Authors: Gitta Sereny
“The first thing I remember when the blanket came off was the smell of urine and cabbage. Now I know that it is a prison smell, but then I didn’t. There were reception officers with a prison officer in charge and I went through the procedure all prisoners go through: I was stripped and searched. No, there wasn’t a doctor, no medical. I’d had lots of medicals before. There was a concrete slab. Standing around after being hosed down … was sort of like … I don’t know:
not me, not May, not real, not happening . You know, that strange echo of gates slamming and keys turning, one off, one on, one off, one on, and the shouting, it was something . sounds . I knew of, but. “
Knew of perhaps from TV films?
“Perhaps. I can’t remember what I felt.”
You must have been very tired?
“I don’t remember. My clothes were taken away and I stood around in some kind of green prison apron-type wrap-around thing which of course would fit most people but which on me was twice my size, and it trailed on the floor, so they had to give me my own clothes back.”
And your underclothes?
“I’m not sure. I seem to remember wearing a night-gown. They kept mentioning the governor. There were quite a few people there, I remember being surrounded by people. I think they were curious. I asked what the governor was and they said she was the head of the place and was deciding what was happening with me. I was sent to the hospital wing, which was just a cell with a bed, and I couldn’t get on it because it was too high up. It was just a bare cell and someone came and looked through the spy hole and I jumped up, or rather down, like a foot baller bumping my head on the rim of the bed, and I spat through the spy hole Everything was green: the walls, the corridor had been, too; the cell had nothing except the bed and a plastic floormat…”
Was there a loo?
“No, a plastic chamber-pot.”
No sink?
“No. They’d take me out for ablutions twice a day. There was a very old, old-fashioned shower and little soap tablets, Windsor soap it was called, two inches long, like hotel soap. But I’d never had a shower in my life. It felt sort of clean, nice.
“The governor came to see me, I don’t remember when, but I think the first morning, and she was a very kind lady with a kind face and wasn’t in uniform. She seemed very old to me I now think she was probably under fifty, but that was old to me. She told me that I had to drink a pint of milk a day, that it was the rule for young offenders, and that I had to be sure to drink it and did I like milk?
So I said I quite liked it and I told her about my dog and she came back just a little later and gave me a photograph of her dog, also an Alsatian, but I can’t remember her name . “
The dog’s?
She laughed, “No, the lady’s. She also said I was entitled to write two letters a week but that I wouldn’t be allowed to mix with other prisoners. I asked her how long I would be there and she said she didn’t know, but not long.”
Did you tell her that you thought you were going to be hanged?
“I can’t remember how I put it, but I remember she told me I wouldn’t be hanged. There wasn’t any arrangement for school, you know, and she said the regulations were I had to have schooling. So she … the governor … was lumbered with me for about an hour a day. She would sort of read and write with me. I’d read to her. I remember that she brought me a book. Black Beauty, and except for when I stole my mother’s book and was beaten black and blue when she found out, that was the first whole book I’d ever read. I loved it. She tried to find out what parts interested me and I read it out loud to her. I could read quite well and she said so, too. She apologized because I had to stay locked in my cell.”
Her mother’s ‘book’ was very vivid in Mary’s mind throughout our talks. She had always thought of it, she told me, as “Mam’s book’, and it was her mother’s most precious and carefully guarded possession.
“She could sit for hours with it on her lap, sort of hugging it,” Mary said.
“I was so curious about it when I was small, I hurt.” By the age of eleven she had, of course, succeeded repeatedly in satisfying her curiosity and had read it from cover to cover. At the trial it was rumoured that the ‘book’ was a bible, and that Mary was fascinated by the list of dead family members glued to the inside cover. But in fact neither the Bible nor a real book it was a folder, about the size of an A4 page but a foot or more thick, which Betty’s father had won in a raffle. As Mary had put it to me about her mother: “It contained her life. It was all kinds of things she cut out, but also things she wrote, letters and poems. It was full of pictures, too, of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, crucifixes, and people leaning over graves. It also had pop-up pictures … I think it was a Grimms’ fairy tale her father had given her and when she started that book, she put it in that thick folder … She always had this huge thing with her wherever she went or lived … I don’t even know how she managed to lift it or hold it, it was so heavy,” Mary said.
“And at home she hid it. Of course, I always found it and used to look at it when she went out. I was fascinated with the pop-out pictures and read the fairy tale and other bits of it, poems to her father … you wouldn’t believe it … love poems to her father^ and obituaries, and locks of hair…”
(The rumours about the record of dead relatives were apparently true:
I was told by one of Betty’s sisters in 1970 that she kept a list on the inside cover of people in the family who had died.
“The book had lots of Betty’s drawings in it from when we were children,” said her sister Isa.
“They were always of religious things,” she said.
“She always drew nuns, and altars, and graves and cemeteries.”
“Betty was that religious and good,” her mother Mrs. McC. added, ‘always with the saints’ pictures and rosaries all over the place. We all thought she was going to be a nun. “) What kind of hair was it, I asked Mary. Children’s hair?
“Oh no … I’m sure they were my gran dad I think now he was the only person’ she ever loved … Anyway, when she caught me looking at it that first time, she picked me up by my hair and shook me and shook me, I thought my head would come off. And then, eight years ago [1988], when I briefly stayed with her, I saw the book again. And now it was even more massively thick and she had countless cuttings in it, about me. It was … it was so sad. And then, when she died, the book just wasn’t there. Everybody looked for it I think we thought her will would be in there, too. Anyway, it had gone. Perhaps she burned it before she died.”
Even during the stressful period of remand and trial Mary quite easily took a liking to people, but certainly the one she spoke of with real pleasure was this governor at Low Newton whose name she never knew.
“Yes, I really did like her,” she said, ‘but I can’t remember what she looked like . I just have a vague image in my mind, quite blurred, I don’t know why. “
So Low Newton is not such a bad memory?
“That’s true,” she said.
“Funny, isn’t it? Because of her, I think.
But also, even though I was locked in and couldn’t be with other people, it felt. I don’t know how to say it. like as if there was a purpose to it, as if I was going somewhere. “
The being alone was like a purpose? Or the potential going somewhere?
“Both, perhaps? The governor, and the prison officers, kept talking about my being transferred, moved on, and being moved on didn’t mean to me like moving house or sideways … it meant something forward.
And I got used to the sounds . the keys, the orders . and in the night, the light was out and I was alone but not frightened. I felt more free in Low Newton than perhaps ever, I don’t know why. I’d shout a lot, sing, kick the doors, generally be a damned nuisance. They’d tell me off but not roughly you know well, they didn’t have any other children there, did they? And now, thinking about it in retrospect, specially the governor, you know, I think they were . how can one say it. uncomfortable with it? Well, wouldn’t you be? I would, if I were a prison governor or officer. I used to do handstands in the cell. There was an exercise square and they’d take me out there for about fifteen minutes every day, and I had to walk around it, by myself, just walk, not run. I don’t know how long I was there. I don’t think I know how long I was anywhere. But it was before Christmas when I was moved on to Cumberlow Lodge, so it couldn’t have been that long, less than two weeks I suppose. “
Cumberlow Lodge, a short-term remand home with high-security provisions in outer London, was used as an assessment and classifying centre where young female offenders could be observed by a large qualified staff and psychiatrists before being sent to suitable institutions. When Mary arrived there about a week before Christmas 1968, the youngest detainee by four years as she would be practically everywhere she was sent the Home Office still had no idea what to do with her and the problem would continue after Christmas.
“There was conference after conference about her,” one of the people who attended many of these meetings told me at the time.
“Nobody could think what to do.”
Again Mary retained some memories of her stay there.
“The couple who ran it were Mr. and Mrs. Hart,” she said.
“Mr. Hart reminded me of David Niven … but I only remember bits about that time … four, five weeks, wasn’t it? It’s very blurred in my mind. I was put in a separate unit with four girls, which meant that much of our time was spent together in a fairly small room. They were all a lot older than me and they could all smoke after each meal. I thought that was brilliant. And there was greenery outside, you know, not walls. I remember, my first morning there, I looked out of the window they were locked and had security glass, but there were no bars like in prison I saw squirrels, and there was a tennis court; I tried once to play. We were very supervised and at night we were locked in separate rooms and I hated that, I don’t know why. I remember I behaved appallingly. One other girl was fourteen or fifteen, I think, and she and I had to have a tutor who would be there from about ten to about four trying to teach us, all in that one room. I can’t remember what or how she taught. I think I wasn’t taking much notice. I wouldn’t sit down. I was like a monkey. I think now that part of it was that there were no restraints, no lines to cross, nobody was punished or disciplined. Now I know, of course, that that was the method, how they were observing us. But I don’t think it can have been right. I only know for myself that it was … I don’t know, it put my back up. I remember Mr. Hart, who was nice you know, trying to speak to me a couple of times, but of course it was useless. I was like … I don’t know … frantic, I suppose. I’m sure I needed nothing so much as boundaries, and there weren’t any.”
Though she was exceptionally provocative and difficult throughout her six weeks or so in Cumberlow Lodge, she was met as I was told later by one of the girls who had been there at the same time ‘with nothing but compassion from the other girls. We all knew who she was,” this girl told me, ‘but we hadn’t somehow realized how young she was, how small. Most of the girls there were, you know,
between late fifteen and seventeen, with all kinds of quite serious problems more family and personality conflicts than criminality, really. And the ethos of the place was to treat us as far as possible as grown-ups. It was a good way for us, but not for her. She really didn’t fit in there at all. She was not . oh . personally aggressive, you know. I honestly don’t think she would have dared, we were all so big by comparison. She was just dreadfully naughty, somehow as if she was bursting with need or needs or whatever. I remember one girl in my unit she was very clever and did A-level psychology later saying once to Mr. Hart, “Why don’t you just give her a spanking? She just wants to be stopped, that’s all, and no talking to her will do it.” And Mr. Hart saying that that was quite true, but as we knew perfectly well, talking was all he could do. To be honest, even though we had been horrified about the killing of the little boys, I think most of us got to be sorry for her. “
In retrospect Mary seemed to agree with the older girls’ descriptions.
“I think the teacher we had was a psychiatrist, and I wonder what she can have learned about me, or anybody, under those conditions?
Nothing, I bet,” she said.
“But they made a big effort about Christmas. Everybody joined up, it seemed like hundreds of girls, and after Christmas dinner with paper hats on, they had presents for everybody. I remember feeling all right that day. I was one of many and nobody was bothered.”
Did you get a present?
“Yes, I think I got a doll.”
Any presents from home?
“I can’t remember. I don’t know if everything that arrived was just sort of pooled. I really don’t know. I got taken back upstairs after dinner and locked in, but I felt better.
“It wasn’t long after Christmas, my mother came to see me. Her face was all swollen. She said she had a toothache. It was her pattern. She always had something, or said she had something, that would make me be sorry for her, or guilty about her.”
Were you glad to see her?
“I can’t really remember. Mr. Hart was there all the time and she said to him and to me, angry you know that here she had come all that way and she felt she was being observed and she told him she didn’t like it. She didn’t stay long at all.” As often happened when Mary was speaking about the past, she had fallen back into Geordie, and her voice sounded oddly sad.
Did she tell you again not to talk to psychiatrists? I asked.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think now she would have said that with anybody there you know. She’d said it again when I saw her that last day in Newcastle you know, something about their getting into my head, like she did before, but I only remembered that much later … I didn’t really hear anything anybody said that day.”
And when psychiatrists like Professor Gibbens saw you at Cumberlow Lodge, did you remember that then?
She nodded.
“I don’t think I talked to any of them said anything really after that. I didn’t have nothing to say you know. It was years before I said anything … even in Red Bank, even to Mr. Dixon.”