At the chapel, there would also be concerts and
events laid on for the children by Reverend Green, whose wife would learn his Sunday morning sermon by heart and sit beside
him as he preached to the congregation – mouthing, perfectly, every word of it.

There had also been a nearby prisoner-of-war camp, ‘German ones, who were friendly to us,’ Gill Job (pronounced Jobe) who
grew up in Morwenna Park Road, remembers. Some of the men had their own families back in Germany, and went back as soon as
they could after the war finished; others married local girls and stayed on.

It was place of wonder for children growing up, a former next-door neighbour of the Letts family said. ‘Northam was then a
small village with farms all around us so we had plenty to do – helping out collecting eggs, milking cows and harvesting time
was fun. But potato picking was hard work, walking behind the tractor picking up all the potatoes and putting them
into bags … I could never wait to get to the stables and, of course, to the beach. How lucky we were …’

Yet, for all the enjoyment other children had growing up here, there was one family whose children were never seen out playing:
the Letts’. Dark-haired Patsy and blonde Joyce had to come straight home after school and play in the back garden, if they
were let out at all. When other little girls knocked on the door to ask them out to play, the usually quiet and ladylike Daisy
would yell at them to ‘go away!’ This soon began to raise a few eyebrows on the estate.

Once installed in her new home and able to do as she pleased without fear of offending her tidy in-laws, Daisy strangely still
couldn’t relax. With Bill away much of the time, she concentrated her efforts on keeping her two girls and new baby, Glenys,
scrupulously clean. As a former neighbour remembered, ‘[Daisy] was very clean; she kept bathing the children all the time.
He [Bill] must have got fed up with it – she was always bathing them.’

Although too poor to buy the girls new clothes very often, Daisy would patch up what they had, ensuring that they were always
well dressed and that the two older girls were polite to anyone they should come into contact with. But, as people noticed,
the girls rarely did come into contact with anyone outside school, other than when running errands to the shop for their mother,
where they were said to be perhaps a little too well turned out and well behaved, like Stepford children.

Outward appearances had become increasingly important to Daisy who, at this time, would relish the compliments she was given
about the children. ‘Them were beautiful girls, and always beautiful turned out,’ as a former neighbour remembered in her
soft Devon burr, ‘… they were well fed and dressed lovely.’ But, as another neighbour said, ‘The kids had to play in the garden.
They never had no life … never allowed out.’

But if the children weren’t allowed to play or get dirty, all
didn’t seem quite right with Daisy either, who had become overly concerned with hygiene and the state of the house.

While Bill was at sea, Daisy would ensure the house was spotless, frequently scrubbing it from top to bottom. She may have
busied herself in this way because she felt isolated in an area where she knew few people, but when the local women tried
to engage her in friendly banter across the back gardens as they hung out the washing, she did not join in. Rather, she was
subdued and nervy and referred to the neighbours formally, ‘Good morning, Mr Lloyd’ and ‘Hello, Mrs Job’. That said, Daisy
was shy, but it would be some time before the real reason for her aloofness would begin to emerge.

During these years, Daisy only saw Bill for intermittent periods of time when he came home on leave from his ship. The neighbours
remembered him turning the corner at the top of the road, looking smart and handsome in his naval uniform, while cheeky kids
ran alongside him, saluting him. But if Daisy was feeling isolated, she wouldn’t have been fazed by managing the home and
bringing up the children single-handedly when Bill was away, as her own father had been away serving in the Army during most
of her childhood: she was used to it. There were also other women at Morwenna Park Road whose husbands were away. Mr Job was
a master carpenter for the county of Devon, who only managed to come home once a month, and other husbands were still away
in the services. Yet when Bill came home, a man described as quiet and charismatic by locals, Daisy didn’t seem any happier.
‘The dad, Bill, was charming. He was quiet and we all thought it was her really,’ as a former neighbour, Gill Job, was to
say.

There were signs too that Daisy was becoming anxious as her behaviour verged on neurotic. ‘She came in crying to me mother
one day, and I went round and helped her scrub the kitchen, because she wanted everything to be clean. It wasn’t him. She
was obsessed with it,’ another neighbour, Mrs Cloke, was to say.

By 1951 Daisy was sinking into a depression and was finding it difficult to cope. Neighbours heard her yelling at Joyce and
Patsy as she chased them with the copper stick. She was ‘disturbed’, as an ex-neighbour put it, whose concerned mother called
in the local authority children’s services. Perhaps as a result of this, and with Daisy’s mental health declining, Bill was
able to arrange for the two oldest children to be educated at a boarding school in neighbouring Cornwall. As Patsy, 8, and
Joyce, 6, packed their bags, they were told they were going to a ‘naval school’. What it was, in fact, was the Royal United
Service Orphan Home for Girls at Narrowcliff in Newquay, which took in the orphaned daughters of service personnel and daughters
of servicemen from ‘difficult home circumstances’ – where, for example, a parent was seriously ill. The children’s home was
run by a Miss Salmon and when Glenys reached the age of 6, she would go there too.

Although it was an open and happy environment at the home, where friends of the children could drop by to visit at any time,
Patsy and Joyce would spend long periods of time there without ever seeing their mother. Daisy was possibly never well enough
to visit them, although Bill, stationed at nearby naval bases in Plymouth and Cornwall, turned up to see the girls when he
could.

Daisy now had only one child at home to care for, but, unfortunately, given her fragile state and the fact that she couldn’t
cope with the children she already had, she became pregnant again. The following year, in 1952, Daisy gave birth to their
fourth child, a boy. But ‘Dad’, as Bill preferred to be called, was delighted to have a son at last. Moreover, with the baby’s
brown hair and fair skin, it looked the spit of himself – unlike the girls, who all favoured their mother. The happy parents
decided to call the baby Andrew after his father Bill’s second name.

Having been an only, often lonely, child, Bill had always relished the idea of having a large family, and was pleased as punch
now
that he had one. But six months after Andrew’s birth, Daisy became ill again, and Bill felt he had no choice but to leave
the Navy and the financial security it provided, to help his sick wife with the care of their children. He was discharged
in September 1952 on compassionate grounds after nine years of service. This decision was one of
the
major factors to affect young Rose’s life when she came along the following year, while doctors now felt Daisy was a suitable
case for treatment.

I
T WAS THE SPRING
of 1953, and while the country was awash with street parties for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Daisy found little
to celebrate as her depression deepened and she became increasingly anxious. So much so that she developed agoraphobia, not
daring to leave the house or even open the door. Coming on so soon after having had a baby, this might today be put down to
postnatal depression, but little was known about ‘baby blues’ at the time.

Bill had not been home long when his wife’s nerves became so bad she had a breakdown, and was referred to a psychiatric hospital
in nearby Bideford. Daisy was willing to try anything for her depression and when the psychiatrist suggested a course of electroconvulsive
therapy (ECT), or electric shock treatment as it is known, she agreed. ECT is most notably known as the treatment given to
Jack Nicholson’s character, McMurphy, in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
– except with Daisy, the ‘electric hammer’, as it is also called, was for real.

Daisy would have had her head shaved and been given a muscle relaxant; then, like Nicholson’s character in the film, she would
have been strapped to a hospital bed (to stop patients falling off when they convulse). After this, a number of large black
electrodes are attached to the skull and she would have been given a piece of rubber or a spatula to bite on. A surge of electricity
is then sent through the electrodes to the brain in an attempt to redress the chemical balance that regulates mood and
to obliterate dark memories. Thankfully, once the power goes on, the patient blacks out. The shocks are accompanied by the
smell of burning rubber, and the patient has convulsions like seizures on the bed. It was at the beginning of her course of
treatment with the ‘electric hammer’ that Daisy fell pregnant with her next child: Rosemary.