The One That Got Away - My Life Living with Fred and Rose West. Caroline Roberts
that’s what happened.
I felt I had two different faces, two separate personalities. Each of my personalities was at odds with the other. I was a rebel, a spoilt brat and a little show-off. Many times, my stepfather Alf would rebuke my behaviour with the line, ‘You can sit down now, Caroline, we’ve all seen you.’
I was the troublemaker of the family, the argumentative one who answered back, the one who never did as she was asked first time – it was always ‘In a minute’ with me. I pushed my luck, constantly defying my parents and annoying my older siblings. From ‘little bitch’ I progressed to ‘dirty little bitch’. I was used to the name-calling. It had started when I was four years old and continued right up into my twenties – and that was just in the place I called home.
My other personality was the ‘shy girl’ – the little girl who would sit for hours on her own in a field full of horses, dreaming of owning one some day. I would make bridles out of rope, straddle a kitchen chair and have my imaginary mount gallop off. I pretended it was my pony. I had a huge appetite for reading books on how to care for a pony and how to ride. I would see other kids riding their real ponies at the gymkhana, hoping one of them would take pity on me and offer me a ride, but they never did.
All I dreamed and longed for was a pony of my own and of being with my real dad again. My dad had told me how he had been raised on a farm in Ireland and went on to say that Grandma had a pony and how she would love me to be there with her and my dad.
All of this, though, was just a dream; Grandma’s farm and the pony existed for me but, years later, I was to find out that I didn’t exist for them – at least not for Grandma, nor anyone in my dad’s family. The dad I had hero-worshipped and adored had given me up without a fight when I was four years old. As a devout Catholic, he was ashamed of me, the bastard he had fathered. I was the dark secret he took to his grave.
When I was in my teens, people outside the family and the home saw me as a pretty, bubbly and friendly girl who liked the boys – a little too much at times – and the boys certainly seemed to like me too. I was well mannered and helpful, always available to babysit, always kind and polite, with a good sense of humour and a smile on my face. I would put the smiles on to hide the fact that more often than not I would just have had my head smashed against the wall for answering back.
I called this face my ‘happy face’; I used it many times, to mask my tears and my pain. I didn’t want other people to be embarrassed at my expense; I didn’t want them to know why I had been given a beating. I didn’t want them to know what a horrible young girl I could be. I needed them to like me and I needed their approval. I could also use this ‘happy face’ to deflect the pain caused by the scathing words and remarks that people would use against me.
When one of my brothers, or my stepfather, said or did anything that hurt my feelings, I would lock it away. I learned how to hide my feelings of hurt with displays of bravado and sarcasm – or a big smile. If someone wanted to hurt me, I would beam a huge smile at him or her, just to be annoying; it always did the trick.
Sometimes, I wouldn’t be able to control my temper and I would lash out verbally and, sometimes, physically, but only towards those who knew me best – my family, especially Alf and Phillip and later my boyfriends. To them I could be a bitch, but in my twisted little mind I was just surviving.
I’d had so many bad things happen to me that I knew it would only be a matter of time before I ended up dead. I had many, many dreams about my demise. Vivid dreams that I thought were most probably premonitions of what was to come. I kept these dreams to myself. Very often, I dreamed of my death at the hands of some madman – or woman. I knew by experience that women were not to be trusted any more than men when it came to me. In my dreams, I knew how it felt to be strangled, gasping for breath, my tongue jutting out between my blue lips, my eyes bulging and bloodshot. I also knew what it felt like to have a knife stab me through the stomach – it didn’t seem to hurt that much, though it made me feel sick as my stomach gurgled and churned, but when the knife pierced my chest it hurt like hell! I would be fighting for breath as though I was drowning in my own blood; this panic feeling always woke me with a start and I would go to pieces.
I knew I would be famous one day, but it wasn’t until I was seventeen years old that I began to keep a diary so someone could write a book about my poor, sad life, when (I predicted) I died of unnatural causes. Yes, I thought, it would come in very handy when my body was found dead and buried under the paving stones of Gloucester.
MUM TRIED TO give me confidence by telling me, often, what an attractive girl I was, and when I complained of having no nice clothes to wear she would say, ‘Caroline, you could be wearing a sack and you’d still stand out and look beautiful.’ I found that being attractive had its downside though, as it meant that I attracted all sorts of people – including the perverts and weirdos. I learned to my cost that I was attractive to paedophiles as a child. I suppose being indecently assaulted when I was thirteen years old should have warned me that there were some weird and dangerous men out there.
A man had followed me into the public toilets in Gloucester Park; I was waiting while my friend used the cubicle first. Initially, I thought he had come in by mistake and I had started to tell him that the ‘Gents’ was around the other side of the building. He kept coming towards me with a blank look on his face. I backed away from him until the cold tiled wall pressed up against my back and stopped my escape. He grabbed at me. I struggled to get away as he forced his hands down my knickers. I tried to scream, but all that came out was a weird gurgling noise. I grabbed at his fingers, trying to pull them away, but he was too strong for me. I heard a cracking sound and was sure I must have broken his finger, but still he wouldn’t let go.
My friend Dawn came out of the toilet to see me squatting down with this elderly man bent over me. Dawn was only eleven, and tiny for her age, but even so she jumped on his back and tried to get him off me; he was too strong for both of us though. Dawn ran out and raised the alarm; she returned with two men, who finally dragged the old man off me. I was so relieved when I was rescued that I started giggling uncontrollably, a mixture of relief and embarrassment.
When the police came for him, the old man looked a shadow of the brutal figure that had just attacked me. What they saw was a sad and pathetic flat-capped figure who cried in front of the crowd of onlookers that had gathered to see what was going on. Among the crowd was a group of young men, all calling out to the police, ‘Let the poor bugger go.’ Maybe it was because of the fact that I didn’t look harmed by the attack that they took pity on the man and made me feel like it was I who had done something wrong, not him!
When the police took me home to our house, all the neighbours came out to their gates or peered out from behind their curtains as I was led by the arm to our front door. Alf came to the front door with a look of thunder in his eyes. As if I had been caught shoplifting, he seethed, ‘What’s she been up to now?’ He didn’t like the police being at his door, whatever the reason. Even when he was told what had happened to me, he still didn’t appear to be concerned about the attack or what effect it would have on me. Mum was the one who sat me down and asked if I was all right.
The old man was charged and the police told Alf that the man had previous form for this sort of thing, that he had attacked several schoolgirls throughout his life and was well known to the police. This put a stop to Alf thinking I was just making a fuss, and not just making it all up to get some attention. Nevertheless, I felt he still thought that, somehow, I had asked for it.
What happened in Gloucester Park that day changed my life and although I was hardened on the outside my dreams and nightmares told the real story of how vulnerable I really felt. I resigned myself to the fact that I would die at an early age, after a sexual assault or even, possibly, rape, which would be followed by murder. From then on, rather than try to save myself and watch out for the dangers in life,