Half life
Killer looks
Carole Morin
Middle-aged Englishwomen often look disappointed and dowdy. Rosemary West makes the skin crawl because of the crimes she has been accused of, but also because she's a frump with a howler of a hairdo. English Rose looks like — and is — somebody's mum. Whether guilty or innocent, she's an advert against life after 40 — if it has to be lived with a dumpy body and a big pair of specs parked on your nose. Plain women have sex, but nobody with any taste wants to hear the more outrageous stories on television.
The 24-year old Myra Hindley's arrest mugshot is the personification of evil for children warned in the Sixties to avoid strange men — even if they're with a woman. Hindley's coarse eyeliner and dark roots made her look mad. Mrs West sits in court like she's dying to get back to her knitting. Her ordinary looks are just as threatening as Myra's manic leer. Everyone has a suburban relative who superficially resembles West. Murder is associated with men and movies. I've watched hundreds of movies with murderers in the Fun Film Club at Wormwood Scrubs, but I've only been at one death. Beefy Craig, the classics teach- er, attracted a crowd when he lay writhing in the playground. We stood around him instead of calling an ambulance, engrossed in a way we'd never been when hearing him mumble about Greek and Roman shenanigans. Gumboil Green, the' science teacher, pushed his way through the audience and kneeled over the body, saying, 'He's dead.' Everybody cheered because a dead teacher meant a day of school mourning. That night I asked Maddie if I would go to Hell. 'Of course not,' she said, 'you've not been doing first-aid long. How were you to know it was a fatal heart attack and not a wee epileptic fit?'
I can't remember what Beefy Craig's corpse looked like. He was just another fat man who wasn't very good at his job. But I remember seeing his wife wearing a coat one size too small, waiting outside the swimming-baths. There was a rumour that his wife and daughter shared the coat because they were too busy to buy two. It dwarfed the daughter and made the wife look like a hunchback as she tensed herself into it. Maddie always looked down on anyone without a huge disposable income, but in those days I found poverty dead glamorous. I couldn't work out why Beefy Craig had been so fat if he was that poor. His death became one of those black comic routines that we giggled about in the school toilets. The toilets were only ever used for smoking and sniggering, except by smelly Vinning. Laughing at Beefy Craig relieved the tension of guilt and terror and all the waiting around teenagers do. Ignorance can make you ruthless or vulnerable, but youth — the romantic promise of something better is easy to empathise with.
The ingredients of the West story are too black for comedy. I'd prefer the corpses in the cellar to be a case for Rob- bie Coltrane in Cracker than the real-life fate of a dozen young girls.
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