Ghost Lake Rising: The Day I met Jimmy Savile

And the day they buried him

Photo by Brian Patrick Tagalog on Unsplash

For those who don’t know, Jimmy Saville was an English radio and TV presenter known for his charity work, but known more for his eccentric image. He lived in Leeds but had an apartment in Scarborough where he was well known. If you lived in Scarborough before Jimmy Savile’s death in 2011, you most likely have a Jimmy story - perhaps you’ve seen him running up the steps from the beach to the town as part of his fitness regime. You might have seen him in restaurants in the town. You might have been one of the people who watched his coffin pass as if it was a state funeral, through the town. He was a source of pride in Scarborough. We named benches and views after him. He got a blue plaque. And then one day allegations began to emerge about Jimmy’s behaviour. There’d been allegations within his own lifetime, but they’d been dismissed, the victims pushed aside. It turns out Jimmy was a sexual predator, preying on the young people and children he worked with through his charity work and through his television work.

I wrote to Jimmy Savile when I was eight years old. He used to present a very famous television show called ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ on the BBC, the premise being that kids wrote to him with requests and he made their dreams come true. I wrote to Jimmy asking for The A-Team to come to my birthday party. I was A-Team obsessed, I’d built my whole eight year old personality around The A-Team. At that time, for reasons I now can’t really remember, I strongly identified with the character Murdoch (perhaps because I knew I was a bit odd/mad/weird and he was too) I wanted to be a Murdoch type character and fly helicopters. I’d memorised quite a lot of facts about helicopters, and flying in general. That too was part of my eight year old personality. I had a weird mad crush on the whole of the A Team. God, isn’t being a child confusing. Anyway, after I wrote to Jimmy, and I watched it slip into the mouth of the red post box, I spent probably three months in an absolute rigid mess of anxiety. I’d told everyone in my class that the A-Team was coming to my birthday party, so partly the anxiety was that The A-Team might not, in fact, come to my birthday party and then what would I say to all these people who didn’t really like me anyway, but whom I had duped into coming to my birthday party with tales of how The A-Team would probably bring their van and we’d all go for rides about Scarborough in it. The second and much more debilitating anxiety was what if they did show up? What if the actual A-Team came all the way from America to my birthday party. I was so shy that I couldn’t speak sometimes. The idea that The A-Team might actually come to the party ruined months of my life. I would wake up at three in the morning crying in fear that The A-Team would arrive and I’d have to speak to them. Reader, shockingly, The A-Team did not come to my party, they were never coming. The day after my birthday party I think I had the best night’s sleep of my life. I never wrote to Jimmy Savile again.

My next experience of Jimmy Savile was one evening in the early 2000s. I don’t think my husband and I were married at that point, but we were definitely living together in Scarborough. I will have been in my early twenties. We were out with another couple, my best friend and her boyfriend at the time. The alcohol was flowing, because the alcohol always flowed when my husband and I were out. We’d gone to a little Italian restaurant called Tuscany Too in Scarborough town and this was at the end of the evening. My best friend’s boyfriend returned from the toilet, weaving between the chairs and stage whispered to us ‘Jimmy’s in!’ and we, because we had grown up with Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It, became loudly and drunkenly excited by the prospect of speaking to him. No sooner had my best friend’s boyfriend sat down again when there was a muffled commotion at the back of the restaurant and then Jimmy himself was making his way through the half empty room. He was wearing a bright yellow shell suit and wrap around ski-style sunglasses, also yellow, and he was smoking a massive cigar and he was adorned with fat gold chains and big rings and his teeth were yellow, and his hair was the hair of a corpse. I don’t think I thought that at the time, about the hair, but every time I think about it now I think of its straggly long grey strands over that grey-pink scalp as corpse like. He had one of those open caps on that people wear when they play poker. You couldn’t really see his face. My best friends boyfriend called to him, ‘Hello Jimmy!’ And got up and shook his hand, because Jimmy was a celebrity and even more so in Scarborough, because he always said good things about the town, always drew a bit of nice publicity for the town. But there were rumours. There were always rumours.

Jimmy shook hands and then stopped and surveyed the two young women in front of him, both of us a bit pissed, both of us slightly undone by a long evening of food and drink, bit both of us beautiful in the way that youth makes everyone beautiful. My friend, though, was and is truly beautiful, she looks like Sandra Bullock. ‘Now then, now then’, says Jimmy, because that was one of his catch phrases and we were now well caught up in the game of role play that was meeting Jimmy Savile and excited that we would hear that catch phrase said to us, Now Then Now then, and his voice dropped a little, ‘You boys must be like coiled springs tonight’. And we laughed because we knew we were young and he was so familiar that it felt familiar and fine and good and funny that this man would be shining his light on us, and I think I remember him touching my friend’s back and I think there might have been a kiss on the cheek and then he was leaving with an entourage of big men who were also smoking cigarettes. Years later, when people asked, ‘But how did it happen?’ in relation to the ‘predator in plain sight’ that was Jimmy Savile, when people questioned why the rumours hadn’t been investigated and how anyone would think that this creepy old man would be safe to let their children go with, I would think of that night, and the way we all fell so easily into the script of Jimmy the celebrity, all of us guided by his catch phrase into a place of nostalgia, the thrill of it, how celebrity turned the abnormal into the normal, how the more he made himself strange to the world, the more normal it seemed.

My next connection point with Jimmy Savile occurred after my daughter had died. My baby daughter died during an emergency cesarian in April 2010, she’d have been 16 next month. Jimmy Savile died in October 2011. They are both buried in the same cemetery, Jimmy up on the top rise looking out to sea, my daughter in the children’s section. I still worked at the hospital, which is very near the cemetery, when he died, and remember being on my lunch break, trying to get across the road back to the hospital, when his funeral procession turned into the road that the hospital and the cemetery are on. There was silence. People stopped what they were doing and watched the hearse move slowly along the road. There was a great deal of reverence for him, people felt they knew him. I did not see him buried, but I know he was buried at a 90 degree angle, so he could face the sea, and that his coffin was encased in concrete to stop people stealing all the gold he carried round his neck.

For months after his burial tourists came to the cemetery to see where he was buried. If people saw me kneeling at my daughter’s grave they would come and ask me where he was and I never thought i could tell them to fuck off, but I wish I had, because they were paying no reverence to my daughter, who had also died, who was also buried there, and they were paying no respect to me. It was all about the fame of Jimmy. When I wrote The Ghost Lake, I talked a little about this moment, when someone almost stood on my daughter’s grave, leaning through the hedge to ask me where Jimmy was buried, without even a hello. Is if by being a part of the cemetery, by having a burial in the cemetery, I was somehow now a guide to the burials. I hated it. I hated the way Jimmy’s gravity was affecting the peace of the place, how all our smaller stars were being sucked into his story. He had a triptych gravestone put up, of course he did, black marble, obviously written by himself, with stories of his charity work, of how loved he was. They had to put one of those iron chains around his grave because so many people wanted to see it.

And then the allegations and the investigations began and Scarborough didn’t know what to do with their town celebrity. Even more people were coming to the cemetery and it began to be a source of shame to the town. The gravestone disappeared, taken down. Then later the iron rope, leaving no trace of him in the cemetery. People did still come, but couldn’t find his grave, unless they were obsessed with it and knew where it was. Less people came over time, now very few come. The town defended him for a while, until he became indefensible, and then they quietly removed the blue plaques and the street signs and the only stories told about him were like this one - I met Jimmy Savile once…and we change the narrative slightly, pull out from our memories the places of darkness, the unnerving awfulness of him that was always there, it was definitely always there; the creepiness, but now we pull it to the front, and we are embarrassed that we could be so easily taken in by the script of Jimmy, by the rose-glow of nostalgia.

Sometimes I think about what archaeologists will find in the cemetery in hundreds of years time. They will find this person encased in concrete, different to the other graves because of the burial’s strange angle, the gold still bright and sharp as the day it went into the grave. They will think, here is a high status individual. And there will be so little left of everyone else, nothing of my tiny daughter, and the stories around Jimmy will be shaped in that way, as they always were.

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