see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

When I wrote my blog about the spate of recent mass killings which have left a large number of men, women and children dead, I surprised myself by the speed with which my memory threw up the names, places and details of previous killings which had etched themselves into my psyche decades ago. Fierce, unexpected video played across the shutters at the back of my eyes. Like the way we know where we were and what we were doing when JFK was shot, the moments when my innocence was spliced apart are fearful tableaux which pop up like ducks at a shooting range.

I was lying on the small persian rug on the floor of my granny's living room in the flat she lived in, in a fairly grand and immaculately maintained old people's home - actually all widows of officers - in Wimbledon in southwest London. The gas fire was blazing because summer was late arriving. Vast tall windows looked out onto the pristine croquet lawns and across them to the clocktower where we would celebrate my 13th birthday in July 1966. The brass letterbox, handle and bell on the heavy wood front door were always shimmeringly bright and the tall rooms smelled faintly of luscious wood floor wax, my granny's Consulate cigarettes and a pot of mince and onions. I was alone in the flat. But entirely safe. In the mornings, I would join the milkman on his rounds and then he would put a solid half a crown into my hand, and I would run home excited. My gran, with whom I was staying during the holidays away from the terrible boarding school in the Titsey Hills - I have no idea where my mum was - would wait for me to return and then go shopping. Usually she would return with a packet of Custard Creams or frozen cream cake which would be defrosted and ready to eat by the time we set up a little tea table and folding chairs outside on the lawn with perfect china and a pot of steaming strong orange pekoe.

I opened the newspaper. Probably the Daily Express and over two huge pages, the horrific details of the Moors Murders sprang off the page and into my brain where they have lodged ever since. There is no way the imagery ever goes away. It doesn't always sit at the front of my consciousness, it doesn't torment or trouble me daily. But it doesn't take much for the memory banks to be opened to Myra Hindley's dreadful mug shot, or to the photo of Ian Brady with his pouty lips. And occasionally I consider that those children they murdered would by now be close to my age. Just as I consider that Polly Klaas would now be in her late 20's and perhaps with her own vulnerable child.

1966 was a year in which Richard Speck murdered 8 nursing students in Chicago and as I saw the headlines, just days before my July birthday, I shuddered. The song 'Summer In The City' by The Lovin' Spoonful had just been released. It opens with the persistent sounds of car horns and jackhammers and simmering heat seems to rise from it. To this day, I cannot listen to that track. If it comes on the radio in my car, my blood goes cold - in fact I turn to another station as soon as I hear the very first note - and all I can think of is this terrifying scenario of those young women facing death at the hands of this killer.  Less than a month later, on August 1st - Charles Whitman climbed the Texas University Tower and went on his shooting spree.

I remember my mother with a pile of magazines on the floor by the sofa in our house in Berlin, with the ash on the cigarette in her hand leaning like the tower of Pisa and dropping onto her lap, while she read through her True Crime Gazette. These magazines lured me when she wasn't there with their gruesome black and white photos of crime scenes, the blood oozing off the side of the images in large black puddles, faces obscured by sheets, black rectangles placed by the editors over the faces of bystanders, and the thing that just struck me - how in the glare of the flashbulbs popping on the cameras of the police photographer or crime beat photo journalist, all of the clothing looked stained and dirty. I always stared at that. You could see the tiniest blob of mayonaise perhaps which the detective had spilled during his lunch-break at the deli, the creases in his pressed pants and the grease stains on the rim of his straw hat.

I'm not fascinated by crime scenes, I'm not a rubber-necker, I dont' slow down to see the grim realities of a car crash, I don't read books or watch movies which evoke horror and destruction. I just know that during that summer of '66 the brutality of the world came crashing, storming through the defenses of my existence and just at that moment the wheels were coming loose in our family world. There was, all at once, no place to hide, to be wrapped in the safety of strong arms. And it left an indelible mark. I wonder sometimes how strongly that summer forged the level of compassion, the level of rebellion, the level of deep sorrow that I have carried ever since. It is Passover. Last night I ate pork, happily. Today I will give thanks, as I do every day - for the gift of being able to see through the filters of my past. And now I've got that off my chest, I can write about blue skies again...

Comments

[Deborah]

I was only turning 6 July '66 so have no ~memory~ of the events of that summer. I know of them only through archived news accounts and re-counts such as this. For that, I'm grateful. Still.. that is not to say there haven't been horrors along the way, personal and global that haven't haunted, touched, and / or intruded the psyche.

Thank goodness indeed for the gift to be able to see through the filters.

Bring on the blue skies, metaphorically and otherwise.

[susie]

beautiful jill. i could smell the wood floor wax, see your almost 13 year old little self sprawled on the rug surrounded by newspapers, with the green green lawn out the window.

susie