One of Your Own (7 page)

Myra’s fear of losing her grandmother had been dispelled, but the following year she suffered a disturbing bereavement when her close friend Michael Higgins drowned. His death came out of nowhere, on a perfect summer’s day, and had a profound and lasting effect on her.

Michael Higgins was not the sort of boy Myra usually befriended. Now nearly 15, Myra was feisty and outspoken. She let it be known that she fancied the head boy at school, Ronnie Woodcock, and she had been smoking for a while, openly lighting cigarettes on the bus that chartered pupils from Ryder Brow to the public baths. Michael, in contrast, was a small and diffident 13 year old, who lived on Taylor Street and attended Catholic school. Despite their obvious differences, Michael and Myra became inseparable; she told him that because they had the same initials, they were fated to be friends and their lives destined to be entwined. ‘I felt very protective towards Michael,’ Myra told her prison therapist. ‘He was always bullied and I would stick up for him. We spent a lot of time together.’
²⁹

Michael emerged from his shell when he was with her. Myra’s sturdy presence gave him the nerve to do things he wouldn’t normally dare. They couldn’t afford to go to the Speedway at Belle Vue very often, so would sneak in without paying. Speedway was then Britain’s second most popular spectator sport and every large town had a track. Myra and Michael discovered that by scrambling over various walls and fences, and crossing the railway line, they could squeeze in at a secret spot without being noticed. Myra was bold enough for the two of them and would brag her way into the riders’ enclosure by telling security guards that she had been sent by her nana, ‘Kitty’ Hindley (Bob’s mother worked at Belle Vue, where she met the married lover whom Nellie called her ‘fancy man’). Michael was thrilled when they gained access; he and Myra begged the drivers for autographs, adding considerable value to the Speedway programmes Michael collected.

Myra’s bravado led to another prank that could have landed them in serious trouble. Together with Eddie Hogan – whose ‘Nitty Nora’ slur had long been forgiven – she and Michael would go into local stores and, while Myra chatted away to the shopkeeper, Michael and Eddie filled their pockets with sweets. Years later Myra referred to her ‘criminal apprenticeship’ as involving a few minor acts of juvenile theft, including stealing some potatoes from a local greengrocer ‘to roast on a bonfire we had made, and on another occasion I ran off with some Christmas cards. I was waiting to pay for them, but I kept getting ignored, so I ran off. I also remember stealing some alleys (marbles) from Woolworths.’
³⁰

Creeping into Gorton Tank was a more dangerous activity. She and Michael liked to clamber about the trains in the huge railway yard, but on one occasion they were seen and chased out. As they fled, laughing, Myra felt a searing pain shoot up her leg; her ankle was caught in a steel trap and blood poured from the serrated wound. Michael raced for help and found her uncle Bert, who carried Myra home. In her autobiography, Myra recalls that while she was lying on the sofa waiting for the doctor to arrive, she asked Michael plaintively if he thought she might die. He laughed at her: ‘Course not! You’re too young.’
³¹

Of all their escapades, swimming in the disused reservoir in Mellands Fields on the outskirts of Gorton was the most perilous. The water was fenced off, hidden behind thick trees and fertile allotments, and only the most foolhardy ventured in. Two years earlier a girl had been saved from drowning there and several people had committed suicide in its murky, weed-filled depths. Another Gorton resident recalls, ‘We were strictly forbidden from going to the res. My mam always told us, “Don’t go in, mind, cos the Jenny Green-teeth (weeds) will drag you under.”’
³²
But Myra and Michael went in, swimming until their limbs ached, then lying drowsily on the grassy bank in the sunlight, letting the water pearl off them.

Friday, 14 June 1957 was the day of the Whit parade. The city was in the middle of a heatwave and Myra could feel the perspiration trickling down her neck as she and Pat Jepson and Pat’s sister Barbara stood watching the procession. Michael had been given the honour of carrying one of the embroidered banners. Myra cheered as he passed them, and waved at Eddie Hogan, who marched alongside Michael. When the procession had gone by, Myra accompanied Pat and Barbara to tea at their aunt’s house in Reddish, having turned down Michael’s idea of swimming in the res. Myra and her friends were dressed in their best – new white outfits bought for Whitsun.

On the way home, they stood on the open rear platform of the bus to get some air, but the draught from the road was hot and gritty. Myra saw a boy pedalling furiously to catch up with the bus and realised it was a lad who lived near Pat and Barbara on Taylor Street. He was shouting at them. The girls jumped down as the bus slowed and the boy told them breathlessly that there had been an accident at the reservoir in Mellands Fields. Myra didn’t wait for him to finish; she turned and started running. Pat and Barbara raced to keep up with her, as she flew down the streets and headed across the playing fields to the reservoir. A huddle of people were walking slowly towards them, where the sun glittered on the water behind the trees. Someone detached themselves from the crowd and responded to Myra’s high-pitched, panic-stricken questions.

That afternoon, Michael had been swimming with Eddie Hogan and a younger boy called Walter King. After a rest on the sun-drenched bank, Michael and Walter dived back in. Walter noticed after a while that Michael appeared to be thrashing about and ‘in difficulties’ but shouted at him to stop fooling around.
³³
Then Michael shot out an arm and pulled Walter under the water. Walter struggled free and resurfaced, gasping for breath. He looked frantically for Michael, but there was no sign of him in the still water.

From the grassy bank, Eddie Hogan watched in disbelief; he, too, thought Michael had been ‘larking about’.
³⁴
An older boy who had seen the two lads go under realised it wasn’t a wind-up and dived into the reservoir to look for Michael. Someone else alerted the police. Within minutes, uniformed figures from the fire brigade, as well as several policemen, were wading into the dark water. The wide reservoir varied in depth from ten feet to twenty-five and could be numbingly cold, even on a hot summer’s day. Grappling lines were brought in and Michael’s parents were told that their son was missing.

At ten to seven in the evening, a Lancashire County Police frogman finally broke the surface of the reservoir with Michael’s body in his arms.

‘It was just lying on the bottom,’ he told the inquest later, ‘face downwards. The water was dark and clouded with mud. The deeper he went down, the colder it got.’
³⁵

On the bank, Laurence Jordan, who lived near Myra, watched in horror: ‘I saw them bringing out this chalk-white body. You could see the whiteness of the body against the blue uniform of the police. His arms were outstretched . . . They hurriedly put him in the mortuary van.’
³⁶
Michael’s mother stumbled into the ambulance to be with the body of her 13-year-old son.

Myra was hysterical. Pat recalled: ‘It was the only time I ever saw Myra cry.’
³⁷
Pat and Barbara took her home with them, but Myra couldn’t stop sobbing and kept repeating that she should have been with him, that if she’d gone with him that afternoon he would still be alive. Mrs Jepson told Myra not to blame herself – there was nothing anyone could have done. ‘If I’d been there, I might have saved him’ became Myra’s refrain, one she still repeated forty years later.
³⁸

Her other friends who had witnessed the accident congregated in a cafe nearby. ‘It went round like wildfire,’ Allan Grafton remembers. ‘We all went to the sarsaparilla bar on Gorton Lane. We used to go there a lot. They had pumps, seats and a bar as you went in, but it was all soft drinks and you could get pints of sarsaparilla, dandelion and burdock, that sort of thing. We sat there talking about it until the place shut, unable to take it in. His death that summer was absolutely shattering for the neighbourhood.’
³⁹

Myra dreamed of Michael that night, of trying to swim under the dark, reedy water to save him. She pestered her mother to make a black armband and wore it as she traipsed from door to door collecting money for a funeral wreath. Touched by her distress, Mrs Higgins gave Myra a few of Michael’s belongings – his Speedway programmes and a comb – but to everyone else there was something eerie about the intensity of Myra’s grief. Her face took on a white, pinched look.

Mrs Higgins worried about the effect of her son’s death on the girl and asked her to visit the house when the coffin was brought in before the funeral, thinking that might bring her some peace. Years later, Myra remembered seeing Michael in his coffin: the sliver of light under his eyelids, and his mother gently sliding the rosary from his fingers to give to her. Allan Grafton also went along: ‘His mother and father invited the kids in, all of us who’d known Michael, to see him in the coffin in the front room. I went in and came straight out again – I couldn’t do it. I thought I’d be all right, but I looked at the faces of my friends who had already been in and I thought, no, this isn’t for me. I went to his funeral, though. Quite a few of us went.’
⁴⁰

A requiem Mass was said for Michael at St Francis’ Monastery. Every pew was filled to capacity, but Myra’s name was not on the list of mourners published in the
Gorton & Openshaw Reporter
on 21 June 1957. She explained later, ‘I couldn’t go to his funeral because I was frightened. His death was hard to come to terms with. It made me realise how final death is. He was the first person who had gone from my life for good.’
⁴¹
She waited at a distance during the internment at Gorton cemetery, back turned to the mourners, while Pat described what was happening.

The local newspaper reported that the inquest into Michael’s death found that he had drowned after getting cramp from the cold water. The verdict of accidental death was no comfort to Myra: ‘My faith was being seriously tested by this. I wanted some kind of sign to tell me it wasn’t just the end of everything.’
⁴²
She told her prison therapist that her grief was profound but had no pernicious influence on her otherwise, and she was revolted by ‘fools [who] said that Michael’s death made me start to hate the world we live in, to hate society. Those cretins just need to find one reason for my crimes.’
⁴³
She conceded only that it ‘brought about a drastic change in my personal beliefs and really it has never left me’.
⁴⁴

Day after day, she sat alone at his grave, bringing flowers she had picked from hedgerows and gardens. She prayed with Michael’s mother at church but ‘cried openly and was inconsolable for weeks after his death, until I was told there was something wrong with me; I was abnormal, I’d be ill, I had to pull myself together, I’d become “soft in the head”. Well-meaning words, no doubt, but they only served my need and ability to bury my emotions as deep as I could.’
⁴⁵

In her autobiography, she recalls being at the Jepsons’ house on Taylor Street and watching the rain trickle in silver lines down the windows. The rain appeared to shimmer and when she looked beyond it, to the opposite side of the street and the ‘Bug Hut’ Plaza cinema, she saw Michael standing hunched in the shadow of the fire escape. He wore his black overcoat and stared straight at her. Myra leapt up and wrenched open the front door; cars splashed past and people walked quickly by with umbrellas, but the gap beneath the fire escape was empty. Michael had gone.

She returned to the house, disturbed and drenched to the skin. The memory of Michael haunted Myra for the rest of her life: ‘Sometimes I can still see him in that murky water, reaching out for me.’
⁴⁶

Myra Hindley’s first appearance in the press was in honour of her achievements. On 19 July 1957, the
Gorton & Openshaw Reporter
featured a column about Ryder Brow school sports day. Myra had covered herself with glory; on an afternoon of ‘keen competition’ she excelled: ‘Individual Championships . . . Senior Girls, Myra Hindley, 10 awards’.
¹
The overall winner in her year among the girls, Myra’s triumphs included coming first in high jump, second in javelin and third in the 220-yard run.

Her last term at school occurred in a period of sweeping social change. The Suez Crisis of the previous year proved that although Britain’s days of Empire were at an end, the gloom of austerity was beginning to disperse, with rationing no longer in force and sales of consumer goods such as washing machines and televisions escalating. Wages and living standards were on the rise, and one of the first signs of significant change in people’s lives was how they shopped: in the major cities, housewives abandoned their daily queuing at individual stores and embraced the supermarket – which, in their infancy, were still nothing like the vast emporiums they are today. Convenience foods in cans and foil containers proliferated, while new products like fish fingers, tinned steak-and-kidney pies and pre-sliced white bread appeared on the shelves. The tea bag was launched in 1952, and a decade later Nescafé’s instant coffee became a contender for the nation’s favourite drink. Youngsters guzzled fizzy pop: Coca-Cola, Vimto and Tizer. Old essentials such as sugar lumps, candles and turnips were replaced by camera films, telephone rentals, dog food and nylon stockings, while high-street stores – WH Smith, Burton and Woolworths – flourished. ‘Deep in the national psyche,’ wrote journalist Christopher Booker, ‘was the knowledge that a very real watershed had been passed . . . the dam had burst.’
²