Authors: Gitta Sereny
“In this whole story about her last day,” Ben said, ‘she seems to be telescoping her memories. My friend Jeff was there in 1972 la year earlier]. He gave her those presents that Christmas; he left in early
‘73. “
“A lot of the boys came in before they turned in,” Mary said, ‘and they all gave me presents, too. I cried a lot, every time anybody looked at me, because they were all saying incredibly nice things to me. , “I stayed up all night. They tried to get me to rest, but I couldn’t.
And much later Mr. Dixon and Miss Hemmings came and told me what I was to wear and I said please, no, because I had these really white jeans called “skinners” I wanted to wear. But he said no way, I was to wear my navy-and-white dress and navy-and-white T-bar shoes. And I said they’ll all laugh at me, they’ll be there with fags hanging out of their mouths and bleached blonde hair and roots showing through . And he said, “What difference does it make to you? Would you rather be covered in tattoos to be accepted? No,” he said, “you have your standards. You can relate to a dustman or to a duke.”
So what happened?
She laughed.
“I wore the dress …”
Carole G. was on duty the afternoon and evening of Mary’s last day at Red Bank, Ben was off.
“But he came over to say goodbye.”
“Yes,” Ben said to Carole, ‘and you were packing all that stuff, her things and her presents, and she said that she needed something to put it all in so I found a brown suitcase for her, with a key. And I told her we’d put it in the store-room but she’d have the key. “
“Miss Hemmings was distraught,” Carole remembered.
“She couldn’t cope with any of it. In fact she was driving us absolutely spare because she kept walking up with the same things, and then seeing May and me she’d walk away with the clothes in her hand and then come back again, to and fro. This packing went on for a long time. And then at one point Jim Dixon came to me with tears in his eyes and he said, out of May’s hearing, ” Let her think you are packing them for her to take, but she can’t take anything. ” She could only take a small bag. So after that I was left with the task of packing this child’s life away, five years of her life. Later we went to the cookery room and made cocoa. I got her to go to bed and I put a mattress on the floor next to her and lay down there. But she didn’t sleep and I didn’t either; we talked. And at one point she talked about prison and she whispered, ” You’ve no idea what it’s like,” and she cried. I think she thought of me as very innocent. Of course, I had a good idea what it would be like, and when we’d heard those rumours [about Mary being transferred] a couple of weeks before, Ben and I had wondered how, after the nurturing for freedom … yes … freedom she had received at Red Bank, we could prepare her for life in prison. We couldn’t think how it could be done, even if there had been time. But anyway, we didn’t believe it could come to that.”
“In the morning Miss Hemmings made me have a bath,” Mary said, ‘and she packed for me and I came down . I don’t think I had breakfast. I chose the hymn. ” She half-sang, half-recited it for me:
“… Wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died …” And then Mr. Dixon sat and gave a very nice talk, praising me, and the loss it meant to have me go. And he told from the beginning about me walking in the door and the things we’d been through together . I cracked up and everybody else did, too. And then I was taken to prison. “
part three november 1973 to may 1980
setback sty al 1973
They had left Red Bank mid-morning. Mr. and Mrs. Dixon took her, Mary said, and Mr.
P.
followed in his car.
“I looked back as we drove out,” she said, ‘and there were faces at every window, the boys, the staff, and everybody waving to me from behind the glass. My friends. “
“It’s funny that May remembers it like that obviously because that’s how she needs to remember it,” Carole G. said, ‘because actually, and I know that sounds dramatic, but no one was allowed to go and wave her off. “
Why would that have been decided? I asked. It seemed normal enough that her friends, with whom she had lived for so long, should wave her goodbye, at least through the closed windows.
“I’m not sure why Jim decided that. Perhaps precisely because for him it was such a huge thing to lose her, and yet kids routinely left Red Bank all the time. Perhaps he wanted to avoid her being given the sort of send-off that no one else would have. I don’t know, but certainly his big thing was that no one should see her off and everyone should stay inside. That said, perhaps there were some boys who went to the windows anyway and waved and she, turning around in the car, saw it as ” everybody”.”
Mary thought it was about a two-hour trip from Lancashire to Styal prison in Cheshire (but as usual, her timing was way out: it is, in fact, much less). “I really don’t remember much about the trip,” she said, and repeated the fears that had accompanied her to Red Bank.
What was uppermost in her mind, as usual, was the fear that she 198 / prison would wet the bed.
“And when Mr. Dixon said we were getting thereto sort of prepare me, you know-I leaned forward and whispered to Mrs. Dixon about it and she says, ” Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out. “
“Somehow,” Mary said, “I didn’t sort of believe that we were actually driving to a prison. But suddenly we turned a corner and there was this monstrosity, HM Styal prison, the most Godforsaken place on earth it was like stepping back in time. It was huge, you know, just huge:
it isn’t one house, but four rows of massive old Victorian-type red-brick buildings. When the gate was opened I could see bars right away on windows and doors; and I saw prison officers, oh God, with keys”
The staff at Red Bank carried keys too, didn’t they?
“Oh yes, but not visibly, not sort of demonstrating it, you know.
These prison officers carried them round on chains and they rattled with every step they took.
“The guard at the gate, a man, said something, I didn’t know what, to Mr. Dixon, and he had to drive round till we got to a … oh … huge red building in black sort of tiles. I expect it looks different to visitors, but to me it was … so forbidding.”
Were there gardens?
“Yes, there were, between the blocks, and I did notice that right away. Of course, it was November so it was bare, but in the spring there were flowers, vegetables, and later there were big plastic hothouses … I know, because I helped build them. It was a lot more open than Red Bank because it was so big: to go from A to B you had to go outside the building, even if it was to go on governor’s call-up or for a medical.”
Mr. Dixon, she said, went to see the deputy governor.
“Mr. P. went off to recce the place. In the end I couldn’t see either of them to say goodbye. Later I heard they were furious about it and made a row. Mrs. Dixon came into reception with me. What struck me most was how high the ceiling was, the walls painted that horrible institutional green, and then that silence, you know, hollow, sort of echoing, almost.
“They told me to strip off, which I was going to find happened all the time in prison: if they suspect you of owning what you shouldn’t own, of having drugs, illegal letters, or even for anything that smacked of disobedience, humiliation is the game. Mrs. Dixon said, ” Is there a real need for that? ” and they said, ” This is a prison, you know,” and told her to leave while I was searched and weighed and she got quite upset. All I was thinking about was what if Mrs. Dixon didn’t have the chance to warn them and I then wet the bed. I barely saw her again either. I think they [the Dixons] were made to feel very uncomfortable and were told to leave.”
“They came back very soon,” Carole G. remembered.
“Styal isn’t that far away. I know Jim came in and sat for a while and said, ” Well, that’s it. ” He was broken up about losing her. He just sat there, looking awful. He died a year and a half afterwards and to be honest we always thought that losing the battle for her affected his health.”
There can be little doubt that this transfer was destructive for Mary.
The success of her moral re-education at Red Bank was almost entirely due to the love she had felt for and received from Mr. Dixon. In ignoring both his proposed solution, and the recommendations of Dr. Westbury, whose opinion the Home Office had sought, the slow growing-up process which with the help of interested teachers she had just begun was brutally interrupted. The carefully constructed security and her developing intellectual ambition were replaced by immersion in an all-female penal community where Mary, now the youngest prisoner in a world of isolated women, would regress entirely. Not only would she be used emotionally as well as sexually as a fresh young girl, but also, and perhaps this was worst of all, she would be treated by her fellow prisoners as a child, not responsible for her crimes.
Although there are exceptions the best-known experiments taking place in California and Scandinavia-prisons are rarely benign places. They don’t have the time or the staff or the financial means to educate or encourage prisoners. And the prison system on the whole does not promote the consideration of prisoners as individuals. The attitude of individual prisons depends largely on the personality of the governors and wardens, and inmates are there, at worst to be punished, and at best to be contained as compliantly or (if necessary through medication) as passively as possible for the duration of their sentence. There are, as Mary was to demonstrate time and time again in her account, many kinds of prison officers: some with hardly any specialist training, others (whom she says the inmates may dislike, but respect) who have served in the police or the army and have greater understanding of the problems of communal life and the proper ways of enforcing discipline. But irrespective of where they come from and how they have been trained, it is, as she said repeatedly, the personalities of individual prison officers and how they choose to impose them on the prison community, that determine the quality of the inmates’ lives.
But there was a strange dichotomy in her reaction to her seven years of prison life. For although she remembered them, and even found a strange enjoyment in recalling them in vivid detail, she seemed to have retained them in her memory as a long string of emotionally linked experiments she provoked or had with other women, rather than as a sequence of cumulative experiences that have contributed to the development of her personality and her life as it is now.
By the time we got to Styal we had talked for just over two months, and except for the actual killing of the two children which she couldn’t face until almost the end of our talks she had managed to lend a totally unexpected degree of shape and form to the telling of each part of her life. She could never remember exact dates, or seasons, or even her own age, but she nearly always knew who was in her life at which point, and almost precisely which experiences followed which. It was as if her memory functioned in a long series of steps, over which it hardly faltered, each one representing a batch of days, weeks, months, even years, which she described to me in images, like a collection of photographs, more or less in sequence.
But this did not apply to her account of prison. Given that she had seemed exceptionally positive about talking about it, and indeed, weeks before we got there repeatedly expressed her longing to tell me about it, I was entirely unprepared for the psychological void I found in her about those years. Except for a few graphic descriptions of specific events, her years there were conveyed to me in a stream of consciousness mode without form or chronology. I have twenty tapes about this period, almost two hundred pages of transcript, and much of the time it sounds as if two voices are talking: one in half-thoughts and unfinished sentences, jumping back and forth, often angrily, across months and years from impression to impression; the other much more lucid and thoughtful, suddenly describing a hitherto unmentioned occasion, the quotes and personality sketches of the people involved so witty and sharp, so present, that one almost forgets that the occasion has no connection with what went before it or will follow.
They are certainly highly emotional memories, but only a few are of deliberate brutality to her, and many are gentle, even loving, with Mary’s two best qualities, compassion and humour, running through them. But as the days went by and words upon words rained down without commas, paragraphs or full stops, what I came to realize was that she revelled in-not talking, but chatting about Styal, as if chat was a verbal reflection of the essential aimlessness of prison life.
(What was easiest for you to talk about? I asked her a few months after our talks ended. And she laughed briefly.
“Oh, you know it, prison,” she said in that low voice of hers, and repeated it with a note almost of tenderness, “Oh yes, prison.” )
“Mrs. Bailey was the reception officer when I arrived,” she said.
“Later she was my house officer and I called her Ma Bailey she was an ex-service lady, a northern woman, you know, and the most humane of the lot. I really got to like her. Even that first day she was all right, you know and I finally told her about the bedwetting and she said it didn’t matter: ” There’s a lot of people like that here. ” And she looked at me and said, ” I think you’d better have some dinner, lass, you look like you could do with some feeding up . ” And then it blew me over-suddenly there was somebody behind me speaking Geordie.
‘ “God, I’d recognize you anywhere,” the voice said.
“You’re Billy
Bell’s lass, aren’t you? I know yer da well, we drink in the same pub.
I’m Betty. Remember me? “
“And I did remember her. They used to call her Betty Blue and she was a sort of singer.
‘“I’m doing five years but me time’s nearly up now,” she said.
“You’re doing LIMP [Her Majesty’s pleasure], so you’re a lifer; you’ll be on five block where I am. Don’t worry, pet, you’ll be all right here, just keep yer nose clean.”
“And Mrs. Bailey said, ” Right, that’s enough gabbing, Betty. Off you go,” and she breezed out. But that was such a comfort to me. I had expected everybody to be … Oh I don’t know, rough women like I’d seen some of in my life, but here she was, and she was Betty the singer from Newcastle, and she knew my dad.