Authors: Gitta Sereny
She wasn’t to meet the governor for another three days, but on the Saturday, two days after she arrived, her mother had come to visit her.
Were you glad she’d come? I asked.
“I can’t remember what I felt. In all those years I never felt… just one thing about her coming to see me. And I’d seen her a month before in Red Bank. I … I always worried how she … how she was and how she would be, you know? I was told to go … they had a sort of classroom or something in another block and that’s where she was waiting for me. And it was embarrassing, you know, really, really embarrassing.
“My baby!” she screamed.
“My baby,” and sobbing, she pulled at me, trying . God . to get me to sit on her knees. She wasn’t really crying you know, she just sobbed for Mrs. Sissons who supervised the visit, just as she had regularly sobbed for the staff at Red Bank. And Mrs. Sissons got extremely upset at seeing this young mum so upset and she told her that it was all wrong and that I shouldn’t be there and then she even said that to me. She meant well, but she didn’t know my mother, who then went, of course, and repeated that to everybody in Newcastle. God only knows what other “grim” tales she told about me in prison. She only stayed for half an hour. That’s all she stayed, you know, and I said nothing and she saw nothing and nobody. She no doubt felt she was an authority on Styal after that, or perhaps on all of HM’s prisons or whatever. But at least, as far as I knew, that first time she didn’t give interviews or go on TV about it.
The next time she came she did and that was awful for me, just awful.
“
Didn’t your mother ask you how you were? How you felt?
“No, she didn’t. She never did. She just complained about her own life and, worrying me to death, about her health, always her health, but on that day I was just as glad she didn’t ask anything because I was very unhappy, just incredibly sad, and I didn’t … I just didn’t want to talk to her.
“Even that first day after I arrived, I began to have this feeling of I don’t know how to put it… hopelessness? No, it’s not the right word. It wasn’t that or just that. You see, there were people I knew there of course Betty Blue, who was going around the place saying she’d known me since she was a kid and anyone says anything about me, she’d punch their brains out, you know. And she was telling the screws about my dad and everything. But then, too, there were sisters of some of the boys, you know, at Red Bank … it all seemed so … so … pat…”
Pat?
“Yes, you know, there were the sisters, and over at Red Bank there were the brothers, and I remembered my dad in that horrible prison, and here was I, and it just seemed that this was where everybody had to end up”
You mean it felt inevitable?
“Yes, yes, as if nothing could have prevented my being there, or their being there. And if nothing could have prevented it, what was the use of anything? And I knew nothing about my brother or the girls, nobody told me nothing. God, how were they?
“Those first days in Styal,” she said, “I heard more horrors than I thought ever existed. They pointed out an old lady to me and they said it was Mary Scorse, who’d been sentenced to hang for murder when she was twenty-six in the 1940s and was already in the death cell when she was found to have TH, and they came to tell her that the MO had found her unfit to swing. By the time I saw her, with her glasses slipping down her nose and gloves on for gardening, she’d done twenty-odd years and somebody says, ” Oh, she is on the murderers’ block and you’ll be ending up with them,” and then they went on, this one had done this, and that one that, and I got really frightened. Later, of course, I understood that the stories were horrendously out of proportion:
anybody who was new got them served up. In fact, all the girls who became my friends were first-time offenders, almost all of them with horrible domestic troubles, with long records of broken jaws and having unborn babies kicked out of them. How some of them ended up in prison I’ll never know. They’d taken it all, time and again, but when abusing
them was no longer enough for their husbands or whatever and they started on the child or the kids and she hauled out and killed the bastard, she gets life imprisonment. Women’s prisons are full full, I tell you with women like that and among them many who, rather than have their children grow up with a mother in prison for life for killing their father, they allow the kids they love . the only thing they love . to be adopted and give up seeing them and after that there is nothing in their lives. “
It was on Sunday afternoon Mary heard her name and number called out and the order “Governor’. ” Usually when you are called on report,” she said, ‘you go to her office or you appear before her in the adjudication room as they call it, at Bleak [the punishment block], and all that was going to happen to me countless times. But on that day she just had me brought to her while she was on her rounds. I had this image of her you know, of a ghastly … like a hippo in a dress.
Well, to be honest she wasn’t like I thought. I mean, well, she was very young, her face was young. The first thing she said to me was:
“What’s your number?” Of course I’d been so nervous I had forgotten that rule.
“All right, 774987,” she said, “you call me Ma’am or Madam.” And then she said, “I suppose you were expecting a red carpet, the way Mr. Dixon came on in here?” I said, “How long will I be here?
They told me only the governor will know. ” And she laughed and said, ” I don’t know, come back in four years and ask me the same question.
“
I said, “But in four years I’ll be twenty,” and she said, “Yes, positively decrepit.”
“And then she said: ” Get it into your head that your Mr. Dixon doesn’t have control any longer over what happens to you. You are in a different place now . And don’t bother to sweep the floor with your eye-lashes,” she said, ” it won’t work with me. ” And that was that. If there was anything I could be sure about, it was that God knows for what reason Molly Morgan disliked me intensely and, very unusual for me, and really for no reason at all, I found myself strongly returning that dislike. It was instantaneous and I knew from that moment on that there would be there was already a private war between us. In the years that followed she tried her utmost to break me and of course, on the face of it, I was always on the losing side.
How could I not be? But I wasn’t, really. I think at times this battle between us was the only thing that kept me going. I wasn’t going to let her thwarted sense of justice beat me into the ground, so in a way she served a purpose. “
Her ‘battle’ with the governor became one of the two focuses of her life, certainly for the first two years, during which rebellion became her only purpose, and resistance to rules her only weapon. The other means by which she could assert her individuality, rather than to allow it to ‘sink’, as she puts it, into the prison quagmire of compliance, was her sexuality. After spending her early adolescence in a male environment, where to all intents and purposes she adapted herself to being as much of a boy as possible, she only discovered how to exert her female sexuality in prison.
Had she hated Styal in those first weeks?
“No,” she said, “I didn’t hate it. It was just really strange, you know, being with all women. It was just so strange. There was a lot more noise. I noticed that women argued rather than being physical when they were angry. You see, boys don’t argue, they punch each other. There were tough young characters at Red Bank, and yes, there were outbreaks of violence, but when things were building up, they had to get in the gym with boxing-gloves and box the lives out of each other with Queensberry rules. That doesn’t mean there weren’t times when people threw chairs or whatever, but at the end of the day it was how you yourself felt, and because Mr. Dixon was what he was, and the staff were what they were, you felt pretty shitty because it was letting yourself down more than them. And always, always, however you behaved, whatever you did, you were talked to and with, and never at.
You knew you were part of something, something you wanted to be in step with: grown-up people who cared about you.
“But at Styal, well, the POs certainly were not there to care for you:
they were there to contain you. And if you wanted to have a life, you either submitted to the system, or you fought it. I learnt very quickly that the more one was in opposition, the better one felt. At least that’s how it became for me and already was for many of the younger women who became my friends. But women’s prisons, I’m sure men’s too, are full of anger; prisoners are angry people. And in women’s prisons, anger, fury, dislike was expressed in words, in shouts, in vulgarity if you like. The rarest thing I saw that very quickly was quiet. And one thing one never did was physically attack another woman. And I had to learn this the hard way.
“Just a few days after I got there, I had an argument with another girl about something absolutely ridiculous, I can’t remember what, and she swore at me which in Red Bank was absolutely taboo and so I punched her and to my total amazement she burst into tears. I mean I hadn’t hurt her, and I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just emphasizing that I wasn’t to be sworn at.
“She was about twenty, I think, a doctor’s daughter. She went flying back on the chair and starts crying and I just sort of laughed, God, and the other ladies looked at me, tut tut tut tut. And I just could not believe it. I could not get my head around it that there was all this disapproval. For me, this was just incredible, I mean, not something I knew how to deal with. What I had been used to was that if you hit out in anger or fury or whatever, well then, that’s that. I mean that would be the end of it. I mean it’s like a physical reaction instead of finding words to say, ” Don’t swear at me, don’t call me names. ” But if it can’t be physical … at least that’s what I felt then anger remains there however much shouting there is. It’s, like, in the air, the atmosphere, and it goes on for ever. This was an awful discovery to make.”
But was there no other discovery? I asked. You were so young and pretty. Did none of the women want to touch you? Was there no offer of tenderness?
“Yes, there was one girl whose father was something high in the police in London. She was very much part of the seventies crowd, very glam, sort of Carnaby Street girl, really beautiful, about five foot seven inches, with long blonde hair and she’d go on, ” Everything’s OK, babe.
You’ll be all right, babe,” and always stroking my hair, ” Oh you, you’re only a baby. ” I used to get really embarrassed and say, ” I’m not a baby,” which of course made me sound like a baby, right?
And she had a friend in another block who really ought to have been a man . who looked very much like a young man . and I was told that that was a relationship. And of course I saw very soon that there were many such relationships and how important a part they are of life in prison the only form, you know, of non-aggressive contact. This is especially for women who were used to not just to a regular sex life, but to . oh, just being-living and sleeping with a partner.
Of course such women and let’s face it, that’s most women are going to need and to seek a continuity of life. I understood quite soon that it wasn’t just sex. In the case of the older ladies you know there are some there really old there was a Greek lady there of eighty doing a ten-year sentence they just needed a cuddle. I mean, feelings, longings, needs don’t die because you are in prison. In fact, to be honest, they are intensified. I mean there really isn’t anything to think about there except. well. feelings. “
You mean sex? I said.
“Yeah, but more … more.”
You knew all about homosexuality from Red Bank, didn’t you?
“Well, yes. But they didn’t there, you know, they couldn’t. It was just… Oh, some of the lads would say about somebody, ” Oh, he’s a poof. ” or they’d say one to the other,” she put on a campy voice, “Ooh, I like the colour of that jacket…” I mean, they’d talk it, but the way the system was run there they couldn’t do it. I mean no two boys were ever even allowed to be alone together; only one boy could go to the toilet at a time, and always with a member of staff nearby.
When it was time for showers, they all went and the staff were there all the time. ” She laughed.
“Of course, they masturbated,” she laughed again.
“All the time, and joked about it; you know, significant remarks, winks, silly words like ” wank-wank”. But with Mr. Dixon there, with his navy experience, nobody weaker could be put in the position of having anything forced upon them as happened in other places. He looked out for them. People were very safe at Red Bank.”
Did that mean she felt women in prison were not safe?
“I don’t even mean that,” she said.
“I don’t think anybody forced anybody into anything sexual at Styal. It just went on all the time How could it not go on all the time when there were all these … well yes, women, but I really mean adult and sexual human beings together?”
Whether they actively engaged in lesbian sex was very much a matter of age, she said, and the prisoners’ hierarchy.
“You see, you have the lifers, and in many ways they are at the top of the hierarchy, in the sense of running the workshops. It makes them very important because it means they control what people earn in the workshops you are not paid by time but by piece. If you get across these old lifers, they can just make you redo a piece indefinitely. It can get very bad. When I came to Styal, most of them lived together in the lifers’ block when I went there first that was Barker’s and I later got put there for a while-and in that block they lived like it was … well, their home for ever, you know. They had privileges, like their own rooms, their own bedspreads, and upholstered furniture. That is their life and they really identified more with the prison officers than other prisoners…”
Did many prisoners have affairs with prison officers? I asked.
“There was some, but not many at all, basically because women can’t keep their mouths shut and that would be fatal for POsit would end their careers.”
Later she heard that while she was in Styal there had been a big write-up in the press about lesbian protection rackets and rapes there.