The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (28 page)

That’s the main problem. Lack of love and affection. Mothers with four or five kids who say I can’t keep an eye on all of them twenty-four hours a day. They just don’t seem to have the time or the patience. Brian visits the local youth clubs, and there’s a little girl in one of them, about two years old, and she’s always running round him. Sometimes she’s a bit annoying, to be honest, but she’s a sweet thing, and one time, she was more annoying than usual, and the mother told her off, told her to leave Brian alone, and she came back, again being a bit naughty, and the mother just drew her hand back and hit the girl across the face, knocking her head sideways, practically into the door. Hey, hey, said Brian. He was really shocked. You can’t go doing that.

He often gives talks at youth clubs and schools, on the effects of drugs and alcohol. There’s been some concern lately, that younger children are being used by older children as couriers for the sale of drugs. Mostly cannabis and LSD, being sold in schools as well. Brian’s sure the police don’t know the half of what goes on.

When he speaks to the youngsters about drugs in his talks they’ll all say dreadful, we think drugs are dreadful. And what do you think about cannabis? Nothing wrong with that, they’ll say. What about drink? Great. What about LSD? Well, we’re a bit wary of that, but we might try it. Drugs to them is crack and heroin, and the rest don’t count.

These talks are usually reserved for children of secondary school age. The primary school kids get the Stranger Danger lectures. What do strangers
look like, he’ll ask the class? They’re ten foot tall, with big beards and pointed ears, comes the answer.

*

Jon was born on 13 August 1982, at the Mill Road Hospital in Everton. His parents, Neil and Susan Venables, who were then aged 29 and 25, were living in an end-terrace house on York Street in Walton, off Rice Lane, a few hundred yards north of St Mary’s.

Susan would say her own upbringing had been strict and disciplined. She had one brother, and the family were fans of country and western music. Some of them played in a group. Neil would say that he and his sister had a good time in childhood, and they were spoilt, although their mother died quite early.

When Jon was born, Neil was working as a fork-lift truck driver at the Jacob’s Biscuit factory in Aintree, and they already had one son, Mark, born three years earlier in May 1979. Their third child, Michelle, was born 15 months after Jon, in November 1983.

The couple had been married since August 1975, and had previously lived in Roderick Road, a turning off Walton Village, moving to York Street for the extra space after Mark came along.

Early on there were problems with Mark. He had difficulty talking, and when Neil and Susan had him examined it turned out that he had been born with a cleft pallet. The frustration of trying to make himself understood caused Mark to have temper tantrums and when he went to one of the local infant schools it was soon apparent that there were behavioural troubles. At about the time of Jon’s birth, Mark was identified as having moderate learning difficulties. He was given speech therapy and began attending Meadow Bank Special School in Fazakerley.

Neil and Susan separated in early 1986 and were later divorced. Neil had lost his job a couple of years earlier, and the strain of this while trying to cope with Mark and two other young children had been too much. Neil at first stayed on in York Street so that he could sell the house, and Susan and the children moved in with her mother. Neil still had a car in those days, and used to take the children out every Sunday.

When York Street sold, Neil moved in with his father, at his father’s maisonette in Breeze Close, then rented his own flat nearby on Breeze Hill for a while, before moving into Kirkdale.

Susan left her mother’s and went to live in Old Swan, and Jon started at the infants’ school in Broad Green. Susan’s new place turned out to be damp and none too pleasant, so she and the children moved back in with Neil, who drove Jon to and from school in Broad Green every day. Jon seemed
happy at the school, though there were concerns that he was upset and difficult following his parents’ split, and he too began to have temper tantrums. He was referred for treatment of a squint in his eye – a problem which would remain untreated.

When Susan’s name came up on the council’s housing list, she moved into a three-bedroomed house in Scarsdale Road on the Norris Green estate, which was one of the large, modern Liverpool developments of public housing.

There was an incident, in January 1987, when the police were called to Susan’s home because the children had been left alone for three hours. Susan had found it difficult to cope with the separation from Neil, and had been treated for depression. Neil also had a history of depressive illness.

Michelle and Jon began attending the Broad Square County Primary Junior School, which was close to Scarsdale Road, in September of 1989, following Jon’s seventh birthday. In his first year it was noted that he displayed some anti-social behaviour in class, which was annoying but nothing too serious. Sometimes, he would go home complaining of being bullied by a gang of lads at school. In June 1990 he was referred to an educational psychologist, and seen by a trainee who reported that Jon seemed uninterested and unable to concentrate. He stared into space. He seemed unable to cope with the pressures on him.

Neil was on the move again, going back to York Street to share with a mate, and he’d often spend a couple of nights at Scarsdale Road, occasionally baby-sitting if Susan wanted a night out.

There was still concern over Mark, who continued to have sudden temper tantrums. This is not unusual among children with learning difficulties, but it led to the involvement of a social worker, who made arrangements for respite fostering. Mark began spending one weekend of every month with a foster family, and this helped to reduce the number of tantrums.

In the following year, Michelle also began to show learning difficulties, and she joined Mark at Meadow Bank Special School. Jon moved up to Year 4 at Broad Square, in a class of 24 pupils, and in the first term there were no particular problems.

It was after the Christmas holiday, in January 1991, that his class teacher, Kathryn Bolger, began to be concerned. Jon was acting very strangely. He would sit on his chair, holding his desk in his hands, and rock backwards and forwards, moaning and making strange noises. When the teacher moved him to sit near her at the front of the class he would fiddle with things on her desk and knock them to the floor. He would sometimes bang his head on the furniture, so hard that the teacher was sure it must be hurting him. Jon cried and said he was being picked on out of class. He occasionally ran out of school, and someone would be sent to his home to
find him. He wouldn’t do anything he was asked, and his school books were empty of work. Jon was marked down as a low achiever; the teacher was sure he was capable of doing more.

Jon’s behaviour began to be disruptive at home. He was abusive towards his mother, and the social worker, who had initially been supporting the family over Mark, now found his attention directed towards Jon. There seemed to be problems with other children in the street where Susan was living. Jokes about Jon’s brother and sister being backward, some bullying of Mark and Jon by older boys, and a lot of name calling: ‘shit, big ears, fucking prick, divvy’. The social worker believed that Jon was experiencing peer group pressure, and was also feeling excluded by, and jealous of, the attention being devoted to Mark and Michelle over their special needs. It also appeared that Jon copied Mark’s behaviour.

Susan was visiting Broad Square School regularly to discuss the difficulties with Jon, but there was no improvement, and his teacher, Kathryn Bolger, was finding it hard to cope with him. She reported all the incidents to the head teacher, and began keeping her own log of Jon’s misbehaviour. The parents of other pupils started to complain that Jon was a disruptive influence in the class.

In March there was a weekend trip to North Wales for Jon’s school year. The teacher did not want to take responsibility for Jon on the trip. The social worker’s offer to go along and take individual charge of him was refused, and Jon did not go to North Wales.

His behaviour deteriorated, and became increasingly bizarre. He would revolve around the walls of the classroom, pulling down displays and other objects. He would lie down and wedge himself between the desks. He would cut himself deliberately with scissors, cut holes in his socks, and stick paper over his face. He would stand on desks, and throw chairs. He threw things across the classroom at the other children, and once, when he was put outside, he began throwing things down the corridor. On another occasion he suspended himself, upside down like a bat, from the coat pegs.

In fourteen years of teaching, Kathryn Bolger had never come across a pupil like Jon. The burden of looking after him in class, coping with what she saw as his attention-seeking behaviour, gave her some stress and anxiety.

The school told Susan that Jon could not sit still for a minute, and she said he was the same at home. He was hyperactive and his sleep was disturbed. He was again referred to the School Psychology Service, and Susan took him to see a psychologist at the clinic in Norris Green. She wondered if Jon’s diet might be causing his hyperactivity, and the psychologist said this was possible. A special diet might help. The psychologist suggested another referral to a more senior colleague.

Susan was supplied with a diet sheet by a social worker, which cut out food with such additives as artificial colouring. She never pursued the
second referral, and tried the special diet on Jon for a while. It did not seem to make much difference to his behaviour, and eventually she gave up.

Neil had moved into a flat in Walton Village, and wasn’t seeing so much of his ex-wife and the children. He left the schooling to Susan, and thought the problems with bullying were just part of growing up. He saw them all on Sundays for a while, and then didn’t see Susan for a couple of months, until she came down to Walton Village and started talking about the difficulties she was having with Jon at school. Neil agreed with Susan that it might be best if he changed schools.

Finally, in class one day, not long before the end of the school year, Jon got behind another boy and held a 12 inch wooden ruler to his throat. The boy began going red in the face, and it seemed to the teacher that Jon was trying to choke his classmate. It required some effort from the teacher and a colleague to free the boy from Jon, who seemed so strong. Jon was taken to the head teacher’s office, and did not complete his final term at Broad Square.

*

With the help of the social worker, an approach was made to Walton St Mary’s Church of England Primary School, and the head teacher, Irene Slack, was asked if she would accept Jon as a pupil because there were problems at his current school.

Irene Slack was concerned by the background to the transfer request, but said she would take him on condition that Jon behaved himself and went into a class below his proper age group.

Walton St Mary’s was in Bedford Road, which was just across County Road from St Mary’s Church. It was an old Victorian school building which now shared some 260 pupils with a branch infant school over towards Walton Village.

Irene Slack had been the head teacher for eleven years. The evolved philosophy of the school was that the pupils should be taught to be tolerant of other races, religions and ways of life; to understand the independence of individuals, groups and nations; to be active participants in society and responsible contributors to it; to be given the ability to function as contributing members of cooperative groups; to be aware of self and sensitive to others.

That latter awareness was the aim that Irene Slack regarded as being the most important. Do unto others as you would like to be done unto yourself was the rule.

Jon entered at the start of the new school year in September 1991 and joined class 4D with Bobby, who was also being kept back a year because of his slow learning progress. Perhaps because of this mutual distinction, they gradually became friends.

The class teacher, Michael Dwyer, was in his fifties and held firm views
on discipline. He had taught in schools that catered for what used to be known as maladjusted children, and soon recognised the symptoms of maladjustment in Jon, who sometimes ignored Dwyer’s instructions, or walked around the class in the middle of lessons and collapsed in a heap over his desk when he was being defiant.

Dwyer responded by trying to create a structured environment for Jon, showing him what work was required, and what behaviour was acceptable. The system was fine in the classroom, but broke down in the unstructured playground, where Jon often got into fights. On one occasion, Dwyer caught him picking on a younger and smaller boy. Dwyer asked Jon how he would like it if a bigger boy began fighting him.

In class, Bobby seemed shy, quiet, an under-achiever, though Dwyer noticed that he could be sly, and sometimes made the bullets for others to shoot. Like Jon, Bobby would become involved in playtime fights, but Dwyer could not say that either of the boys was remarkable as a trouble-maker or a problem child.

Throughout that year there was a little concern over Bobby’s truancy, but no such difficulty with Jon. It appeared that he was settling down in his new school, and his behaviour at home was improving, though the social worker was still worried that Jon felt he was being overlooked because of the attention being given to Michelle and Mark. Jon did not get on well with Mark, and occasionally they would fight. That summer the social worker arranged a holiday for Jon and Michelle, through the charity KIND, Kids In Need and Distress.

The problem of Jon being bullied in the area around his Norris Green home seemed to have subsided, and he had a group of friends there with whom he was always out playing, though Susan noticed that he seemed happier in the company of younger children.

When he played out Jon was usually involved in football, riding around on his bike or games such as hide and seek and British bulldog. Sometimes his was the only bike, and they would give each other piggy rides on the back. Sometimes they sat on the stairs at another boy’s home, and told each other jokes and ghost stories.