This artticle on The legacy of Fred West is frightening and chilling. It doesn't seem ten years ago. I recall being on audit and staying, with some colleagues, in a pub in Llandrindod Wells, where there was another set of people staying, and I made polite conversation "Where are you from?" And one chap answered "Gloucester" with an embarrassed apologetic face and tone that made further chitchat very difficult.
Martin Amis, whose cousin was found to be one of the Wests' victims, describes, in his memoir Experience, how the average domestic day at 25 Cromwell Street was 'a scarcely credible inventory of troglodytic squalor, including theft, violence, incest, rape, sexual torture, whoredom, pimpdom, peeping-tomdom, pornography, child prostitution and paedophilia'.and from the man who happened to be duty solicitor:
'Here we had a proper nuclear family, properly married couple, with their own house, proper mortgage, lots of kids - and look what had gone on! The fact that some of the moral issues of 10 years ago, the drive for conformity, have now faded is in part, I think, due to the West case: people are now happier to accept other forms of cohabitation, other models.
I had never imagined that such ....evil.... could exist. And yet, again, how interesting to note that the perpetrators had themselves been subject to evil.
Just as a postscript. I worked with someone five years ago who happened to live on what had been Rillington Place, and although it had been renamed to "Pretty Flowers Court" or somesuch, everyone knew it was Rillington Place.
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