Authors: Gitta Sereny
It began to happen, oddly enough, in the autumn of 1995, on the night of the launch party in London for my book about Albert Speer, when Hilary Rubinstein, who had been my agent for The Case of Mary Bell, asked me quietly whether I might still be interested in writing about Mary. The next morning he told me that Mary’s mother had died the previous January and that this might be the time for Mary to find a way
of telling her story. Since her release she had received several offers of grotesque sums of money from both British and foreign magazines for her story (one magazine offered 250,000), all of which she had refused. Rubinstein had first been asked to represent her interests in 1983 when her then partner, who could see his future paved with gold, had persuaded her to have a stab at writing herself about her life. But though she has a distinct gift for words, and had produced a draft of a hundred pages which a publisher thought with professional help could be made into a book, the project was abandoned because the conditions could not be agreed.
Rubinstein believed that Mary felt differently now. Before meeting her again, he had spoken at length with her probation officer and her solicitor, who together, he said, had rescued her from many setbacks, helped her to cut loose from that first relationship and shielded her from the media for the past fourteen years. He had suggested to them, and subsequently to Mary herself, that if what she was thinking of now was a serious book, she should meet with me. After some persuasion she had agreed to do so.
“She is quite extraordinarily distrustful,” he said, ‘oddly enough, particularly of you. ” I did not think that odd.
No one had exposed Mary, or, of course, her mother, as I had done. If anything surprised me, it was her willingness now, comparatively soon after her mother’s death, to meet me at all.
“For my mother you were the devil, you know,” Mary said almost the moment we sat down in that small room in the Probation Office.
“She said you’d written that book full of lies; that you went through rubbish bins to find the dirt on people; that you had accosted my five-year-old cousin, my Auntie Cath’s boy, for information about her;
that you’d called her a prostitute. She said she went to all the book-stores in Newcastle and turned your book around so people wouldn’t look at it. Oh, she hated you, I think to the day she died.
And, well, I was just a kid, wasn’t I? So for years I believed her.
“
When had her mother first warned her against me, I asked.
“Oh, I remember that very well,” she said.
“That was long before she told me about the book. It was at that inquiry … you know … about that housemaster. Do you remember? You came over to talk to me.”
We had, in fact, met face to face twice before the day she mentioned, but she had forgotten. Early in 1970, shortly after the Daily Telegraph Magazine had published my articles, and again a few months later when I had begun work on the book, the Home Office had allowed me to go to Red Bank, the special unit where Mary had been sent after being sentenced, to see her and meet the unit’s staff. Both times I chatted briefly with her, as one does with children, about her art work, her writing and what sports she liked most (swimming).
She had been at Red Bank for sixteen months when, in June 1970, then just thirteen, she accused a housemaster of sexually molesting her.
The inquiry she was now referring to was held to determine whether there was a case to answer. I had stepped over to chat with her that day during a break we talked about a young woman teacher I had been told she particularly liked not because I wanted to know anything (that would have been unthinkable), but because, incomprehensibly, she had been left sitting on her own and looked lost. I will write more later of the housemaster episode, but in 1995, when we met again, I was surprised to hear that she could recall that momentary meeting.
She told me, in fact, she had only remembered it after her release, when she had seen a photograph of me on the jacket of my book.
“That day I had no idea who you were,” she said.
“But my mother was there and saw you talk to me. And she ran over and screamed at me: I was not to, not to, not to talk to you, ever. She was always angry, but that time she was … just manic. I was so frightened.”
Mary talked a great deal about her mother in the next few hours without actually saying anything real about her. She was like a shadow weaving in and out of the background of her memory: a figure repeatedly referred to as ‘smart’, but equally frequently as ‘sick’ and ‘sad’, she kept appearing without becoming even momentarily a person. She came
and went amid the torrent of words which gushed out of Mary as if this was as if this had to be the occasion when she would tell me everything: about Red Bank, where she stayed for five years, and about the headmaster there, Mr. Dixon, who implanted in her a first inkling of the difference between right and wrong “You couldn’t not learn to understand that, with Mr. Dixon as your headmaster. I loved him,” she said.
“I will love him till I die.” She was unstoppable about Mr. Dixon, unstoppable, too, about her mutinous prison years “I wasn’t going to give in to them. I wasn’t going to become their creature. I wasn’t going to be institutionalized.” So she learned about power games and corruption and during those years, virtually unmanageable for the prison staff, used sex (with fellow inmates) and her manipulative gifts (on inmates and staff) in her attempts to dominate her environment. She talked about her life after her release and about her child: again and again about the child, but never, not with one word, about her own childhood.
Had she actually read The Case of Mary Bell (in which there was so much about her childhood), I finally asked her. In 1981, a year after her release from prison, she said, by now living under a different name, she had signed on for courses at a College of Higher Education in West Yorkshire she refers to it as ‘the uni’ and it was in the library there that a student she knew, walking by with a book, had asked her whether she’d read it.
“It’s so sad,” the girl had said, ‘so sad what they did to that little girl Mary Bell. ” After that, Mary had read, ‘not all of it, just bits’, she said.
“It just wasn’t a bit like my mother had said. I couldn’t believe that there had been somebody who’d felt compassion for me. My mother had always said nobody did, nobody could, because I was so bad … such a shaming thing in her life. When I was released she said I was never to tell anybody that she was my mother, that she couldn’t live with the shame of it and she introduced me to her pub pals as her sister, and at other times her cousin.” She wanted now to talk about it all, she said, but even more, she wanted help in thinking about it all: she called it ‘setting the record straight’.
I asked her what there was to set straight. Was she claiming that she had been unjustly convicted? She shook her head. Not that, she said, manifestly unable to go into it any further then. It was almost five hours later by now. We had had sandwiches for lunch and unending cups of coffee and tea and she looked pale and very tired.
“It wasn’t that … simple,” she said.
“I want to talk about the way it happened the way it was done … and and … you know, go over the record of it, for myself. How could it have happened? How did I become such a child?”
Did she realize, I asked her, that such a book was bound to be controversial? That people were bound to think she did it for money?
That both of us would be accused of insensitivity towards the two little victims’ families by bringing their dreadful tragedy back into the limelight and, almost inevitably, of sensationalism, because of some of the material the book would have to contain? Above all, did she understand that readers would not stand for any suggestion of possible mitigation for her crimes? And had she faced the reality that if she did collaborate in such a book, it would expose her to renewed onslaughts by the media if they found her?
In the months to come her ability to ponder for long moments over questions she was asked would become very familiar. On such occasions she would sit very still, her hands slightly curled, almost in a meditative position, with a curious inward look on her face. I would never get tired of observing this effort at concentration, this visible seeking inside herself, not for a ‘proper’ answer, as one might suspect and I did at first that day but for something that was meaningful, both to herself and me.
It was the question about Martin Brown’s and Brian Howe’s families she replied to first. She had hurt them so much, she said, she really didn’t want to hurt them more . and suddenly she was crying.
“But… but… there are things they don’t know … it won’t change anything for them, I know, but still…”
What sort of things? I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Just things …” It was obvious that helping her to organize her thoughts and bringing out whatever it was she wanted to say would, as I always suspected, require the right environment, carefully structured conversations, and, above all, time.
The continuous media interest, she said a little later, was one of the many reasons why she had come to her decision. She thought that once she had told me all her story, answered all my questions as honestly as she could, perhaps they would leave her alone.
“After all,” she smiled a little crookedly, ‘once you get through with me, there won’t be much left for anybody to ask, will there? “
I tried to disabuse her of this optimism. Newspapers, I told her, particularly the ones that had pursued her for so long, were a very different medium from a book, with a different readership, and reporters would always find questions to ask. And the money I myself would propose she receive if she decided to go ahead (hopefully to put in trust for her child), because I thought it was right as without her such a book could not be written, would be a real moral problem, not only for the media, but for the families of the dead boys and for many sensitive people.
Discussing money would later always be difficult for her. Even though she wanted it quite desperately in order to change her family’s unsettled way of life, she was very aware of the possible moral objections, and when she spoke of money, her voice stiff as she repeated arguments which were not her own, she would, unusually, sound defensive, stubborn and not quite true.
She and her partner, who has by now been her principal emotional support for eleven years, have had long periods of living a hand-to mouth existence. With Mary a notorious released prisoner on licence, hunted by the media, they have rarely been able to hold on to jobs for any length of time, and have frequently resorted to living on the state. Except for one period of several years when, living in the more prosperous South of England, both of them were in regular employment Mary’s partner has had long stretches of being out of work, and Mary herself, who has had many jobs since her release, has had to give them up after a few months or even weeks, either because the Probation Service considered the job inappropriate for her, or because she had been, or was afraid of being, recognized.
Her partner, Jim, is an interesting man. When I knew him first I found myself faintly irritated by some of his rather esoteric “New Age’ philosophies. But there are other aspects of his personality, such as his total rejection of racism of any kind, his opposition to hard drugs and alcohol and his deep belief in tolerance and family values, which are admirable. Above all, one has to recognize his steadfastness to Mary, whose neediness, lack of self-confidence and profound feelings of guilt are no doubt exhausting to live with. He is, too, I’m told by those who know, an excellent father.
But there was from the start a radical difference in their attitudes towards the money she would receive. He felt, and would tell me so quite often, that notwithstanding the crimes she had committed as a child, she was now, and had been for years, quite a ‘different person’. Given what she had suffered at the hands of ‘this crappy system’, which, he claimed, had stood still in antiquity as far as the understanding of children was concerned, whatever money she could get was neither a gift nor charity: he felt she ‘deserved’ it Mary did not feel that (nor, of course, did I) and for a long time Jim was very sceptical when she or I tried to explain the priorities for the book project which had nothing to do with money.
“Cut the crap,” was his automatic reaction, and it was an attitude to which, I realized, Mary would have been exposed and would have had to argue against almost throughout. In the course of time, though, Jim came to understand entirely the real importance of this undertaking. Furthermore, in the two years since Mary and I started this project, he has established himself in a satisfying and secure job, and is now supporting the family.
When we talked on this first occasion, what she said about the money did not seem unreasonable to me.
“I’m not going to say that I don’t want money,” she said.
“That would be dishonest: everybody wants money. But what I want most of all is a normal life. I want to get off the treadmill of social security and do work I enjoy. I want roots and a normal settled life for my child,” she repeated.
Much more than money, she said, she had come to feel she needed to talk yes, about what she had done, but also (she shook her head, slowly, another gesture, of bewilderment and often despair, that would become very familiar to me) about what had happened to her. When I suggested,
and I was to repeat this suggestion many times over the subsequent months, that a psychiatrist might be a better solution for this than talking to me for a book, I was taken aback by the vehemence of her reaction.
“No,” she said.
“No. I won’t talk to psychiatrists, I won’t. I won’t, ever.” Her voice had grown almost strident with tension.
“If you don’t want to do it, I’ll find somebody else.” She got up, brusquely.
“I’m going out to have a cigarette,” she said, and left.
Earlier that morning, I had talked at length with Pat Royston. Rather surprisingly, she had been in favour of the book project from the start. Given that her own experiences with the media on Mary’s behalf had been largely unfavorable, what was it, I asked, that made her agree with Mary’s decision to co-operate with me on this book?