Authors: Gitta Sereny
“It’s rubbish, utter rubbish.” she said. People did what they wanted or needed to do and of course that couldn’t be prevented. And why should it be? ” she asked.
“I myself can’t think that any affection is bad. And in prison? For God’s sake, prison staff may not be well trained, lots of things are wrong, but on the whole they are not monsters. Above all, people don’t become governors of prisons because they are stupid and anybody with a spark of intelligence knows that the relief of relationships, including sex, is essential for prisoners. Where it becomes dangerous,” she said, ‘and this is outside my personal experience though I’ve heard a lot about it happening in male prisons and youth offenders’ institutions, is when affection plays no part, or almost no part, and younger or weaker boys and men are forced into sex which then becomes nothing but a commodity and brutality. ” Oddly though, she says, this isn’t a problem in women’s prisons, though of course, emotional pressures and drugs are …”
“Don’t be funny,” she said when I asked how much of a drug problem there was in Styal.
“Everybody smokes dope; prisons are full of it.
Hard drugs? Well, it depends what you mean by it. Certainly, a lot of drugs . painkillers, tranquillizers, sleeping pills are prescribed”
On demand? I asked, and she shrugged.
“What is demand? I don’t know that there is a great difference here between demand and apparent need. People are very, very unhappy in prison, and for prison administrators, full-flared unhappiness, whether individual or in a group, is not just hard but nearly impossible to deal with. Yes, they want to keep prisoners healthy; but they also need to keep them controlled. So in the end, the handing out of pills becomes not only a question of medical judgement but, let’s face it, very often in prison one of necessity, right?”
If, however, I was asking her about drugs such as cocaine, morphine, heroin or such-like, she said they were no doubt available but, except for one time when she had tried heroin and got very sick from it, hard drugs hadn’t been part of her prison experience.
She said that in the case of most lifers, sexual activity depended on their age.
“I was to learn quite soon that the younger ones among them refused to have any relationship with anybody sentenced to less than five years. It was, as I would find out for myself, too difficult, too painful. But quite a few lifers are older, you know, quite old really.
They’d committed one crime in their whole bloody life and were sent down when they were fifty or more when they had grandchildren and everything. To them the idea of sex with a woman is really dreadful, I mean morally awful and physically repugnant. “
But certainly, she said, relationships, whether sexual or not, ruled prison life, and she had realized this very quickly, realized, too, the marked distinction in sexual identity.
“Between prisoners there was never any name-calling, though angry POs might call someone a ” bloody dyke”,” she said.
“But it was simply a fact of life that you were either a ” butch” or a ” femme” and that much more than in ordinary gay life the ” butch” was always the dominant part of such a relationship.”
Was this a frequent subject of conversation? I asked. I mean, did you get the feeling that this was what was uppermost in most women’s minds?
“Oh God yes, yes. Oh, yes.” It was so pronounced, so conspicuous, she said, that she very quickly became extremely curious about it.
“Very soon after I got there, I became aware of this woman on my block, you know, who also really did look like a boy but she’d done something wrong, I never found out what because it had happened just before I came and nobody would tell me. And for punishment she was being made [by the staff] to wear a dress, which to her was total humiliation. So one night, I can’t remember when, but I think before the end of my second week, I slipped into bed with her and I asked her: ” What do you do? ” And she was quite embarrassed and said, ” I can’t. no really . I can’t say. “
“So I asked her what kind of girls she fancied and did she fancy me. I said that I was sixteen and old enough, didn’t she think? Yeah, well, she obliged you know, but when I wanted to touch her she stopped me.
And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Because I don’t.”
‘“Don’t what?” I asked and she said she just didn’t like to be touched and later I not only realized that that was the case for most of the “butch” women, but that I came to feel this myself very strongly when I went butch. “
Was that, I asked her, because they couldn’t take tenderness, or because they wanted to be and remain the initiator and dominant partner?
“Well, they are all that, you see,” she said.
“But much more than that, they protect the hiding of their own femininity at least that’s what I found when I asked questions, and then felt when I did it myself.”
Mary had become both emotionally stirred and sexually active within two weeks of arriving at Styal. There can be no doubt whatever, and no particular surprise, that sexual feelings had been stored up in her during her last year at Red Bank. (As Ben and Carole so clearly remember, she had, they thought deliberately, put barriers between herself and the boys and attached herself increasingly to the female members of staff and to feminine activities including cooking, which, oddly enough, in Red Bank she enjoyed. ) But one thing that is important to remember is that whatever happened to her in her childhood, and then in early adolescence, she was physically intact when, four days after her arrival in Styal, she was crudely and painfully examined by an inept doctor.
She described her first encounter with the prison medical staff with some of her usual humour, but quite graphically.
“I told the Medical Officer that I was enure tic which he already knew but also that I was suffering, as I did every month, from severe period pains. I said that when that happened at Red Bank I was allowed to lie down with a hot-water bottle. Well, he said I wouldn’t get any of those creature comforts, but that I could have a pill.
“There is a contraceptive pill,” he said, “which alleviates and regulates.” And he warned me that I might not be regular in the near future because periods sometimes change or cease altogether after traumatic experiences: he meant my move to prison, I suppose. But I said, “I won’t take pills,” and he went off on how much the damned things cost and that they have to be imported from Germany, but I said I wasn’t interested. I just wasn’t into taking any chemical pills. And then he said I had to see another doctor and have an internal examination. I said, “For God’s sake, I’ve got my period. And I’ve come here from a totally secure place. I’m hardly likely to have VD or whatever.” But he said, “It’s procedure,” and he told me to strip and I said no and he said not to be silly, they could make me, so I did and put a dressing-gown on and then ran out into the corridor, but they caught me and the MO came back in and told me I was the sorriest person in the world. God only knew what was in my head, and I said, “I’m a virgin, a virgin,” and then he pushed me through the door into another room where this man yes, in a white coat. was sitting with a cup of tea dipping his biscuit disgustingly into the tea while a nurse pushed me down on a bed or something and put my legs up in stirrups. I was never so embarrassed in my life, him with his tea, me with my legs up and everything showing; it was outrageous. And then he ambled over and before I could say anything he pushed this thing into me and it was spring-loaded, you know, and it shut or opened or whatever, but it hurt like mad, and I was screaming that it hurt and the Sister, who was nice, was saying, “Now, now, now,” and he was telling me to stop being so tense and I’m saying again, “It’s hurting,” and he said he just had to take a swab and my God he pushed it in even further and then snap, I felt this sharp pain and heard this dull thud and he’d been sitting on one of those chairs with wheels on and he went back saying, “Ahhh help. Sister?” And it was she who undid it and pulled it out you know, quite slowly and carefully. “
They could at least have waited till your period was over, I said.
Didn’t you suggest that?
“I didn’t know what they were going to do. After all, I’d never had that. Anyway, I was already telling the MO I had my period and I was a virgin and begging them to do nothing to me. I wouldn’t have known what else to say. Well, anyway, that was that, wasn’t it? And I walked around afterwards as if I’d just come back from the Korean War and didn’t realize that Big Ben was a clock.”
But you knew what had happened?
“Well, yes, I suppose so, that horrible thing had snapped shut on me, but you know I just hurt and that’s all I could think of and I just went back to Mellanby and was embarrassed because I was crying. And then, really only a few days later, I fell in love.”
monotony sty al 1973 to 1975
Many of the experiences Mary would relate to me, mostly in anecdotal terms, about her first weeks and months at Styal, demonstrate the extent to which she had been emotionally and sexually unbalanced by her five years in a peer group made up almost exclusively of adolescent boys.
All her reactions to the ultra-female environment she suddenly found herself in will be familiar to any ex-boarding-school girl. The crushes, the blushes, the unspoken pursuits of older females, the trembling hands in the proximity of the adored were those of a twelve or thirteen-year-old just coming into puberty and not the sexual feelings of a sixteen-year-old growing into womanhood. The girl Mary had ‘fallen in love’ with so soon after her arrival was on a different block, a ‘butch’ girl, inevitably years older than she was: “I just loved her to bits and I couldn’t, you know … I mean she wouldn’t have and I told myself if not her then nobody, and it became sort of love from afar.”
Did it ever turn into something more than that?
“No, no.” She still sounded regretful.
“She treated me like a little sister. And I never … you know, oh God, told her, ” I love you” … I would have died. So I just arranged to be next to her whenever I could and I sort of, but never really, touched her, just sometimes brushed against her you know as if by accident. But once, just once, I saw she did like me or something, because one of the male prisoners who used to come and do chores, electric stuff or whatever, he tried to give me a letter and she intercepted it and went berserk. She was a very quiet deep sort of person but she went totally spare and wouldn’t let me have the letter”
But did she tell you why not?
“Yes, she said because it was full of filth, filthy words, filthy stuff, bloody men.”
I had always realized that the trauma of Mary’s transfer from the male environment of Red Bank to the aggressively female one of Styal had to be deeply engraved into her psyche. But it would be some time before I began to suspect that there might be a different and much wider meaning to the expressions Mary had used when talking, quite easily, about ‘butch’ sexuality. The refusal to be touched, and the wish to protect and to hide, could equally be interpreted as Mary’s own determination to protect herself; by not allowing herself to be affected in a lasting way by any sexual or other experiences;
to ‘hide’ from her emotional memory those basically mindless and therefore destructive seven years of her life.
It is of course entirely possible that I am overreaching with what inevitably must be speculation, but from what she began to tell me about her own and other prisoners’ management of their sexuality, it was clearly a part of prison life of overriding importance to her.
Many of her memories of Styal and it was these she treasured were anything but deep, and though she was never vulgar, many of her anecdotes contained a note of broad, at times quite bawdy, humour, more often than not directed against herself.
“By the time I was romantically revelling in my infatuation with Carol that was her name and imagining myself a celibate for ever more, I was actually quite eager to have a go, and after that first rather stilted attempt with the reluctant butch, I jumped into bed with another lass where again little happened. What I remember most was her saying, ” You’re too young, go away,” which was really more shaming than frustrating.
Of course, what I didn’t know, but found out soon after, was that the word was out that if anyone touched me they’d be sorted out. “
But who put the word out? I asked.
“I was never sure, but I think it was Betty Blue and her friends,” she laughed.
“You know, a sort of protective Newcastle—Scotswood mafia:
Betty because of my dad, so . even though he never knew it, my dad was protecting me as I had felt years and years ago when I was oh, about eight, that he was protecting or would protect me if I asked.
But anyway, by that time . about two weeks into my time there . I felt I knew it all, you know, and when my mother came next I told her you know, showing off. that I had had a lesbian affair and she went, “Jesus Christ, what next?” she says.
“You’re a murderer and now you’re a lesbian.”
Mary’s first work assignment, she said, had been to assist the Mellanby cook. Pat. But that, as she had told me, ended very soon by mutual agreement ‘they were quite democratic that way, ha ha,” she said ‘and I was assigned to the bottom workroom fat the southern end of the prison] where Carol was working, too.”
At this point, as had happened before, describing her childhood, or emotional moments in Red Bank, she suddenly dropped into broad Geordie, which was almost totally incomprehensible to me.
“We w’re cooping th’ ends offliprs,” she said.
You were ‘cooping’ what of what? I asked.
“Cutting,” she said, patiently, back in her Red Bank English.
“We had these big scissors and we were cutting the ends off flippers, honestly, great big black rubber things, I think they were for the police divers. There were little thin bits [of rubber] all over and we had to sort of trim them, get the bits off you know, with sharp scissors. We engineered a sort of sit-down there, because it was freezing and there was no heat, and we hadn’t even been given hot drinks and our hands froze with those bloody cold flippers, so we just stopped and sat and refused to work. The governor came and said did we know that this was called mutiny and it might have gone bad for us except that even she saw how cold it was and she told us to go to our blocks, quickly, and we made ourselves hot drinks and warmed up under blankets and by the next day the heating had been fixed.”