In November 2019, a video popped up on Vicky Foster’s social media. It looked like a scene from an action movie, but it was real. One man was being chased on London Bridge by three others, who were armed with a narwhal tusk and a fire extinguisher. The man they wrestled to the ground was a terrorist, Usman Khan, who seemed to be wearing a suicide vest, and had just stabbed and killed two people at a prisoner rehabilitation conference. Foster shared the video, which was all over Facebook and Twitter. It told a short, striking story of exceptional bravery, of heroes and villain, of good over evil.
Foster thought little more about it until the following January, when it was reported that one of those heroes was a man called Steven Gallant, who was serving a life sentence for murdering her former partner and father of her children, Barrie Jackson. (Gallant had attended the conference on day release.) When his name was made public, he was widely celebrated, hailed a hero on TV and radio chatshows, by MPs, by the PM, Boris Johnson, who declared himself “lost in admiration”, and even by the Queen, who granted Gallant a royal pardon, which released him from the remaining 10 months of his sentence. The extensive coverage retold the details of Jackson’s murder. The swift reaction on social media and especially through Foster’s local press in Hull was devastating. “He was a sick beast, he deserved death,” was one comment about Jackson. “I would rather have Gallant … walking the streets of Hull than Jackson,” said another. “Well, I say he has done the world two favours and should be let out.”
“If you’d asked me what was the worst thing that could have happened to me at that point in my life, this was it,” says Foster. When we meet, she’s in Waterstones’ cafe in Hull, cradling a cappuccino, friendly, open, quick to laugh – to really laugh – and excited that her new book, It Happened Like This, is on display downstairs. After reading it, you want to celebrate with her; as her friend puts it in the final pages: “Karma probably does owe you one.”
Jackson was brutally murdered in 2005 and in the 15 years since, Foster had very slowly built back a life. She studied English as a mature student at Hull University, financing it through singing at pubs and clubs around Yorkshire. She became a published poet who won awards for her writing and was in a healthy relationship with a good man. Her sons, three and five when their dad was murdered, were now 18 and 20. “All this time, Barrie and his murder had been this shadow that lurked at the edge of my peripheral vision,” says Foster. “It was this mass of complicated emotions that I couldn’t look at or talk about or even think about. Some people knew about it, but I’d gradually moved away from that. Now, suddenly, everybody knew.
“Can you imagine the worst thing that’s ever happened to you being put out there for everybody to talk about? The level of attention, these voices coming at you, and the fact that it didn’t stop, made the fallout for me and my children really difficult. I was having flashbacks to things that I’d blocked. It was like living in two time zones.” Foster’s book recreates this through a patchwork of personal memories that span years, press extracts, letters, readers’ comments and court reports. Together, they tell one woman’s experience of crime, chaos and survival. It’s the account that tends to stay hidden when all the focus is on the acts of men.
Foster had met Jackson when she was 19 and he was 25. At the time, she had dropped out of college, never finishing her A-levels, had fallen out with her mum and was working in a pub in east Hull.
“I was bumbling along, figuring out what was next,” she says. Within a few months, she’d moved in with Jackson and was expecting their first child. “Barrie had experienced massive traumas from a very young age, he’d had a very difficult past but he seemed to have turned his life around,” says Foster. “That was one of the things that attracted me. He was a fireman. He ran towards danger. He cut people from crashed cars and carried people from burning buildings. He was a person who would stop at bus stops if it was raining and give old ladies a lift to wherever they were going.”
At home though, Foster soon saw another side to him. Jackson didn’t like her going out, and under pressure from him, Foster gave up her job, lost touch with her friends. When their son was born less than a year into their relationship, she found herself housebound and isolated. Their second son quickly followed. Jackson controlled all the money.
“I was really scared of him,” says Foster. “I never had serious injuries but he used to grab me by the throat a lot. He was also getting violent outside the home.” She was hearing rumours; there were visits from the police. Apparently, Jackson had assaulted a woman. He had thrown a brick through someone’s window. He had jumped on someone’s car during a road rage incident. “I was chalking it all up in my head,” says Foster.
Several times, she tried to leave. “I remember getting out of the house in the middle of the night, pushing my son in his buggy, arriving at my dad’s, terrified,” says Foster. Next morning, her dad sent her home. “He told me I had a baby to think of,” says Foster. “As a woman, as a mother, the onus was on me to make it all OK, and you’re terrified of being blamed if it isn’t.” Foster’s book powerfully conveys what it takes to manage all this. “It’s exhausting,” she says. “You’ve just got to get through each day, knowing in the back of your mind that at some point you’ve got to do something, you just don’t know when or what it’s going to be.
“You’ve got to be so careful when you’re around someone like Barrie because if he goes off, what’s he going to do? What are the kids going to see? I’m full of admiration for women managing that situation. Not only are they doing it on their own, without much support, they also come under heavy criticism as well. It’s madness.”
One night in July 2002, when Jackson was out, Foster did leave for good. “I had absolutely nothing,” she says. “I packed up nappies and the kids’ favourite toys in bin bags and took them to my mum’s. It was terrifying. I was fairly certain that he’d come after me. I had his kids and he’d always let me know that he was never going to let me take them away.”
In the years afterwards, the treatment she received from police, from the family courts, from authorities that might have protected her, only compounded the danger, adding layers of trauma. Shortly after leaving Jackson, police arrived at Foster’s home to say that he’d been arrested for a brutal assault on a woman, Carol Ives, who had been left for dead in a skip. Foster gave them a 25-page statement that detailed all the abuse she had experienced with him. Police returned to the station, showed it to Jackson as part of their interview, then released him the next day. (They did at least first install a panic button and cameras in Foster’s home.) The first thing Jackson did was call Foster to let her know that the panic button wouldn’t save her. All he had to do was cut the wires.
Though Jackson was eventually charged with the attack on Ives, he was found not guilty. (The case revolved around DNA evidence on his shoe, which the defence argued could have been contamination.) He was, however, jailed for knocking another woman unconscious. In and out of custody, he continued to threaten and stalk Foster, driving past her on the street, pushing letters through her door, chasing her through the family courts for unsupervised access to the children. One of these contact hearings is recounted in the book. When Foster’s solicitor explains in court that Foster is having panic attacks because of Jackson’s behaviour, the judge replies: “There is no evidence of domestic abuse, and if your client is not capable of looking after her children, then maybe we should consider whether they should go to live with their father.”
Somehow, Foster raised her children, pushed through the days and very long nights. Each evening, she double-checked the garden, doors and windows. In bed, she made herself switch out the light and practised feeling for her panic button. She had an escape plan. “But the truth is that if he appeared in my room, there was nothing I could have done,” she says. She remembers trying to arrange a small tea party for her son’s birthday and one of the school mums declining the invitation because their house was “too dangerous”.
“Wow,” says Foster. “Our house was too dangerous for her son for one hour and we lived there all the time. And I could sort of see her point.”
In April 2005, Jackson was murdered by two men, Steven Gallant and Daniel Gilligan. It was reported to be an act of revenge for an attack on Gallant’s girlfriend. Jackson was disabled with CS spray, hit by a van, kicked, stamped on and hit with a hammer. “I met someone who told me they’d been there when Barrie was killed,” says Foster. “He told me he’d tried to resuscitate him with a straw because Barrie didn’t have a mouth. You get these little pieces of information then you can’t stop picturing it. I wasn’t physically there but I still had flashbacks to what it looked like. For years, I couldn’t drive past where it happened.”
Trauma so often leads to more trauma and Foster’s book shows clearly why. Despite what happened to the family, they received no specialised support – no therapy beyond the standard six sessions on the NHS, and no criminal injuries compensation because Jackson had committed crimes himself. The fallout on her health, her relationships and on her children from so much horror was devastating. “I remember this dread that I had to tell them in an age-appropriate way that someone had killed their dad,” she says. “I didn’t want them to be scared in the world. The narrative I tried to develop was that somebody had done a bad thing to him but also that he’d been walking down a path where bad things can happen.” By 2020, when the story resurfaced with Gallant as a national hero, Foster’s oldest son was at university – he dropped out shortly after – while the other was in active addiction. “When Barrie had been killed, they’d been so young, you could shield them,” says Foster. “Now they were 18 and 20 and reading all the comments on social media, seeing and hearing what everyone was saying. They just had a very emotional response.”
She hopes they have all come through now. They are applying for funding to enable her son to return to university for a final year and finish his degree. Her younger son is working as a youth drugs worker in the centre that helped him through his own recovery. As for Foster herself, writing the book has forced her to process her past. “It’s not lurking in the background any more, it’s out in the open,” she says. “Barrie’s not a bogeyman now. He’s just a complicated, scary, damaged person.” To some, he’s even a hero. Jackson, like Gallant, saved lives – in fact, one woman posted on social media that, whatever else he’d done, he had saved her daughter in a house fire.
“For me, the parallel between him and Steven Gallant is just so obvious,” says Foster. “There is a kind of person who is impulsive, who will run into whatever the situation requires, maybe without thinking too much about the danger. Sometimes that works out really well – and sometimes it works out really badly. I have no idea if Steven Gallant is a different person now. It’s a very compelling idea, but I only have two acts of 30 minutes in his life to go on.”
What is now clear to Foster is that bravery takes many forms. It’s not all about heroes and headlines. “We’re far quicker to say something that a man does is brave – usually a short, physical act – than something a woman might have to manage over years and years,” she says. “Working on the book, remembering all the things I’ve had to do, I actually started to feel proud of myself after so many years of feeling shame. It’s still a bit uncomfortable saying it, but I was brave. And the same goes for thousands of other women too.”
It Happened Like This by Vicky Foster (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 and the domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
