STUBBLE-BURNING IN THE HOME
Byron Rogers tries to explain why women in the countryside were so easily persuaded to set fire to themselves THE MOST extraordinary case I have ever heard of has just ended. A 29-year- old sheep farmer, living in the Northamp- tonshire village of Woodford Halse, just five miles from where I am writing this, pleaded guilty to charges of threatening women over the telephone until they agreed to set fire to their pubic hair. The extraordinary part is this: the women fre- quently did.
I first became aware that something very odd was going on when last year our local give-away newspaper printed a police warning to beware of some anonymous caller making what were described as 'per- verted suggestions'. No details were given and nobody I talked to had even heard of it, but, by then intrigued, I rang the police and the full story emerged.
The calls were being made during the day, always during office hours, which sug- gested to the police that whoever was mak- ing them had access to a firm's telephones. They thought this because there were so many calls, each one lasting up to half an hour and often much longer, and no local around here could afford the phone bill.
The form the calls took was this: if a man answered, the caller immediately rang off, but if it was a woman, he then engaged her in conversation. He did not make threats at first, he just asked them about themselves. The police said he extracted information from them 'like a practised Journalist', which showed a touching faith in the powers of practised journalists (I have spent 20 years trying to extract infor- mation on the telephone without much success). On some occasions he already knew something about his victims from local press items or wedding announce- ments, but much of the time he just found out about them from what they told him. For these women talked to a stranger. Now in the country you get used to being rung up by strangers; every week, usually in the evenings, some woman I have never met will ring to ask after my Windows or kitchen cupboards. They sound so concerned, and their vision of an ideal home so precise, that I listen to them with interest, for nothing much happens here. BY nine in the morning the villages empty of everyone except the old, the unem- ployed and young women at home with their children. The caller knew how vul- nerable his victims were.
The young women were bored and lone- ly, so of course they talked to this friendly voice and, incredibly, told him about their families. It was then that the threats start- ed. At first he claimed to have kidnapped their children, was torturing them and would only stop if ransom demands were met. No money was ever delivered (appar- ently he asked for thousands of pounds), but then in April last year the threats changed, when he began to demand that his interlocutors set fire to their pubic hair.
Now the extraordinary thing is that they believed in his threats. They wouldn't have done so 20 years ago when a village was a place where you knew your neighbours and your mother lived just down the road, so a lunatic on the telephone would have been a joke over the garden fence. But they are vulnerable now: they sit at home, listening to the news bulletin reports of kidnaps and urban terror on the radio, and are afraid.
You see the fear in village streets where no children play and cars deliver them to 'I used to work for Dan-Air.' their friends' homes, as though an English village in the late 20th century were down- town Detroit. Nobody questions this. Yet nobody has ever heard of a child being taken; we all listen to the news on which such things happen and assume it is only a matter of time before it happens in our vil- lage.
The only crimes around here are drunk- en driving and the theft of slates from barns out in the fields. There is little else, apart from the odd burglary, and even then half the village has a fair idea who has been responsible. Once there was a murder, but it was in 1873 and the murderer was arrest- ed an hour later. The one thing which has changed is fear.
This may take a ludicrous form, as when after the Libyan bombings Gaddafi was briefly as much part of rural demonology as Napoleon had been and some old people refused to open their doors, but the fear exists. A young man in black leathers tak- ing photographs of houses in our village had his motorcycle number taken by just about everyone who saw him, until it turned out he was on a location shoot for Country Life. Against this background, young women in the spring of 1991 began setting fire to their pubic hair.
Nobody knows how many did. The court evidence mentions 12 cases, but these, as the police admit, were the only ones reported to them; others may have been too embarrassed to come forward. In evi- dence, a husband reported returning from work to find his wife naked and trembling, still holding the telephone.
When I first started talking about the pubic-hair-burning, it was suggested that all this had occurred only in my own dement- ed imagination, and I almost came to believe this, for I heard nothing more about it. Even in the village pub nobody knew anything, and when I brought the matter up the barmaid dropped a glass and said I would be none the worse for some medical attention.
But then there it was again in the give- away paper, but this time as a front-page headline: 'Pervert jailed for sick calls.' He got five years. The police, who had hoped to catch him on his phone bill alone (350 reported calls were made), did so in the end only when a man took the receiver from his wife and recognised the voice. It was that of Simon Wadland, a local sheep farmer.
A plump, red, grinning face looked out of the newspaper photographs, the sort of face you can see any night of the year in the pubs of middle England. His defending counsel, describing Wadland as 'a friendly, likable and highly respectable member of the farming community', said his client had made the calls because at the time he was under severe financial pressure.
Oh, dear. Even in its economics this case will tell you as much as you will ever need to know about life in the English country- side in 1992.
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