Authors: Gitta Sereny
“Don’t worry about it,” she said once.
“I’m used to it: lots of the boys have that problem.” It was . like in Rothbury . fit] made me feel easier, you know. “
“Miss Hemmings, the ” housemother”, was a special type of person,” Carole G. said.
“On the outside, the unsmiling battle-axe, but she had a heart of gold underneath and was a tower of strength for the kids.”
Did she like Mary? I asked.
“Much more than like, she adored her she became the child she’d never had. What one is apt to forget,” she said, ‘is just how young and how well. small. May was. For Miss Hemmings, who’d of course never had a little girl to care for there, it must have been a real shock when she saw her first. “
If most of Mary’s memories of her years in Red Bank have a decidedly rosy glow, she becomes almost poetic when she speaks about James Dixon, quoting him almost verbatim she claims as addressing these children in his care with deliberate formality and largely in naval officer’s terms.
“It is how he talked,” she said.
“I couldn’t forget, ever.”
That first day, at the morning assembly after breakfast and the daily PT - “After a couple of years,” she said, laughing, ‘when I . you know . developed, I was excused from PT’ he had formally introduced her to the boys.
“He said: ” As you can see we have a new member among us, of the more delicate sort of species. I know you’ll treat her with respect as she will you. Her name’s May and that’s all you need to know. “
Had the boys known why she was there? I asked.
“Oh yes,” she answered.
“Everybody always somehow knew everything about everybody who came. The teachers talked to us …”
They told you about other children?
Again she was taken aback at the question which implied criticism.
“Well, yes,” she said, defensively, ‘they trusted us . well, some of us. But also, boys came and went, you know, so people came in knowing things. But nobody said anything, not to my face anyway, not until much later. “
Lessons were from 9 a. m. to 12. 45 and 2 p. m. to 4 p. m.
“The older boys did a lot more practical woodwork and metal-work. I was given some tests and put into a group of four that was mainly academic. I had a brilliant teacher for English language and literature, Mr. Shaw, but we did all subjects.
And we took exams under the supervision of the local authority.”
“May was very bright, incredibly bright really,” said Ben G. “But not so much academically: she learned through people rather than books. In books she only dipped. She is a big dipper, you know, pages here and there, but rarely chapters, not to speak of whole books.
What she did we experienced it ourselves and saw her do it with others is borrow people’s lives to develop her dream of what life should be. When she did it with you, it was very tiring “Tell me some more. Talk to me. What then? What did you do? What was it like?
Describe it. ” It was draining, but in a way we thought there was something wonderful about her always wanting to fill in the gaps.”
“Dinner-that is, lunch,” Mary continued, ‘was at 1 p. m. ” then we were locked into our rooms for a rest. Between four and five we could choose to play draughts or chess. At five was tea, the last cooked meal of the day. At six, no matter what the weather [‘in summer only’, said Ben G.] we had half an hour of swimming in the open pool belonging to the approved school. On weekends it was an hour twice a day. After swimming there was football, athletics or whatever, all organized in groups, a very tight schedule, no time for brooding. At eight it was showers, then supper of cocoa and sandwiches …”
” Did they have to dress again after showers?
She laughed.
“After I came they did. Before then, I think they could come down in pyjamas. And from eight thirty to nine, which was bedtime lights out was at nine thirty … we could see TV if there was something suitable, a documentary or sport. If there was a good film the member of staff on duty could decide we could stay up longer. I remember the landing on the moon: we were allowed to see all of that.
The staff watched it with us. Mr. Dixon said it was history in the making. “
How long was it before she knew that she’d be in Red Bank for years?
“I don’t think I ever knew,” she replied.
“Years were nothing, you know, time ran into time. The average for a boy there was five months.
There was a system of reward points through which people could get all kinds of privileges, outings, home leave and earlier release. Not me, of course, at least not for a while. “
Did Mr. Dixon encourage her to talk about the crime, about the little boys she had killed?
“No. Oh no. For years I said I’d never done it, so how could he have talked about it?”
But there was a psychiatrist who came to the unit once a week, wasn’t there? I reminded her. I met him at the time; he was a nice man, wasn’t he?
“I don’t know whether he was nice or not,” Mary said, stiffly.
“I
didn’t like any psychiatrists, but him I didn’t like at all because he used to sit there and wouldn’t say anything . “
And that made you feel uncomfortable?
“I didn’t know what he was about … I like to know where I am with people …”
What hadn’t she liked about him? I asked, and she became evasive.
“It wasn’t really that I didn’t like him, I just couldn’t relate to him. I didn’t know how I was supposed to relate to him with him just sitting there scrutinizing me. I mean, if he had asked questions, like others had done, you know, I could just have told him to fuck off, but with him not saying anything, there wasn’t really anything I could say.”
Was bad language allowed at Red Bank? I asked and she laughed, suddenly happy. She enjoyed describing Red Bank.
“Oh no,” she said.
“Not at all. You really got into trouble if you swore. You got a talking to and, of course, you could lose points. After a while I didn’t swear at all.”
To most of the boys all except for two, she said, who were in for life like she was-these reward points were very important, because after they got forty of them they got released.
“So they had something to aim for. I didn’t really except… you know what I came to feel for Mr. Dixon. And he did try to make the reward system work for me, too, within the limits of the circumstances. If I did well, I’d be allowed to pick fun classes to go to, you know, rather than my scheduled programme; and for a day or two I didn’t have to get out of bed early; and once Mr. P. took me out with his family, to see the film Wuthering Heights, and Mr. Roberts and his wife took me to see Godspell. Then there was Mr. G. he was courting Miss Jeffries they were both very young and they took me for an outing by a lake and they had a bottle of wine and they put it in the lake to cool and that was fun.”
In their essentials, Ben G. and Carole confirmed most of Mary’s Red Bank stories. It is only in the details dates, and who was who in some of her stories that her memory sometimes fails her.
“By the time I came,” Carole said, “May was fifteen and I was just twenty. It must have been quite strange for her to suddenly have somebody there well, quite feminine and close to her age, who was so obviously new to all the things that go on in such a place. She is quite right if she says we were close: it really was a fact, we were more like sisters than teacher and pupil. I let her call me by my first name, not in class of course, but when we were alone I think perhaps it wouldn’t have been allowed had it become known. Mr. Dixon was quite strict on maintaining distance. But it seemed to be important to her and I saw no harm in it.
“After I had been there for a while I was given permission to take her out. My parents had a pub nearby and I took her … well… out into my world, to meet them, and sometimes for a hair-cut, or just to sit and talk. And yes, Ben and I took her out once for a day, a picnic by the lake and later to dinner at a restaurant. She used to write to us quite often after she left and, yes, she always mentioned that picnic;
it was a special day for her. “
“But the bottle of wine she remembers cooling,” said Ben, ‘that was at the restaurant. It probably came in one of those coolers. I would never have taken alcohol to a picnic with a kid, but in a restaurant, yes, that was all right. ” He couldn’t think, he said, how she had come to imagine that bottle of wine she had so precisely described to me cooling in the lake held by a string. He shook his head.
“It just never happened.”
“But she loved that evening’s outing,” Carole said.
“She was wearing one of my dresses: we’d gone through my cupboard together and she had chosen it. It was the first time she had been in a restaurant like that, with a formally laid table, with flowers and all the cutlery and glasses. She just loved it. She asked about everything … you know what is this spoon for or that fork and how do you open a bottle?
She soaked up information like a sponge. ” And that, they said, was also the experience of other teachers who took her out.
“One day, Mr. and Mrs. Dixon and Miss Hemmings took me … just me to Blackpool,” Mary continued.
“Though I think the other two … lifers, you know … also got taken out. But there were very happy times and I really thought I was going to be all right, and I know Mr. Dixon thought so, too.”
He became a sort of grandfather figure for you, didn’t he?
“No, not family … more than that,” she said.
“When you meet someone you like, you can say you like them, but finally it isn’t that I liked him: I loved him. You don’t love anyone right away, I mean like falling in love, or loving your own child. Getting to love someone the way I loved Mr. Dixon takes time, a long time”
But given that you came to love him, didn’t you ever want to talk to him . about that ‘inkling’, that feeling you told me you had more and more as time went on, that you had done something very wrong?
She nodded. But then, as if there were two simultaneous thoughts in her, she said, “No, no. I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want him to be disappointed …”
In what?
The two times I visited Red Bank, I had been astonished to see that Mary’s room-unlike the others I was shown, most of which, aside from the odd photograph, poster and toilet articles, were comparatively bare of possessions was chock-a-block.
“She is so showered with presents from her relatives,” said Mr. Dixon, who was showing me round, ‘that we can’t give her all of them, we hold some of them back. ” There were dolls, soaps in every shape and colour, tins of talcum powder and packets of bath salts, bottles of toilet-water and scent, diaries and greeting-cards; they filled every inch of every surface of the room and were stacked up in the corners against the wall. Three-quarters of these presents, carefully arranged as if for a window display, hadn’t even been unpacked but were in their original cellophane or plastic covers.
“It’s like an exhibition, isn’t it?”
said Dr. Dewi Jones, the psychiatrist Mary now told me she hadn’t been able to relate to. And another member of the staff I met said, “She doesn’t use any of them, she just looks at them.”
“When I first met May,” Carole said, ‘she had more “stuff” than I’d ever had, and she loved her things and they were very important to her. She cared for them meticulously and she was very clean and tidy. “
“She was always having baths,” Ben said.
“She’d often go up for bed with the early group so she’d have time for a bath. I can hear [Miss] Hemmings now, banging on the door, saying, ” Come on out, come out now! “
“She’d say: ” I’m intent on having a bath tonight and I’ve got all my smellies and my bubble bath,” Carole added.
“But you see, if there was some deep psychological reason behind that business of having baths and I don’t know that there was … but anyway, we wouldn’t have known and there wasn’t anybody around there who would have.”
Dr. Dewi Jones, a young, rather thoughtful consultant from Liverpool Children’s Hospital, was convinced, even before I related to him what Mary’s family had told me, that she was blocking experiences and feelings from her childhood and needed to be helped to take issue with them if she was ever to develop into a normal adult. He didn’t think this could be done except in a kind of psychiatrically orientated environment which, he admitted, didn’t exist in Britain.
He felt that Red Bank, with its well-intentioned staff, although pleasant and even reassuring for Mary, was quite wrong for her. He confirmed that, apart from special short courses in the treatment of maladjusted children, the teachers were untrained in any kind of psychological discipline. He pointed out that before Mary arrived the staff were given a written directive on how to deal with her, but were told that her background was unimportant for them to know about. He wished he could believe, he said, that this suggestion was only made in the realization that it was pointless to give them knowledge they wouldn’t know what to do with. But he suspected it wasn’t so. The writers of the directive actually believed that a negative memory of the past which they, like so many others, no doubt conveniently reduced to a childhood of poverty and neglect: i. e. ” a class question was best overcome by a positive approach to the present. This rejection of the significance of early childhood experiences, that is, of the basic tenets of psychiatry, was, he felt (in 1970), part of the establishment dogma and deeply harmful to the care of troubled children.
Dr. Jones said his own role at the unit proved the point. He was not there to see individual children, but to attend a weekly case conference to advise the staff on problems. This meant, of course, that he was dependent on their assessments. Most of them were devoted to the children, he said, and in some instances were passionate about their jobs, but because they had little or no training in any of the therapeutic disciplines their observations were at best those of the intelligent layman, which was simply not enough when dealing with severely disturbed children.
(It is fair to say that in this particular respect there have been improvements over the past twenty-five years. There are now four special secure units in Britain dealing with severely disturbed children, of which Red Bank is one. If a child agrees to treatment, therapists are now made available to them on an individual basis. ) Dr. Jones had realized in 1970, very soon after Mary’s mother had begun to visit her, that these meetings were having an adverse effect on Mary.