Kathleen Richards was 17 when she knocked on the door of 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, looking to rent a room, along with her older sister and her infant nephew. Their landlords for the next 18 months were Britain’s most notorious serial killers, Fred and Rosemary West.
Richards, helped by renowned ghost writer and journalist Ann Cusack, reveals details of a hugely distressing childhood before she ever came in contact with the Wests.
Her account of life in 1960s Dublin reads almost like the memoir of someone from a century earlier, such was the level of penury and destitution in which she grew up, with an illiterate father, prone to rage, and an cold, unemotive mother. She shared a bed with eight other siblings – “if one wet the bed, we were all soaked to the skin”. Food and love were in short supply and Christmas presents a pipe dream. At eight, she was groomed, exploited and sexually abused by a factory caretaker, before suffering similarly at the hands of her grandfather a year later.
“The abuse seeped ... into every area of my life, and I accepted it as my fate, as something that happened to girls like me,” she says. Kathleen developed a stutter, but also a sense of shame that she has struggled with for her entire life, “consumed by a miasma of revulsion, self-reproach, anger and sadness”.
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While initially enjoying the newfound freedom of life on Cromwell Street, things soon turn sour for Kathleen
The reality of sharing a roof with the Wests is equal parts terrifying and gripping. The reader notes the warning signs that all was not right in the house – Fred introducing the sisters to his wife and his pregnant 17-year-old “lover”, Shirley Robinson, the peepholes in the wall of the sisters’ bedsit, the locked cellar, and the revolving door of new faces as lodgers came and left.
While initially enjoying the newfound freedom of life on Cromwell Street, things soon turn sour for Kathleen. Fred becomes ever more invasive, repeatedly grabbing her and making lewd suggestions, before events turn so dark that we are left in no doubt that Kathleen was extremely fortunate to escape from the Wests when she did.
This is a frequently heart-rending read, as Richards unveils a lifetime of trauma and abuse and the legacy it leaves behind, but it is also a story of survival and remarkable resilience.
