Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (17 page)

One Rutlish old boy from this period remembered that from his first day, two specific objectives were outlined: ‘By the time you leave Rutlish School you will be able to swim and to speak the King’s English.’
³²
Another pupil felt the Varnish agenda was extremely simple: ‘Get educated, talk proper and you will succeed in life.’
³³
Elocution was pivotal to a Rutlish education and was drilled into the boys by Herbert Cave, an English master who had written a book on the subject in 1930,
Practical Exercises in Spoken English
.
³⁴
The Governors’ Report of 1933 particularly commended this – ‘a successful attempt had been made to turn out boys with power to speak correct Standard English’
³⁵
– by which they meant Received Pronunciation. This was to prove invaluable to Heath who was to use his accent and the assumption of a patrician manner to masquerade as a member of the upper-middle class throughout his life and career.

Given how frequently he was to attempt to pass himself off as a product of Eton and Oxbridge, it’s clear that something of Varnish’s social ambitions for his boys rubbed off on the young Neville Heath; his yearning for upward social mobility, his self-aggrandizement and snobbery was ignited by Varnish’s public-school ambitions for his grammar-school boys.
³⁶
J. D. Casswell, Heath’s defence counsel, was later to identify this key element of Heath’s character. He was, he said, ‘a man never satisfied to remain in the station to which he had been called and for which he was qualified’.
³⁷

Far from accepting the rigid class divisions of pre-war Britain, Heath was to study them, learn the manners and language of his social superiors – ape them – then ruthlessly exploit them.

In the various books and articles written about Heath over the past six decades, several cite uncorroborated incidents from his school days that identify embryonic sadistic behaviour. Gerald Byrne in
Borstal Boy
reports the instance of a girl in Heath’s class at school being beaten by him so hard with a ruler that she had to be sent home in a taxi. If true, this must have taken place before the age of twelve, as Rutlish was a school for boys only. Certainly, Bessie Heath denied that this incident ever took place: ‘I do not know of this incident [and] neither does his headmaster, who has nothing but good to say of him. Surely I, his mother, would have heard of this, if it had happened?’
³⁸

This may well be the opinion of a mother blind to the faults of a much-loved son. But, in the wake of the huge publicity surrounding Heath at the time of his arrest, many of the tales about him may well be apocryphal. Like this story, none are verifiable by any sources.
Borstal Boy
was published immediately after the trial in 1946, written in great haste and with a tabloid audience in mind. Its author, Gerald Byrne, was a journalist with the Sunday newspaper,
Empire News
. He had met Heath casually in various pubs and during the trial had talked to many of Heath’s associates. Though he doesn’t cite any sources, some of the incidents he describes do have the ring of truth. He quotes one young woman, a friend from Heath’s schooldays:

Even at the age of fifteen Neville Heath started to show his sway over girls. The girls at the local school I attended used to take turns arranging regular little parties at their various homes and we wouldn’t have dreamt of having a party without Neville – it wouldn’t have been complete. He was an unmitigated liar, show-off swank-pot and all the things that usually go to make an unpopular character, yet although all the girls knew his faults, he somehow managed to blend them into an unusual and charming personality, and we all liked him.
³⁹

Heath was to develop this persona as the likeable rogue, the young dandy, throughout his adolescence to such an extent that by the time he reached borstal, he was a self-confessed ‘Raffles’.

Byrne cites another incident, uncorroborated at the time, but verified a decade later by Giles Playfair and Derrick Sington in their study of psychopathy,
The Offenders
. Having read of the incident in Byrne’s book and uneasy about quoting unverifiable sources, they had tracked down many of the individuals involved.

One winter night, when he was about fifteen, the young Heath and a boy called ‘Howard’ attended a party at the home of a mutual friend, Elizabeth, in Wimbledon High Street. The two boys, who were in the habit of drinking quarts of beer together in the garage behind Howard’s house, had purchased a considerable amount of alcohol from the off-licence in Sutton High Street. As well as the boys, Elizabeth had invited five of her female friends. Her parents were out for the evening and the young people were left to their own devices. After a while, it was suggested that they play ‘Murders’ and the group dispersed to various parts of the house. They successfully played the game twice. The third time, Heath and Howard persuaded a girl called ‘Jeanette’ to accompany them in their search for clues. The three young people climbed to the top of the house and entered a bedroom. Suddenly, Heath grabbed Jeanette and threw her on the bed, calling to Howard to help him.

‘Come on Howard, let’s make real love to her!’ Neville held Jeanette down as she violently kicked and struggled. The two boys first tried to kiss her face but she moved her head from side to side to avoid their lips. Then – ‘We’ll soon show her what love really is!’ said Neville.

Jeanette screamed, alerting the other girls in the house. She returned home, deeply shocked, ‘with deep blue finger marks on both sides of her throat’.
⁴⁰

Gerald Byrne interviewed both Jeanette’s father and Howard in 1946. Then, in 1956, Playfair and Sington attempted to have the assault verified by Jeanette’s father, a former MP.
⁴¹
He confirmed that the story was true. After the incident, he had gone off in search of the two boys and caught up with them outside Howard’s house. He reprimanded Heath and warned him that not only might he be expelled from school for such behaviour, but he might also be reported to the authorities. This, after all, was a violent attempted sexual assault and not merely adolescent ‘horseplay’ as Byrne has Heath refer to it. Heath was ‘disarmingly apologetic, courteous and contrite’ and managed to persuade Jeanette’s father not to report him to Varnish or the police. This was to become a well-rehearsed strategy in Heath’s life. Having committed offences, he would rely on his innate charm and good manners to side-step difficult situations. Together with the appearance of sincere contrition this usually led to Heath being let off the hook. Not only did this allow him to refine his skill in petty offences, but it also began to cement his attitude to those in authority.
⁴²

This incident is the first evidence of violence in Heath’s life, and it’s worth bearing in mind that he stated to a prison psychiatrist in 1946 that he had no knowledge of sex until the age of eighteen,
⁴³
some years
after
this attack. But it’s also significant that Heath had been drinking before the assault – the marriage of sexual aggression and alcohol already fused, even before he had lost his virginity.

Though adept at sport – especially at rugby, cricket and athletics – Heath did not excel at school, mathematics being the only subject he felt confident in. He sat the matriculation exam but failed. He refused to take it again, despite appeals from his mother and Mr Varnish. Without matriculating, neither university nor a commission as an officer in the services were options for him. At the age of sixteen, on 9 March 1934, he started work as a warehouseman in the silk department of Pawson and Leaf, an established textile importer at St Paul’s Churchyard in the City of London, which had been trading since the eighteenth century.
⁴⁴
The building still remains situated directly opposite the cathedral. This job had probably been arranged for Heath through his father’s connections in the textile business and William Heath may well have worked for Pawson and Leaf at some point himself. Heath earned 25s. a week for general menial duties and though the job was dull, he was buoyed by the social life.
⁴⁵
In the City, he made friends with several other young men who were in the Territorial Army, specifically the Artists Rifles whose ranks were generally filled with young businessmen and public schoolboys. On 30 October, Heath enlisted as a rifleman ‘terrier’ in the 28th London Regiment Territorial Army at the Drill Hall, Duke’s Road, just off the Euston Road. By now, Heath had specifically set his sights on a uniformed service career, commenting to a friend at the time that ‘it is the uniform I want’.
⁴⁶

The appeal of the uniform was fundamental to Heath’s psychology. For him it became a complex symbol which accumulated power and significance as his career progressed from peacetime to war – at once a signifier of status and class as well as an indicator of bravery and heroism. From the mid-1930s onwards, Heath would adopt various uniforms, only some of which he was entitled to wear. When he was on active service in Palestine in 1940, he lamented the fact that his division did
not
wear uniform and were allowed to wear ‘civvies’.
⁴⁷
By a conspiracy of historical events, Heath would reach his maturity when the world would be suddenly – and rapidly – flooded with uniforms as it launched headlong into the Second World War.

Heath’s ultimate aim was to be a Royal Air Force pilot. His tenure with the RAF was the apotheosis of his life – the fulfilment of a
Boy’s Own
dream. His relationship with flight and flying was intense and he was later to state: ‘I have always been crazy on flying. All my successes, and all my failures, are bound up with my history as a flyer.’
⁴⁸

The RAF had only been a force independent of the army or the navy as recently as 1918 and throughout the 1930s, with Germany re-arming and investing in her defences, they launched an extensive campaign to expand the service. From 1935, forty-five new air stations were ordered to be built throughout the British Isles, most of which were operational by 1939.
⁴⁹
This was accompanied by huge investment in new aircraft designs with up-to-the-minute technology and a mass recruitment drive. The RAF increased in strength from 31,000 personnel in 1934 to 118,000 in 1939, backed by 45,000 reserves; an increase in manpower of 500 per cent in five years.
⁵⁰
With extraordinary speed, the RAF had transformed from a small and exclusive elite into an ultra-modern combat service with the manpower and technology to lead the Allies in the new frontier of warfare; the air.
⁵¹

Throughout the 1930s, the priority for the RAF was to publicize their fledgling service and to find a way of engaging a generation of boys who would become the core of the force during the Second World War. It was essential for them to explain to the public who they were, what they did and what they stood for,
per ardua ad astra
(‘through adversity to the stars’) – a suitably aspirational motto for the boy from suburban Wimbledon. From 1920 to 1937, an air pageant was held every summer at Hendon Aerodrome, which included races, mock battles and aerobatics. These events – later named the Royal Air Force Air Display – attracted huge crowds and were reported throughout the media. At the same time there was huge popular interest in the Schneider Trophy, an international air race that encouraged advances in aerodynamics. The 1930s became very much the age of the plane – fast, glamorous and modern. Aviators like Charles Lindbergh and Amy Johnson were as famous as film stars and stories of their record-breaking achievements filled the newspapers. Consequently a whole generation of boys became fascinated with the mystery, romance and power of flight. As Patrick Bishop points out in his study of Fighter Command,
Fighter Boys
, many of these boys’ first encounters with aeroplanes and airmen took on a dream-like or mythic aura and many of those that are recorded have a sense of a meeting with Destiny.
⁵²

This generation had been brought up on illustrated papers like
The Magnet
,
The Gem
and
The Modern Boy
, which celebrated the heroism of the fighter aces from the First World War like Captain W. E. Johns. In 1932 Johns himself made a huge impact when he published the first of his Biggles stories. Captain James Bigglesworth was both a figure fit to hero-worship as well as a role model that a generation of schoolboys – including ‘Dam Buster’ Guy Gibson – would follow into the air in less than a decade. Crucially, Johns didn’t depict a hardened and experienced flyer – but a boy, just like them.

[Biggles was a] slight, fair-haired good-looking lad still in his teens but [already] an acting flight commander . . . his deep-set eyes were never still and held a glint of yellow fire that somehow seemed out of place in a pale face upon which the strain of war, and the sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines . . . he had killed six men during the past month – or was it a year? What did it matter anyway? He knew he had to die some time and had long ago ceased to worry about it.
⁵³

The Air Ministry even appealed directly to schools for recruits and advertised in flying magazines and newspapers. One front-page advertisement from the
Daily Express
stated that though the basic educational qualification was a school certificate, ‘an actual certificate is not necessary’. What the service required was not qualifications but a particular sort of character, as the RAF, even in its embryonic stage, had begun to establish its own identity, attracting a very specific type of recruit distinctly different from the other services. They tended to be louche and eccentric about their dress, hence the iconic look of pencil moustache, flying jacket and silk scarf, now the stuff of easy parody but at the time very much regarded as a fashion of dissent. RAF officers treated the army and navy (the ‘senior’ services) and their traditions flippantly, priding themselves, for instance, on their lack of knowledge of horses.