Scary stuff

My last post was from the newspaper at the end of WW2. I still laugh in sympathy for the poor bloke who didn't dare go home. I’ll get round to the best bits, to split up the blocks of print into a shape you can still read in this blog format. Some of them are quite interesting, like “There is still no sign of Hitler.” They thought he’d run for it. Sorry about the death reports in the clipping, but you know the saying – “in the midst of life etc …..”  

By coincidence I've been watching TV tonight – the wonderful Martin Clunes in ‘A is for Acid’, a WW2 drama about a serial killer who thinks that without a body you can’t be tried for murder. He’s such a lovely man in real life but he’s making a startlingly good murderer. The whole macabre business has just reminded me of the last year I lived in London, 1981.

I’d come down from Manchester after a sort of life–turning–around–watershed, determined to get a decent job and pay off my modest overdraft. I ended up almost immediately with two great part–time jobs, totalling 58 hours a week. I was planning to be a boat–builder, which meant moving to either Lowestoft or Falmouth. I thought of a sunny, happy, childhood holiday in Cornwall and went for the latter.

Had to go to Kentish Town job centre, nearest to where I lived, to apply for the 20–week course. Was required to take a maths test – could have put it off and revised but I felt fairly confident in basic maths so I went for it on the spot. There were fractions and lowest common denominators and by some magic the old formulas sort of came back to me, 12 years after I’d done them at ‘O’ level. Then I was taken into a small windowless interview room and told I’d passed the maths test and was questioned in detail.
He asked about my general circumstances, the path which had led me to boatbuilding, and about more personal stuff. 

“Where do you live?”
“With my brother’s family – they have three children – in Hampstead.”
“Oh, that’s alright then.” In a tone of voice like he’d been expecting a problem but been pleasantly surprised.

It struck me as an odd thing to say, given the strong emphasis with which he said it, but just one of those things you put down to individual expressions.
It was also odd that he seemed to dwell on the personal stuff. He spent a little while on that, on my personal history. The professional boat–related subject was dealt with in peremptory fashion. Then I was released from the tiny room (he sat in the far corner at a desk facing the wall while I sat at a desk on my own).

And off I went to Cornwall, six months later, and qualified as a boatbuilder.

A couple of years after that, it was all over the news.

A serial killer had been befriending gay men, and female prostitutes who by definition mostly lived in bedsits. He disapproved of any women living in bedsits, and prostitutes (male and female) were easy to meet.  It meant, in his eyes, that they were unloved and alone and not part of a loving family. He thought it was his duty to put them out of their 'misery'. He lived in Muswell Hill and had been stuffing the body parts down the drain, in the dustbin, all over the place including under the floorboards. He’d murdered so many he was running out of space. His name was Dennis Nielsen and he’d interviewed me in that tiny room. 

He’d pronounced a judgement on my lifestyle. I had passed the maths and a different kind of test.