The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (31 page)

Jack appears with a knife. I’ll bloody kill yer, I’ll bloody kill yer. Don’t be stupid, says Ann, go and put yer knife away. It’s not the first time she’s done it, you know, Jack said. You’re the fifth family she’s split up, but she’ll be back. Twelve months and she’ll be back. He got in his car and drove home to Oswaldtwistle. Bobby and Barbara took a taxi and went off together. Ann was left with six kids, an eight-berth tent and a van she couldn’t drive.

In the morning, as soon as it was light, Ann phoned Bobby’s mother and asked for Al to come and fetch them. His mum said, oh, our Robert wouldn’t have buggered off with somebody. I’m tellin yer, ’e ’as, said Ann.

At dinner time, while she was still waiting for Al, Bobby turned up with Barbara and put her in the front of the van and said, if you touch ’er I’ll fuckin’ kill yer. I’ll just leave youse all here. He started collecting all the stuff. They were all going to drive back from Banks together in the van. Ann had been up all night, turning it over in her head. If I could get that lead round her neck as we’re drivin’ along, let’s see what he does then. But she sacked that and grabbed the teapot instead, lunged forward and embedded it in Barbara’s head. The last thing she saw was all the blood, then Bobby grabbed her and she woke up on the floor, and he drove off, leaving her with the kids again. The kids were in a right state by this time.

Eventually, Al arrived and took them home.

Bobby was back in the house that night, and stayed there for six or seven weeks, sleeping on the couch, during which time he more or less locked Ann in the house. If she went anywhere he’d take her there and back again. She got out one day when he didn’t lock the door, and went round to tell his mother. Our Robert wouldn’t do a thing like that, she said. Ann walked back home through Walton Village.

She had to take one of the boys to the clinic, so she told the nurse what’d been happening, and the nurse sent her to the Family Service Unit. She was feeling really paranoid, so they gave her some Temazepam and Diazepam, but they only seemed to make her more depressed.

It was Sunday, 16 October 1988 when Bobby left for good. He’d sent one of the boys out for a copy of
The
Sport
earlier in the week. Bobby never read
The
Sport
,
but he looked through it and said, load of bloody crap that, go an throw it in the bin.

Ann later convinced herself that Barbara had put a message in
The
Sport
for Bobby. He went out on the Friday night and came back at three in the morning. He’d been cross all day and Ann was fuming. She stood there ironing his clothes and on the Sunday she said, there’s yer clothes, now piss off, and he just packed it all up and went. He told Ian he’d be back for him on Tuesday, but the only time any of them ever saw him after that was once, at his mother’s funeral.

As he was walking out the door Ann gave him her wedding ring. ’Ere’s somethin’ to remember me by. Ann’s brother had just come back from Cyprus and given her a bottle of Ouzo, so she opened it and drank the lot, straight down. It never touched the sides, and it didn’t make her drunk, and it didn’t make her forget.

Bobby had walked out on a thousand pound electricity bill and a five hundred pound gas bill. Ann had a fiver in her pocket. She went to the benefit office and sat there crying. They gave her a crisis loan.

A week later, on Saturday, 22 October, Ann and the boys went round to her parents’, and when they returned home the house was on fire. It was said to have been caused by an electrical fault – which was an unhappy coincidence, but only a coincidence, given big Bobby’s trade.

They were put into a hostel in Toxteth for a few weeks and, at first, Ann barely knew what day it was. She couldn’t remember the fire or anything. It was about a fortnight before she came out of it and washed her hair and did it up, and began to feel better. The man who’d booked them into the hostel saw Ann and said, my God, I wouldn’t have given tuppence for yer when you came in, and now look at yer.

It was January before they were rehoused, at 223 Walton Village. Peter, the second eldest, couldn’t bear the hostel and had gone to stay with his nan, big Bobby’s mum. It wasn’t long after they moved into the Village that someone from social services came round saying Peter was being mistreated at home, and that Ann was beating her kids with a stick.

Ann ushered all the boys into the room and said to the people from social services, here, if you can find one bruise on any of ’em … she made all the boys strip off and stand in a line.

The weight fell away from Ann. She developed asthma, which she was told was psychosomatic, though it stayed with her. She had a lump on her breast, which terrified her, until she got it checked out, and it was non-malignant, just ratty tissue. She began drinking, seriously drinking, starting at home in the morning, and into the top house, or Top House as it was by now, for the rest of the day.

When she went home at night and got into bed she’d see faces crowding round, laughing at her. It wasn’t anyone she knew, just faces. She’d lie there sweating and sweating, and unable to sleep. She decided she’d better stop taking the Temazepam and the Diazepam, so she did, and the faces went away.

Her friend Monica helped out with the kids. Monica would go into the pub and say, come on, come ’ome an’ ’ave somethin’ to eat. Piss off an’ leave me alone, Ann would say, I don’t wanna know. She’d just sit in the corner and drink, or take it out on the dart board.

They’d always had darts in the Top House. Bobby had started a team there and when they’d moved to Belmont Road Ann had played in the
Ladies’ Prem for the King Charles pub team. She’d been good, playing competitively, but now when she got on the oche she went blank with the tension, and couldn’t throw. Now she just played killer with some of the others, and sometimes she threw so hard her darts got embedded in the barrel behind the board. That was the anger coming out.

Occasionally, someone, a fella more often than not, would say something. You should be ashamed of yerself, in ’ere with yer kids at ’ome. Slag. They’d never said that when she had a husband of course. When you put a loaf on me table, Ann would tell them, then you can order me about. Until then, mind yer own fuckin’ business. If they persisted, she’d hit them.

Most of the time she couldn’t get drunk, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. It was just like drinking through it, and coming out sober the other side. She kept a bottle under her pillow, and woke up with it most mornings for the best part of eighteen months.

The older sons were left in charge at home, and sometimes hit the younger ones, sometimes with sticks. They began sagging, hanging out with other lads in the area, getting involved in petty crime. Bobby and Ryan were still in the infants’, displaying no outward signs of the domestic difficulties.

After their dad left, Philip asked Ian who he’d rather be with. Ian said his dad, and Philip told Ann, who was upset and started giving Ian a hard time. Ian already felt he was getting a hard time at Walton St Mary’s school, singled out as a Thompson by the staff, because of the reputation for truancy and misbehaviour earned by his elder brothers.

Ian was suspected of some petty theft at the school. His younger brother, Philip, was seen there with bite marks. He sometimes said he was being bullied by Ian.

When the group of boys he was going around with began thieving and smoking dope, Ian stopped seeing them, not wanting to get involved.

Peter was the first one into care. It seemed to Ann that he had been hit the hardest by their dad’s going. Peter said David had locked him in the pigeon shed and chained him up. David was arrested and Peter was examined. There were no charges. Ann was sure he was lying, and said he’d be best off in voluntary care until he learned to tell the truth.

David left home and came back again, and continued to live there periodically. He got probation for robbing a motor bike. Ian moved on to secondary school and Bobby and Ryan started at Walton St Mary’s. As the next eldest, Ian was left in charge, with responsibility for making sure Bobby and Ryan got up and ready for school, and getting them there in time, before going to school himself.

Philip went out early, came home late at night, and was always sagging. He began doing drugs, sniffing aerosols and all sorts. He was picking up a string of cautions for petty offences. Once he was seen and caught coming out of the window of a local solicitors’ office with several thousand pounds
worth of computer equipment. He had been looking after Bobby and Ryan at the time, and had taken them with him on the job.

On another occasion there was a fire at an abandoned property in the Village. A sooty-faced boy emerged from the smoke claiming that Philip and another lad had started the fire, and Philip was picked up and taken to Walton Lane Police Station. Ann was notified, and went to the station, going in on the bounce, blaming the police for picking on her boys. Her Philip wouldn’t start a fire. It was always the Thompsons that got the blame. You wouldn’t do a thing like that would you, Philip? Mum, it was me, I was there. There were no charges.

Philip was suspected of an indecency offence involving two small children, but the case was dropped, the allegation unproved.

In the end, he was getting so out of hand that Ann took all his clothes and tore them up and burnt them, everything except his school uniform, in an effort to keep him at home. Yer fuckin’ bastard doin’ that to me clothes, said Philip. He climbed out the window and went round his mate’s and took his mate’s mum’s trainies. She came knocking for Ann and told her they’d cost fifty quid.

When Philip came home Ann got him on the floor with Ian and told Ian to hold his hands while she got the trainies off his feet. Philip wriggled free and pulled a knife out and went for Ian. Ann marched him down the police station, and Philip went into voluntary care.

Ian got on well at secondary school. He was likeable, popular and academically bright. His head teacher identified him as one of the cleverest pupils in the school, and he was student of the year.

Gradually, as he continued to take responsibilities in the family, Ian began to exhibit behavioural problems at school, being cheeky and argumentative with the staff and, finally, he was excluded from school, after threatening a teacher with a chair during a row.

Ann met a man over the road, in the laundrette, and began a relationship with him – he was another Bobby – which led to another pregnancy. She stopped drinking altogether then, and baby Ben was born in May 1992.

Things seemed better at home for a while, and Ian felt his burden of responsibility had been lifted. As it turned out, the respite was short-lived and, in October, a week before the fourth anniversay of big Bobby’s departure, Ann swung at Ian with a cane she kept to threaten them all, and hit him on the arm.

Ian decided he’d had enough, and, after seeing a social worker, he went into voluntary care at a residential home round the corner from 223 Walton Village. This was the first social worker involvement with the family for some months, because of staff sickness.

Little Bobby went round to see Ian at his home one evening, not long after his arrival. Bobby showed Ian what he was carrying, which was a green
bulb and a red bulb attached to a plastic disc by wires. The eyes of a troll doll, Bobby explained. A troll with illuminating eyes. Ian asked Bobby where he’d got it from, and Bobby said out of a troll. Ian asked Bobby if his mum had bought it, and Bobby said no, he’d robbed it out of the Kwikkie. He’d robbed it just to get the eyes. This did not seem strange to Ian, because Bobby was always messing around with electrical things, taking them apart carefully with screwdrivers and knives, just to get at some small component inside.

*

The staff at Walton St Mary’s discovered that Bobby and Jon were going robbing when they sagged, and did their best to respond. Irene Slack could never get the truth out of Bobby, but on one occasion, after he and Jon had been seen shoplifting while they should have been in school, she lost her temper and shouted at him. Bobby admitted what they had been doing. It was the only time Irene Slack ever got him to admit anything.

She was concerned about Ryan, who was beginning to notch up his own tally of unauthorised absences. Ryan said Bobby threatened to break his glasses if he didn’t sag, and was always complaining to his teacher, Jacqueline Helm, that Bobby punched and kicked him when they were at home. Ryan was enthusiastic at school but it seemed that Bobby’s bullying was making him miserable.

John Gregory, Walton Lane Police Station’s community liaison officer, had already spoken to Bobby and Ryan about truanting, and, when he came to the school with Brian Whitby in mid-November, to give one of their Stranger Danger talks to the pupils, they were asked to give another truancy talk to Bobby and Ryan. Brian Whitby told them it was wrong to sag, and asked them if they knew why. Because we get into trouble off Miss Slack.

Ten days later, one Thursday when the caretaker was away ill and there was no one watching the gates, Bobby and Jon were overheard plotting their escape, and ran out of the school when the lunch break started. They were later seen on County Road, robbing again.

Jon was supposed to be staying at his father’s that night, and Neil had been at the school to meet Jon when he came out. He called Susan and eventually they went to the police to report Jon missing. Neil went round in a Panda car, looking for Jon, but he was finally found by Susan at about half past ten, playing out with Bobby in Walton Village.

Jon said he’d been enjoying himself and had forgotten the time. He didn’t seem very bothered by the upset he’d caused. His mum smacked Jon, and sent him to bed. He was grounded for a week.

His parents had noticed that he was always asking for things, saying that they thought more of Mark and Michelle than they did of him. Neil
thought this might be because the other two were together at a special school, and always going out on trips and excursions. Jon actually asked once if he could go to Mark and Michelle’s school, because of all the things he could get. Neil told him he couldn’t go there because it was a special kind of school. He told Jon he wasn’t being left out, and made an effort to try and compensate with trips and treats.