Читать книгу Raoul Moat - Vanessa Howard - Страница 12

The ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme was the last government’s flagship capital investment scheme and its aim was to either rebuild or renew all schools over the ensuing 15 years. The programme came to a juddering halt once the Coalition took power in May 2010 and cuts in public spending began in earnest, yet some schools had already been redeveloped and amongst that list was Stocksfield Avenue Primary in Fenham.

The school was moved to a new site and the impressive purpose-built constructions were completed in 2008. It was a new start for the school and no doubt Moat, a former pupil, will have noted how much had changed since his day. For better or for worse, schooling was different in the 1970s. It was ‘chalk and talk’, not the interactive, pupil-centred learning environments of today, where ‘Maths days’ can involve visits from a local celebrity, games, kite making and prizes.

Thirty years ago, school children sat in buildings mostly constructed by the Victorians, which were draughty and uninspiring. A lot of learning was still done by rote. Someone who was at school with Moat told a reporter that Raoul was laughed at because he could not even remember how to recite the two-times table. The future killer, it seemed, struggled to find his place in primary school.

It would be wrong to suggest that Moat wasn’t bright but it is possible to imagine that he did not fit in easily into his new environment. Asthma would not have helped. Although a common childhood complaint today it was relatively rare then and marked him out, unhelpfully, as having yet another difference. Without even considering his issues at home, his red hair, wheezing and slight build made him an obvious candidate for bullying.

Clothing, too, was another problem. One ex-classmate said that he was teased and told that he looked like a tramp. Children can be cruel and a throwaway remark made my one child to another can often hit a sore point, as there may have been little extra money to spare at home. In the pecking order at school, sport, and in particular football, could have been his salvation, but he had no skill in that direction and so missed out. Raoul would never be the boy with the latest bike or game to show off to others so, all in all, the best he could expect was to keep his head down so as not to be noticed.

The late 1970s were a time of social change and upheaval. Whilst the Queen was celebrating her Silver Jubilee and people held street parties with flag waving and union jack bunting fluttering, the Sex Pistols were enjoying a hit with their iconoclastic hit ‘God Save the Queen’. The single didn’t make it to Number One in the hit parade but the rumour circulated that it was deliberately kept off the top spot. It was banned by the BBC, the institution at the time reflecting the outrage of Middle England.

The band was already notorious for swearing live on Bill Grundy’s Today programme. Watching the footage, it is as if two worlds collided – the late 1950s-born disaffected youth mocking the generation that was raised pre-war. There was no respect for anything that Grundy represented and it seemed that all that was sober, traditional and restrained was under threat. The tabloids had a frenzy of indignation and shock with the Daily Mirror announcing that the incident as ‘The Filth and the Fury’.

The fury was evident in the Sex Pistols’ lyrics, young people latched onto ‘God Save The Queen’ as Lydon sneered that there was ‘no future’ for his emerging generation. He had a point. Britain was locked into an apparently unstoppable and serious spiral of economic decline and industrial unrest. In 1977, firefighters went on strike, asking for a 30 per cent pay increase and that kind of union demand was commonplace. By the following year, during what was described as ‘The Winter of Discontent’, car workers, refuse collectors, lorry drivers, railwaymen, nurses, ambulance and lorry drivers were on strike. Refuse started piling in the streets and the army was on standby should a state of emergency have to be called by the Callaghan administration.

With unemployment rising, the future for anyone growing up in Britain did look bleak. Younger children like Moat will not have been aware of the issues in any detail but the sense that this was a community, and a part of the country in decline, was all pervasive.

For Raoul Moat, school could have offered a positive escape but that wasn’t to be. Home, then, should have been a refuge but matters were about to take a turn for the worse. Josephine suffered a number of episodes and Angus Moat remembers an occasion when his mother spoke in an intense and garbled way about religion, telling him and Raoul that they were the ‘chosen people’ and that the boys were ‘going to be Princes’ and that they were not to be sad ‘because the devil doesn’t want to you to be sad’.

Manic episodes, if indeed this was one, can be upsetting for anyone to witness and particularly disturbing for a child. Angus can remember crying, and feelings of distress are hard to dismiss when a parent is in a manic state. Children have an innate belief that adults tell the truth and so the more alarming the claims, the more frightening they are to hear.

Bipolar can induce psychotic extremes, when mania strikes it can exceed the sense of general elation and cause the sufferer to believe that they have special powers or are charged with a mission. It can also induce hallucinations. Stress can provoke episodes of either depression or mania in the sufferer and the condition has a high rate of recurrence. If untreated, approximately 15 per cent of sufferers commit suicide.

It is a life-long disease and runs in families and it is thought that a child will have a 25 per cent chance of developing a mood disorder if a parent is bipolar. If both parents are bipolar, the risk that a child will develop a mood disorder rises to between 50 and 75 per cent. The Moat brothers of course, had no idea if their biological fathers were mentally healthy or not.

Not enough is known as to what triggers bipolar disorders but some research suggests that it is associated with abnormal brain levels of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine: hormones that regulate stress and feelings of wellbeing.

Bipolar affects each sufferer to a varying degree and, of course, some families cope better than others. The duration of the depressive and manic episodes differ too but what is alarming is that manic episodes usually begin abruptly and can last for between two weeks and five months. Depressive episodes tend to last longer, commonly for six months, though rarely for more than a year but to a child growing up in an environment with a parent suffering from the condition, such periods of time will seem interminable.

People suffering from bipolar have to take lithium and often antipsychotic drugs indefinitely, and these drugs can suppress episodes. But as mania can quickly escalate there is a risk that it will destroy a sufferer’s career or reputation, which is usually why doctors will hospitalise out-of-control patients before they ‘lose everything’. In a manic state, people have been known to waste thousands of pounds chasing ideas and impulses. Likewise, severely depressed and suicidal patients often require hospitalisation to save their lives.

Bipolar disorder becomes evident commonly at around the age of 20 and yet many sufferers report that they felt the onset of the illness before the age of 13. Interestingly, research has also shown that the children of parents with bipolar who grow to have the condition themselves have an earlier onset of the illness. It has been called the ‘anticipation effect’ and the children in question also report a greater number of episodes when compared to their parents.

Furthermore, these adults with earlier onset may have diminished response to drug therapy and are more likely to be at risk of attempting suicide. An early diagnosis of developing bipolar disorder is far from clear but symptoms in children older than five years old include withdrawal, a change in appetite, unexplained gastric complaints, mood elevation and committing violent and destructive acts.

As Raoul grew, there would be incidents that he was said to be involved in that could suggest that he was at the outset of a bipolar disorder developing. Perhaps there is no truth to them and perhaps they have been exaggerated – such as the time that he allegedly burnt down a corner shop. It was said that he deliberately set fire to cardboard boxes at the back of the premises and that it was subsequently destroyed, and that this was just one example of how destructive he could be.

Another incident involved a cat. It was said that he was going to throw a cat off a balcony but that other boys who knew him from school tried to stop him. He threw it anyway, claiming that cats always land on their feet, but then he was said to have slammed the cat into the ground, breaking its back.

Both arson and misuse of animals are classic, in fact textbook, signs of developing psychosis in childhood. Studies carried out by forensic psychologists who have surveyed serial and multiple killers show time and time again the patterns that emerge in childhood. Children who have been severely mistreated, and commonly that includes prolonged sexual as well as physical and emotional abuse, can begin to fantasise about relocating their internal pain onto an external object.

Dr Deborah Schurman-Kauflin has interviewed serial killers at length. They agreed to talk to her on the understanding that they would remain anonymous. She put together a study of the formative experiences in the lives of these killers and a strikingly similar series of events were shared across the seven incarcerated killers who agreed to be interviewed.

Neglect and abuse in childhood occurred in all cases and as the early years passed, the children had all mistreated animals. Here is what one convicted killer said about attacking a dog:

‘No one could see what I was doing. I always made sure there was no one to see what I was doing. And I took the clothes line and I tied his back legs together so there was nowhere he could go. I picked up a stick and whacked him upside his head, and finally that little shit stopped yipping, and I kept hitting him with sticks and rocks until he cried…the more he cried, the more I liked it. It was like, hey, finally, something else feels like I do. Let something else suffer for a change.’

All of the respondents confessed that it felt good to see something else suffer but each also recorded that they felt a curiosity, a wonder that they created death. It was real, it was a convincing way to show that they had taken back power and were in control of it.

The difficulty is that the incidents of violence and destructive behaviour that were given to a tabloid news reporter seem almost too neat. If Moat became a ‘monster’, then it becomes too easy to imagine a narrative whereby the boy-Moat displays early psychotic behaviour. Whether this was true or not or simply a tale that became embellished in the retelling can become lost in the desire to create a simple sequence of events that culminated in Moat raising a shotgun and firing. But lives aren’t led that way, cause does not always follow effect in the human character. Early childhood experiences, genetic factors and environment do shape a young person’s character, but not always in the same way in every case.

Besides, others who knew Moat when he was a boy do not recognise the picture of him as a child who was willfully cruel to animals. His brother and mother have both spoken about the younger Raoul being a nature lover, a lad who cared for his two cats Smokie and Fifi, and that if one characteristic was especially noticeable in his childhood it was his sensitivity.

Of course, no two people will recall events in exactly the same way; each of us takes different meaning from shared occurrences and memories can be deceptive. Yet it does not seem to be the case that Moat was well-known as the boy who terrorised his neighbours and was branded ‘mad and dangerous’. He joined the Scouts and later the Army Cadets but was not singled out as a dangerous troublemaker. If he was picked on for the differences in his background, he learned to embellish rather than deny that his father was unknown to him. He said that he’d been born in France, that he lived there until school age on a large farm with his father until his parents went their separate ways. It must have helped him deflect any negative remarks his classmates might have made. Fellow pupils at Stocksfield Avenue Primary School have expressed shock that the boy that they knew was to become a killer who was notorious throughout the country. And a picture of him with his classmates suggests nothing: he smiles broadly into the camera just as his peers do, standing or sitting in their neat rows. But of course behind the innocent facade something wasn’t right. Something buried deeper in his psyche would mean that thirty years later, he would respond to personal crises with devastating violence.

Another view put forward is that Moat was developing another behavioural disorder: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This is a condition characterised by a need for admiration, extreme self-involvement, and lack of empathy for others. Difficulties managing self-worth are thought to make individuals with the condition oversensitive to criticism or failure. Any perceived criticism provokes feelings of humiliation and can result in rage and an angry counterattack.

The condition isn’t understood as clearly as other more documented disorders such as bipolar, and suspected causes of the defect include both an overindulgent mother or father and unpredictable and unreliable parenting. So it seems that Narcissistic Personality Disorder can be incubated by parents that place too high a regard on their child as well as those who are negligent and detached. Yet rather than viewing indulgent or negligent parenting as two ends of a spectrum, it is easy to imagine that they can produce a similar result. In both instances, the emotional needs of the child are secondary to the needs or deficiencies of the parent and this can have a significant and negative impact on childhood development. It can undermine the child’s ability to form bonds of trust with others as they reach maturity.

Children with the condition eventually begin to see themselves as having a separate identity from their parents and they begin to start processing parental behaviour with a degree of detachment. Angus Moat has spoken about the moment he began to remove himself from his mother’s more disruptive behaviour and it occurred at a key time in Raoul’s life – he was around seven years old.

The older Moat son recalls that it was during one of Josephine’s manic episodes, and she had once more begun to talk in an extreme way, using religious imagery. On this occasion, Angus does not remember fear or confusion, he recalls thinking ‘you are full of shit.’ It was a remarkable departure from the fear and upset of two years earlier and indicative of the fact that children quickly learn to become emotionally defensive and even closed off from disturbing events.

Whatever the truth of the incident, bipolar is a recognised illness and it would be unfair to ask sufferers to be accountable for their behaviour during episodes. Nevertheless, growing up in the company of a bipolar illness sufferer will affect some children and Angus has stressed that despite the efforts of his grandmother, the childhood he and his brother shared was traumatic.

Learning that a parent cannot give unqualified love and support is not a lesson that is learned once but one that is repeated time and time again. Even if a child builds a psychological wall around themselves, it is a construct that then damages their chances of forging meaningful bonds later in life. Questions about trust become all consuming, such as: can I trust this person? Will they always be there for me? Are they worthy of my love? Am I worthy of theirs?

Whilst growing up, the issues are chiefly ones of survival; for example, how can I stop this person hurting me? Anger is a common emotion and is one route to forging a sense of separation. Although rage has its uses in protecting a sense of self, if unchallenged and un-channelled, it can grow to become a destructive element in someone’s psychological make-up. If that person feels undermined, threatened or disregarded, the emotional response can be explosive.

Raoul still had his brother and his grandmother and also his uncle Charlie, Josephine’s brother-in-law, who was a positive male role model. But over the course of his short life, he had come to know that those closest to him could be absent, neglectful and unstable. He did not have a father and he was reaching his teens, a time when he needed to understand his place in society. What did the world have in store for him? He may not have had the easiest of starts in life but that is the case for a lot of people and a great many go on to use their pasts to fuel their ambitions for the future. We don’t have to be defined by our pasts – but how far can we outrun them?