One of Your Own (9 page)

In spring 1959, Myra was made redundant due to financial difficulties at Lawrence Scott. She was unemployed for just one week; in March 1959, she began work as a junior typist at Clydesdale’s Furniture Shop in Gorton. The wages were poor, but Nana Hindley came to the rescue by securing weekend jobs for Myra, Margie and a few other ex-Lawrence Scott girls in the catering department at Belle Vue. Allan Grafton and his friends visited the huge entertainment complex every weekend: ‘On Saturday nights, everyone would go to the Speedway and then into Belle Vue amusement park. At 10.30 p.m., the crowds converged on the Lake Hotel boating lake, where there was a fantastic weekly firework display. Apart from paying a small fee to go to the Speedway, everything was free.’
¹⁸
Myra served customers from food trolleys, but she hated the stink of fish and chips on her clothing and was glad when she and her friend Irene were offered work in the German-styled ‘bierkeller’ instead. The head barmaid advised them to dress up, keep smiling and serve short measures without getting caught. Myra and Irene were happy to go along with it, especially when they were given free packets of cigarettes as a bribe.

Ronnie presented her with an engagement ring on her 18th birthday, which Myra duly displayed to her family and friends, careful to point out the three tiny diamond chips set in it, while hoping they wouldn’t find out it was second-hand. Bob offered to pay for the wedding with his compensation money from the foundry. Nellie was less enthusiastic; she wanted Myra to enjoy life while she was still young and didn’t like the idea of her settling down with the first boy who proposed. Her mother’s misgivings roused Myra’s own. She looked at Nellie, trapped in a ‘boring domestic role’ of the ‘downtrodden wife. I wanted my mother to stand up for herself, but she was weak and allowed Dad to bully her. I hated that.’
¹⁹
Myra began silently criticising Ronnie as a result, put off by the grease under his fingernails – ‘like Dad’s’ – and secretly condemning him as ‘boring and mundane. He cared a lot about me, which mattered, but he didn’t like dancing and we spent most of our time at stock car races, which was his hobby.’
²⁰

Pat Jepson was the first of her friends to marry. Others followed, and Myra abhorred how their lives seemed to shrink: ‘When I began to witness many of my friends and neighbours, some of whom “had to get married”, having baby after baby, almost tied to the kitchen sink and struggling to make ends meet while their husbands went out every night, drinking and betting away their wages just as my father had done, I began to feel uncomfortable and restless.’
²¹
She disliked their husbands, drinkers who flirted endlessly with other women, and came to the conclusion that ‘very few men could be trusted’.
²²
She felt her friends had been ‘trapped into family life, with no money and no freedom’.
²³

Just after her birthday, Myra caused the gossips’ tongues to wag when she had a pink rinse at Maison Laurette. She told Mrs Howells that she was thinking of working abroad as a nanny or else as a Butlin’s Redcoat. Myra had social aspirations: she strove to subdue her Lancashire accent, intended to learn how to drive and craved foreign holidays. ‘I wanted a career, to better myself, to travel and struggle to break free of the confines of what was expected of me,’ she recalled. ‘Although so much was unattainable, I still dreamed and made plans and kept everything to myself. I didn’t want to leave home, because I loved my family, but I wanted more scope and space, and they would think I was “getting above myself” if I confided in them.’
²⁴
She enrolled in judo classes to burn off the excess energy triggered by her ambitions, but at the Gresham Street club she attended once a week, Myra quickly became the girl whom nobody liked to partner because she took so long to release her fierce grip.

She was drifting, and she knew it. Yet her relationship with her mother improved: the two of them often went shopping together and mealtimes at home were not the argumentative chore they had been in the past, though Myra scarcely tolerated her father. She counted her sister as her best friend, though Maureen was proving more streetwise than Myra. Despite her tiny frame, she would take on anyone in a fight and was a member of the Gorton street gang. She had the same beehive as Myra, although hers was ink-black, accentuating her pale skin. She wore similar clothes to Myra and copied her sister’s heavy black eye make-up. Maureen was instantly recognisable, even at a distance, tottering down the street in stilettos, pencil skirt and sweater, black beehive stiff as a board, arms crossed or thin fingers clasping one of the Park Drive cigarettes she’d cadged off Myra, who had started smoking Embassy Tipped because she considered them to be a classier brand. Maureen talked nineteen-to-the-dozen and would dance at the drop of a hat, in the streets with her friends, at Sivori’s in front of the jukebox or at home with Myra to the distorted crackle of the blaring record player.

Myra envied Maureen’s carefree, even lackadaisical attitude to life. By her own admission, she was filled with ‘conflict and confusion’.
²⁵
She left Clydesdale’s and on 15 February 1960 started working as a typist for Bratby & Hinchcliffe, Engineers and Automatic Bottling Manufacturers, in Gorton Lane. She liked her colleagues Anita and Mary but loathed her boss, who banned his staff from talking to each other during working hours. She started arriving late again, or not at all. When Anita left to work for Burlington’s, a catalogue warehouse in town, Myra and Mary jumped at the chance of joining her there when two other jobs came up, but Anita rang to say that Burlington’s was even worse than Bratby & Hinchcliffe, with guards patrolling the warehouse to pounce on any shirkers. ‘I decided to look elsewhere,’ Myra remembered. ‘I wanted job security, but also personal satisfaction was important to me. I wasn’t going to follow my friends into domestic drudgery. I wanted different from the norm.’
²⁶
Mary decided to stick with the job she already had, but Myra went back to studying the ‘Situations Vacant’ pages of the
Manchester Evening News
. Mary pointed out an advert for Millwards Merchandising. ‘She had worked there herself in the recent past,’ Myra recalled. ‘She told me something about the firm and mentioned some of the people I’d be working with, if I got the job. She told me about . . . a tall and good-looking, very quiet and shy, smartly dressed “intriguing man” who had appealed to her.’
²⁷

She was interviewed at Millwards on 21 December 1960. The company had been supplying chemicals, mostly to the cotton industry, since 1810 and occupied a large, detached house off Levenshulme Road. The entrance was at the back, down a potholed lane and past a cluster of brick outhouses. Despite its unkempt appearance, the house had once been an elegant family home called Rose Cottage. The boss’s office was in the old drawing room. It retained an ornate fireplace and French windows that led into the garden, now filled with chemical containers.

The head of the firm, Tom Craig, greeted Myra warmly and showed her through to a small room where he set her a simple typing test and chatted to her for a while. He was an affable, middle-aged man who was keen to get along with his staff. There were about 15 employees – bookkeepers, typists and manual workers. Tom offered Myra the job on the spot. The wages were reasonable – £8 10s – and the hours regular: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through the week and alternate Saturday mornings. Since it was the end of the afternoon, Tom invited her to meet the rest of the staff, leading her through to his office, which he shared with two men. One was a retirement-age clerk sitting at a desk. He stood up with a smile as Myra entered and introduced himself as Bert Matthews. Tom explained that Myra would probably be taking most of her dictation from him.

The other man was standing by the filing cabinets. He was much younger than Bert and Tom, in his early twenties, tall and thin with a sallow complexion and dense, dark-brown hair combed into a short quiff. He wore a smart, three-piece suit and the look he gave Myra was unreadable. Tom introduced him as the stock clerk, Ian Brady.

 

Myra’s description of her meeting with Ian Brady was inevitably coloured by hindsight: ‘Before his name was mentioned, I already knew it was him. I can only describe my reaction to him as an immediate and fatal attraction, although I had no inkling then of just how fatal it would turn out to be.’
¹
She was struck by his ‘dark hair, deep-blue eyes and fresh complexion’ and the ‘well-manicured fingernails’ that were ‘in stark contrast to my boyfriend’s, which were always greasy’.
²
Dirty fingernails signified manual work; she intuitively responded to a man whose job required the use of his brain more than his hands, although she had never been attracted to her previous male co-workers.

Ronnie was on night shift the evening after her interview at Millwards, leaving Myra free to go out with her friends. She told them about the encounter, comparing Ian to Elvis and James Dean, regarding his indifference as a challenge: ‘He gave no indication that he noticed me, appearing to be the strong silent type. I was determined I would make him notice me.’
³

She began working at Millwards on Monday, 16 January 1961, putting extra care into her appearance for Ian’s benefit. She caught the bus opposite the Steelworks Tavern and arrived on time for once.

Her desk was in a chilly little office of its own, meaning she had minimal contact with the other staff, apart from taking dictation, but there was a strong social bond between the employees, who met regularly for nights out and had a weekly football pools syndicate. During lunch breaks, the men would play cards, chess and dominoes, and consult the racing pages of the press. Nearby was a bookies and most afternoons one of the men would pop out to put their bets on. Tom allowed them to listen to the major races on the radio or someone would phone through to the betting shop for the results. Ian was a keen gambler but careful, though Myra heard him shouting on the telephone at the bookie if he lost money. His betting name was Gorgonzola; eventually, he shortened it to Gorgon. She listened to him talking to colleagues about the books he read and realised they regarded him as highbrow and tedious. Other than that, she learned scarcely anything about him. He hardly spoke to her and barely seemed to notice she existed, despite her efforts.

Her infatuation deepened and she broke off her engagement to Ronnie, telling Pat that he was ‘too childish and we’re not saving enough money for marriage’.
⁴
But secretly she was frightened of ending up in a dull marriage, one whose tedious dynamics were reflected in the kitchen-sink dramas playing in every British cinema, usually set in the North. A real-life
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
wasn’t for her. ‘Things could have been right with [Ronnie], but I got bored,’ she recalled. ‘Looking back on it, this loving relationship was the type that I desired but in the end it wasn’t very attractive.’
⁵
Her ex-fiancé was distraught; he rang Millwards repeatedly in an attempt to persuade Myra to think again – until Tom warned him to expect a visit from the police if he didn’t stop. Myra was relieved when the phone calls ceased but secretly pleased that Ian had witnessed Ronnie’s desperation.
⁶

Myra was free to indulge her fixation with Ian. She recalled, ‘For almost a year, during which I broke off my engagement, he took virtually no notice of me. When he did, it was either a covert “come on”, which sent my hopes soaring . . . or an ostentatious apathy towards me, making cruel and sarcastic remarks or totally ignoring me except when he had to ask me to take dictation and type letters for him. It was a year of emotional torture which I’d never experienced before. I went from loving him to hating him and loving and hating him at the same time. When he smiled at or was nice to me, I felt blessed and floated on air.’
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The attraction was straightforward enough, apart from his appearance: ‘Ian was older and seemed wiser than me, so cultured, so exciting and different from others.’
⁸

Despite her antipathy towards her father, she noted similarities between the two (apart from the fingernails): ‘They both had strong, dominant personalities. Each was his own man, living independently from the rest of the family and doing his own thing. My father ignored me, so perhaps subconsciously I wasn’t going to let that happen with Ian.’
⁹

She began keeping a diary, hiding it in her desk drawer, which she was careful to keep locked. By the time she put pen to paper, she was ‘head over heels in love’.
¹⁰
It was six months since she had begun working at Millwards.

She found out his address by eavesdropping on a telephone conversation Ian had with the bookie: 18 Westmoreland Street, Longsight. She slipped out that evening with a plan: ‘I often took my baby cousin [Aunt Annie’s son, Michael] out in his pram, and when I discovered where Ian lived, I began taking Michael down the long street he lived in, hoping I’d see him and he’d stop to talk to me, but I never did. I asked one of my friends to come with me to the pub on the corner of his street in the hope that he might be there, but he never was. I’d become utterly obsessed with him, though tried desperately not to show it.’
¹²
The friend was May Hill; she and Myra had known each other for years. The two of them whiled away several evenings in the Westmoreland pub until it became obvious Ian wasn’t a regular customer. Myra returned to wandering past the bay window of his house alone, singing ‘On the Street Where You Live’ under her breath. Then she admitted defeat and contented herself with reporting nonsensical snippets about Ian in her diary: