Authors: Gitta Sereny
“She didn’t know who I was and asked me whether I knew where she could find the railway tickets and money [which the Children’s Department provided] for the trip to Lancashire,” Mr. Roycroft told me at the time.
“We had been trying to get her to go and see Mary for some time and she had always refused. I told her, yes, I knew where it was and that I’d get it for her.” When he came back, he sat down next to Betty and asked whether she knew what train to catch and about a place to stay.
“She said that she’d heard there was a train at noon and that she didn’t want to stay overnight but would come back on the night train. I asked her how she now felt about Mary and whether she was looking forward to seeing her and the unit,” he said. And then, he said, Betty Bell burst into tears and told him about being ‘on the game’. Then, ‘crying even more, she said she sometimes wondered whether she had harmed Mary, whether she was to blame. She was particularly disturbed about “the speciality she was known for” as she put it, saying that the police had picked her up many times and warned her. This “got around” , she said and a lot more people came to her for “it” ” After she had referred to this ‘speciality’ several times, Mr. Roycroft finally asked her what it was. ’” I whip them,” she said, and added quickly, ” I always hid the whips from the kids. “
The unit’s staff, who knew nothing about Betty’s background, were apparently quite curious to see Mary’s mother.
“Mary was to await her mother in her room but got impatient and came downstairs,” one of the counsellors told me.
“When her mother arrived, Mary ran towards her and embraced and kissed her. Later they sat in the library, with Mary on Betty’s lap, and they both cried.”
Other family members came to see her: “My Auntie Cath came about six times over the years,” Mary told me.
“And she brought my little cousin. I have photos showing me teaching him to swim in the pool. He remembers it, too. My Auntie Audrey never came, but Uncle Peter [her husband] came once. My dad’s mum came once, and my gran [Betty’s mother], whom I loved most of all, came as well, once with my mother, and once on her own, all the way from Glasgow though she was so old and frail by then. She stayed overnight that time and I was so happy to see her. But my Uncle Philip [Betty’s brother] never came, never a card, not even for my birthday. And Auntie Isa never came either. Her baby died of leukaemia not long after I was sent away and my mother told me Isa blamed me; that it was God’s vengeance on the family for my being such a bad person. When I was, oh I don’t know, maybe eight or nine, Auntie Isa was expecting her first baby and she let me feel it move in her tummy. I never forgot about that. It was special. She was special for me. So I was just devastated to think she blamed me for the second baby’s dying. And then much later I heard it wasn’t true. She had never blamed me.”
For several years Betty would now be Mary’s most regular visitor.
Until the middle of April 1970 she came once or twice a month, and one of Mary’s teachers would confirm what Dr. Dewi Jones had told me.
“May looked forward to the visits but she was always unsettled afterwards,” the teacher said.
“She’d become surly to adults and aggressive to the other children, in a way regressing to the way she had behaved towards children, never to adults in the beginning months: fighting, using bad language, lying, biting, scratching. And she cheated at games and when told one didn’t do that replied that she could.” With Betty, too, Mary was never left alone. The staff felt that Betty was putting on an act.
“She ” played” at being a mother,” another teacher said.
“May once said she didn’t think Betty was her mother ” She just isn’t like a mother,” she said.”
“I remember the first time she came to see me,” Mary told me, ‘she brought me a lamp, a sort of lantern, you know, the little brass kind of thing with a torch in it you get in gift shops? Because of course I wouldn’t have been allowed to have a candle. But I chucked it back at her. Practically from the moment she came she’d been telling me about her aches and pains and how terrible her life was I knew she meant by comparison to mine. She was sitting there and I knew, I really knew she was trying to make me feel sorry for her. She did it at the trial, and now she was doing it again, you know, a year later. I really resented her then, probably because I believed her. I thought it had to be all my fault. The visit was stopped very quickly. She told Mr. Dixon that day not ever to leave me alone with her, that she was frightened she was going to kill me. “
How did you know Betty had said that to Mr. Dixon?
“She said it, right there, in front of the duty staff, she’d rather kill me than see me in there. I don’t think that was the point. I mean, she knew she couldn’t kill me: we were never left alone. Much later I understood that seeing how I was surrounded with … you know, middleclass adults, educated people, she must have been terrified of what I was going to come out with. More often than not when she was with me, she talked to the duty staff rather than me. Anyway, she was always very aware of their presence and she didn’t really have anything to say to me, did she?
She couldn’t talk to me about my dad, because they’d split up. She couldn’t tell me about my brother and sisters, whom I really wanted to hear about and see, because she’d left them and never saw them any more. She did bring her boyfriend, whom I made myself dislike, though later she was married to him by then we became really good friends. He was twelve years younger than she was, a really good guy, hardworking, honest as the day is long, and incredibly loyal to her for years, even after they got divorced and he remarried. ” (This positive description of Betty’s last husband was confirmed by Pat Royston, and he himself in a way proved his enduring loyalty when he told Mary, who asked him to talk to me about the years he had known Betty, that he would never speak about her to anyone.) Quite a few of her mother’s visits to see her at Red Bank were stopped, Mary told me, because both of them became upset.
“I used to get knots in my stomach, you know…” Mary said.
“She started to get upset and I thought it was me and I thought it would be better …”
Were you always upset after she left? I asked.
“Yes, because she would tell me how sad she was, about how she was always writing to the prime minister, and not to worry, she’d get me out. And I would ask about S. and K. [Mary’s sisters] and she would say I’m the only one that matters, ” I’ve got enough on my plate because of what happened to you. I can’t look after the others. ” So I thought that was my fault too that the kids had no mum!”
Did Billy ever talk to you about her giving up the other children? I asked her.
“No,” she said.
“He just said they’d split up.”
Did he ever talk about her?
“No, my father never involved me in the … he tried to make it as simple and clear-cut as he could, as people just splitting up, you know. And he said that my mother was a very nervous person, not very strong, and that she had a breakdown and so, you know, it was better for her to be away from us so she could go off on her fancy trips … He never questioned me, you know, he never sort of asked me … things like my mother did … ” Who do you love most? “
Did he talk to you about the other children?
“Yes, he would just say different things, you know, how they were doing, how they were getting on.”
I told her that when I’d spoken to Billy back in 1969 he’d not been very forthcoming.
“Well,” she said, slightly defensively, ‘he spoke to Mr.
G.
” he spoke to Mr. Dixon. I don’t know, with you he was probably gob-smacked, not knowing what to say.”
“I think what annoyed Mr. Dixon,” said Ben G. “
“I mean what he was really very concerned about was that there was a very obvious controlling factor in the relationship between May and her mother. She used May. I remember one visit when, after her mum had gone, I asked May whether she had enjoyed the visit, and she said, ” Yes, I’ve been writing her some poems. ” And I said, ” That’s nice,” and she said, ” Not really. She’ll only use them on gravestones and greeting-cards. ” I asked her what she meant and she said, ” Oh, she sells them,” and implied that her mother had directed her in what to write.” From her arrival at Red Bank, and throughout her detention, Betty would offer information and stories about Mary to tabloid newspapers.
Ben’s memory here, of Mary at twelve, and her bitterness about the use her mother made of her and her notoriety, was in sharp contrast to Carole’s impression of Mary’s feelings two years later. I had asked whether Mary spoke to her about her family and Carole said yes, but mostly about her grandmother.
“She loved her gran. About her mother,” she said, “I think in some respects she may have fabricated a relationship for my benefit which didn’t exist. Her mum used to come and it was like a fantasy of an entourage, you know, a big visit.
There were never any negative stories about her mother like what Ben just quoted her saying. It was like a romantic illusion mum this and mum that, and that she loved, just loved, her mum. And all this time we knew that Mr. Dixon was very worried about her visiting. “
From what these two young teachers had observed then, though differently at different ages, it seemed that while James Dixon’s intuition told him to cut off the visits altogether (as Dr. Dewi Jones had recommended from the start), his lack of knowledge about her background, and therefore his inability really to evaluate the dangers, combined with his strong conventional sense of fairness, made anything more than occasional intervention impossible.
How would you have felt, I asked Mary, if Mr. Dixon had stopped your mother’s visits altogether? She pondered for a long time.
“I don’t know,” she finally said.
“I was always very confused about my feelings for her. You see, she was very pretty … even Mrs. R. lone of her teachers] always said how pretty she was and what lovely legs she had and all that, and it pleased me, made me feel proud, you know. At the same time…” She stopped.
“I want to be careful,” she said then, ‘because perhaps I’m saying this now, with my feelings now, which are so different. Still, no, I think it’s true that even then I always had a slight . a vague sense of discomfort about her after a while, something I couldn’t and didn’t even think to identify, you know, in the pit of my stomach. But often, often when she sat there, I felt, “Oh no, I don’t want her here. She isn’t… like … a mother …”
Did you ever try to talk to her about what you had done?
“I tried once,” Mary said.
“It was soon after I got to Red Bank. I said, ” What did I do? Why did I do it? ” And she said in that hard voice she often had, ” I don’t want to know. Don’t talk about it. Don’t ever talk about it to no one. ” And she’d only been there a minute and a half and she got up and, she didn’t walk, she ran … ran out of the room with her blonde wig flying out of the building, and I didn’t see her then for months.”
And you never tried again? I asked her. “No,” she said.
“I just shut She slammed the door and then I shut it [inside myself] tight.”
In the spring of 1970, Mary was allowed to visit her father in prison.
“And she came,” Mary said, ‘and it was the day it had been arranged for me to go and see my dad. [Mary was almost incapable of referring to her mother as Mum, or Mam, or Betty; even ‘my mother’ was rare. It was almost always ‘she’. ] So I says to her, “Right, I have to go, because I’m going to see my dad,” and she said like I had to choose between him and her. I said all right and that I
chose my dad. I don’t know if she got a shock when I chose him, but she should have taken that opportunity to cut out. That’s what she was looking for all the time. After that I told Mr. Dixon that I didn’t want to see my mother again. They wrote and asked her to stop her visits. “
It is not clear whether this request was made before Mary’s visit to her father or afterwards, as a result of seeing him. The visit, though arranged with the best of intentions, turned out to be ill advised. In the early hours of the next morning, the special unit’s night watchman called the housemaster on duty and told him that Mary was lying on her bed, crying bitterly.
“Old Tom,” Mary remembered.
“That’s what we called the night-watchman who made rounds every half-hour. There was a night duty roster for staff, and right on top of the stairs was a sleeping-in room where, during his shift, at night, and our after-lunch rest, the duty officer was on call.”
“She was inconsolable,” this teacher told me some months afterwards. ‘ “I saw my dad in that place…” she sobbed.
“It isn’t a nice place at all…” I finally got really worried about her,” the teacher said, ‘and called Mr. Dixon. He came over in his pyjamas and sat with her for more than two hours. He finally got her to go back to sleep. She’ll do anything for Mr. Dixon.”
Of course, your dad had been in prison many times, I said to Mary, but that was the first time you’d ever seen him in there, wasn’t it? It must have been a terrible shock.
“He’d lost a lot of weight,” she said, sounding desolate even now at the memory.
“And when I remarked on it, he joked-as he would you know, we are very alike in that, we always try to joke. He said it was because he wasn’t getting his brown ale. I asked I don’t know why what do you eat with? And he joked again, and said: ” Bloody chopsticks, what do you think? ” He was really in there trying to make me feel better, but you know, it was a really old prison, Ribbleton, Preston, an ancient building, and it was all so sad …”
It is unlikely that Mary hasn’t learned since that Billy had on that occasion committed a more serious offence than his usual small burglaries. But in her enduring affection for him she still tried to embellish it, to make it sound less bad, and to present him as a ‘protector’ of others, and thus a victim, rather than a perpetrator.
“He got eighteen months, I think,” she said, ‘for withholding information. I think he served nine of them. “
Red Bank confirmed to me at the time that Mary had asked for her mother not to be allowed to visit her, but this restriction never lasted long. The record shows that, with a few exceptions, Betty saw Mary at least once a month between the summer of 1971 and Christmas 1972. “Altogether I think I asked three times that she shouldn’t come,” Mary said.