One of Your Own Page 10

  They were keen cinema-goers. Ian always tried to reserve seats that had an uninterrupted view of the screen but recalls when, if there was a full house and they had to wait, ‘the doorman would come walking along the queue declaring that two of the best seats (also the most expensive) were available [and] I hated having to walk past the queue in order to accept them; I felt that I was deliberately snubbing or insulting them by my action. “I can afford the most expensive; you can’t.”’3 He vividly remembers sitting with Myra in the front circle at the spectacular Gaumont cinema on Oxford Road to watch West Side Story. They were spellbound by the riotous colour and energy of the film; it flashed by ‘in what seemed like half an hour’, Ian recalls.4 They shared the national interest in the spy dramas that reflected the political climate of the times and, having read Ian Fleming’s novels, were both eager to see the first Bond film, Dr. No, when it premiered in October 1962. New Statesman cursorily dismissed the spy as ‘an invincibly stupid-looking secret service agent’, but the British public embraced the film, relieved to have an alternative to the gritty new-wave realism of the working-class North.5 Ian and Myra loved it, and saw the follow-up, From Russia with Love, when it was released the following year.

  After the cinema, they would head back to Bannock Street and share a bottle of Liebfraumilch, which Ian placed next to the fire until the heat forced the cork from the bottle. On other evenings, when Gran was in bed, they indulged in the new British obsession: television. Replacing the radio as a daily staple in people’s lives, by 1962 the television had gone from being a luxury to a social necessity. Coronation Street was an immediate ratings winner upon its launch in 1960, as was the long-running, gentle police drama Dixon of Dock Green, superseded in 1962 by the more hard-hitting Z Cars. The Wednesday Play outraged the moral majority with its pragmatic depictions of sex, poverty and crime. But the programme Ian and Myra never liked to miss was That Was The Week That Was (TW3), a satirical news show that began in November 1962 and reached the peak of its popularity in April 1963. David Frost was the chief presenter, but it also starred Bernard Levin, an opinionated journalist with whom Ian later corresponded, and Malcolm Bradbury, Jack Rosenthal, John Braine and Dennis Potter contributed sketches.

  Each evening, Ian would pretend to return home, sharing a curious streak of public prudery with Myra, not wanting the neighbours to know that they spent the night together. Mrs Margaret Withnall, who lived nearby, wasn’t fooled: ‘When Ian started visiting Myra, he used to leave the house and say goodnight at the front door, but several times we heard him sneaking in later.’6

  The couple’s public prudery was at odds with their private lives and values. Literature featured heavily in their love-making; they borrowed books on philosophy and torture from local libraries. Barbara Hughes, a trainee librarian in the district, grew used to seeing them: ‘[Myra] wore quite short skirts, even before the miniskirt was in fashion, so the first impression was that she was tarty, a bit common. That’s why I thought they were not suited. When he returned his books at the Longsight branch, he never said please or thank you. He always walked straight to the True Crime shelves, crash hat under his arm. They frequently came into Levenshulme Library, chatting together, but they never spoke to the staff.’7 They went elsewhere in search of more explicit books. Myra told her solicitor, Jim Nichol: ‘When we went to the Central Library in Manchester and upstairs into the reference library, [Ian would] give me a list of books to pick out, such as The Cradle of Erotica, which was pornographic, Havelock Ellis, Kinsey, etc. and show my library card to get them and casually leave all but one on the desk he’d chosen to sit at, some distance away from mine. There was one book, Sexual Murders, which could only be taken out on a special ticket. I had to go to the main desk and ask for it, and get it stamped out on my card and give my name and address.’8

  Together they read Henry Miller, Harold Robbins and de Sade, incorporating scenarios into their own sex lives. ‘[Ian] took the lead most times,’ Myra divulged to her prison therapist. ‘He enjoyed rough sex and light spankings became whippings . . . He excited me in a way that no other man had done before.’9 Although she used alcohol to lower her inhibitions, she never drank to excess, not wanting to dull her senses: ‘I needed to drink to perform for him or to do the things Ian wanted to do. He liked me to dress up like a tart, for us both to wear hoods. He enjoyed anal sex the most . . . He also enjoyed having a candle inserted up his backside. It gave us both pleasure, especially me, because then I was in the dominant role.’10 The pornography they used wasn’t always of interest to her, but she ‘went along with it for Ian’s sake. I didn’t reach orgasm, but I was very excited by seeing him satisfied.’11 De Sade – whose writings by then had largely fallen into obscurity – remained a mutual favourite. They read aloud to each other from his books, which feature rape, bestiality, incest and necrophilia, and deliberated on the lines: ‘If you enjoy wickedness, it shows that nature intended you to be wicked and it would be wicked not to be’ and ‘If crime is seasoned by enjoyment, crime can become a pleasure . . .’12 Myra admitted to journalist Duncan Staff that Ian’s sadistic desires, inspired by de Sade’s writings, aroused her. They took a substantial risk by never using a reliable form of birth control, although a family planning leaflet was found among their belongings after their arrest, and Myra recalled, ‘On one occasion . . . I thought I might be pregnant. I was very happy at the thought, but in the end I wasn’t. Perhaps it might have been disastrous if I had been.’13

  Ian had never seen the appeal of conventional relationships and scorned those around him whose aims in life were ‘to marry, breed, further burden themselves by mortgage . . . own a family car, and live in excruciating moderation and boredom till death do they depart’.14 Myra briefly entertained the idea that their affair might lead to marriage but was glad to have found someone who echoed her own loathing of ‘dreary domestic bliss and the norm’.15 She and Ian had ‘a very good understanding with one another’ which she felt was far superior to her married friends’ lives.16 Finally, she had met a man ‘on a similar intellectual level’ to herself.17 In her eyes, Ian was ‘cultured, he listened to classical music, he read classical literature. They were things that interested me too, but I’d had no one to share them with.’18

  Ian encouraged her to use her mind, to realise that politics weren’t something that happened in London but had a personal and daily effect on her life. His belief that the working classes were deliberately kept in a state of subjugation by the government and that ‘the very wealthy and powerful are the lawmakers [but] no one accumulates such a high degree of wealth and power by honest and legal means’ made sense to her.19 Myra recalled: ‘One thing which we shared was a dissatisfaction with belonging to the working class and being trapped in it.’20 He was fanatical about Nazism and despised Churchill for his part in the Third Reich’s downfall. He bought German records from mail-order companies, ending his letters with the flourish, ‘Thank you, Meine Herren.’ Both he and Myra were gripped by Hitler’s Inferno, a compilation of war songs, speeches from the Nuremberg rallies and beer hall music. Fuelled by Nazi-inspired hatred, he and Myra detested the waves of immigrants who arrived in Britain between 1955 and 1962 from the West Indies, East Africa and South Asia in search of work and better lives for their families. Ian and Myra regarded the newcomers as ‘filth’ and ‘spongers’, while the rest of humanity were ‘morons’ and ‘maggots’.21 Animals were preferable to people; the two of them lavished attention on Ian’s dog, Bruce, and Gran’s dog, Lassie, whom they dubbed ‘Ches’. They read the Manchester Evening News for names of those convicted of animal cruelty, then secretly damaged their property or subjected them to physical attack.

  The revolution in Myra’s intellect manifested itself in her appearance. Ian was obsessive about the cut and fabric of his suits, which he either bought from Burtons or had made to measure by a Jewish tailor (temporarily setting aside his virulent anti-Semitism). His clothes were classic in style; Myra had always followed th
e fashion pack with her pencil skirts and neat blouses, which tended to look ageing on her, but she began dressing provocatively, ditching the flat ballet pumps for stilettos or knee-length boots, and wearing her skirts shorter and her trousers tighter, and topped it all off with a leather jacket. She drew her inspiration from Ian’s crush on Irma Grese, the notorious female concentration camp guard who was executed in 1945, and kept a photograph of Grese in her handbag.

  At Millwards, foreman George Clitheroe noticed Myra ‘starting to become overbearing, and wearing kinky clothes. They used to laugh and joke together over dirty books.’22 Tom Craig was disappointed in her: ‘She was a good shorthand typist, I’ll say that for her, and she was always smartly dressed. She wore these short skirts and boots and fancy stockings. But she would have been fired if it hadn’t been difficult to get a replacement. With most of the girls in an office you have a bit of a lark around, you pull their legs and everyone tries to get a bit of fun out of their work. But Myra was heavy going. You got no response from her at all. She was surly at the best of times and aggressive if you spoke to her the wrong way. She didn’t come in contact much with the other girls, but she still managed to have a bad effect on everybody. The pair of them were just plain surly and unsociable.’23

  Outside the office, Myra was the curt public face of the closed unit she and Ian presented to the world. He provided the funds, but if they travelled by bus, she bought the tickets; if they frequented a pub, she paid for the drinks; and if they visited an off-licence for cigarettes, she requested the brand in newly clipped vowels. She even placed bets at bookies while Ian sat outside in his sunglasses to wait for the ticket stub. Otherwise, she rarely spoke to anyone; in Gorton, the neighbours called her Miss Hoity-Toity because she wouldn’t acknowledge them. One school friend recalls: ‘She went from this happy-go-lucky girl to not wanting to speak to anybody, not wanting to be with anybody. You’d shout to her and she’d completely ignore you.’24 Even Pat Jepson felt sidelined as Myra withdrew from their friendship and ‘start[ed] to speak posh’.25 Pleasantries from her were so rare that when she rewarded Mr Spencer from the chip shop with a smile and a thank you after he repaired the primus stove she and Ian used on their travels, he passed the news on to his customers.

  Only the affection Myra and Ian felt for their families survived the cohesive rejection of everyone else. Ian mourned the death of his foster father, John Sloan, from lung cancer in 1962 and returned to Scotland for the funeral, but postponed the introduction of Myra to his mother and stepfather for months. Peggy still washed and cooked for Ian, and was delighted when he mumbled that he had found a girlfriend, but he never brought Myra indoors, asking her to wait for him instead on the corner of Westmoreland Street while he changed his clothes or finished a meal. The neighbours became accustomed to seeing ‘Blondie’ sitting on the low wall in front of the house, stonily smoking a cigarette and ignoring all polite nods until Ian appeared and the two of them disappeared on his Tiger Cub motorbike.

  Dance halls and coffee bars held no attraction for the couple; they craved the countryside beyond the city, travelling into Derbyshire and Staffordshire on Ian’s motorbike, stopping at the old-fashioned pubs he loved. Myra recalled, ‘We had some pleasant, relaxing times in country places that he’d found on his travels on his bike; we’d pack a picnic lunch, flasks of coffee and bottles of wine and spend whole days in peace and tranquillity . . .’26 They recorded their explorations on camera: Myra wearing a motorcycle helmet and sitting on the old stone stile that led into Shallcross Wood; Ian standing with his dog hoisted onto his shoulder below the great jutting fin of a vast rock formation; Myra teasing the dogs with a twig held high at Ladybower reservoir, where a pair of drowned villages lay beneath the still surface of the water. One day they took a different route, passing east through the city suburbs to the old mill villages out towards the dark shoulder of Saddleworth Moor, an undulating, vast and empty landscape that reminded Ian of his boyhood visit to Loch Lomond. He was enraptured as the moor rose and fell on either side of the twisting road, where long expanses of water lay glinting in the hollows of heather-marled valleys. They came to regard the moor as their kingdom, riding through it slowly enough to catch the thick smell of the black soil on the air or walking for miles across wind-soughed hills to mysterious rock formations callused by time. They ate and drank on the moor, had sex in its cotton-grass vales and named its soaring outcrops for themselves.

  And it was on the moor in 1963, lying together on a plaid picnic blanket in the sun, that they began to discuss what Ian called ‘switching on the dark’ inside oneself: the execution of a classic bank robbery – and the perfect murder of a child.27

  ‘For years people have assumed that Ian totally corrupted me, but he didn’t,’ Myra admitted a few years before her death. ‘I have to own the part that I played in things, to accept that I wanted some of the things to happen.’28

  Her initial infatuation with Ian Brady isn’t difficult to understand; it was based on simple sexual attraction to a man she perceived as good-looking, intelligent and arcane. But, within a short while, everything else that he was had become clear to her and rather than being repulsed by the discovery, she found it stimulating. Why she was ‘attracted to his “theology” of fascism and nihilism’ and went on to participate in the murders are questions that have never been adequately answered, and it is – as writer Helen Birch phrases it – ‘around this absent centre [that] knowledge and understanding fail’.29 Psychoanalysts inevitably point to Myra’s upbringing as fully culpable, but the ‘absent centre’ was within Myra herself. She told her prison therapist a few years before her death that the ‘predatory instinct’ already existed within her before she met Ian, around whom her naturally obsessive nature revolved.30 This, coupled with a strong, dominant element in her character and a desire to rise above her background, drew her to the atrophy of established morality offered by her relationship with Ian.31 She described him as having ‘a powerful personality, a magnet-like charisma’, but she is the only woman to have ever felt that way about him.32 What he did have was the insidious ability to awaken in her an extant urge to ‘kick against social and moral convention’, as she herself phrased it.33 She admitted finding it ‘exciting to swim against the tide, to do things that others would never dream of . . . I just don’t know how much, but I have always wanted something different, more exciting. I have never been satisfied with any situation for long.’34

  The discussions she and Ian had on the moor quickened her blood. ‘Not killing people initially, but criminal activities,’ she told her prison therapist, ‘the perfect robbery, its planning and execution.’35 She described her participation in the crimes as ‘exciting’ and owned up to experiencing an adrenalin rush beforehand.36 She maintained that her incentive was a form of social sedition: ‘I did not gain any sexual gratification from the murders. The prime motivation for the murders, for Ian Brady, was the feeling of power and control. In my case, it was rather compensation in the sense of being different from other people and being set apart from the world.’37

  She had a sense of having been asleep until she met Ian; his stated desire to ‘shed the boring, accepted realities that suffocate the majority and embrace or confront what lies beyond’ – of being able to see ‘far and deep’ – was the base element in the alchemy of their relationship.38 Before he met her, Ian had used literature as a means of validating his darkest impulses to himself; as a couple, they continued to do the same, discussing the philosophy of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Ian introduced her to moral relativism, the concept that there is no universal ethical code by which a person should have to live his or her life, only societal and cultural conventions that can and should be cast off. Decades after their arrest, when they were each preoccupied with constructing dissimilar accounts of their involvement in the crimes, they agreed on one issue: having practised a form of self-hypnosis to liberate them of guilt and to deflect outside suspicion. ‘One important aspect of our relationship was
that we shared equally the ability to shut down our feelings and our emotions,’ Myra explained. ‘Ian talked of controlling the subconscious urges or presenting a cold exterior. This ability plus the use of alcohol influenced our sexual experience and would eventually influence everything in our lives . . . We had to be able to blend into our surroundings like chameleons. To exist on two different planes, convincing others that we were normal, not capable of committing crimes . . . He taught me how to conquer my emotions, to do things on autopilot and disregard the consequences. I was a willing apprentice.’39

  Until then, Ian’s impulses had been internalised, but the relationship with Myra justified them: ‘Before I met Myra it was all inside me, and the feeling of unreality kept me down . . . I feared it. The energy was kept in. When I met her, she made me feel confident. She believed in me and looked up to me so much that I lost all fear, and the energy projected outwards and I lost control . . .’40 Their initial plans revolved around robbery, although it may have been a ruse on Ian’s part to discover whether or not Myra was truly capable of carrying out the criminal activities they discussed. Ian retained the names of several men whom he had known in Strangeways and borstal, and Myra recalled his mooting Gil Deares as a possible accomplice in a bank raid.41 They debated seizing money from couriers, and Ian suggested that Myra should stake out the electricity showroom on Hyde Road in preparation. Among the thousands of papers in the relevant files at the National Archives is a note from Ian to Myra on the subject, dated 16 April 1963. Written during his absence from work, after he had injured his ankle crashing the Tiger Cub into railings at Belle Vue, it reads: ‘Well Myra, Ich habe meinen Fuss verboten [sic] . . . However, let us capitalise on the situation, I shall grasp the opportunity to view the investment establishment situated on Stockport Road, next Friday, to go over details.’42 He digresses with a slur about Jews before ending: ‘please excuse this atrocious scribble as I am writing this in a yoga stance (filthy swine) upside down. Well Myra, just wanted to put you in the picture. I’ll sign off now, as I am writing to Tommy [Craig], poor soul. See you soon, love from I.’