One of Your Own (11 page)

A week into the new year, Myra’s diary ended as tersely as it had begun:

Bert Matthews retired early in the new year and Ian was promoted to his job. Whether by coincidence or design, most of his work was done with Myra. Her desk was shuffled in next to his, although he insisted on standing up for dictation. If their relationship seemed slow to her at first (‘If he didn’t want to see me, I had no choice. I had taken so long to get him to take me out; I wasn’t going to ruin things’
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), it deepened after he used his increase in wages to put down a deposit on a Triumph Tiger Cub motorbike. He’d seen an advert in the local newspaper for one with a front windshield and told Myra he intended to use it for travelling to work each day and ‘in hot weather, including fast trips to Glasgow’.
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She recalled, ‘When he bought a motorbike, he came one weeknight unexpectedly and we went for a ride. After that, because he never made a date, I began staying in every night, terrified that I might be out when – if – he came round. I became estranged from most of my friends, who had become disgusted with me for “letting him tread all over me”.’
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Myra’s friends encouraged her to invite Ian out with them, but Myra didn’t ask him, either sensing that he would refuse or preferring to be alone with him. ‘I’d become totally besotted with him,’ she wrote in her 1995
Guardian
article, ‘always trying to fathom out the mystery he’d become to me, the aura that emanated from him.’

There were countless occasions when Ian would arrange to meet her, then fail to appear: ‘I asked where he was going or where he had been [and] he would answer: never mind. Some women might ask why I stayed with such a self-centred man, but at least when he was with me he made me feel good, when he wasn’t I was content to stay in and wash my hair or babysit.’
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Eventually, he told her that he liked to ‘people-watch’ at the Rembrandt pub on Canal Street or the Union Hotel on the corner of Canal Street and Princess Street. Myra was aware that the two venues attracted an almost exclusively homosexual clientele, but she either discounted the possibility that Ian might be an active observer or chose to ignore it; either way, she accepted his often compulsive desire to go there.

As the months passed, Ian’s ‘aura of mystery and secrecy’, which had proved such an irresistible lure for her in the first place, began to dissipate as the two of them called in at the Waggon and Horses pub at the end of Hyde Road daily after work.
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In the snug, old-fashioned surroundings of the pub, with its thick wooden beams and polished horse-brasses, Ian divulged remnants of his fractured past.

The destruction of the church at the end of Gorbals’ Camden Street by a German bomb was among Ian’s most vivid childhood memories. As the stained glass shattered into a million brilliant filaments, then vanished into dust, the impact blew out ‘all the tenement windows’.
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But Ian wasn’t troubled: ‘To all of my age, it was an exciting time, not one of fear or danger. The blackout was also hilarious, families bumping into one another and tripping over cats as they negotiated the streets and alleys to reach cinemas.’
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What remained of Glasgow’s Gorbals after the war was destroyed by the town planners of the 1960s in much the same way as Gorton disappeared.

A once elegant neighbourhood, by the turn of the twentieth century the Gorbals landlords had grown avaricious, and then negligent, as migrants crowded into the city. By the 1930s, it was the notorious slum made infamous in Alexander McArthur’s pre-war novel
No Mean City
, where the chief character, Johnnie Stark, is the Razor King, stalking through streets riddled with ‘gangs, winos, poverty, overcrowding, sickness, defective drains, bed-bugs and three-shilling prostitutes’.
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Twenty years later, another resident confirmed that ‘the hard drinking and open-razor fights still went on, and the area, with its magnificent buildings and crumbling tenements, was much the same as it had been in the 1930s’
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.

Ian Brady was born Ian Duncan Stewart at Rottenrow maternity hospital in Glasgow on 2 January 1938. His mother, 28-year-old Maggie Stewart, was an unmarried tearoom waitress, although the hospital recorded her as ‘Mrs’ Stewart. She appears to have had no close family and lived with a friend at 8 Huntingdon Place. Ian’s father, according to Maggie, was a journalist who died three months before the birth of his son. She told an early biographer, ‘Why Ian’s so clever with reading and writing is his dad was a reporter – but not on the
Glasgow Herald
.’
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For reasons of her own, she kept his identity a secret from her son. Interviewed later about his father, Ian could only add that he had heard ‘of a move to Australia’ and didn’t know his name.
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After her son was christened, Maggie found a rented room in a tenement on Caledonia Road. She struggled to find someone to care for the baby while she returned to waitressing but wouldn’t consider giving him up for adoption. After four months, she decided the best means of ensuring Ian’s safety while remaining part of his life was to find a suitable foster family. Ian referred to it as a ‘commercial’ arrangement, and it was the only viable solution if Maggie was to continue earning a living.
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Mary Sloan, a 34-year-old cotton-mill worker, responded to Maggie’s predicament with the offer of a home for Ian. Mary’s husband of 15 years was 39-year-old John Sloan, a grain-store employee. They had four children of their own – Robert (thirteen), Jean (eleven), Mary (six) and John junior (two) – and lived in the heart of the Gorbals, at 56 Camden Street, a two-room flat in a tall tenement with shared washing facilities and an outside toilet. It was poor and cramped, but the family were regarded as warm, respectable people by those who knew them.

Ian’s earliest memories revolve around the flat on Camden Street. He recalls lying mottled with measles in his cot, in the warm light of the kitchen range, while his new family gathered around the radio. Each Christmas they hung a stocking at the foot of his bed, although they could ill-afford to fill it. Ian loved them all, and called Mary and John his ma and pa, although his natural mother was a constant presence, visiting him at least every Sunday. He soon grasped that the slim, pretty woman who now called herself Peggy was his real mother. She spoiled him with gifts and clothes bought from her wages at the hotel, bringing him a kilt and ruffled shirt for Sunday best and a pair of black velvet trousers to wear during the week. He was known as ‘the smartest wee lad on the street’.
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From the age of five, Ian attended Camden Street Primary, a quarter of a mile’s walk from home. Despite stories of temper tantrums that erupted in repetitive head banging, Ian insists that his childhood was largely trouble-free and ‘the best [period] in my life . . . I had many friends and won school prizes, including one for English.’
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His sole act of rebellion occurred at Sunday School when the teacher asked the children if they believed in God; Ian’s voice quavered, ‘No.’
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Later, he would fume at psychologists who pointed to his illegitimacy and being fostered as the origin of his crimes: ‘I had a happy childhood and loved the family. The dichotomy in parentage was not pivotal – I was aware of it from an early age . . . I enjoy remembering aspects of the past . . . Searching for the fashionable stereotypical excuses and scapegoats in childhood would be fruitless in my case.’
¹¹

War broke out in 1939 and, two years later, in March 1941, German bombers besieged shipyards and munitions factories in the Clydebank area until it became the most consistently shelled spot in Britain. Ian found the ‘crump’ of missiles thrilling, suffering no personal losses during the bombardment. His home life was stable, due to the Sloans’ care and attention, and regular visits from his mother, who worked as a lathe operator in a factory. When the war ended in 1945, Ian was seven years old. Half a century later, he retained ‘vivid recollections’ of VE Night, particularly the terrific ‘street bonfires’.
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There followed a brief spurt of cruelty towards animals, but that ended when he encountered a fallen horse in the street. It was a cold, misty morning and the Clydesdale had been pulling the drayman’s cart when it slipped on the cobbles and broke a bone in its leg. Ian was transfixed by the pain and helplessness in the horse’s eyes. He ran away from the distressing spectacle, sobbing.

The Sloans acquired a pet dog around the same time and Ian adored it, subsequently developing a powerful affinity with animals. Police chief Peter Topping, who interviewed him in the 1980s, recalls, ‘He was always upset if he read about cruelty to animals and he did not like the articles and books which claimed he had been cruel to a cat when he was a child. “I prefer animals to people,” he would say.’
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At school, Ian’s poor performance in team games earned him the nickname ‘Big Lassie’. He relished his other nickname, ‘Dracula’, which arose from his taste for horror films. Academically, he shone and won praise for his neat, meticulous writing. His recollection of the last years at Camden Street Primary are disjointed: he told one correspondent that ‘the child’s games in the playground seemed futile to me and I had stood alone at the edge of crowds, never fitting in’, but in his own book he claims the opposite: ‘In childhood years I was not the stereotypical “loner” so beloved by popular media. Friends formed round me eagerly in the school playground . . . Apparently I had a descriptive talent and contagious enthusiasm.’
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His best friend, John Cameron, lived in the flat below the Sloans and told a much-repeated story: ‘[Ian] always carried a flick-knife and was a great one for a carry-on. He once tied me to a steel washing-post, heaped newspapers round my legs and set fire to them. I can still remember feeling dizzy with the smoke before I blacked out.’
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He added, ‘Mind you, we were all rough lads in those days. But Ian was the toughest of the lot.’
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A seminal event did occur in 1947, when the Sloans took a picnic to Loch Lomond, some 20 miles north of Glasgow. It was Ian’s first experience of a vast, open and empty landscape; the wide expanse of water and wild blue splendour of the hills and mist-trailed, wooded glens mesmerised him. He explained years later what he could not then put into words, how endless, bleak panoramas ‘expanded’ his spirit: ‘Confronting a sea, a moor, or standing on a mountain, you can almost hear the unknown, invisible presences: you know they are there, almost within touch, speaking an arcane language, and you feel the power rise up within as you become a receiver.’
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It was spiritual rather than religious, a godless, self-affirming and inherent ‘surge of ultimate energy and power [that] makes you laugh with pure delight or cry with gratitude’.
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His foster family, ready to return home, found him standing on one of the hills, feet firmly planted in the grass, staring ahead as though hypnotised by the shadowy rise and fall of the land. He was unusually garrulous throughout the journey back to Glasgow.

That same year, as part of the slum clearance programme that saw ugly tower blocks replace old tenements, the Sloans were resettled on an overspill estate in Pollock. Families were vetted before being allocated houses there, hence its status as a ‘select’ estate; 21 Templeland Road was a three-bedroom house on a street of semi-detached properties with indoor bathrooms and rear gardens. Ian shared a bedroom with Robert, who was in his twenties by then, and John, who was two years his senior. He was delighted with the move; apart from the vastly improved living conditions, nearby there were woods and the River Cart. The couple next door, Thomas and Elizabeth Chalmers, remembered the Sloans as ‘terribly nice people who kept themselves to themselves’, dedicated gardeners whose plot was ‘a mass of roses’.
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Ian willingly helped out in the garden and looked after the vegetable patch. He loved home comforts and has strong, happy memories of childhood Hogmanays.

He changed schools after the move, transferring to Carnwadric Primary on Capelrig Street, a two-mile bus journey from home. He attained good marks and made new friends; however, his mother began missing their Sunday meetings in 1948, when she began a relationship with Patrick Brady, an Irish ex-army man. Weeks drifted by in which she had no contact with her ten-year-old son, and when Patrick moved to Manchester for work, Peggy went with him, leaving Ian in the care of his foster family. Communication between them was by letter alone.

Ian attended the wedding of his foster brother Robert Sloan the following year. Afterwards, there was a family holiday in Perthshire, where the Sloans rented a cottage in Dunning and Ian stumbled across the memorial to Maggie Wall, the witch who had burned there three centuries earlier. Ian loved the cottage, with its low ceilings and oil lamps, and the stone bridge nearby across the river. He happily accompanied the family to the witch’s monument, on walks through the fields and on a day trip to the salt-eddied coast of St Andrew’s, and another to the harbour village of St Monans, where he scrambled over the bulbous stones of the ancient castle ruins.