Authors: Gitta Sereny
* All names of people in the public sector who have spoken for this book have been changed.
xxvi/ introduction
There are ways and ways of writing about events. One can report on them, describe them, quote the witnesses, the victims, and sometimes the heroes, of them. And although, being human, one can never hope to be entirely objective, one must do all this with a large measure of detachment. On another level of the narrative one must also comment on the events, evaluate their significance and, if one can, put them into the context of life as we live it, measure them against the rules and principles which by our choice govern our existence.
From all these perspectives, this book has been extraordinarily difficult to write. It is one thing to write, as I have done elsewhere, about men or women who, at least partly as a consequence of unhappy childhoods, became iniquitous adults. It is very different to write about a person who has committed, not once but twice, the worst of iniquities when she was a child, but who against all expectations and entirely without the props we have come to take for granted trauma therapy and psychiatric treatment appears to have become a morally aware adult.
The difficulty throughout has been to believe. It has demanded on my part a continuous review and renewal of an act of faith in the possibility of metamorphosis; that is, in the integrity of an adult who I knew at one point to have been a pathologically disturbed child, and for years afterwards an alarmingly manipulative adolescent. I was tempted time and again to look at a human being as if she were not one but two people: the child and the adult. And this is, of course, not so: she is one, as we all are, from the moment we are born to the moment we die. So when I finally realized I must deny myself that consolation, I had to accept that the mystery starts with the question of what, consciously or unconsciously, can be put into a child by another human being to produce actions entirely incompatible with the intrinsic goodness of the human being as born. Is it only a parent who can affect a child in this way, or can it be caused by the behaviour of other adults close to the child’s life? Would a child, for example, respond as powerfully if he or she were emotionally deprived or abused
by foster parents or carers? And a question introduction /xxvii brought up not only by this case, and by the more recent one of the two ten-year-old boys who killed the toddler James Bulger in Liverpool in 1993, but yet again, in March 1998, as I am finishing this book, by the two boys aged eleven and thirteen who in Jonesboro, Arkansas, carried out a massacre in their school yard killing four little girls and a teacher-is it possible for children to cause such moral breakdown in each other?
The second mystery Mary presents is how a child can react in ways that are entirely unthinkable for that same human being as an adult. And therefore what is it, inside the human mind, the nerves, the heart, that first destroys or paralyses and that can then recreate or reinstate morality and goodness? These are huge questions to seek answers to through the examination of one child’s life, but that was and remains my hope.
So the book I am presenting to you here needs to be read with all these matters in mind. There has not been a day in the two years I have worked on it when the families of the two little boys who would now have been thirty-four and thirty-three years old have not been in my mind. And there has not been a day, either, when I have not asked myself whether writing this book was the right thing to do: for those who would publish it, for those who would read it, for Mary Bell, from whom, with great difficulty and agonizingly for her, I extracted her life, for the families of the children she killed, and for her own family, above all her child, who now is her life.
There is no indiscretion in my mentioning her child, for the media, both British and foreign, who have pursued Mary Bell for years just as assiduously as she has tried to avoid them, have always known of the child’s existence. It is indeed to protect the interest of the child that she was made a ward of court almost as of the time when she was born. No one and this of course includes me may identify her, or write anything that would lead to her being identified.
So the child, whom Mary loves with every fibre of her being, and to whom she is determined to give a happy childhood, does not appear in the book, and yet she is, I think, essentially its raison d’&tre
xxviii / introduction and even its Justification. And why this is so, I hope the book will convey.
It is quite rare that a writer can remain with a story for more than half of her life, rarer still to be given the opportunity after thirty years to apply it towards a larger purpose. It might seem at first that the story itself, as a critique of the outdated nature of the British judicial system in the second half of the twentieth century is the purpose. But while the deplorable failure of successive British governments to reform the system of justice as it applies to children is of deep concern to many of us, and Mary Bell’s story, with its many tragic elements, can indeed justify a book, my purpose is wider.
It is and I have no hesitation in saying so to use Mary and her story. The understanding we gain from her memories of her childhood, of her trial and her punishment, needs to be used not only as a contribution towards the judicial reforms that are so essential in Britain, and equally in much of Europe and most of the United States where growing child criminality is resulting in increasingly punitive measures, it must also make us look very closely at the nature of the communication we maintain with our children, both within the family and in society as a whole. If I have titled this book Cries Unheard, it is because I feel that this is the explanation for those unknown thousands of children who are in prisons in Europe and America for crimes they committed, not because of what they are, but because of what, unheard when early in their childhood they cried for help, they were made to be.
newcastle upon tyne 1968
Before coming to the substance of this book, we must go back briefly to the past, to 1968, to the northern city on the River Tyne and the two little boys who died.
Today, Newcastle is relatively rich. There are new industries, new factories, new housing. Above all there are jobs. Not enough for everyone, but infinitely more than there were in 1968, when it was a decaying city brought to the brink of economic ruin by the dying mining and shipbuilding industries. Newcastle then had the doubtful distinction of the highest crime record, highest rate of alcoholism and consistently some of the highest unemployment figures of any city in Britain. And nowhere was this more evident than in Scotswood, an area of about half a square mile on a hillside three miles west of the city centre, whose streets of rundown council houses, for which the tenants paid 2. 4s a week, stretched in long terraces down towards the industrial wasteland along the River Tyne. About 17,000 people lived there then, and the unemployment rate was well over fifty per cent.
The people of Newcastle are and always were a friendly lot, even though their reactions can be explosive and their vocabulary, in fun as well as anger, pungent. They speak “Geordie’, a dialect which is virtually incomprehensible to outsiders: ‘home’, for instance, is ‘hyem’; ‘my wife’ is ‘wor lass’; ‘pretty’ is ‘canny’, but then canny can also mean ‘many’ as in ‘a canny few’. The language, one might deduce, is intimate rather than logical: when a child thinks it is going to be punished, it speaks of getting ‘wrong’ and the word The’ (he asked me) is always replaced by ‘us’. But however bewildering the dialect,
warmth and laughter is innate, and however quick the slap in 2/ newcastle UPON tyne retribution of naughtiness, there is a lot of love for children, now, just as there was in those bad times during the late sixties.
In Scotswood, two long roads, Whitehouse Road and, below it, St. Margaret’s Road, curved around the hill with a few small streets and crescents crossing them. Almost everybody in the neighbourhood knew everyone else then, and they were tolerant of each other or so it seemed to strangers. There was one small shop at the end of St. Margaret’s Road, variously referred to as “Dixon’s’ or ” Davy’s’, and nearby the Woodlands Crescent Nursery and its sand-pit, both of which were to play a part in the terrible events that spring.
The houses on the two main residential streets overlooked the railway lines, an industrial plant belonging to Vickers Armstrong, a large and straggly waste ground the children who played there called the “I’m Lizzie’, and, beyond it, the main thoroughfare of Scotswood Road, the river and, in the distance an excursion away the city.
Because the inhabitants knew each other and were therefore immediately aware of strangers, children were very free: free, even when quite young, to play in the street, roam the neighbourhood, drop in on relatives (extended families were the norm), take the dogs around the corner into the small greenery of Hodkin Park, slip over to the nursery sand-pit, or buy chips, or a lollipop, or an ice on a stick at Davy’s. Despite the financial pressures of that period and the resentments they bred against authority which only appeared either to threaten or, equally resented, to dispense charity it was a friendly, and a sociable life: endless cups of tea, chats over fences, or indeed, an almost southern European effect, from window to window and, at meal-times, calls through open doors, very swiftly obeyed, for the children to come in, “John, Ian, Kate, Brian, May, Martin yer tea.”
On 25 May 1968 Martin Brown was four years and two months old. He was a sturdy little boy, blond and blue-eyed with a round mischievous face. He lived in a two-storey red-brick terraced house at 140 St. Margaret’s Road with his mother June, whom he called “Mam’, his father, whom he called ” Georgie’, and his one-year-old sister, Linda, with whom he shared a bedroom. June’s older sister, Rita Finlay, lived with
her five children a few doors away, at number’ ll2 June worked, so her mother took care of Linda during the week, and Rita had Martin; he called her “Fita’.
That Saturday morning, as always on weekends when his parents had a lie-in, Martin brought up some milk and a piece of bread for the baby, carefully holding the cup while she chewed on the rusk.
“He always did that,” June told me later.
“I’d hear him coax her, ” Come on, Linda, drink yer milk. ” After that he dressed the baby and brought her in to June before having his own breakfast in the kitchen.
“Sugar Pops,” June said, ‘them were his favourites. He got his anorak I was in the scullery I heard him call, “I’m away, Mam. Tara, Georgie!” That was the last I saw or heard of him. “
It is unimaginable, isn’t it? But it really was the last June Brown saw or heard of her Martin. Other people saw him that morning: he stood for a while watching two workmen from the Newcastle Electricity Board disconnecting power cables from derelict houses in St. Margaret’s Road they gave him a biscuit. Rita saw him when he woke her up late that morning; he cried when she told him off.
“My mam came by while he cried and she gave him an egg on toast. I don’t remember seeing him go then we didn’t think to watch when they came and went, you know all the kids are all over the place;
Martin, everybody was his friend. “
His father, Georgie, was the next to see him, when Martin shot in just before 3 p. m. when Dixon’s shop opened to get some money off him for his lollipop. Dixon’s son Wilson scolded him because he had his fingers in his mouth and his hands were filthy when he handed him the lollipop. Rita saw him once more when he came in and asked for bread and butter. She told him the butter was for tea, he could have margarine.
“He was angry,” she told me. ‘“I’m not coming to your house bloody no more,” he said.
“I won’t come again …” But he couldn’t stay mad for long,” she said. ’” Oh, don’t be like that, Fita,” he said, and then he went and that was the last I saw of him.”
At 3. 30 p. m. ” not more than twenty minutes after Wilson Dixon had sold Martin his lollipop, three schoolboys, foraging in the derelict houses for wood to build a pigeon-cote, found him in a back bedroom of number 85 St. Margaret’s Road. He was lying on his back on the rubble-covered floor with his arms outstretched and blood and saliva coming from his mouth. There was no sign of a struggle or a fall, his clothing was not torn or damaged, there were no broken bones nor, aside from a trivial bruise on his knee, were there any external injuries. Among the rubble there were some empty pill bottles which would briefly make the police think of accidental poisoning. Gordon Collinson, one of the Electricity Board workmen, ran to call an ambulance; John Hall, one of the others, gave him the kiss of life.
There was shouting all along the street. Rita and June came running, the ambulance arrived in minutes.
“They tried to revive him,” June told me.
“I watched them, but I knew.” Martin was dead, they believed for months, because of an inexplicable accident . “All I wanted,” June said, ‘was to lie down and die too . “
Nine weeks later, on 31 July 1968, Brian Howe was three years and four months old. He had fine, curly light-blond hair, a pink-and- white complexion, and was not yet grown out of babyhood. He lived at 64 Whitehouse Road with his father, Eric, his seven-year-old brother Norman, his fourteen-year-old sister Pat, his older brother Albert, who was courting a girl called Irene, and his black-and-white dog.
Lassie. His mother had left them when he was only a year-and a-half, but between Albert and Pat, who kept house for the family when she was not at school, Irene, who often stayed with them, and Rita Finlay, whose three-year-old son John was his best friend, Brian was well cared for.
“I loved little Brian,” Rita said, ‘different like from the way I loved our Martin, but I loved him. I loved Pat too-she was always over here. I used to go and wake her up on my way to taking John to the nursery and then I’d take Brian, too . “
That morning, though, it was school holidays and nobody had answered when Rita knocked on the door of number 64. “I said to myself. Pat must be having a lie-in. The woman at the nursery asked where Brian was.”