Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer Read Online Free PDF Page B

lived in one bedroom and Nilsen, his mother and brother in another. Nilsen says it was a cold, uncaring, dour and religious environment.
    As a baby, Nilsen thinks he was especially sensitive to the unemotional atmosphere that surrounded him. He says he has reason to believe his mother and grandmother would pass him around like an ‘unpleasant object’. There were no loving hands, he laments, but rather, he says, he was ‘acted upon’ in ‘rituals’ of ‘carrying, stripping, bathing, powdering, dressing and laying out’, by ‘strong and towering powers’.
    Nilsen says because his world consisted of harsh, domineering women, his first emotional connections were weak. More importantly, he says the way his body was bathed and changed in a ‘ritualistic’ way profoundly affected his basic emotional and sexual needs. Then he makes an explosive assertion which sets up his entire story. He speculates whether the rituals he later performed on the dead bodies of his victims – the compulsion to dress, undress and wash the victim’s corpses – were, in fact, all re-enactments of scenes from his infancy. Somehow, he feels, the emotional deprivation of early childhood had imprinted itself on to his sexual subconscious.
    This concept needs further explanation. It’s not only absurd to think imperfect mothering, alone, could have hadsuch a catastrophic effect, but it also sounds as if he may be trying to fix the blame at such a distant past point in time that no one can argue. On the first point, Nilsen agrees that his earliest experiences weren’t, in themselves,
sufficient
to corrupt his subconscious needs. The rest of his first chapter attempts to explain those other formative childhood events that he feels set his emotions down such a dark and disturbed track.

    In order to understand Nilsen’s developing psychology, it’s crucial to appreciate how he feels about his birth town. Fraserburgh – also known as ‘the Broch’ – is a mid-sized fishing town 35 miles north of Aberdeen, in the district of Buchan. The town centre is Victorian and grey. Most of these buildings are built of granite slabs which, in winter, can look like prison walls. Close by are dour housing estates. The harbour may be more colourful but it is decidedly functional.
    Many residents feel trapped by the remoteness and sense of insularity (in recent years it has also been dubbed Scotland’s heroin capital). Mother Nature doesn’t help the sense of bleakness. The persistent winds whip up salt spray, the gulls are constantly screeching and, in winter, it seems dark all day long. But there is also a more uplifting side, especially when the sun shines. The surrounding land is of the kind that is perfect for golf links, and the beaches of Fraserburgh Bay are long and sandy. The natural surroundings can be quite spectacular. And that is the only positive thing Nilsen ever has to say about his birthplace.
    Nilsen describes the Broch as a rain-lashed, cultural backwater full of bigots – some religious, others just rough. In one essay, he describes the freezing climate as ‘magnified bythe cold commanding calculation of other people’. He says he felt totally insignificant, and describes the emotions he felt as a child: ‘Big people wore clothes in black and grey and they were forever issuing orders. I was one of the little people to be controlled and ordered about.’ Then, in his essay called ‘Feelings’ (quoted by Matthew Malekos in his thesis), Nilsen gives a metaphor of reaching out to the world only to find his ‘hand dirled by the sharp crack of somebody’s thin hard stick’.
    The stylised prose continues throughout. Nilsen says he was treated like a street dog, with an emotional life that was ‘a world of cold maximum power and minimal warmth of close tactile love. I took my place in the line for processing. I was a few points above the status of street urchin.’
    Despite the obvious exaggeration, the fact that similar accounts