Authors: Paul Britton
People respond to the same situation in different ways. For example, you could take three young women through the same streets, into the same shops, restaurants and pubs and each could see the environment differently. One might see people laughing and enjoying themselves and think of them as potential friends. Another might look at these same people and think them hostile or likely to laugh at her or ridicule her. The third woman has a perfectly realistic view that these strangers are neither good nor bad and are just going about their lives.
These three women wear different clothes for different reasons and not just because certain styles suit them. Imagine the first woman is interested in attracting attention; she enjoys being looked at so wears clothes that catch the eye. The second woman tries to avoid this - she doesn’t want to stand out and is more careful and conservative. The third woman dresses to please herself and to make herself feel comfortable.
Each of them is different and will probably react to similar situations in a different way. None of this just happens. We are each the product of our pasts. When Lynda Mann walked along the Black Pad on that Monday night, she carried within her all the things that shaped her as a person and these things determined how she reacted when confronted by her killer. Did she run? Did she get angry? Was she passive?
In just the same way, I knew that her killer was more than a caricature or comic book villain. He also had a rich life which had shaped his personality and actions. What went through his mind, I wondered, when he saw Lynda? What did he see and why did he choose her? If he could do this to a young girl, what did he think of women in general? Was he likely to be intelligent? What sort of job would he do?
The wind tugged at my trouser turn-ups and sent leaves scurrying along the gutters and against the metal railings as I turned and walked away. Somewhere, still out there, Lynda Mann’s killer walked the streets, ate his lunch, showered, slept and probably had a beer at his local pub.
Within a few yards, my thoughts of Lynda had been pushed aside and I pondered my meeting. It wasn’t my concern, I thought. Psychologists didn’t get asked to help catch killers, that was the grim job of the police and I didn’t envy them.
A fortnight later, on 2 February, 1984, the coroner released Lynda’s body for burial and she was laid to rest in the cemetery of All Saints Church. Her headstone read:
LYNDA ROSE MARIE MANN Taken 21st November 1983 Aged 15 years
We didn’t have time to say goodbye, but you’re only a thought away.
There was no single event or watershed that convinced me to become a psychologist. People often try to find triggers in their lives but invariably decisions or choices are the culmination of many small incidents and influences that come together or fall haphazardly into place.
As a teenager I had no interest in how things work mechanically. I didn’t dismantle old alarm clocks or marvel at the workings of the wireless in my mother’s kitchen. I had no particular interest in steam engines, model aeroplanes or the mechanical engineering experiments we performed at school.
Later, when I bought my first car, an old Standard 10 van with no second gear that cost me Ł39, my knowledge of what made the wheels turn was pathetically slim. I remember my wife, Marilyn, and I setting off on our first big outing to Wales to see her grandmother. The van’s top speed was 56 mph and we trundled along celebrating our new found freedom.
At some point on the Old Road just past Chepstow I noticed that the top speed was beginning to fall. Even with my foot flat on the floor I couldn’t coax more than 35 mph out of the van. When this continued falling into the twenties, I decided that it was time to find a garage. Initially I thought it might be a fuel problem. Maybe the top speed was dependent on how much petrol was in the tank - less petrol meant less speed.
A rather bored-looking mechanic with a flop of hair covering one eye climbed out of the grease pit, wiping his hands on a rag and sauntered across the forecourt to the van. I explained the problem, trying to sound authoritative about the workings of the internal combustion engine.
‘What about oil?’ he said.
‘Oil? Ah, well, I don’t think so. It doesn’t squeak. Have you heard any squeaks, Marilyn?’
She shook her head.
The mechanic looked at me strangely and asked Marilyn to pull the bonnet catch. I peered over his shoulder as he fiddled with several leads and examined the battery. Then he pulled out the dip-stick.
‘Look at this,’ he said, holding the gleaming stick aloft.
‘It looks very clean to me,’ I offered.
‘Clean? Listen, mate, you’ve got no oil.’
‘Is that a problem?’
I mention this episode not just to illustrate my ignorance of most things mechanical, but as a counterpoint to where my real interests lay. While machines held no fascination for me, I was intrigued by people and how their minds and bodies work; why we do the things we do and become the people we become.
A great many of these answers lie in our pasts and mine began in May 1946, the year after peace broke out in Europe. I was born and grew up in Royal Leamington Spa, a rather grand-sounding name for a town whose grandeur had passed a century earlier. Many of the guest-houses and hotels on the Victorian terraces that had once welcomed the great and the good who had come to sample the spa waters had since been converted into flats and boarding houses.
I can’t recall having a father - he’d gone by the time I was old enough to notice such things. Down the years I heard stories about him, not all of them flattering, but I never did hear his account. My earliest firm memory was growing up in a condemned basement room in Leamington. I don’t know why it had been condemned, perhaps because of rising damp or subsidence, but my mother made sure it was so spotless you could have eaten off the floor.
A devout Catholic all her life, she diligently took my younger brother, Anthony, and me to Mass each Sunday at St Peter’s Church, giving thanks for the help the church gave her in raising a family on her own.
During the week she did various jobs although the one I remember best is when she worked as an assistant nurse at an old people’s home. It sticks in my mind because of an ancient-looking resident called Mr Blower who I met one day during the school holidays when my mother brought him his lunch. He smelled of tobacco and old tea leaves and would sit in his slippers and dressing-gown, seeming to stare out of an imaginary window. He must have been in his eighties or nineties and I was about seven.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked me.
‘Paul, sir.’
‘Do you like pirates, Paul?’
‘I don’t know any pirates.’
‘What? None!’
‘What about explorers?’
I shook my head.
He sucked air through his teeth and looked right past me as if he’d forgotten our conversation in mid-sentence. But a few days later, my mother came home with some books.
‘These are from Mr Blower,’ she said.
They were the first real books in our household and I read them over and over. I still have them - Lost in the Wilds of Canada by Eleanor Stredder, The Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Wolf Hunters by James Oliver Curwood.
I suppose you could say it was the beginning of my lifelong love-affair with reading. Mr Blower continued to send me books until the day he couldn’t send any more. When I was old enough I joined the Leamington Library. By then we’d moved to a house in Lillington, an expanding village on the outskirts of Leamington, soon to be swallowed up by the town.
In between lay the Campion Hills which became my childhood playground. A single oak tree stood on top of the hills and from the great fork in the main branches I could look over the whole of the town and towards Warwick, the county seat, four or five miles away. The tree was a magical childhood place that became a castle, pirate ship or cavalry fort, depending upon the chosen game.
I didn’t regard our family as being poor or deprived. Some had more, some had less. Similarly, not having a father wasn’t particularly unusual, the war had seen to that. For this reason, I greeted the arrival of my stepfather with a degree of ambivalence. I was twelve years old at the time and didn’t see any great hole in my life that he would suddenly fill.
He was a Russian who had lost a wife and two daughters in the war. An avowed anti-Communist, he fought as a major in the Russian army and afterwards fled Stalin’s regime, walking from his homeland to Switzerland. Eventually he ended up in Warwickshire working as an engineer for the Ford motor company.
His ability to read English was limited - a source of frustration - but he could speak it quite well. Even so, he seemed to be a man who was horribly out of place. Having been well-educated, from quite possibly a wealthy family, with great technical skills and a history of commanding men in battle, he found himself mixing and working with people from totally different backgrounds. Even amongst the other emigres from Eastern Europe, he seemed isolated because of his intelligence and former status.
Gaining a good education was rather a hit and miss affair at the local Catholic schools. The primary school served a wide catchment area and drew children from every social grouping, from well-to-do families to those who seemed to specialize in breeding savages. It was a harsh place, dreadful academically, where children moved through classes each year and teaching was a matter of child-minding as much as enlightenment.
I lost every nail on my fingers before the age of thirteen. Surprisingly, this had nothing to do with the rougher of my classmates. The person responsible was Mr Adams, a teacher who took a perverse pleasure in inflicting pain. His favoured means of punishment was to make a student put his fingers on the desk and then he’d use a piece of wooden dowelling, about two feet long, to whip down across the fingernails.
I wasn’t particularly singled out for this treatment. It reached the stage where any boy in the class who didn’t bear the tell-tale stigmata of blackened nails was reckoned to be the teacher’s pet.
Another of my junior school teachers would enliven spelling by making us stand with our hands held out and for every letter we got wrong in spelling a word he would swipe us with the sharp edge of a ruler. To this day, I do not spell as well as I might because of the fear he created.
If the standard of education was deplorable, the iniquities of the English education system made things worse. At the age of eleven, students had to take an exam known as the eleven-plus which would decide whether or not they went on to a grammar school or to a secondary modern school. One path opened up the possibility of going to university, the other prepared students for life outside.
I don’t know how other schools organized these exams, but my class was virtually segregated into children from wealthier families and others less well provided for. Because the grammar school required uniforms and there was an expectation that children would have cultural pursuits, it was felt that only those from the more wealthy families would have the wherewithal to support such an education.
These children were then kept in after school to be groomed and coached for the eleven-plus exam. Others, like myself, were left to fend for themselves. As expected, all of one group passed the examination while the rest of us looked at the paper and said, ‘What’s this?’
Thus, my future was decided and I was sent to a secondary modern school. There would be no O levels, or A levels. I was being prepared for life. The reality hit home one day when I stood at the front of a classroom and noticed that nearby a cupboard door had been left ajar. Peering inside I saw chemistry flasks, test tubes, Bunsen burners and stands - all of them a mystery to me.
I held up a test tube and asked the teacher, ‘What are these?’
‘Oh, put that back,’ he said. ‘You’ll never have need of those.’
Although I wouldn’t seek to rewrite my past, I think any system that decides the educational pathway of a child at age of eleven is one of the greatest offences against the youngsters of the day. Even as I left school, I realized that I wanted to go to university. It wasn’t clear quite how, but I planned to save enough money and eventually do my O levels and A levels. This notion of further study wasn’t entirely understood at home. My mother had grown up in a small village in Ireland and had very basic, straightforward priorities. A university education wasn’t among them and she was fearful and overly respectful towards scholars.
I can’t remember why I decided to become a police cadet - perhaps we had a couple of local bobbies who impressed me. In spite of once being carpeted by the local inspector for breaking a gas mantle in an old street lamp, I don’t actually recall there being any crime in Leamington when I was growing up. That’s the benefit of childhood memory. People didn’t bolt their doors or lock their cars; mothers left their babies in prams outside shops and children walked to school. Crime was something that happened in mystery stories or to other people.
Like most of us, I assumed real villains were easily recognizable. Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens drew them in my imagination - extraordinary figures like Moriarty and Bill Sykes. Of course, it’s not that simple in the real world.
I can pinpoint exactly when I realized that badness wasn’t worn like a badge, tattoo or scar. Having become a police cadet in Warwickshire, I was stationed at Leamington Police Station when, in the early hours of Thursday 8 August, 1963, fifteen masked men stopped the night train from Glasgow to London at Bridego Bridge near Leighton Buzzard and stole Ł2,631,684. It became known as The Great Train Robbery and caught the world’s imagination.
In policing terms it was like having a bucket of icy water thrown over you. A momentary numbness went through the whole system and people thought, Jesse James robs trains, it doesn’t happen here. There was a sense of affront and outrage, particularly when the newspapers portrayed it as a Robin Hood-style robbery - the money didn’t belong to anyone, it was going to be destroyed anyway and the thieves simply helped themselves, good luck to them. Unfortunately, the train driver Jack Mills had been severely beaten during the robbery and however romantic the heist may have seemed to the public, the police responded intensely to the violence done.