Running Wild

The Pangbourne Children

During the next hours, Sergeant Payne, using film, slides and videos, took me through the evidence assembled by the police investigation into the characters and history of the Pangbourne children. Together it formed the portrait of a group of likable and talented youngsters, successful at school and with a wide range of outdoor interests that included swimming and hang gliding, scuba diving and parachute jumping. As I looked at the photographs of these fresh-faced teenagers, snapped by their friends as they posed in their flying overalls and wet suits, I could not help thinking that all these activities involved the element of escape, as if the children were unconsciously equipping themselves with the means to break free from their lives.

Surprisingly, however, their interest in these outdoor sports had begun to lapse during the previous year, as the children moved the focus of their activities to their own homes. This was clear from their diaries and videos, and from the private newspaper, oddly named _The Pangbourne Pang_ (circulation, thirteen copies), published from his desktop printer by the fifteen-year-old Roger Sterling. A darker and more closed world soon emerged.

By the winter of 1987 the children had abandoned their hang gliding and scuba diving, and were spending nearly all their time in their own rooms. So gradual was this process that it was scarcely noticed by the domestic staff, though in their testimony two of the maids commented on the increasing difficulty of cleaning the children's quarters.

_Miss Rogers_: He was building a strange kite that

completely filled his whole bedroom. Once I tried

to pick it up and it just snapped shut around me.

Mark had to cut me loose-he was very sorry, and

Mr. Sanger asked him very nicely to apologize.

_Mrs. Stacey_: Graham was always playing with his

computer, adding up all these numbers. Finally I had

to ask Mrs. Lymington to put my times on the

bulletin board.

This loss of interest in outdoor activities inevitably led to the withering-away of their friendships with children from the nearby estates. Fewer school friends visited them, and those who did commented on the clannish atmosphere.

_William Knox_, 14, school friend of Roger Sterling:

They were busy with their own thing. It used to be

fun there, and then it wasn't fun anymore.

_Philip Bax_, 15, son of a Reading doctor: It wasn't

really spooky, but they seemed to have gone away.

They used all these codes talking to each other.

This retreat within the perimeter of Pangbourne Village appears to have been unplanned, but the secret hobbies of the children might well have given the parents pause. The milder of these, like the rifle magazines concealed in Jeremy Maxted's closet, lay well within the bounds of ordinary adolescent behavior. Almost all the children kept diaries, either written in longhand or typed into their word processors, and most were either shredded or erased in the days before the massacre.

However, two of the girls, Gail and Annabel Reade, kept elaborate secret journals which were discovered in the panels behind their dressing-table mirrors. These throw no direct light on the Pangbourne murders, but describe a richly imagined alternative to life in the estate that at the same time seems an implicit comment upon it.

The journals cover the lives of a number of genteel Victorian families living in Pangbourne in the late nineteenth century, a caring and affectionate upper-middle-class community described in a formal prose reminiscent of Jane Austen but with a startling frankness about their sexual activities. Together they convey the impression of _Pride and Prejudice_ with its missing pornographic passages restored. Two of the charming and well-bred daughters establish themselves as prostitutes and serve the desires of the other members of their families of whatever sex and age. Yet it is clearly not the pornographic details that appeal most strongly to Gail and Annabel-these are sketched in perfunctorily-but rather the powerful emotions which their sexual passion elicits. What comes through most vividly is the sense that through these sexual activities the overcivilized inhabitants of Pangbourne can make their escape into a more brutal and more real world of the senses.

Many of the other hobbies of the Pangbourne children show the same obsession with the theme of escape. Andrew Zest, an enthusiastic radio ham, had rigged a powerful radio antenna on the roof of his house and was trying to communicate with intelligent life in a neighboring galaxy. This complex array of wires was only discovered when it interfered with the estate's TV security system.

The same reductive strain was apparent in _The Pangbourne Pang_, desktop-printed by Roger Sterling and distributed between March and June 1988 to its thirteen readers. In a lively tabloid visual style, it specialized only in boring news. "Egg boils in three minutes" and "Staircase leads to second floor" are two of its banner headlines.

Graham Lymington, meanwhile, programmed his computer to calculate pi to a million places, and papered the walls of his bedroom with the printouts. Gently dissuaded from this by his parents, he then put out _Radio Free Pangbourne_, an audiocassette program, six issues of which were distributed to the other children in November and December 1987. This was a sequence of random sounds, mostly his own breathing, interspersed with long patches of silence.

The key to all these was the curious home video, filmed by Amanda Lymington and Jasper Ogilvy, which at first sight appeared to be a matter-of-fact documentary of daily life at Pangbourne Village. Some seventeen minutes long, it was made with the happy cooperation of the parents, and adopts the style of a real-estate developer's promotional video. With its glossy color and tableau-like settings, it depicts the parents sitting in their drawing rooms, having dinner, parking their cars. The commentary is warm and affectionate, and the film is a lighthearted parody, before the event, of the BBC-TV documentary that was to be made about Pangbourne Village in the late summer of 1988. There is a certain gentle leg-pulling at the parents' expense-the camera lingers on Mrs. Sterling as she mistimes a swallow dive, and on Mr. Garfield as he drops his cocktail shaker.

Extracts of the film were shown to the parents and often screened for the benefit of visitors. However, the final version that secretly circulated among the children was very different. This carried the identical jovial sound track, but Jasper and Amanda had added some twenty-five seconds of footage, culled from TV news documentaries, of car crashes, electric chairs and concentration-camp mass graves. Scattered at random among the scenes of their parents, this atrocity footage transformed the film into a work of eerie and threatening prophecy.

Almost all copies of the videotape were destroyed at some time before June 25, but a single cassette was found in the Maxteds' bedroom safe. One wonders what these fashionable psychiatrists made of it. Seeing the film, I had the strong sense, not for the first time, of young minds willing themselves into madness as a way of finding freedom.

"It's a remarkable piece of work, Sergeant," I said to Payne as the film ended. "I can't help feeling that it links everything else together."

"Could the Ogilvy boy have been the ringleader? He was the oldest of them."

"Possibly-something acted as the trigger and persuaded the children to plan the murders."

"The film, Doctor. It's practically a detailed blueprint for the killings-shootings, car crashes, electrocutions…" Payne grimaced, almost gagging on his own cigarette smoke. "It's as if the film came first for them."

"By the time they made this, everything was turning into a film. The BBC producer was due to visit the estate on the afternoon of June 25. Perhaps the planned documentary was the last straw-the children knew they'd have to play their parts for the cameras, doing all the interviews, acting out their 'happiness' under the eyes of their doting parents. The prospect of all that phoniness could have driven them over the edge…"

I walked to the projector screen, which showed the cryptic credits of the children's video, "A Pangbourne Village Production," superimposed upon an idyllic view of the estate. I was thinking of Marion Miller-if I was right, her escape had been a desperate attempt to return to her childhood world.

"Tell me, Sergeant, could you get me an edited version of the video?"

"Without the car crashes and electric chairs? I can arrange one for you, Doctor. Who do you want to show it to?"

"Marion Miller. It's just an idea. It might help to remind her of happier times."