The Atlantic Ocean: Reports from Britain and America - Softcover

ANDREW O'HAGAN was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His previous novels have been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award.

The Killing of James Bulger

The abduction and murder of James Bulger, a two-year-old boy from Liverpool, has caused unprecedented grief and anger. Hours before the two ten-year-old boys accused of the crime arrived at South Sefton Magistrates’ Court, a large, baying crowd had formed outside. As a pair of blue vans drew up, the crowd surged forward, bawling and screaming. A number of men tried to reach the vehicles, to get at the youths inside, and scuffles spilled onto the road. Some leapt over crash barriers and burst through police cordons, lobbing rocks and banging on the sides of the vans. Many in the crowd—sick with condemnation—howled and spat and wept.
   Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke has promised measures to deal with “nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders.” Those two little offenders—if they were the offenders, the childish child murderers from Walton—were caught on camera twice. First on the security camera at the shopping precinct in Bootle where they lifted James, and again by the camera of a security firm on Breeze Hill as they dragged James past—the child clearly in some distress.
   Watching those boys on camera brought into my head a flurry of pictures from my own boyhood. At that age, we were brimming with nastiness. I grew up in the last of Scotland’s new-town developments. There were lots of children, lots of dogs and lots of building sites. Torture among our kind was fairly commonplace. I remember two furious old teachers driving me and my six-year-old girlfriend, Heather Watt, home early one morning. In recent weeks we had been walking the mile to school in the company of a boy, smaller and younger than ourselves, a fragile boy with ginger hair called David. I think we thought of him as “our boy.” We bossed him. Occasionally, when he didn’t walk straight or carry our bags or speak when we wanted him to, we’d slap him or hit his hands with a ruler. We had to pass through fields to get to school, with diggers going and “workies” taking little notice of us, though from time to time they’d bring over empty lemonade bottles which we could exchange for money or sweets at the chip shop. We must have looked innocent enough, holding hands, Heather and I, walking the younger boy to school.
   Over time, we started to hit the boy hard. Our way to the school was dotted with new trees, freshly planted and bound to supporting stalks with rubber belts. We got into the habit of removing belts every day: we began to punish David with them whenever we thought he’d “been bad.” Just a few hits at first on top of his shorts, not so’s you’d notice. It got worse, though, and on the last morning, when we were caught by the two old lady teachers, we were beating his bare legs with the coiled-up straps. Though we’d set out on time that morning, we were late, having spent the best part of half an hour on top of an out-of-the-way railway bridge practically skinning the screaming boy’s legs.
   That incident caused a scandal in our square. My mother was employed as a cleaner in another local primary school with David’s mother, and—although I remember crying and being confused and not quite knowing what we’d done wrong—I could see that we’d caused a lot of embarrassment. Up until the age of ten, I’d both taken part in and witnessed many such incidents. Some of my brothers had reputations for being a bit wild; other boys said they’d “do anything.” I watched them do any number of crazy things to other kids around the squares, and I watched the other kids do some brutal things in return. One time, the family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under sixteen commits an offense: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to assess what the real problem is and decide whether the child should be in care—which in my brother’s case would have meant a residential, List D school. In the event, that didn’t happen, but it took a long time for the community—especially our teachers—to forget what he did. With a friend, he’d burnt down a wing of our local Catholic secondary school.
   It’s not that any of us were evil; even the more bookish and shy among us were given to a bit of destructive boredom and stupid imagining. Now and then it got out of hand. The boys I hung around with in my preteen years were always losing their heads. During the good weather, the light nights, what started off as a game of rounders or crazy golf would end up as a game of clubbing the neighbor’s cat to death. A night of camping on the playing fields could usually be turned into an opportunity for the wrecking of vegetable gardens, or the killing of frogs and people’s pet rabbits. Mindless stuff. Yet now and again people would get into things that you sensed were about to go over the edge, or were already over it. My memory tells me that that point was much more difficult to judge than I’d now like to think.
   My friend Moggie began taking music lessons at the house of a woman who lived in the next square. She started going out when she was supposed to be teaching him, leaving him to babysit her child, who was not yet a year old. Moggie would have been about seven or eight. One day I was in with him, bashing uselessly on her old piano, when he shouted me to the front of the living room.
   “I’m biting the baby,” he said. “D’you want to?”
   The baby was lying on a white toweling nappy and Moggie was bent over her, biting her arms and then her legs and then the cheeks of her face. He said he did it all the time and that the baby liked it. He said it was like tickling. I didn’t want to do it but said I’d stay and watch. Another game he played was to put on a record, hoist the baby onto her legs and shake her in time to the music. She obviously wasn’t walking yet, but he would jostle her and jam her legs on the carpet. Her head would jerk about and she would cry. Some time later, the bite marks were discovered and Moggie was barred from the house, although everyone—including the baby’s parents—said that she had been bitten by the dog. I got to stay, since the woman reckoned I was sensible. Another boy who came to that house used to swallow handfuls of the woman’s pills (she always had a great variety lying around, so much so that her daughter was eventually rushed to hospital after eating a load). Moggie joined the navy, and the pill swallower was at the edge of a mob of boys who killed someone at a local ATM ten years later. In the years that I hung around it, that house (and there were many others like it) had been the site of a large number of life-threatening games, solvent abuses and youthful experiments gone wrong.
   Something happened when we all got together, even though we were that young. We were competitive, deluded and full of our own small powers. And, of course, we spoke our own language. We had our own way of walking—which wasn’t unlike that of the two boys on the video—dragging our feet, hands in our pockets, heads always lolling towards the shoulder. That culpable tilt gave the full measure of our arrogant, untelling ways. As only dependents can be, we were full of our own independence. The approval that really mattered was that of the wee Moggies and Bennas and Caesars we ran around with. There were times when I’m sure we could’ve led each other into just about anything.
   Just William–type adventures—earning pocket money or looking for fun—would more often than not end in nastiness or threats to each other or danger to other people, especially to girls our own age and younger boys. There was badness in it, a form of delinquency that most of us have left behind. The girls with whom I read books and colored-in, with whom I regularly played office, were the victims of verbal taunting, harassment and gang violence when I ran around with boys. We all carried sticks and were all of us baby arsonists who could never get enough matches. We stole them from our houses, stole money out of our mothers’ purses with which to buy them and begged them from construction workers. I can remember pleading with my mother to buy me a Little Big Man action doll from Woolworth’s and then burning it in a field with my pals. Most of our games, when I think of it, were predicated on someone else’s humiliation or eventual pain. It made us feel strong and untouchable.
   If all of this sounds uncommonly horrific, then I can only say that it did not seem so then; it was the main way that most of the boys I knew used up their spare time. There was no steady regression towards the juvenile barbarism famously characterized in Lord of the Flies. We lived two lives at once: while most of the stuff detailed above went on, we all made our first communions, sang in the school choir, did our homework, became altar boys and some went to matches or played brilliantly at football. We didn’t stop to think, nor did our parents, that something dire might result from the darker of our extracurricular activities. Except when that murky side took over, and your bad-bastardness became obvious to everyone.
   Bullies who had no aptitude for classwork—who always got “easily distracted” scribbled in red ink on report cards that never made it home—had unbelievable concentration when it came to torturing minors, in the playground or on the way home. For many of the pupils bullying was a serious game. It involved strategies, points scored for and against, and not a little detailed planning. It was scary, competitive and brought out the very worst in those who had anything to d...