The worst thing that happened...

'Daft' Peter aka Bruce George Lee

My memory of daft Peter Dinsdale, for what it is worth, is of skinny boy in a stripy hat and an anorak. He had a thin arm not quite fully formed, and was, therefore, a bit lopsided when you looked at him from the back. I didn't know him, but I'd seen him. Everyone had seen him and his rickety old bike. He was one of a number of local oddballs - the old fella who picked up tab ends, Wiggy, the old lady who stank of cat piss, the enormously fat boy (who killed himself by over-eating, and who I now realise must have had prader-willi syndrome), Eamon who waved to me (and everyone) from the Cider Bar - that an old bus shelter at the Hessle Road end of the Boulevard. It was rich in detail where I grew up, even Horace next door with his florescent socks and his large model of a submarine in his middle room, was averagely strange and all, all were the antithesis of the quiet cul-de-sacs and semi-detached lives of the people I was in top set German with.

Peter Dinsdale, who had his name changed by deed poll to Bruce Lee was a delusional, sad case. In 1979, he became, for a time, the most prolific serial killer in England. His notoriety did not last, detained as he was under the mental health act (presumably til he dies) ensuring that he disappeared from the public domain almost as quickly as he appeared. But if you are from Hull, and west Hull in particular the memory of what daft Peter did (or was supposed to do) lives vivid in the memory.

Daft Peter, by his own confession on the 4th December, 1979, poured paraffin through the door of a notorious family's house and the subsequent fire killed three of the boys who slept there. The marriage of these two things - the arson attack and the fact it was this family, reverberated around the neighbourhood like a slow rhythmic drum beat. The shock was palpable.

I knew this family. I knew them from a distance as most people did, and I also knew them up close and personal as they threatened to beat the living shit out of me. I knew them, as everyone did by reputation, and by experience. There is a certain irony I cannot help feeling about modern politicians and their pronouncements about feral children and broken societies... as though these things are new, when the truth is there has always been an element who were best avoided, who always existed outside the system - occasionally falling foul of it, always an element who ran wild... The Hastie family were that family. I want, and am passionate advocate for equality of opportunity and for those on the margins to be offered the same chances as those in power but I am also a realist and some people will never want this for themselves.

Edith Hastie and her husband Charles senior were notorious rabble rousers. At 34, Edith was the mother of 7 children, four boys and three girls and she was not, to put it bluntly, to be fucked with.

My clearest memory of her was on a bright autumnal, sunny day. I was charged, by the vicar, along with my sister (I think) and some other girls with clearing the back of the church hall of rubbish. We worked at our task quite methodically, throwing old bits of wood and other things onto a fire. The centre piece of the waste ground was an old wooden door propped against some bricks, and, sure this was heavy and would require a group effort we seemed to skirt around it.

As the afternoon wore on, and the sun got higher and the cold came in, I felt, and then noticed, that we were being watched. First one Hastie boy was there, and then another, and finally a third, each similar looking and slightly bigger than the last, a sort of star-jumpered version of russian dolls.

I don't remember the precise configuration of Charlie junior's expletives but it was very clear that he was unhappy. We continued, safe in the knowledge that the vicar would protect us and that we would surely go to heaven for our efforts, and continued to move wood and other broken items to the fire.

Finally the centrepiece door was the only thing that remained of our effort. We gathered round it and lifted it up.

"You'd better fucking leave that alone," Charlie said, or words to that effect

The truth is, I was happy to do that, I was happy to leave it. I was not brave then and I am not brave now. I did not want to fight with Charlie and his unwieldy family - particularly Angelina who I had encountered before, and who I knew packed a punch. I did not want to fight with any of them. I had been on the wrong end of Charlie's wrath too - when me and a scout I knew found his cache of porno mags behind the church. I didn't want trouble.

I looked down behind the door and saw that beneath lay cigarettes, and alcohol and a range of other contraband that I assumed had not been gathered by legal means. This would, ordinarily have been a good hiding place if an interfering vicar and a bunch of guides hadn't bumbled their way to a discovery.

The vicar, who up until that point, had always seemed to me to be a total wimp, suddenly was overcome with something akin to bravery. "Obviously," he began, "If they're on church property - they belong..." He didn't quite finish his sentence, because by this time Charlie was spitting feathers, threatening Armageddon and a bit more besides.

Charlie left the scene, and returned with what looked like a weapon and the vocal support of his mum and dad, now hanging, semi naked from the front bedroom window of their house. Edith had a sheet wrapped around her and Charles senior was just plain butt naked. Believe me, this kind of afternoon romp may have been popular in the 70s but you did not throw open your windows and advertise it. Charles senior had just been released from prison, and this was offered as an explanation of their behaviour, but I think we were all a little taken aback...

The vicar, bizarrely - stood his ground. I was hiding my face. Because I knew being seen was a bad move, and I knew that we were not going to survive any systematic campaign devised by the family and that our lives would be hell. Charlie threatened us. Peter threatened us. Paul did. Charles senior and Edith threatened us. I have no doubt that we would have got our comeuppance. We had suffered at the hands of Angelina, and Charlie had joined in for fun, Friday after Friday on our way to the guides. But the threatened revenge did not happen.

Charlie Hastie

It did not happen because Daft Peter, allegedly, took matters into his own hands. It had absolutely nothing to do with us, or what had happened on that autumnal afternoon. History tells a story of difficulties between Daft Peter Dinsdale and Charlie Hastie, but I do not believe the stories of things that happened between them in public lavatories. Charlie was a bad lad, but I find it hard to credit that he prostituted himself to Peter Dinsdale or anyone else. Or indeed that Peter Dinsdale was capable of the monstrous revenge he wrought. I may be wrong, I have been wrong before, but I just don't buy it...

Whatever the truth of any tale, the Hastie boys lay asleep in their house on Selby Street, when someone, Bruce Lee, or someone else, put lighted paraffin through their door. Edith Hastie told how Charlie threw her from the window tosave her, and returned to the bedroom of his younger brothers to save them too. They all perished.

The neighbourhood was alive with gossip and rumour. It is true to say that many people had fallen out with the Hastie family, and our little episode was a minor one compared to some of the tales of woe and campaigns of terror that came out from their immediate neighbours. But my teenage self was outraged that this could have happened, even to boys who had caused me pain, even to a family who had frightened me and who I had crossed the road to avoid.

I remembered my guide leader saying that they deserved it, because they were bad through and through and I remember thinking that if she represented God, and God supported what she thought, then that would be my last moment of believing. This sense of outrage and grief confused me, but I knew that whatever they had done, they did not deserve this terrible end - a feeling reinforced by the act of pushing their smiling faces through door after door on my paper round. Nobody deserved the revenge meted out to them.

Later, a conspiracy theory grew up around the fire - tales of drugs, drugs sellers and the wrong house being targeted, but Daft Peter Dinsdale aka Bruce George Lee remains inside for this and other crimes.

100 years of guiding, and its part in my downfall...and the substitute middle class parent...

I watched the hundred years of guiding today, and it made me think about the enormous impact the Girl Guides had on my life. I know this sounds a bit OTT - but it really did propel me into a journey I might not otherwise have taken.

In the first place, I had the (mis)fortune to be the younger sister and my guide captain - also a younger sister, decided that my sister, Kim, bullied me and then she determined because of her own experience, to find a way of getting rid of my sister from the guides. Well, I'm not sure it was quite this thought through - I don't think Audrey Lord, the captain, thought anything through (she was never still long enough), but she did engineer the situation for me to be at the guides on my own and exist without any other member of my family. Anyone who comes from a big (ish) family will tell you this - it is virtually impossible to be seen without the filter of one or other of them, especially if you happen to be third in line to the throne. You are always someone's sister or like your great aunt nellie or doing something that someone or other has done before you...

But with the guides, it was not like that. Well - it was not like that after an incident. The funny thing about this incident is that looking back I was not only fully involved in it, I may even have instigated it. What a hoot we thought, one Friday evening, if we shoved an old exhaust pipe that we'd found under Audrey's car so that when she left the guides that night it would be dangling down on the floor, and she would think her exhaust was broken. To add to the general mayhem we (myself, Kim, and our friends, Dawn and Alison) had also written 'crap car' and 'clean me' and so on all over the car in the dust, too.

Audrey wasn't fooled. she pulled the old exhaust out, cross that someone had tried to play that trick, and drove off. And we trudged home a bit disappointed. We weren't disappointed for long. We'd apparently shoved the old exhaust a bit too vigorously because two weeks later when Audrey was on holiday in Scotland her real exhaust fell off her car in quite spectacular fashion. And this, she concluded was our fault.

When she got back to Hull she rang my mother up. It was one of those tense moments in the kitchen when you knew that trouble was brewing. My mother said, "My children would never write such a terrible word on your car!" and she said, "My girls would never destroy your exhaust." She was pretty angry when she got off the line. "I'd better not find out that you've done that, or your feet won't touch." (This was one of a number of phrases my mother used that I didn't quite get. She used to say, "I've been shopping like a man with no arms." I still don't understand this.)

My sister and I shifted awkwardly and tried not to meet our mother's eye. Then the expletives started to fall, and then we knew we were in trouble. "You've made me look like a prize idiot" (Could idiots win prizes?) and that was a very dangerous thing to do. I took cover (my usual reaction) and Kim fronted it out (her usual reaction.)

The next Friday we went to the guides, and Kim and Alison were both asked to leave. That was after they'd be ritually stripped of their patrol leader badges, all very solemn. Just like that, banished. For good. Dawn, dramatic and daft, left with them both. And I stayed. It was at that point that Guides started to matter.

A few weeks later, Audrey made me a patrol leader. Then she encouraged me to do badges and other stuff. Then she encouraged me to do my Queen's guide (see the marvellous picture above....) It was the first time that I had followed a path that no-one else had taken, and I liked it. I liked it very much. As an aside, when I received my Queen's Guide it was a bit of an event. The newspapers came, and I had my picture in the Hull Daily Mail (squeezed in on a page with a reflective piece about the Yorkshire Ripper...making me look like one of his victims), and in the parish magazine, I had to play second fiddle behind Charles and Diana who thoughtlessly chose to get married in the same summer. Mind, the church threw a bit of a do, so I wasn't too disappointed and enjoyed my celebrity.

The Guides opened a number of doors for me and set me off on a road of over-achieving and leadership - it certainly made me realise that I could manage people, and could get things done. I was also encountering other young women, in better companies, who intended to go on to university and whilst I couldn't lay money on it, I have a fair sense that that was where I got the idea from. I never got it from school. I was a relative failure at academia with my 3 'o' levels, and never destined for the Higher education route. In that sense, the Guides very much operated as a substitute middle class parent: offering me a raft of opportunities and allowing me to rub shoulders as an equal with other young women who took sixth form, and university as their right. The Guides gave me what they called on the TV programme a 'can do attitude' and, it allowed me to be a different kind of girl. To be honest, I do remember being very awkward in a number of situations - and whilst it's easy to dismiss this as an inferiority complex, I did always feel as often the sole representative of 68th St. Matthew's Company, like the poor relation rocking up at the superior in-laws' parties and eating the centre-piece in error. The Guides is chopped into districts, and each district is made up of a number of companies, under the leadership of a district commissioner - well, it was. Our company was attached to St. Matthew's Church, then in a pretty dodgy part of Hull. There were three other companies in our district and one of them, St Nick's were posh compared to us. From where I am now, they so clearly were not posh at all - but such was the sense of not being like them, I can remember going into events and deciding I didn't like people based on the fact that they talked posh, or were looking at us funny or they were not like us. Their leaders were young professionals, and clearly very much more dynamic than Audrey (although I did really admire Aud, who died very young and I still miss her.)

I remember once taking an instant dislike to a girl, Julie, from St. Nick's. Then, we were young leaders together on a camp and from the second I met her properly, we were absolutely firm mates. She was a blast. So it taught me that not all posh people were hideous, or other. At that point, Guides was starting to open doors that would have stayed shut for me as a girl from a working class community. I went horse riding with the guides, abseiling, rock-climbing, windsurfing, camping - supervised and unsupervised by adults,  - hiking and so on. I did fundraising, church parade, singing, first aid, looked after elders, etc etc... It afforded me privileges that I would not otherwise have had. And it made a difference, it really did. If we are talking about transgression, and the possibilities that transgressing opens up - then the Guiding movement was my ticket to crossing. It was my way of stepping over the borderline between the classes. 

So, any more transgressive stories?

Okay, this should have gone up two weeks ago...

The street where I grew up...no-one had a car then.

I have just come back from a rather lovely holiday in a cottage in Wales. No ordinary cottage being a fan of The Landmark Trust - this one had an enormous fowl house attached to it - bigger than the cottage; the result of the vision of a Victorian Industrialist! That's the Victorians for you - doing it properly. Okay, so class was absolutely clear then but the cottage we stayed in was where the poultry keeper lived, and I could have lived with that, I think. Although it would of course, being work for a man. Still, a girl can dream.

The fowl house at Poultry Cottage, Welshpool

It was bitterly cold there though. The Landmark Trust develop abandoned historical properties of interest, and they do it sympathetically. No central heating, and no double glazing. One of the things that was really noticeable with this was that the bathroom was absolutely freezing. No hanging around in there when it's minus 12 outside!

The bathroom and bathroom activities at Poultry cottage were very reminiscent of baths as a child. In and out in three seconds flat and then throwing on every single piece of clothing you can find in under a minute, as if a time penalty kicked in if you failed. I remember my older brother (the wag) saying in response to my, "Oi - it's chilly in here" when he opened the door, "Very strange, it's England our here!" I feel duty bound to report that he is a comedian now.

The other thing that poultry cottage had in common with the house I grew up in as a child was that the toilet was approximately 4 days away from the bedroom. My sister, Kim (aka the long-suffering one) was woken up to accompany me on the long journey when I wanted to go. I was literally afraid of my own reflection when the kitchen light was switched on - always surprised even though I knew it was coming, to see myself looking back, slightly disheveled and a little skeletal. Our toilet was in the furthest reaches of the house - down a landing, down two stairs, across a short landing to the main stairs, down a hallway and across the aforementioned kitchen. It was, in other words, practically outside (where it had been originally) and it was regularly beyond perishing cold. It was equivalent to entering the Arctic Time Zone. Next door to the toilet, my dad used the original scullery as a shed - an indoor shed, a place he stored things of purpose. There was something about the grime and the blackness of that room with its shadowy tools (and once a couple of dead rabbits that uncle Keith had brought) that scared me too. It was a male, unfinished sort of place, cold and unforgiving. There was a mirror behind the toilet door but it was possible with skill and careful thought to manoeuvre yourself out of it without catching a glimpse of your own ghostly presence.

The house I grew up in...

A story springs to mind. My grandfather Jarvis, (my mother's father) arrived once to look after us when my mum was doing a shift at Smith and Nephews. He walked towards the house with his trilby cocked at a rakish angle, with a practiced nonchalance in his stride. BUT children had changed since his own had grown up, and he had not reckoned with our wind-up record player or the half a dozen orange vinyl classics we possessed: 'Skip to my Lou' being the one I remember most vividly. We played it incessantly throughout the evening and did precisely as we assumed it asked - 'skipped to the loo' - which we clearly thought hilarious. On and on we skipped in spite of Granddad's protestations (as an aside I was probably 20 before I realised that the first line: 'shoo fly don't bother me' didn't relate to a fly that liked your laces. I had similar problems with 'this cross eyed bear' in the song at church.) Anyway, the upshot of all the skipping and the repeated Arctic blasts as the door opened and then banged shut, was that Grandma Jarvis looked after us after that and she taught us how to knit; the kind of thing girls are supposed to know.