Authors: Gitta Sereny
“Mrs. Bailey told me to get changed. You’re allowed to have three sets of clothes, three of everything, underwear and all. I put my jeans on.”
Did she put on the white skinny ones she’d wanted to wear before?
“No, I knew they wouldn’t suit. I put on my big baggy ones with all the patches, falling to bits. And a top with a peacock on it. When Mrs. Dixon, who had waited outside, saw me, she was horrified:
“What will people think?” she said.
“One of the assistant governors came, a Mrs. Naylor. And I was told to stand in her presence. I found we had to stand for all officers except our house officers. We were up and down ” like a pair of whore’s knickers” I heard one old dear say later. Mrs. Naylor said I would be going to Mellanby House, one of the eleven blocks in the prison, each named for a female prison reformer. Mrs. Bailey had filled out a property list which I had to sign with my name and number
774987.
Mrs. Naylor told me to repeat it several times so I wouldn’t forget it:
whenever an officer addressed you, you had to stand straight and say your name and number. “
Then a girl had come with a tray of lunch, she said.
“One plate for me, a different lot of food staff food for Mrs. Bailey. I didn’t want mine and Mrs. Bailey asked whether I wanted hers but I said, ” No thank you,” and she was absolutely astonished because I said things like please and thank you. I don’t know what they were expecting…”
New prisoners were usually taken to see the governor, Molly Morgan.
“But not me, no, she didn’t deign to meet me, not until days later.
She was going to show me right away what was what and that my life was going to be as she ordained it, when she ordained it. “
The Mellanby house officer came to get her and her “bundle” : two sheets, two blankets and a pillow-case.
“You know, with one sheet wrapped around the whole thing so that it became a bundle. We walked, it felt like miles, past all these long big blocks with hundreds of barred windows and all of them linked by huge black pipes, heating pipes they were. I later worked on those, too, when I was on ” engineers’ party”, cleaning up the sewers.
And without telling me what it was she told me I was going to the “Education Block” There were quite a few women about, walking from one place to another, and they all turned around and shouted hiya.
Later I heard that Betty had run and told everyone that I’d come, and I could hear them shout to each other: “Isn’t she tiny?” I think they meant “young” with tiny because I heard two of them saying, “She looks about twelve.” I was really insulted, you know. “
Does everybody usually know about new arrivals? I asked.
“Oh yes, they all do, but you normally arrive in shipments and are taken to houses in groups, while I … well … was brought on my own.”
Do you think that made you stand out right away?
“Well, I did anyway, you know. First of all because I was so young certainly the youngest there. And then … well, prisons are floating populations, with many people coming for short periods, months rather than years I was to find that women get sent to prison for truly ridiculous reasons which men would get a financial slap on the wrist for, that’s all. Though of course there are many there for longer.
Anybody who gets more than three years is considered an LTI [longterm inmate] and if they have over five years they are usually lifers.
There were about 500 women prisoners there and many of them would have read about me five years before, and. ” she smiled, kindly, ‘what with your book, not to speak of my mother’s outpourings in the Newcastle press and on TV, many since.”
Given how prisoners are known to feel about co-prisoners who have killed or abused children, was she made to feel that right away?
“No. Later there were some women who had children and who had done atrocious things and some … you know … wanted to turn things round on to me. But the general consensus of opinion, really throughout my time in prison, was that as I was only ten and eleven, I wasn’t a child-murderer. There were of -course child-murderers there and there was talk about them, and I’d be sitting there and somebody who’d been talking would notice I was there and turn around and say, ” Oh, I don’t mean you. Why would I think you? You were nothing but a kid yourself.
“
And that’s when I started in a way to realize what was meant when papers write “child-murderer” , and when I saw that I’d say to myself, “Oh, God, no. I wasn’t like that.” So you see, people in prison made a distinction which, as I would find out much later when there were headlines again describing me as “the child-murderer” , the media didn’t couldn’t make. “
What sprang to my mind when she said that was her immediate, instinctive reaction when Mr. Dixon had told her that she was going to prison: “But why? What have I done?” Her perception of herself unaided by anyone since the terrible events in 1968simply excluded the reality of her crimes. In these talks, however, it was essential not to contribute to the false security she had been given.
Of course, I said to her, in a literal sense, having killed two children you were, in fact, a ‘child-murderer’. Nonetheless, you accepted that distinction of being different from ‘other child-murderers’ because of your age, did you? You felt that was justified?
“It was a long, long time years, before I could think about it in terms that would allow me to answer such a question,” she said.
“At Red Bank I’d just about reached a point when I think I could have begun to face it: I think Mr. Dixon would have helped me.”
Helped you in what way?
“It’s just what I think, knowing him,” she said, ‘he must have known I needed help. He was biding his time, getting me ready to think, so to speak . at least, that’s how I see it. “
In the course of what by then was already months of talking, during which her feelings of guilt and unhappiness about the two little boys, Martin and Brian, had come up time and again, she had certainly begun to understand and accept that by the time our talks ended and before I could begin to write this book she would have to face the fact of having killed them. Her words here are understandably romanticized.
Saying that she now ‘sees’ how Mr. Dixon intended to give her the ‘help [she] needed’ is in a way her gift to this teacher she came to love.
She probably knows quite well that Mr. Dixon would never have brought her into this confrontation he avoided it, as we know, the one time when, writing the notes for Mr.
P.
” she had actually sought it. And the reason, we also now know, appears to be that he did not believe or could not bring himself to believe that she had killed the little boys. Knowing now that this is the help she should have had during those five years in Red Bank, she invests James Dixon with the intention of giving it to her that is her gift.
“But then, you see,” she went on.
“I was taken away from him before I was ready. So it never happened. So what it was … still mostly is in my mind … is unconnected flashes of horror.”
When she was finally taken to Mellanby House she remembered a yellow back door being unlocked and being led in’ there was that smell of polish again,” she said.
“They’re all potty about polish … there were those big tins, ” Cardinal Red” it was called, which you lug around and smear on everything.” The other by now predictable smell that pervaded the place was stale cabbage.
“The outer doors of all the houses are locked,” she said, ‘but inside, it’s open; they do try, you know. Miss Parker, the house officer, took me to her office, sat me down and told me the rules. There was a letter sheet for every prisoner, she said a list of people she intended to write to. I could write one letter that first day they called it a “reception letter” to tell one person on my letter sheet that I was there. After that, she said, I could write one letter a week and I would only be allowed to receive letters from people I had written to. Any others, whether they were on my letter sheet or not, would be classed as “non-entitled” Because I was a “star” prisoner [she was referring to the asterisk prisons put against the names of first offenders] and also a YP [young prisoner], I’d be allowed two visits a month. Until I was allocated a work detail, probably after one week there, I’d be on housework in Mellanby. “
She laughed.
“In the end they took me off it quicker because I kept ringing the fire bell first just by mistake, but then, when that brought all the screws running, I thought it was a great joke and did it a few more times till the girls told me to stop or I’d be put ” on report”. That was the first time I heard that expression and I couldn’t have imagined in my worst dreams what it meant till it happened to me later. But that afternoon. Miss Parker took me across the corridor from her office to a dormitory with four beds, told me to make up my bed and put my affairs in the locker, and went. So far I hadn’t seen any of the women and I was scared, really scared. I imagined them in uniforms and green aprons and big fat bellies and boobs down to their knees and covered in tattoos and hairy legs. Well.
I had a surprise coming. But then, they told me later, they had too:
God knows what they thought I’d be like.
“It was four forty-five or so when they came in from work, in twos and threes. And that’s when I found out how and why Mellanby had been designated the ” Education Block”. I realized very quickly it was a real joke. Because I was coming, and at sixteen by law should still have been in full-time education, they’d apparently scurried around the day before and moved anyone who could string a sentence together into this block. What they ended up with were a few who had been there in the first place, nothing to do with being ” educated” or ” educable”, and then about a dozen other girls, mostly in for smoking dope or, I don’t know, doing something foolish with a car or something, were moved in. They were all from areas where children are privately educated: St. John’s Wood or Knightsbridge in London, or that something-belt on the Thames where people own those large houses.
There were a couple of Lady So-and-sos and other girls with posh voices, some really, really beautiful. “
Is that what you mostly remember?
“From that first afternoon, yes, because I had been so frightened and found that there were after all human beings there.”
The ‘posh’ girls?
“Well,” she said, her voice a little defensive, “I liked it when people spoke properly. I like it still. That’s what I learned in Red Bank, you know. It had been … well … become my life. It was just oh, a relief that afternoon to find they weren’t all… rough. I’m not trying to mislead you. That was just a few of them … It just helped me, those first hours.”
Mary is particularly conscious of, and embarrassed about, her partiality for middleclass language and standards. She is conscious because she has been subjected at highly sensitive ages eleven and sixteen to a series of extreme social upheavals which, occurring by force and not by choice, increased her recognition of class and social divisions. She is embarrassed because she is both intellectually and emotionally aware of these divisions and therefore not only does not wish to be considered presumptuous by those who naturally belong to this social category, but also realizes that her preference for middleclass mores alienates her further from her blood relatives above all her siblings to whom, against all odds, she would like to be close.
The next-youngest inmate in Mellanby was twenty-two, she said, and the average age was thirty-plus.
“Geriatric for me, though I have to say most of them didn’t look it. All the women were referred to, and referred to each other, as ” the girls”: ” the girls” in the workroom, ” the girls” on the gardening] party and so on. Women in their sixties and seventies were the ” old girls”. But yes, I’d say the average age was thirtyish: to them I was just a child and I think most of them felt sorry for me. I was offered ” rollies” [home-made cigarettes] and advice and told to keep my nose clean.
“Tea [supper] was served in the kitchen on wooden tables which I was to find had to be scrubbed every day till they were white. People are put on cooking shifts and each block does their own cooking though there was an overseer, at my time it was Mrs. Carr, ” Noddy” to us because she wore that big hat. She was a cordon bleu cook and God only knows why she chose to waste her talent teaching cookery classes in a prison. It was certainly wasted on me when I landed there for a very short time. It was soon evident to everybody that I was an anti-talent in the kitchen: the porridge I made could have been used to plaster walls; even the boiled eggs sprouted white lumps like fungi. I produced nothing but disasters.
“At nine o’clock we were searched and prepared for bed, lights went out at a quarter to ten. For the first night or two I was in the downstairs dormitory where there was an officer sitting just outside the room all night because, you see, the doors weren’t locked. There were bars, but the inner doors weren’t locked. You could get up and go to the loo without asking permission, you know. I didn’t wet the bed the first night because I didn’t sleep. I had candy-striped pyjamas and I lay on my bed staring through the barred windows and up at the sky, thinking of everyone at Red Bank. I had a horrible gutted feeling in my stomach. I thought it couldn’t be real, this couldn’t be happening. I remember I was crying, with tears rolling down my face, and I couldn’t stop and my pillow got all wet and someone whispered, ” You’ll be all right. ” And then I decided that I wouldn’t let it happen. I would tell the governor the next day when I saw her that I couldn’t … I just couldn’t live with all these women and that I wanted to go back to Red Bank.
“I’d heard a lot about the governor already,” she said.
“Women talk all the time, you know, and there are just three subjects of conversation: the nick and stuff about other women; the nick and gossip about staff; and a long time after that, and only when you have friends who trust you home, and their private lives.
“About the governor, I’d heard she was a monster; that, above all, she didn’t like ” pretty little things”; that the prisoner was always guilty. I was told she always met new prisoners, but she hadn’t met me and it made me very nervous because I didn’t know why. It made me very nervous about meeting her.”