The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (46 page)

Jon did complain of being bullied, at school and in the street near his mother’s home, and this can only have added to his vulnerability and powerless frustration.

When he was seven years old Jon was referred to a trainee educational psychologist who said that Jon seemed unable to cope with the pressures on him. Nothing seems to have changed as a result of this diagnosis. No help was forthcoming and there was continuing instability in the family. The ‘pressure’ must have risen inside Jon.

His class teacher noticed a dramatic deterioration in Jon’s behaviour after the 1990 Christmas holidays. Did something happen during that holiday to make him so much worse? Now he begins to act out very serious internal distress, showing aggression and self-destructiveness. The consensus is that he is seeking attention. He wants attention.

His worsening behaviour – we know it is extreme because his teacher has never seen anything like it in 14 years of teaching – results in a second visit to a psychologist. Susan proposes another (denying) explanation for what she calls Jon’s hyperactivity: his diet. The psychologist colludes in Susan’s denial and suggests a special diet, as well as a referral to a senior colleague.

Susan tries the diet but gives up because it doesn’t seem to make any difference. She does not pursue the referral. Does she give up because she does not think the problem is very serious – he’ll grow out of it – or because she is afraid of the truth and finds it easier to deny?

When Jon finally nearly chokes a boy with a ruler – using such enraged strength it takes two adults to separate him from his victim – Susan attributes this to the bullying and decides he should change schools. The very action that draws him to Bobby.

All agree that Jon’s behaviour improves under the more disciplined methods of his first teacher at his new school in Walton. He still butts his head against the wall in the playground, but not very often, and only the dinner lady seems concerned about this. The head teacher just wants Jon to ‘behave himself’ in her school and has only accepted him on the basis that he goes into a class below his proper age group – another humiliation for Jon to take on board.

Where are Jon’s feelings in the ‘structured environment’ of his new, disciplined teaching? They cannot now be expressed in his behaviour and they cannot disappear. They can only be suppressed where they will fester.
He has probably already been made to feel guilty for all the trouble he has been causing his mother. He wants to please her because he wants to be loved. He is a child and what is happening to him is not his fault, but he is being asked to carry the additional burden of responsibility.

Jon’s mother notes that he seems happier playing with younger children in the street. A teacher finds him in the playground, picking on a smaller boy. He and Bobby, when they get together, enjoy a reputation for bullying. Here is Jon, vulnerable and powerless, taking opportunities to reclaim some power, and project his vulnerability and powerlessness onto somebody else.

Susan leaves Jon to make his own way to school and he begins to truant. In the new school year, with a less strict teacher, his behaviour again starts to degenerate. The teacher thinks Jon knows he is doing wrong but carries on as if he doesn’t care and wants the attention. There is no uniformity of opinion about Jon among the staff. The head thinks he is ‘odd’. Only the dinner lady and one teacher appear to think that there is a real problem. The truanting continues.

With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to say that, short of writing it out in big letters on the school blackboard, Jon could not have made himself plainer. If he was not helped he was going to do something really terrible. At some point, probably sooner rather than later, he would find an outlet for all that suppressed rage and powerless frustration. He would find someone vulnerable over whom he could exert absolute power. He would be abusive and very violent. It was becoming a matter of urgency.

When four detectives knocked on Susan Venables’ door to arrest her son for murder she said, ‘I knew you’d be here. I told him you’d want to see him for sagging school on Friday.’ Sadly, tragically, I believe that, deep down, even then, Susan knew the real reason for the detectives’ visit. Denial is a difficult habit to break.

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If it was instability that characterised Jon’s childhood, it was turbulence that defined Bobby’s. Conflict and violence were an inbuilt part of life in the Thompson household. We probably don’t know the half of what Bobby witnessed or was subjected to, but what we do know provides a vivid picture of a classically dysfunctional family.

His mother, Ann – like Jon, a middle child – was ill-prepared for an adult life as parent and partner. Her own childhood was dominated by the terror and tyranny of a drunken, physically abusive father and a mother who seemed to Ann to be passive, weak and unsupporting.

Who knows what historical cycle had led Ann’s parents – Bobby’s maternal grandparents – to play these roles or why it was Ann alone, of the
three children, who felt victimised and unloved. Middle children, sandwiched between the first-born and an adored baby, can often feel isolated as the family scapegoat.

If you are denied love and affection as a child how can you express those feelings as an adult? What else could Ann do with those unsatisfied needs but, unconsciously, develop a store of resentment and anger behind a wall of truculent self-protection? Treated as if she was worthless, Ann would inevitably come to believe it. She could not live with feeling worthless, so she buried the feeling, and created a mask of aggressive defiance.

No wonder then, that she married the ‘first fella who ever paid her attention’. Engaged on her seventeenth birthday, married on her eighteenth, she could not get away from home quick enough and was almost bound to step out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Her father’s beating had continued, apparently unabated, into adolescence. There is something almost sexual in her father’s humiliating violation of Ann’s body, the beating of a teenaged daughter by a father who has just been told she is leaving him to get married.

Ann did not leave her parents’ home to get married and start a family, or because she was ready. She left because she needed to. There was no hope of fulfilling the wishful, escapist fantasy she had played out with dolls. There could be no ‘fairytale’ marriage.

Little is known of her husband, Bobby senior, but from what we do know, the parallel between his own childhood and that of his son Bobby is extraordinary. Bobby senior, the third youngest like his son, lost his own father – through death rather than desertion – in childhood. ‘The paternal role had been taken on by the elder brothers, and they were strict in imposing discipline.’ This is so exact it could be a prophecy. Another turn of the cycle.

As a married couple, Ann and Bobby senior seem, initially, to have been permanently broke and unhappy. Why did they have so many children? Ann says she kept on trying for a girl and her husband wanted a football team. Perhaps the truth is that Ann wanted, or needed, the doll-like innocence of babies. A need that could never be satisfied and could only be disastrous for the children.

It is no surprise that Bobby senior turns out to be a violent drunk like Ann’s father. Bobby senior, deprived of a father and subjugated to the will of his older siblings, is now in a position of power which he is only too ready to abuse.

What a good laugh it must have been among Ann and her sons, joking about Bobby senior’s similarities with Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. What must the family have experienced to make that joke acceptable?

By the time little Bobby is born the family is already in trouble, Bobby senior is violent with his wife and his sons. It is difficult to believe that Ann does not employ physical punishment nor sometimes fight back at her husband. There is probably a great deal of abusive shouting and verbal conflict.
There is probably very little show of love and tenderness and certainly no consistency.

The eldest boy, David, has been on and off the child protection register. Ann has attempted suicide with an overdose of Valium, not long after the birth of her fourth child. They probably thought she was suffering from post-natal depression. Don’t worry, love, you’ll get over it. How many truckloads of Valium would it take to dull Ann’s pain? She would not expect to be helped and no help, or not very much, is forthcoming.

Ironically, family life begins to improve after the birth of little Bobby. There is more money and camping holidays. Nothing has been confronted or resolved and the construct must still be dangerously fragile but, perhaps, there is a little less pressure and conflict.

Bobby is just about two years old when his younger brother Ryan is born and he is no longer the new baby in the family. He is six years old when his father leaves and ceases all contact with Ann and the boys. (Is it possible Bobby senior was six when his father died?)

First Bobby has been displaced in the family by Ryan – at the very age of James Bulger when he is killed – and now he has been abandoned by his father. The little love and affection the family has to spare has perhaps been invested in the new-born. This was withdrawn from Bobby when Ryan came along and now his father, by his actions, is saying, ‘I don’t want you, I don’t love you’.

The effect on the whole family of the father’s departure is catastrophic. First, symbolically, the family home immediately burns down. Then Ann turns to drink, confirmed now in her role as a victim, and, unsurprisingly, incapable of being one adequate parent, never mind two.

Bobby, like his father before him, is now left to the mercies of his older brothers. The experience of conflict and violence – the deliberate and unintentional abuse of adult power – is their only model. What else can they do, when suddenly and prematurely awarded the power for themselves, but act out the same conflict and violence? We don’t know what went on, while Ann was in the pub and Bobby senior was God knows where, but, at best, it was probably bullying and, at worst, it may have reached into those dark corners of excessive abuse.

At home, Ann was almost certainly short-tempered, unaffectionate and harsh. Bobby must have responded to her as a victim, wanting to please and protect his mother. He must have felt resentment too, that she was not there to protect him. He would have suppressed those feelings and perhaps projected them onto his father, who was now a convenient focus for all the anger in the family.

Bobby will also have taken on his mother’s protective shell of defiance: those instincts for self-preservation that were to serve him so well in his interviews with the police and to see him wrongly perceived as the leader of the plot to kill James Bulger.

By the time Ann emerges from her alcoholic stupor, the family is in total disarray. One by one, the boys are heading into care. There is delinquency, depression and attempts at suicide (overdoses, just like Ann – another cycle).

The turbulence and confusion of Bobby’s childhood could not be worse. Ann becomes pregnant and a new baby, Ben, is born. Bobby helps to feed and change the baby, perhaps enjoys helping his mother, wanting to please her. He bakes cakes in the kitchen too. It is as if he is trying to provoke some love and affection from Ann. Or, at least, some consistency in her mothering.

We know from the teachers at school in Walton that Ryan complains of being bullied by Bobby. Yet, in bed, at night they turn to each other for security, each sucking the other’s thumb. It is no wonder that Bobby feels insecure or that he needs someone to bully.

At school, no-one sees
a troubled child. Bobby – another Thompson in that long line of truants, bullies and general miscreants – has expectations to fulfill and does not disappoint. His protective shell, surely only reinforced by these expectations, is misinterpreted as the demeanour of a child causing trouble. Like Jon, he is kept back in a class a year below his age group.

Neglected, resentful, betrayed by his father, bullied by his brothers, reminded at school of his poor pedigree and ‘bad’ behaviour, Bobby has no support.

He truants and goes shoplifting. He steals things and throws them away. He is self-destructive because he doesn’t know any better and no-one is there to make sense of it for him. He has reserves of anger and resentment and unsatisfied needs. He has experienced abuse of power and will one day impose his own power to abuse. Now there is no sign, other than bullying Ryan, of any urgent impulse to violence. But when the opportunity is created he will take it. With Jon he finds and makes that opportunity.

Is it possible that Jon and Bobby found each other because they were the two unhappiest and most mistreated boys in the school? Perhaps they saw something of themselves in each other. Perhaps, unconsciously, Bobby identified Jon’s readiness to go to extremes.

Jon was isolated at school by his temper tantrums and uncontrollable behaviour, while Bobby was isolated by his distinction as a Thompson, with all the baggage that entailed. They were united in the humiliation of being kept down a year. Another humiliation was the last thing either boy needed.

In all likelihood, if Bobby and Jon had not got together James Bulger would not have been killed. It is difficult to imagine either boy carrying out the killing alone. I believe they needed each other’s presence to bolster their nerve and maintain the ‘normality’ that permitted the escalation into violence. It is equally unlikely that there were other pupils in the school who were so badly damaged that they would want, or need, to participate in the abduction and murder of a child.

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Many people, I know, are reluctant to accept this kind of explanation for a seemingly inexplicable, inexcusable act of such horrific violence. The will to try and understand such a crime sometimes appears to be less important than the need to find someone or something to blame. This is a kind of displacement. The crime is so extreme and so unpleasant that it must be placed beyond all human boundaries. What will we have to address in ourselves if we seek to make a link between such violence and childhood experience which, to a lesser or greater extent, is part of all our childhoods?