The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

Internal assessment

Stephen Westerman, since he is in his mid to late thirties and roughly the same stature, is judged to be a story worth pursuing. There are some anomalies, but when there can be no way to verify physical characteristics other than gender, stature, rough age and presence, we can assume that he will be suitable material. As ever, it is the history and detail of a life that forms our greatest interest, since it is via these, the social contacts, the family, the profession, the accidentals, or indeed by their absence, that we come to know an individual and thus recognize identity. In the case of Stephen Westerman, the process of identifying potential contacts has been extensive and thorough.

Stephen Westerman was once a happy man. It lasted just a few years, and followed the start of a serious relationship, the first and perhaps only one he ever made with other people. Since then, he has almost toyed with life at arm’s length, neither ever fully engaging with his interests, nor shunning anything to the point of rejection, but also never really engaging in anything that might be called friendship. It might be said that life has lived him, so consistently does he seem to have been the passive recipient of its diktats.

Of course, we only know a person via the memories and experiences of others. When we can no longer respond to life’s inputs, it is what we have left in the lives of others that lives on, and that only for a generation. Beyond that, a fiction of reinvention takes over. For most of us, we die with the death of the memories we left, not when the body’s functions are caused to stop. So, if we want to know how the demise of an individual might be perceived, then we must identify and describe the contacts met in that life, the memories that might have been created, and the experience potentially retained by others.

Stephen Westerman was raised by two sets of foster parents. The first foster home was a success, but by the time he reached the second, he had become a difficult, highly active and emotional child. He spent much of his childhood in care, shunted from place to place and never settling anywhere.

He was born to Stephanie Ormsby in nineteen eighty-two. She was fifteen, unmarried and a Catholic. The school record at Saint Mary’s Girls’ School, Everby, West Yorkshire, described her as being, on occasions, rather headstrong, opinionated, rebellious, and unconventional, so there was a sense of mere confirmation, a distinct ‘I told you so’, when she had to go on extended leave. To protect identities, of course, names, addresses and institutions are fictitious, but any interested reader with the requisite authority can access these files unredacted.

When Stephanie announced that she was pregnant, her family, an almost prototypical northern English, working-class Catholic household, clearly had no way of coping with her condition, either economically or emotionally. For them, a pregnant and unmarried fifteen-year-old was an oxymoron, a state that could not even be imagined, or envisaged, let alone accepted.

She was one of four children in what could be seen as a model family, steady, caring, devout, sharing and supportive, but also viciously judgemental. The parents, both deceased, conformed to that archetypal Yorkshire mould of the work-a-day father and the stay-at-home mother. Dad worked on the railways and had done since leaving school at the end of the forties, to experience the last full decade of steam, and be entranced by it to the same extent he was by his religious faith, and then to live, via its demise, with a permanent, almost cynical sense of bereavement. His workmates would joke that Ernie had last smiled in 1968, on seeing television pictures of the last steam departure, a Britannia class pull, the mere memory of which would bring tears to his eyes.

His wife, Mary, had Irish roots, lived for her children and her family, while being permanently devoted full time to saving her public face. She attended mass every Sunday, religiously, if that’s not understood, and would go to church irregularly on weekday mornings after walking her children to school, ‘just to stay on the right side of things’, as she used to say.

The couple had known one another for some time, but had married only in 1956, after a two-year engagement, during which they had both saved regularly, paying money into their still separate Post Office accounts on a weekly basis, always in cash. By the time the big day came, it could justly be celebrated in the current style with a mass and slap-up meal in one of those middle-class 1950s institutions, The Country Club, where solicitors, doctors, bank managers, the occasional successful clerk and any other aspirants to social mobility and even membership of the Golf Club could rub shoulders in a quick step on the dance floor, before enjoying the obligatory chicken or scampi and chips in the basket.

For Ernie and Mary, Stephanie was the last of four, a late child, possibly a mistake, born in 1967, separated from her older siblings by more than seven years. Stephanie, it seems, was never close to her two brothers and sister, who had already married, had children and were leading their own family lives before Stephanie fell pregnant.

Neither, it seems, did Stephanie have much time for her parents. The school records have numerous letters about her, a correspondence that was conducted equally in both directions, where the parents, mainly her mother, forever conscious of her own perceived respectability, would describe her daughter as out of control, a black sheep, a misfit or even an embarrassment. The school, to its credit, always used less emotive language, but it is clear her teachers and parents shared the same judgment of Stephanie, condemnatory, albeit in a different language, on both sides. At one point, Mary Ormsby resigned herself to prayer as the only remaining avenue of assistance for her daughter, a strategy which the local parish priest still remembers helping to formulate.

Stephanie grew up in the seventies. Infancy and primary school seem to have passed without much note, except to record occasional tantrums, for which no obvious cause or pattern could be identified. As she grew up, she had less to do with her siblings or even friends, preferring her own company to that of others, a description of her first recorded before she reached ten. In her teens, she became the archetypal punk. She regularly wore a coloured streak in her hair, washed it out, put it back, cut it out, sometimes hid it under a scarf in the short term at the behest of the school, a school that strictly proscribed head coverings inside the buildings, unless, of course, that building was a church, when wearing one was strictly obligatory. At home, there was little contact with siblings. A brother joined the army and never came home after an overseas posting to Germany. Another brother was a sales representative and spent most of his days traveling the country, and apparently becoming so tired that, on a day off, his travel could almost never extend to see his parents in Everby. The sister had never got on with her father, describing him once in public as a ‘drunken slob, fit for the pub but nowt else’. She had married at sixteen, had three children before the age of twenty, and had to spend her little spare time managing the finances for her housebuilder husband, who went on to operate a sizable and successful company in Leeds. Contact between the Ormsby parents and their daughter ceased completely when the prosperity-driven class divide separated them completely.

Though it is not recorded explicitly anywhere in any form, family contacts have mentioned that there developed significant resentment among the elder three children at what they perceived as Stephanie’s relatively privileged status. Privileged, that is, when compared to the austere fifties and early sixties in which they themselves were raised. As a late child, she had been treated from the start as if she were an only child, with all the undivided attention that often brings. And, it must be noted, the Ormsby family, having already brought up three children in that previous decade, had begun to share a little of the generally increased affluence that the sixties brought, an affluence they grasped to bestow upon the youngest child many material privileges that the others had been denied.

But it all went wrong, horribly wrong, perhaps because of the conflict that arose between the child of an increasingly secular age and a devout Roman Catholic mother, fixed on saving her church, her face and her own soul within it. The reaction, perhaps, was inevitable. Its eventual product, Stephen, his mother’s namesake became its burden.

Stephanie had been going to pubs for a year. She had a group of friends who stayed out late, who, because of cash flow, drank little, but spent a lot of time in the area’s discotheque pubs, a social institution that grew out of a lack of municipal spaces that could attract youth. Each town had its venue. Even small places, even villages, would have that one ale house that would set up a tower of flashing lights on one midweek night, import a disc jockey and a sound system, and proceed to feed the current top twenty, plus the occasional golden oldie, to receptive ears at ninety decibels via speakers better suited to station announcements. But the punters used to lap it up, with many such a venue crowded to overflowing with underage drinkers. It was an age of experimentation, tolerance and freedom. But it was also an age of a knee-jerk retrenchment, of tut-tutting self-righteousness expressed to the strains of ‘they ought to know better’, mixed with ‘I don’t know what the youth of today get up to’, even if overactive imaginations were all too ready to fill in the gaps.

After one such midweek aural experience, Stephanie lost her virginity to a lad she had met that night and had immediately fancied, pausing for a few minutes in a bus shelter on a council estate in nearby Westbury. She went to the same disco a week later, intent on interesting another interested party, did just that and fell pregnant as a result. She only did it twice, a week apart, so the dates are identifiable. The father, the second encounter, was at the time and still remains unknown, a stranger, who answered to the name of Paul. He seems to have been, and have remained, anonymous, untraceable, just another older male who woke up the next morning unable to remember how many pints he had drunk the night before.

Stephanie, perhaps having resolved that she should be more careful, perhaps sensing there might be something wrong, did not go to the disco for the next three weeks. The behaviour change may have resulted from other problems and her eagle-eyed mother noticed immediately. Her behaviour at school was a problem at the time and she was excluded, a process that meant she stayed at home for two weeks, during which a meeting was organized between her head of year, her class teacher, parents Ernie and Mary, plus an educational psychologist, who took copious notes of proceedings, case notes that are still on Stephanie school records.

Stephanie was allowed back into school, where, after a couple of quiet weeks, she mis-behaved again, calling one of the elderly nuns, “a concentration camp guard”, with multiple expletives added. She was again excluded from school, had an enormous run-in with her mother and ran away from home. As in many such cases, however, she ran only as far as a friend’s house, where she stayed the night to be discovered by another angry mother the next morning, still in bed, having persuaded her normally disciplined and meek friend to bunk the day off school.

Returned to home and greeted with the undiluted anger of both her parents, who had both rung in sick to look for her, the father to work, the mother to the priest to announce she would not be at mass, Stephanie announced she had already missed two periods and was ‘up the spout’. Her father left the house. Her mother hit her several times, left a blackeye and bruising around the ear and cheek that social workers recorded in detail, along with the rest of Stephanie’s recent history, a report, which, of course, was the source of the above. Dad did come home but he never again spoke to his daughter. Her mother effectively disowned her, made her prepare her own meals, launder her own clothes and do her own shopping and cooking.

When Stephanie’s bump started to show, a cartel comprising the school’s headteacher, the local priest and Stephanie’s parents arranged an extended holiday for her, which was spent in what at the time were euphemistically called ‘mother and baby homes’, euphemistically because the home was never to be for the baby, which, as soon as possible, was always going to be parcelled off for adoption.

The intention, of course, was that Stephanie should go home after giving birth, return to school and finish her education. The adoption was swift, not swift enough for Mary Ormsby, though it must be noted, quick enough so that there never developed any bond between the child and its mother. We cannot even ascertain from the records whether Stephanie actually ever saw her child. Stephen, christened by Stephanie in her own image during her extended labour, was taken by a couple called Richards, a childless, older couple, already in their thirties, already at an age that ran counter to recommended adoption practices at the time. The problem was noted, but not seen as crucial.

Stephanie did go home and did return to school. Her mother still shunned her. Her father would not speak to her. Her classmates all knew precisely what had happened, because the first thing Stephanie did was tell them all, from the front of the room, on her feet beside an embarrassed but powerless biology teacher, who tried to wrestle her to silence. He was transferred and she was excluded from school again, this time with an associated threat of expulsion. She ran away from home for a second time, spent a week in a hotel in London at an address a friend had supplied, met a stranger, and left the country just three months after the birth on the flight to Perth, Australia. Her partner’s name was never recorded, but he clearly was on the same flight as her, so there is an avenue for further tracing work. It was, after all, the era when London was known for its young Australian overland tourists, who generally lived itinerant lives in then cheap hotels in Earl’s Court, making a living from casual work. It is distinctly possible that Stephanie Ormsby met such a person during her hotel stay and entered into a relationship.

Stephanie, having cleared immigration at Perth, simply disappeared, having probably gone to live with her new partner, changed her name and started a new life, somewhere outside of the urban area. All traceable names on the passenger list from 1982 have been researched and none of them can be associated with the Stephanie Ormsby who travelled on the same flight. There remain several names from that list who cannot be traced in any of Perth’s city records or indeed any extant records of western Australia. We may suggest that Stephanie’s new partner might have been a cash-paid worker in the mining industry. No matches have been found, but employment data from that time is either scant or non-existent. It is possible that the woman who was Stephanie Ormsby is still alive and resident somewhere in Western Australia, possibly even using her original name. If she is still alive, it is more likely that she is using a changed name, since no financial or data link can be traced to the name Stephanie Ormsby. Crucially for us, I can find no attempt by any western Australian resident to trace an adopted child originating from that particular area of West Yorkshire. There exist numerous organisations devoted to assist such tracing, but just a few handle the vast majority of such work. I have trawled their records, even posed as Stephen Ormsby attempting to trace his mother. I have devoted significant time to this in order to establish whether Stephen is completely disowned by his family. I can generate no possible contact in Australia and no original family member responded to any request. The enquiries, undoubtedly, happen anonymously, so we may assume that had anyone been interested in the name, then a response would have been forthcoming. Even Stephen’s siblings would have received a message of the kind, “a possible acquaintance from your past request you make contact.” No one messaged would have been aware of a link to Stephen, but also no one contacted even opened the message.

Stephen Ormsby became Stephen Richards before he himself could talk. The Richards, unlikely foster parents according to the rules, proved to be models of the uneventful but devoted type. In his early years, Stephen Richards seemed to grow up a balanced child with no particular needs, no bad health, good school reports and no behaviour problems, at least until the age of seven. This was the only period of stability in Stephen’s life and the family life he lived with his foster parents represent the only genuine personal relationship he ever knew.

The family lived in West Yorkshire, in a large stone built, nineteenth century detached house with a surround garden. Stepfather was a solicitor and stepmom was a practising doctor, who gave up her chance of professional advancement to bring up her new child, preferring to work part time as a peripatetic in the surgery where she had previously been based.

They cut the perfect image of a middle-class family, very much self-reliant and self-contained, so much so that when both parents lost their lives in a car accident, almost none of their friends could recall anything about their foster child. Some could recall his existence, of course, but none could describe him in any more detail than he used ‘to play on the hearth rug’ or ‘he was a sweet little boy’. The Richards, it seemed, formed not only a nuclear family, but also an insulated one, insulated ideologically, perhaps, a trait that had led to Stephen being home schooled by his mother.

Stephen Richards was strapped into a child seat in the rear of the family car when it was hit head on by a speeding Range Rover, driven by a deranged and drunken farmer, who had just had a major argument with his wife about his drinking. The Richards died instantly. Stephen was extracted from the wreckage with not a single scratch.

Stephen was seven years old, already a person, already culturally formed, thoroughly middle-class in the image of his proud foster parents. He had no trace of his birth-parents’ accent (we presume his father to have been a local lad), had been given what can only be described as elocution lessons by his parents, and spoke with a southern English long ‘a’, a fact that marked him out from his peers sufficiently for some of his primary school teachers to remember calling him la-di-dah.

Stephen then spent three years in a local authority care facility, where he was severely bullied. At first, he seemed stoical, relatively unaffected by his trauma, but some months after the accident he ‘fell apart’ in the words of one staff member in a written report. He became completely withdrawn for most of the time, but occasionally, probably no more than once a month, he would become uncontrollably active, even violent, and had to be restrained. He would quieten after sedation, but the process was repeated many times. When, at the age of ten, turning eleven years old, he was subjected to two almost simultaneous transformations, a tall order for any child, surely an impossibility for one so emotionally unstable. At this stage, we must remember, Stephen Richards had no idea he had once been Stephen Ormsby and had no reason to believe that he had not just lost his real mother and father in a car accident.

The two changes were a new school, secondary school at a comprehensive in the nearby large city, and another future home, this time to another childless couple called Westerman, hence Stephen’s current surname. The couple had been on the adoption list for only a few months and, it might be argued, had not been certainly vetted as to the suitability. The written case notes indicate however, that Stephen’s problems were thought to be caused by his institutional status, and that they would probably subside if he returned to a family environment. The theory was probably correct. The practice, however, proved inappropriate.

Danny Westerman had no history of violence. He was, it must be recognized, about as far removed from the young Stephen as it was possible to be in terms of his social class, his societal status and no doubt, his attitude. It might be argued, if we recall Stephen’s experience to the age of seven, that the Westermans were inappropriate foster parents, given the vast gulf in social class and culture between them and the younger Stephen. It must be remembered, however, that Stephen had been in care for three years or so. The judgment at the time was that his former life was already remote and would continue to fade.

Danny Westerman seemed to resent the boy’s accent and his middle-class behaviour, deciding from the start that he should learn to ‘talk proper’. The new stepfather also inculcated a trait that would become important later in Stephen’s life, that of overt, aggressive racism. He tried to teach the eleven-year-old boy to point at ethnic minority people in the street, telling the boy that these people were bad, taking white people’s jobs, invading the country, polluting the population with the dark skin and dirty genes.

Why these attitudes had not been noted in Danny Westerman before the adoption can possibly be explained by the fact that he, himself, had only attended two of the four occasions when the prospective parents met with assessors, and only the shorter two of the four meetings, meetings at which the prospective foster father was described as quiet, even reticent. Daniel’s wife was potentially a model foster-mother and had been assessed as a perfect match for Stephen. In reality, however, it was Daniel who intervened to take over the lion share of Stephen’s formation, obviously intent on transforming him into a model of the person he, himself, had always wanted to be, proud, strong, white supremacist, assertive. When the child did not respond as the foster-father wished, Danny beat him.

Danny beat Stephen with his fists, with his belt, sometimes with the poker, sometimes with anything that came to hand. Social services were called, and within a year, Stephen was back in local authority care and the couple had split up. Daniel Westerman was later sectioned and is currently detained in a secure site, permanently sedated and being treated for schizophrenia. His wife, whose name has thus far been deliberately omitted, immediately divorced him and remarried, not telling her new husband anything of the fostering of Stephen. She died of Covid last year, having had no children of her own, and we may assume that her widower, to this day, has no knowledge whatsoever of his former wife’s foster child. There exists no contact avenue back to Stephen from that source.

Back in institutional care, Stephen’s tantrums grew worse. He was rarely in education, where he was regarded in all three secondary schools he attended as uncontrollable and uncommunicating. He hit several teachers, was suspended or expelled from all three institutions and finally ended up on roll again at the first one he started, though, during this second spell of official attendance at the school, he never attended. He made no friends, created no lasting memories, obtained no qualifications and certainly learned little.

He left school at sixteen and was described as ‘unemployable’ when he had an interview at the local job centre. At seventeen he absented himself from care and worked for cash in various locations, never staying in one place for more than a few weeks and leaving no rental or occupation records. What he did, where he lived and with whom he interacted during the next seven years can only be pieced together via fragments.

There are Social Security records, occasionally, from employers, but nothing that suggests any more than a couple of months of regular employment each time. There were occasions when he appeared before magistrates on drunk and disorderly charges, but these all resulted in fines, which he was apparently able to pay. He was bound over, but never sent to prison. He clearly stole, but what or from whom was never identified, indicating perhaps that it was always low-level pilfering that sustained him. There are no medical or dental records for him whatsoever for the period, none, of course, until that day in June when he was twenty-five years old.

He was in Leeds, in Chapeltown. There exist journalistic reports of these events, so locating them poses no confidentiality problems. It was in the early hours on a warm summer evening when local residents were sleeping with the windows open, so they could hear all the disturbance as it happened. Several residents called the police when they heard the screams.

It seemed, following investigations, that Stephen had made contact with a streetwalking prostitute and negotiated a price. They had gone to her flat and she had asked for her money, but Stephen had hit her, overpowered her, raped her and had already left the house, when the girl’s minders caught up with him in the street outside. It seems that the gang contained black faces and Stephen had racially abused them, just to add to his existing problems. He was identified immediately after the event by name tag sewn into his trousers, indicating that he had accessed a hostel with communal laundry facilities in the past. His attackers took his jacket, wallet, his shoes and even his shirt, The trousers obviously not being worth the trouble. They left Stephen unconscious, disfigured and brain damaged. Though, as recorded above, the case was reported in the media, there is no evidence of anyone trying to contact Stephen during his several weeks in hospital, despite the publication of those contemporary newspaper reports that described his fate.

With no family, and, apparently, no friends or acquaintances, at least none willing to seek him out, he stayed in hospital and then convalescent care in a mental facility for the next two years. He had permanently lost the ability to speak, and temporarily to walk, though this facility did return, albeit with it with a limp that to this day looks like a stumble at every step.

Although under surveillance and in need of nursing care, he managed to abscond after he had been transferred to a secure unit near London because of his special needs. He has spent the years intervening between then and now sleeping rough in London. Whether he knows he is in London is hard to say, since his verbal communication skills never returned, the best he can manage being an unintelligible mumble married to a forceful proximity of presence that most find disconcerting.

Stephen Westerman is currently sedentary. He sleeps in a doorway near Kings Cross station, where he begs. He buys beer and chocolate bars in shops nearby, but none of the owners regard him as anything other than a nuisance All say they would rather he did not enter their premises, since he sleeps rough, is always dirty and never washes. He smells strongly of urine, so if he is to be of any use, he will have to be taken in hand and cleaned up prior to deployment. He is of the right age and stature, he has no medical or dental records and, for over ten years, has had no relationships with other people significant enough for them to remember him or even to learn anything about him. He has never owned a mobile phone, a credit card or bank account, an email address or a computer, so therefore has no online presence whatsoever. Crucially, he has no current status with any service. He is therefore perfect for our needs. I therefore confirm that the proposed course of action is viable.