We played dress-up with a cupboard full of women’s clothes. We didn’t know they belo nged to Dad’s victims
Just one macabre episode in the nightmarish childhood of Fred and Rose West’s daughter Mae – and relived here in the first extract from her haunting memoir . . .
MAE WEST grew up in 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester — a home that in 1994 became known as the House of Horrors. Her father Fred West, helped by wife Rose, murdered at least ten young women — including one of their daughters — many entombed in the cellar. In a searing interview in the Mail on Saturday, Mae revealed how she managed to escape her past. But, in this first extract from a new memoir, she reveals the savage world of cruelty that lurked within those four walls . . .
by Mae West with Neil McKay Mum worked as a prostitute — I took the calls
THE letter was headed HM Prison Durham. ‘I want you to feel that you can talk to me about anything,’ wrote my mother. ‘You must feel awful sometimes and I know you feel very isolated at times. I know I miss you so much sometimes that I feel angry.
‘It must be really rotten for you when you need a family member to talk to or you need mum to sound off to . . . I love you and I want to do anything I can do to help you get over things and to be as happy as possible!!! ‘Love as always, Mum’ She’d sent this in November 1995 — just two months after being jailed for life for helping my father Fred West murder nine women and a child, including Heather, my own sister.
She was widely considered to be one of the most evil women on the planet — but back then I still believed her vehement protestations of innocence. So I was touched to receive such an affectionate letter, particularly as I’d always longed for her love and support.
At the same time, I was painfully aware that my mother had never said those kind of things when I was growing up. Nor had she once hugged me since I’d grown out of nappies.
on the contrary, she used to beat my siblings and me so badly that we frequently had injuries. The local hospital had a record of us ending up in A&E over 30 times in all, and never spotted any kind of pattern. No, even before the world learned about the so-called House of Horrors, no one in their right mind would have called rose West a good mother. She’d even deliberately ignored my father’s incestuous advances towards me.
I may have been naive, but deep down, I think I always knew my mother didn’t love me. But that didn’t stop me getting caught up in her manipulative web . . . For my siblings and me, 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, was our home — one that now has terrible memories and associations, but nevertheless was the focal point of our lives.
Although nothing in our household was ever what other people might regard as ‘normal’, we did ordinary things. We ate meals and watched TV together, celebrated birthdays, and went on holidays.
Mum used to bake superb cakes. We’d always have a fantastic iced sponge for our birthdays and a lovely fruit cake laced with booze at Christmas. In fact, Christmas was the one day we really did feel like any other family.
Dad, taking a rare day off from his manual labour work, would insist that we all gather round to watch the Queen’s speech. Like Mum, he was a royalist.
‘remarkable woman, the Queen!’ Dad would say from the sofa. Mum would agree: ‘I like Queenie, too. Proper class she’s got.’
‘And she talks a lot of sense,’ Dad would add.
He seemed obsessed with current affairs, particularly News At Ten. We all had to keep quiet and watch it with him.
And he’d be especially scathing about EastEnders, which he refused to have on, saying it contained too much violence and he found it depressing.
His favourite film was Bambi. ‘Breaks my heart, it does,’ he used to say. ‘’Specially the bit where Bambi’s mother dies.’
Don’t misunderstand me: there was also abuse, misery, violence and distress in our home — but it wasn’t constant, and it certainly wasn’t the whole picture.
Astonishing as it may seem, our family mattered deeply to us, as much as it does to any child. I WAS the second of the eight children my parents had together, though at least two were almost certainly fathered by Mum’s clients. For much of my childhood, she worked as a prostitute.
She’d tell my older sister Heather and me to babysit the younger kids for hours while she was servicing her clients, most of them old white men, at the top of the house in a boudoir specially designed by Dad. By the time I’d reached my early teens, I had to answer the phone, taking calls from men wanting to book appointments with ‘Mandy’, the name she worked under. It was almost like being her secretary.
I found it very difficult and embarrassing, especially when some of them went into detail about what they wanted. ‘Sorry, you’ll have to speak to her about that,’ I’d tell them, cringing.
Dad wired up a baby-listening device so that he could eavesdrop on Mum’s encounters from elsewhere in the house. He found our disgust and discomfort funny.
Although Mum later protested that he’d forced her into prostitution, it seemed much more like a joint enterprise at the time. There was even a cushion saying ‘Mum and Dad’ on the sofa where the men sat waiting their turn.
It’s amazing to me now, looking back on it from an adult perspective, how easily we came to terms with this extraordinary aspect of my parents’ lives.
of course, we knew other families weren’t like that — but we did our best to help conceal what was going on from the outside world because, apart from anything else, it was deeply embarrassing.
Another reason was that the family was our only source of security, and we feared doing anything to break it up. I think Mum deliberately kept the outside world at bay. We weren’t allowed to bring any friends home, not that I was remotely popular anyway.
She made Heather and me wear second-hand clothes and boys’ shoes to school, and kept our hair brutally short. As a result, we were mercilessly bullied.
When we were older and even more vulnerable to peer pressure, Mum made us wash our hair with washing-up liquid, and never let us shave our legs or use deodorant. Kids can be cruel — they sang an advert jingle as they passed me: ‘Arms up if you use rightguard.’
At home, Mum would beat us for the smallest things. Some of these beatings were sadistic: she’d go to the special cupboard where she kept her canes and belts, and line us all up to take our punishment.
If we cried as she hit us, she’d yell at us to stop — ‘or you’ll get another one’. So we learned to fight back the tears, at least until we were alone.
Because of that, I’ve always found it hard to cry. I sometimes think that’s why, when all my
parents’ crimes came to light in 1994, I couldn’t give way to selfpity or tears. I’d had years of learning how to numb my feelings.
after her fourth child, Tara, was born in 1977, Mum became more and more violent, lashing out at the slightest provocation, throwing pots and pans at our heads. She once knocked my brother Steve out cold by breaking a Pyrex dish over his head.
One day, she even scooped the baby out of her high chair, hit her and then threw her back into it — all because Tara had thrown her food on the floor.
The last time Mum was truly violent with me was in my early teens. I must have said something to annoy her because she suddenly picked up a carving knife and rushed at me, yelling: ‘Do you think I wouldn’t use this on you?’
Then she began to slash at my chest, cutting through my vest and nicking the skin. I was whimpering in fright. Fearing for my life, I ran down into the basement.
One of the worst occasions was when I saw her strangle Steve to the point where I really thought he was going to die. He was only little, about six or seven.
He’d been sitting on the kitchen counter and Mum told him to get down. When he didn’t, she grabbed him by his neck and held him off the ground. It was beyond terrifying: his face was going purple and his eyes were all bloodshot.
Eventually, she dropped him. When he went to school the next day, his face all covered in red blotches, she told us to say he’d caught his neck on a tree branch.
Sometimes I’d sit there in class, hoping a teacher might ask me what was wrong, but they never did. and the truth is that even if they’d asked questions, I probably wouldn’t have said anything.
I knew Mum and Dad didn’t want outsiders poking into their business. There was always a threat, sometimes quite explicit, that if any of us complained about any aspect of our home life to anyone — by reporting a beating, for example — we might be taken into care.
However bad things were at home, we didn’t want that.
yet it still beggars belief that the authorities never questioned what went on in our house, especially as we now know there were anonymous tip-offs given to the police. [The children were interviewed but it went no further as they had been sworn to silence by Fred and rose.] I ONCE had a conversation with Heather about my dad, after he’d started sexually pestering us and trying to grope our teenage bodies. It would have made little sense to anyone listening in.
We agreed that, in many ways, he’d been the parent we liked best — the one we’d all have chosen to go with if our parents had ever decided to divorce. Extraordinary as it may sound, aside from abusing us sexually, he’d been quite kind, even funny.
and, despite the savage nature of his murders, he’d never hit us. He’d actually intervene sometimes when Mum punished us, saying: ‘Ease off, rose!’
She was the one who terrified us, and as far as we could see, wore the trousers in their marriage.
Of course, no child should ever have to choose between being viciously beaten or sexually abused, but that was life as we knew it in Cromwell Street. and I can’t deny Heather and I were terrified of what our father might do.
We were still little girls when he started telling us that he’d one day be ‘breaking us in’, as he put it.
at first, his frequent comments about a father’s ‘right’ to take his daughter’s virginity seemed like a joke, but as we approached puberty they seemed more like a threat. ‘Only right and proper, it is. My old man did the same to my sisters,’ he’d say.
He started lunging at us at the slightest opportunity, especially if we were wearing our school uniform. and he’d sneak into our room before we woke up, pull the bedclothes off and try to grope us. Eventually, we took to sleeping fully clothed.
We’d also stand guard for each other when we used the bathroom, as there was no lock on the door. I could never relax. Even now, all these years later, I always have one eye on the door when I’m taking a shower.
Mum made no attempt to stop Dad groping us, though he sometimes did it in front of her. She saw it as normal Fred behaviour, and seemed to expect me to see it in the same way.
Nor did she object when he tried to make us watch hard-core porn with him, including films he’d made of my mother with her clients. I used to find them completely repulsive and find excuses to leave the room.
Did I have even an inkling that my parents had killed a succession of young women, some of them our lodgers? Of course not. In any case, Dad had made a separate entrance for the lodgers, so we seldom saw them.
One day, when I was about eight,
Dad said it was his right to take our virginity