Authors: Gitta Sereny
“She told the governor she was ” stupid” not to see I was ill,” Mary said, ‘and I never heard the end of it. I was called in to see Molly Morgan the next morning and she was furious. I couldn’t blame her;
I could well imagine how my mother would have come on to her. “
The governor had told her that, given her mother’s ‘immaturity,
with a boyfriend in the house’, it was unlikely she would ever be released to her.
“I was really gob-smacked,” Mary said.
“I mean, I’d only just arrived … what was she talking about? But also, how dare she talk like that about my mother to me?”
Molly Morgan must have been extraordinarily angered by her encounter with Betty to allow herself such a personal and premature remark. It was based not on any real knowledge of Betty’s troubles, or of Mary’s childhood experiences with her, but on an entirely conventional disapproval (still the case in the early 1970s) of a woman cohabiting outside wedlock.
Whichever authority had supplied her with this information had no idea of the extent to which Betty’s circumstances had changed in the five years since Mary’s trial. By 1973 George, a hardworking young man with considerable business flair, had stabilized Betty’s life. He had got her to take courses in typing and accountancy and encouraged her to work with him in building up his business. She had learned to drive, and George would eventually buy her a car.
By the time Molly Morgan made her remarks, Mary, of course, knew all about these changes: “My mother told me endlessly about all she was doing and the nice house George had bought or was buying for them and ” my room” in it. I was so offended when Molly Morgan talked about her like that. Wouldn’t you have thought they [the nameless authorities] would know that George was a respectable person and that they were living a respectable life?” (George did in fact marry Betty at some point in the next few years Mary has forgotten when and it would be some time before Mary herself became aware of Betty’s increasing drinking problem, which George would find himself eventually unable to deal with and which, thirteen years later, Betty by then a full-blown alcoholic, would finally break up their relationship. )
Mary’s first real trouble came only a few weeks after her arrival at Styal when two girls asked her to help them escape. They had stolen a wrench from a workshop and needed someone strong to prise the bars open and then straighten them out once they’d gone.
“I
believed them, stupid me,” Mary said.
“I thought this was great, just like a film. I didn’t realize they were just mouth, mouth, mouth, and that nobody could escape, not that way anyway. So I helped them and then I hid the wrench and then of course they were caught and there was a tool count and everybody was called in for questioning, and although one of the girls owned up to stealing the wrench, there was still the question who hid it afterwards, and so there was no way that I could get out of it without gras sing anyone else up. So I was put on report and told I’d be taking the eight o’clock walk the next morning.”
That first punishment award was to be traumatic.
“Yes,” she guffawed, ‘that’s what they called it, an “award” “An officer came for me at eight o’clock and we walked to the bottom end of the prison. Eight o’clock is the time of morning they used to hang people and they kept the report walk to the same time. There is something sinister about that to me. I’m sure it’s meant to invoke the psychological reaction it causes, an unknown fear, a sense of foreboding which is unlike anything else certainly I have ever felt. By this time, too, I had heard so many stories about Bleak House the punishment block I was really scared.
“My first sight of Bleak was really dismal,” she said.
“It was a low, grim building, straight out of a Dickens novel, sort of crouching and decaying, surrounded by a metal fence, with bars and wire mesh on the Perspex windows. The screw with me rang a bell and then a kind of door inset within the big doors was unlocked and there was a stench of urine and disinfectant. They searched me and took my shoes off me, and then led me to a cell with a small light high up on the ceiling under a big grille which I later saw was full of dead insects and spiders which had got caught. There was nothing in the cell but a bedspring with a bottle-green rimmed metal frame, a stained plastic chamber-pot and an equally filthy plastic mug. You weren’t allowed to have anything of your own. They gave you a toothbrush and soap for ablutions and stuff to roll one cigarette after each meal.
“I couldn’t believe it could be as bad as it was,” she said, ‘but it really was. I’ve often wondered whether they’ve made any changes to it since then. I almost can’t believe they wouldn’t have. I mean, how can it be allowed?
“There was supposed to be a Gideon Bible in each cell but there wasn’t even that. The screw said they were taken away because people made obscene drawings on them.
“Your kind of art,” she said scornfully.
She said I was not to lie down on the bed, which may have been her idea of a joke because there wasn’t any blanket or sheet or anything they brought bed stuff at six in the evening and took it away at six in the morning, so all you had to sit on was the rim of the bed. The walls were full of graffiti, names, sentences, threats to the governor, the staff, but also lines from songs. By the time I left that cell fourteen days later I knew all the names, all the sentences, all the songs and lines from poems too by heart . “
Couldn’t you have requested the Bible? I asked.
“Much later, when I’d been in Bleak several times, I did,” she said.
“I said I’d read the rule-book and that I was allowed to have religious scriptures, but they just told me to shut my mouth. It was the younger POs who were the worst, really cruel and using terrible language; real little Hitlers. The principal officer at Bleak was actually quite a nice woman. She was older and had been in the services. She’d taken enough discipline to know how to dish it out.
“Oh, God, not you again,” she’d often say later when I was brought in again.
“Why don’t you give it a rest?”
“The formalities are always the same. Soon after you get there, the principal officer comes with two others, reads out your number and name and what you are on report for. Then she hands you a paper and a pencil and says that if you wish to reply you can do so by writing on the back of the paper.
“You will have every opportunity to state your case to the governor,” she says and then you sign. Not long afterwards, the MO, accompanied by a nurse, looks in, says, “Good morning, how are you?” and disappears before you can answer. That is a rule: if you are in solitary, a doctor has to see you each day. There was a bell I had been shown for “emergencies” and after a long while I rang it and a screw looked in through the spy hole and when I
asked when I could see the governor she said, “When she’s ready,” and told me not to dare to ring again.
“I think that morning was about the worst I remember. I don’t think I have ever felt so deserted in my life, either before or since. I sat on the rim of the bed and cried and wiped my face with my sleeve and couldn’t think how I could stand it.
“Hours later they took me to the adjudication room. It’s like a court in session, you know, but no defence for you. There is the governor sitting behind a table with the chief officer and a principal officer I don’t know the difference between them next to her. I had to stand barefoot I don’t know why on the edge of a mat facing them, with two officers standing in front of me, legs apart and hands behind backs, the same military way I had been told to stand. Another officer read out my number and name and the report.”
What sort of of fences got one sent to Bleak? I asked.
“Refusing to work, insolence, caught in the possession of somebody else’s things, you know, a sock or something; swapping clothes with somebody, holding hands publicly, shouting out of windows, childish, childish things …”
But it sounds so petty, so silly, why would they bother?
“I’m not sure. I sometimes thought it was almost at pre-set times, to demonstrate power when it seemed to be getting too lax.”
But it couldn’t only have been for such absurd reasons?
“No, of course not. I told you, there is a great deal of repressed anger in prisons, and sometimes something small, like disobeying a direct order because it seems unreasonable, can turn into violence.
That is when a PO will ring the aggro bell and the “heavy mob” comes running: that’s up to eight special POs whose job it is to remove prisoners as quickly and, yes, as painlessly as possible. What they do is about two of them get a hold of each limb in such a way so they don’t damage or hurt the prisoner and carry them off. “
But one can imagine this becoming necessary at times, I said to her.
Even your stories underline the anger and occasional explosion into violence. No prison administration could allow that, could they?
“That’s true. It’s only that in some prisons, and Styal at the time was one of them, it happens too often, so that one has to wonder what is wrong with the atmosphere. It had a very bad reputation among prisoners. I’ve heard women scream to go back to Durham or Holloway.
And once you are in Bleak, you really have no out: you just plead guilty, as I did, the first time and every time thereafter. What else could one do?
“That first time I couldn’t stop myself from crying. Molly Morgan told me to stop snivelling and to remember that I wasn’t in Red Bank now and she gave me the fourteen days ” behind the door” … That’s what solitary confinement is called.
“Well, that was the first of many times for me in Bleak; many times because I decided that day that I’d never let any of them see me cry again: as far as they were concerned I was going to be hard, hard to the core.”
Mary’s memory is particularly vague about the ‘dozens’ of detentions she spent in Bleak. It is not the transgressions she has forgotten, nor her feelings during the detentions, but again the precise or even approximate dates. All she knows is that the first time was within weeks of her arrival and that after three years, with a few exceptions, her visits to Bleak stopped.
“By that time,” she said, “I had learned how to play the system. Not by submitting, not that, ever, but to be in charge of myself.”
What did that mean? I asked her.
“It meant retaining my anger, but instead of expressing rebellion through childish pranks, or by screaming abuse at POs, to keep it within myself, so to speak in reserve.”
The pressure of holding her anger ‘in reserve’, as she calls it, may well at least partly have been what was to lead to two halfhearted attempts at suicide, for both of which she was punished by detention.
“I cut myself so I bled,” she said and laughed she really did find it funny ‘so they sent me to Bleak for damaging government property. “
“Very soon after I came out, that first time, they sent me to Davies,” she said.
“It was my second house and that actually happened because the governor decided all LTIs, instead of being spread across the place, were to be housed together in three houses on central row and that was Davies, Fry and Barker.”
That surely was intelligent, I said. Don’t you think it showed compassion?
She shrugged indifferently.
“Perhaps, considered from outside. But at the time, the girls only felt she was wanting to isolate them even more. Nobody was prepared to assign anything but mean motivations to her.
“So I went to Davies. And Janey Jones you know, the famous madam? she was in there. She was really nice. She was a character, an entertainer through and through. But she didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. She would have us in fits with her stories, but she could laugh at herself too: that’s class.
“But … Oh, God, I was so stupid. One Sunday when my mother was coming on a visit, Janey, out of the goodness of her heart, offered to put a bit of make-up on me. It was fun you know … that was before I went butch. And when I went on the visit [to the visitor’s room] my mother said, ” You look like a tart. You put much too much on. ” Well, it takes one to know one, doesn’t it?” Mary’s voice was quite vicious when she said this.
“And when I said I didn’t make myself up, I didn’t even know how, Janey Jones, who was in my house, had done it for me, that tore it, she went totally berserk. The truth is, she was deadly afeared of prostitutes, my mother was. It was so weird, wasn’t it?
Here she was. Catholic to the eyeballs, the saints here and the saints there, and sin sin sin and . well. you know what she was . True, not any more then: she was becoming respectable, with a respectable man and a brand-new house with brand-new furniture she’d endlessly describe to me, a lifer you know, at Styal. She’d tell me about “my” room in that house . my room? Oh, God, she understood nothing, never anything, never that prison was not a . a . an interlude: it was my life; the place where I would be for ever. “
Mary had suddenly started to cry and kept shaking her head, her face streaked with tears.
“She came all the time you know, every month, even sometimes twice a month in that first year, and I tried to feel … even though I always knew it wasn’t so … that she must be doing it for me, she must mean well, but, there had always been this tension when she came, to Red Bank too … But there I felt cared for, both during her visits and always, always after them. In prison, well, you are not an individual, just a number and … how can it be otherwise? They know nothing about you except your crime and the sentence of the court, and with a few remarkable exceptions and there were those POs don’t care. Why should they and how could they?
One thing one has to face in prison is that you are not there to be helped, you are there to be punished.
“Like for old Mary Scorse the time of your crime, and the feelings that made you commit it, are so far away, you may not even remember them. Certainly most people try not to remember. So if you are being punished, it is finally for being, not for doing, do you know what I mean? And many, many people, women probably more than men, give in to it and as they won’t or can’t remember the perhaps one occasion when they wronged, they just come to agree, come to feel, that they are bad. My mother had always told me I was bad, as long as I could remember. Mr. Dixon told me I wasn’t, but slowly, or perhaps even not so slowly, that reassurance disappeared. My mother had to be blameless. I understand that now. I couldn’t have lived if I thought she wasn’t. But I could hardly bear to see her. I didn’t know where my head was any more about her.”