The One That Got Away - My Life Living with Fred and Rose West. Caroline Roberts
home immediately. Alf looked older and frailer than I remembered him. I tried to be nice to him, scared that if I made him angry again he would die. I was glad to be back home again, and tried my best to get on with the rest of the family, helping Mum around the house, cooking the tea for everyone and looking after Alf, who was still recovering from his heart attack. I kept busy, being helpful. For once, I felt Alf appreciated that I was trying to please him.
I FIRST MET Fred and Rose West in early September 1972. I had been hitchhiking back from Tewkesbury after seeing my boyfriend Tony, whom I had met at the annual Tewkesbury Ham Fair. We had been seeing each other for two months by then. I was nearly seventeen years old; he was six months younger than me, but seemed really mature for his age.
Tony was a skinhead and well respected by the older boys in the town. The relationship was still in its early days and we weren’t lovers. In fact, Tony was such a cool dude that I wasn’t really sure where I stood with him, but I was hoping it would become a long-term relationship.
I was used to hitchhiking everywhere – lots of young girls did it – and with Tony not driving yet, it was easier for me to travel to him. Most of the time I took a friend with me and we would hang around the town with Tony and his mate Rob. Sometimes we would go to discos in the town hall or sit in the café drinking Coke and chatting. Then, at about 10.30pm, I would stand opposite the Gupshil Manor, on the edge of town, and say good night.
Tony would go back to his lodgings, leaving me to get myself a lift home to Cinderford. The journey home was some twenty-five miles, which I usually made in two lifts. The first lift took me the ten miles to Gloucester, and then I’d get another lift from the Westgate Bridge, which was fifteen miles to Cinderford.
That night in September 1972, I remember noticing the grey-coloured Ford Popular going in the opposite direction just minutes before it pulled up alongside me. At first I was a little worried in case two men were inside, but when I saw there was a girl in the passenger seat I relaxed.
The girl rolled down the window and asked me where I was going. As I bent down to tell her, I noticed that the driver was leaning over, looking at me. He looked quite scruffy and much older than the girl who, I guessed, was my age. They offered me a lift and, feeling it was a safe ride, I accepted. The girl got out and lifted her seat so I could get into the rear seat of the two-door car.
Straight away, they started chatting and telling me their names: Fred and Rose West. I was surprised that they were married; I wouldn’t have fancied someone like him, and she was pretty. I felt she could have done a lot better for herself, but they seemed happy and he was quite charming, in a roguish kind of way.
During the first part of the journey they questioned me a lot, asking about where I had been and who with, and did I have a job. I told them that I had been away to Portsmouth for six months and that I had to come back because my stepfather had suffered a heart attack, and was very ill though he had pulled through.
I explained to them that Alf was the reason I had gone away in the first place. I told them that we had never got on and that I had felt he was always on my case, always finding fault with me. As soon as he became ill, I revealed, I had wanted to get to him, hoping we would get on better but we had soon started arguing again and things were back to being tense at home, so I spent most of my time out of the house avoiding him. I mentioned to Fred and Rose that Alf had started nagging me because I didn’t have a job and how he called he me lazy, saying I would never make anything of myself, and would most probably end up pregnant and living off the government. I had looked for a job, but I felt I was not capable of getting anything decent.
After I had finished explaining this to the pair of them, they both looked each other in the eye and then, at the same time, both said, ‘We need a nanny to look after our three daughters.’
They went on to tell me that they lived in a big house in Cromwell Street, Gloucester, and that if I wanted the job I could move in with them. They offered me £8 a week plus free board and lodgings.
I told them I would have to talk to my mum about it first, and that she would want to meet them first before anything could be decided. They said they would be happy to meet my parents and with that they drove me all the way home so that they would know where I lived and said that they would come back on the Sunday afternoon to meet my parents. I wasn’t sure how my mum would react to Fred, as he was quite rough looking. I hoped he would make the effort to look tidier when he came round, though as it turned out he didn’t.
When they arrived, after dinner on the Sunday, they had the three girls with them; I instantly fell in love with them, especially little Heather. I could tell from the look on Mum’s face that she was not impressed by Fred’s appearance. He noticed it too, and quickly apologised for having to come in his working clothes. He said he was working all hours, and that was why Rose needed some help around the house and with the demanding job of looking after the children. Rose left most of the talking to Fred, who reassured my mum that he would look after me and keep a fatherly eye on me. Meanwhile, Rose chatted to my younger brothers and sisters.
Alf popped into the room just once while they were there. He looked Fred up and down, then he looked at Rose, who gave him a smile. He smiled back and said, ‘Make sure she doesn’t run wild,’ then went back out to his shed and his DIY.
The next day, I moved into 25 Cromwell Street, a three-storey townhouse just 300 yards from the park that had held bad memories for me; the park that I would not be taking the children to during my time at their home. It didn’t take me long to get acquainted with the West household and to form my own opinions about them all.
At 31 years of age, Fred West was a big man trapped in a little man’s body. He clearly thought of himself as a gynaecologist and Warren Beatty lookalike all rolled into one; the surgeon and the stud. The reality was that he worked in a factory, doing the occasional odd job on the side. This budding ‘surgeon’ bragged that he had performed abortions for girls in trouble; according to him, they were usually so grateful to him that they would offer themselves to him for his sexual pleasures as soon as the foetus was removed. ‘I’ve had thousands of women,’ he told me; they would, he claimed, fall at his feet.
Fred West’s incessant bragging was at best annoying and at worst sickening. According to him, he was God’s gift to women. ‘Once you’d been with Freddie, you wouldn’t go anywhere else,’ he’d say. How true this was to prove.
In reality, Fred West was a short little man with piercing blue eyes, a flat, wonky nose and thick lips that hid a gap in his front teeth. Not at all attractive. His mop of hair was gypsy-like – dark and curly. All he needed was a scarf around his head and one of those big loop earrings in his ear and he would have been transformed into Gypsy Rose Lee. He was never tidy, his favourite outfit being jeans, a check shirt and a donkey jacket. I couldn’t see how anyone would find him attractive, except perhaps someone simple or needy.
At nineteen years of age, the words that best described Rose would be ‘simple-minded’. In spite of this, she was quite a pretty girl, two years older than me, with dark wavy hair and big brown doe eyes. Rose had a whiny, drippy way of talking that, at times, I found very grating, but not half as irritating as when she yelled at her little ones. That high-pitched scream emitted by Rose made me wince. Her ear-bursting howls would stun me into silence, much as it did the eldest child in their home, eight-year-old Anna-Marie. (Later to rename herself Anne-Marie.) While two-year-old Heather and four-month-old May (later changed to Mae) would also instantly shut up at the sound of that scream, this only worked on them for a minute or two; they were not old enough yet to be smacked around the head, as Anna-Marie was.
Anna-Marie was Fred’s daughter from a previous marriage. Heather and May were Fred and Rose’s daughters. I was told by Anna-Marie that she had a big sister called Charmaine who had ‘gone away’, back to Scotland with her mother; Fred’s first wife,