Normally, says a lecturer at Suffolk College, it is hard to keep the girls calm at this time of year. “Usually they’d be all excitable about Christmas, partying, wanting to get away and out on the town”. Not this year. College feels safer just now than the familiar streets. IT groups read the news online minute by minute, and as days go by with more bodies and missing girls and no arrest yet, the unease rises.
“We were going to let the girls go home early, before dark” says the lecturer. “But we’ve been told not to. A lot are only 16, parents need to know where they are. A lot are picking them up from the bus stops.” Most notably and typically, she has not heard a single voice tutting about prostitution. “It isn’t even mentioned, among staff or girls. These were ordinary girls, like them.”
And it’s an almost exaggeratedly ordinary sort of town: not a hotbed or a focus or a tinderbox or powderkeg or any such handy metaphor for the passing journalist. People still get quite shocked in Ipswich if a lad gets an ASBO. Indeed, if you live round here, as we do, out in the sticks using the town as a main-line station and shopping centre and cinema outing, it is unnerving to have its name screaming from every news bulletin . Normally the word Ipswich is spoken only in the football results, or in freakish stories like the one the other day when the Queen and Prince Philip turned up in an ordinary first-class carriage at Ipswich station for a private weekend’s shooting near by. It is creepy to consider that they, like us over the last five weeks, will have walked past Missing posters showing the vivid Renaissance-angel face and dark hair of poor dead Tania Nicol.
Ipswich is not important, not buzzy, not newsworthy. It is not a university hub like Norwich or Cambridge, not picturesque like Bury St Edmunds with its stately cathedral. Ipswich is the most middling of towns, an ancient port whose trade long since moved downstream to the giant cranes of Felixstowe, and whose new sprouting of yuppie Dockside flats and dance studios is still half-rubble. Despite a determined new arts festival, amateur orchestras, touring tribute bands at the Regent and the game struggles of the Wolsey theatre it remains a workaday town, unimpressed by itself or by anything else. Indeed it has been so lacking in modish pizzazz that when the Café Rouge chain opened here it shortly afterwards closed again, with a shrug.
Ipswich has occasional punts at getting itself dubbed a “city”, and adopts the unconvincing slogan of “Hipswich” to promote its councillors’ dream of forming one end of a hi-tech silicon corridor stretching all the way to Cambridge; but considering it is only an hour from Stratford and the City it remains cheap to live in and relatively undiscovered by commuters. Yet — despite the expensive private schools that nestle in the nearby woodland now being combed by police — Ipswich is not rural in character either: TV reporters dub it a “small market town”, but that is not the feeling.
For all its estuary environs and pretty village hinterland, Ipswich by night feels glumly urban. The roaring of boy racers made it, until recently, unpleasant to retrieve your car late at night from the “Ipswich Village” car park near the station (repeated middle-class whingeing has finally caused the council to install a barrier). Near by, the inevitable barn-like nightclub causes ambulances to wait resignedly at weekends for the drunks and increasingly common knife crimes; a stroll away lies a bland 21st century leisure park — Cineworld, McDonald’s, Liquids Nightclub, KFC. The old Odeon uptown has given up and sold itself to developers. Small Norman churches rear their stone towers protestingly between drinking clubs, half-built flats, patches of rubbled wasteland where animal-feed mills are being demolished, and huge DIY superstores: every planning sin of the past 40 years has been visited on this unassuming old borough.
Meanwhile, a few minutes away, past the prison wire and glaring lights of the Portman Road football ground, the town’s scattering of young prostitutes walk the grey streets, feeling a fear that is quite new. Until the deaths of Gemma, Tania and Anneli and the disappearance of Paula and Annette, it was 13 years since the last disappearance of a streetwalker. It may have a seedy fringe, but it is just not that sort of town.
Actually, Ipswich is oddly loveable. This is Fifties Britain, a town where people are born, stay near their extended families, amuse themselves in clubs and institutes, earn a living and mind their own business. Quietly rich eccentricities have room to thrive: along Wherstead Road, in Des Pawson’s back garden, is the UK’s only Museum of Ropework, and a man with a vast subtropical greenhouse who grows mangoes for fun. Some Ipswich schools are excellent, others so-so. Among the town’s famous sons and daughters are Bernie Ecclestone, Jane Lapotaire and V. S. Pritchett, though people tend to move away to find eminence (and sometimes, like Lapotaire, write scorching memoirs of a dull childhood on the concrete banks of the River Orwell).
But dull can be comfortable. Despite the late-night bingers who now characterise most provincial English towns, this is not a hotbed of crime and disorder. Next to Friday’s East Anglian Daily Times report of the serial murders lay a far more typical crime story: “Police are appealing for witnesses after a teenager punched the wing mirror of a car as he walked past, causing it to break.” The victim was, it adds, a Toyota Yaris.
So the killing of young women has been taken hard. The discovery of Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams and Anneli Alderton is received with horrified disbelief. Gemma, as widely reported, sold herself to feed a heroin habit, but she was not some abandoned, cynical, half-feral child of the streets: far from it. The granddaughter of a policeman, she went to Kesgrave High School (more recently famous for insisting on girls wearing trousers, and holding the UK record for the most children walking or cycling to school daily). She went to Suffolk College and had worked for a motor insurance company in the town. Her heroin habit was of fairly recent date, and a strong family hoped to get her back on the rails.
Tania Nicol had a family, too: at only 19 she still lived with her mum in Woolverstone Close, and her childhood friends fill the Evening Star’s website with memories — “Fantastic smiley person . . . I remember making up dances with her and setting up a tent in her back garden one summer to stay in overnight . . . Tania used to braid my hair when I was pregnant . . . a group of us went on holiday to the New Forest and had such a laugh . . .miss ya loads Tania”. These are not the hardened streetwise tarts of urban legend, prowling the concrete jungle in leather miniskirts: they went missing in jeans, zip jackets, trainers, beanie hats. Ordinary girls: probably not all that wary of the pathetic local punters they picked up down the Portman Road.
Suffolk gentleness also marks the responses of the people on the village fringes of Ipswich. There is no censure from the middle-aged shopkeepers and retired couples who walk their dogs in the Nacton woodlands and the marshy pathways by streams where the first bodies were found. “Poor young things, bless them, such pretty girls, so young.” Covertly censorious talk of “vice girls” is confined, it seems, to journalists.
Most reactions ignore any such stigma, in a way that tracks a fascinating change in mores and expectations since the days when the Yorkshire Ripper drew real alarm only when he started picking on non-prostitutes. A local businessman, Graeme Kalbraier, offers £50,000 as a reward for information, saying robustly: “I have a teenage daughter aged 17, I also have an Ipswich workforce of 300, many of whom are girls in their teens and early twenties. They all frequent the town centre and they have all got mums and dads. I just want this person caught and off the streets.” Amen to that.
