Authors: Gitta Sereny
“But…” she shrugged, ‘somehow, a few weeks later, without anything being said, she was back again. ” It seemed, then, and until her mother’s death twenty-three years later, that neither of them could ever quite let the other go.
It is impossible to say now how much these visits contributed to the problems Mary began to experience around this time with the onset of puberty. She says that sex instruction was part of the curriculum and that ‘no great mystery was made of it’. Nonetheless, adolescent girls have very different emotional and practical needs than boys. For the non-teaching part of the children’s care, the staff was divided into groups.
“There was always a female member of staff in each group,” Ben G. said.
“May related particularly well to the house staff. They had good chats about gutsy things.” But Carole saw this differently.
“I
wouldn’t have batted an eyelid talking to a girl, you know, in a contemporary manner, but in fact it was frowned upon,” she said.
“I
honestly don’t think anybody specifically talked to May about “female” things. “
Mary doesn’t remember, for example, any specific instruction about menstruation.
“That’s right,” Carole said.
“It was quite an old fashioned attitude. You know. Miss Hemmings will have got her Kotex or whatever and put it in her drawer wrapped in brown paper, and even though May doesn’t remember it, will probably have told her how to dispose of them. But now that I think about it, the fact of being with boys all the time may well have affected May in the sense that she didn’t ask questions, of me, either, when otherwise she might have.”
“In a way,” Ben added then, ‘perhaps because she was more often than not the only girl, there was a permanent underlying awareness of this.
By the time I came, which was, of course, after that incident with that housemaster, men didn’t ever go into the so-called “female wing” except in pairs; that was a rule Mr. Dixon made following that incident and also, from that moment on, there were always two duty officers at night. “
Not long after Mary’s first request to James Dixon to stop her mother’s visits in the spring of 1970 a very strange thing happened to me. I received an anonymous letter with a Newcastle postmark enclosing a poem. In the three-line note that accompanied it, the sender claimed that it was a poem Mary had written and sent to her mother and the note ended: “Sister Cath has seen it.”
I immediately telephoned Betty’s sister, Cath, who confirmed that she had indeed seen the poem and that Betty had told her it was Mary’s.
But she hadn’t sent it to me, she said, and she couldn’t think who had. As far as she knew, nobody except herself and Betty had seen it.
Although I am certain now that it was Betty who sent the poem, neither I nor anyone else who saw it then had any reason to doubt that Mary had written it. I, as well as the psychiatrists I was in contact with throughout the research for my first book, found it not only an extraordinary poem for a thirteen-year-old, but considered it a very important step in Mary’s development, and I said so in The Case of Mary Bell.
When Mary and I had talked for the first time in 1995, months before we started to work together, she mentioned that she had been told about ‘a poem’, but claimed firmly that she didn’t know anything about it. When I realized later that she had actually never read all, or even much of the book, I gave her the poem to read:
“MAM’
I know that in my heart From you once was not apart My love for you grows More each day.
When you visit me mam Id weep once, your away I look into your, eyes. So Blue and th eyre very sad, you try to be very cheery But I know you think Im Bad so Bad though I really don’t know. If you feel the same, and treat it as a silly game.
A child who has made criminal fame Please mam put my tiny mind at ease tell Judge and Jury on your knees they will LISTEN to your cry of PLEAS THE GUILTY ONE IS you not me.
I sorry IT HAS TO BE THIS WAY Well both cry and you will go away to other gates were you are free locked up in prison cells, Your famley are wee.
these last words I speak, on behalf of dad P . and me tell them you are guilty Please, so then mam,“ll1 be free. Daughter
“No, no, no …” she said, sounding distraught even while reading it.
“I never … My God, I never wrote that. It’s hers … She will have When she died, you know, there was a lot of stuff in her drawers, rambling poems and letters … I read through them … well, it did
* See the facsimile in Appendix 1.
give me an insight into her . or what she thought I was feeling, you know. I wondered . How did she write these things? What was she trying to write? From me to her, from her to . anybody, or to herself. what was it? In this one, quite aside from the handwriting, which anybody familiar with hers would recognize right away [although Cath hadn’t], there is a sort of. Scottishness, isn’t there? You know, the word “wee” for “small” , I would never use that. ” And then she added, with a degree of derision, ” And the spelling, and all this rhyming, dadedadeda, same, game, fame, ease, knees, pleas, it’s just as rubbishy as all her poems. There was once a letter published in a paper I was supposed to have written and I got to see it, I can’t remember how. And my English teacher saw it and laughed out loud:
“That’s supposed to be from you?” he said.
“Nonsense.” He would have had my guts for garters if I’d written like that. “
It had never occurred to me, I told Mary, that Betty could have written the poem. But what was most important was that if it had not been Mary who had written it, but her mother, who had then felt moved to send it to me, then it would have been a huge admission on her mother’s part of her guilt, and her own cry for help. Didn’t Mary agree with that?
“Well, yes, but it’s not what she ever said to me, you know. To me she only said for all those years that what she had to hide from the world was being my mother. That that was what dragged her through the gutter bearing her cross of Calgary [sic]. She’d say: ” Jesus was only nailed to the cross, I’m being hammered. ” She’d write these strange, strange letters to me. Mr. Dixon would call me in, and rather than just handing them to me as was usually done with post after it had been censored, he read them to me. Later I realized that that was because he found them so disturbing. They were all about ” the Lady of Sorrows will watch over you with St. Jude, the saint for hopeless cases . ” and that sort of stuff.
“It’s pathetic,” she said, suddenly sounding angry, ‘that people would believe that I wrote this. I mean, anything I wrote was censored, and everything I received was censored and signed by the censor. How could I have written this without it being noticed and then discussed with me? Mr. Dixon discussed everything with me. Why wasn’t it analysed? You know, why wasn’t the handwriting analysed? “
I said that as no one except her Aunt Cath had seen it until I published it in my book, it would never have occurred to anybody to doubt that Mary had written it if her mother said she had, unless they were suspicious to start out with.
“Well, isn’t that pathetic, too?” she asked.
“How? How was it possible…” she asked once again, in a mixture of anger and helplessness, ‘that they . you know . the social services and all these clever people, knew nothing about me . about her . ?
Within weeks of receiving the copy of this poem, which for the next twenty-six years I believed had been written by Mary, I learned of the next disturbing event in her life. On an early evening in the spring of 1970, Mary told her latest counsellor. Miss X. ” whom I was told she particularly liked, that during the weekend just past one of the house masters had indecently assaulted her.
Now the subject of paedophilia is very familiar to us. We have become shockingly accustomed to hearing or reading about lurid discoveries of children who have been hurt and damaged by members of their families, by teachers, and most particularly by so-called ‘carers’ in children’s homes and institutions. But even as recently as 1970 the phenomenon was not familiar, and where known about was kept secret.
Mary spoke to me for two whole days about her experience with the housemaster. When I had heard the story in 1970, I hadn’t believed every detail, but now, so many years later, when her account was almost identical, I believe that in essence she spoke the truth.
She had barely had anything to do with Mr.
Y.
when it had all started, she told me.
Had she liked him when she met him?
“I didn’t like or dislike him. He seemed OK.”
It had been shortly after she’d met him, she said, that he had been on after-lunch rest duty and (as the children had to do) she rang the bell to go to the toilet.
“We were not allowed [to stay there] alone. The duty staff had to wait for us,” she said.
“And I was … well, sitting there … when I heard him ask from outside whether I’d started my periods. I was ..” really surprised and I said, “God, no, I don’t want to have periods.” And he says, like, “It won’t be very long before you do,” and then he says, “Have you started growing pubic hair?” Well, I giggled you know, but I became . sort of curious . I now think I felt that he was. ” and she went into a long and confused explanation of how a child can recognize what she called ‘a nonce’ - a word she applies to a man who is sexually attracted to children.
Later that afternoon, she and another ‘lifer’, a fifteen-year-old boy, D. ” were in the greenhouse, planting seeds.
“He had killed. I can’t remember exactly what had happened, but he was thirteen then, and not overly bright. When I knew him, he was nice, you know, mild and inoffensive.” She had by then, she said, been quite aware of ‘boy and boy or boy and girl stuff,” and had seen boys ‘fool around together, kissing and such, you know’. But nobody had ever bothered her.
“He was totally not interested anyway,” she said about D. “I think in girls or boys either.”
Were you interested in him that way, I asked, and she laughed:
“God, no,” she said.
“I was just a tomboy. That afternoon I was interested in gardening, and so was he.”
Mr.
Y.
had begun talking to them ‘in a funny way: “When you plant the seed trays and you’ve got your fingers like this,” he said, sticking his finger into the earth, it was, he says to the boy, you know, “like if you’re giving someone a good poke,” and he looked at me and then back at him and said, “I bet you’ve never done that to a girl in your life,” and D. blushed and I felt myself blushing too. ” (As my work over the years has made me unhappily familiar with the manners and vocabulary of paedophiles, Mary’s account became eerily authentic here.) She had stood up then, she said, and Mr. Y. had pushed against her and she could feel he had an erection. How did she know about erections? I asked.
“Well, I was living with all those boys,” she said.
“I’d seen them and I’d heard them talk about ” hard-ons”, jokingly you know, but we had sex education, too. It wasn’t, you know, treated as a great mystery…”
When Mr.
Y.
‘rubbed against’ you, did you pull away? Did you mind?
She laughed: “No, I didn’t. I think I thought it was funny.”
The boy D. had been sitting ‘underneath a trestle and he could see what was happening. Mr.
Y.
then went out saying, “I’ll leave you alone now for five minutes,” which was special, because we were never supposed to be alone with just one other person [another child]. “
And after the housemaster had gone, she said, she’d felt, “I suppose, excited, and I could see D. was, too. So I said, ” You’ve got one on, haven’t you? ” And I sort of challenged him, you know. I said, ” You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” sort of thing, so he took it out and there was …” she laughed, ‘a mix of his jeans and my dungarees, which of course I couldn’t take off, you know, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do because Mr.
Y.
would be back any moment, but I said he could put his hand down there and he did but it didn’t make me feel . well, what I thought I ought to feel, so I just helped him to masturbate. “
She knew all about masturbating, did she? And she laughed: “God, yes.
I was living with twenty-two adolescent boys. What do you think they talked about?
“But then,” she continued, “Mr. Y. came back and right away made some scathing remark to me about playing with little boys and, with a wink, what I needed was ” a good stiff telling-off sort of thing”.”
D.
had never tried anything again, or spoken of it, she said.
“We weren’t attracted to each other, you know. All the boys were too accessible, I think, and they knew Mr. Dixon would slaughter them if they bothered me that way.”
But later, as she got older, was she never attracted by any of this changing boy population?
“There were some on the other units I liked, you know, boys at the approved school,” she said.
“I watched them out of the windows. There was one. I thought he looked just like Paul Newman. I fell in love with him. I’d watch him six times a day when he walked past and I died a thousand deaths … But you know, it was puppy love, like being in love with Donny Osmond, not really ” sexual”. I felt quite inadequate as a female, even when I got to be sixteen, because I was always just like a boy dressed in baggy trousers and baggy tops. Only on Sundays and when I had visitors I had to wear a dress, you know, ” dress appropriately” as Mr. Dixon would say.”
It was during a rest period the following weekend that Mr.
Y.
came to her room.
Did he knock on the door? I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“He unlocked it.”
But you were a girl. Didn’t they ever knock?
“They could see through the observation glass what I was doing, and I had no choice in the matter: if someone was coming in, they were coming in. Some were OK. They’d call out to warn me ” Are you decent? “
What were you doing when Mr.
Y.
came in?
“I was reading the Jackie magazine. And he took it out of my hands and handed me a book and said, ” You ought to read this instead, it’s more interesting. ” And he sort of flipped it open, pointed to the pictures, said he’d be back, and then he left. It was just a pornographic book, full of pictures .,. you know what I mean? It was called Oral Love. I only read a bit of it, but…” she smiled and that sudden smile which so often preceded or followed a revelation was always a surprise.