Authors: Gitta Sereny
But however ambivalent Mary felt, Betty was her only regular visitor at Styal throughout the seven years.
“At Red Bank, lots of people came,” she said.
“Above all, my dad. But he never came to Styal, I suppose because it was prison.” From what her family had said to me, it was quite clear: Red Bank was a beautiful school to them, where Mary, as Cath said, was likely to ‘get a better education than my kids’. It was such an attractive setting, and the staff they met were so pleasant and educated, there was no sense of embarrassment to them visiting her there; after all, Cath had brought her little boy once and Mary taught him swimming in the pool. But Styal was a very different matter. One cannot doubt that they were deeply shocked to know her being there: now she was different. And without deliberately wishing to hurt her, at that point all of them cut themselves loose from her. One has to believe that for Betty this was a victory. Now she had Mary in a way all to herself again, and at Styal no one knew, nor did the system have time to care, that Betty continued to spell disaster for her.
“Anyway,” Mary said, ‘on that Janey Jones occasion, my mother said she was going “to do something” about it and I thought, oh, God, she’s going to go to Molly, like she had done before, so I told her not to be so bloody stupid. I didn’t know she was going to go to the papers again,” Mary said.
“But there it was, the next Sunday, splashed all over the front page of the News of the World: ” Take my sixteen-year-old daughter away from Evil Vice Queen” or some such bilge. God!
“Janey Jones was livid. Can you blame her? She was going to sue my mother…” Her voice became cutting: “I wish to God she had. She didn’t but she was very upset with me and not only that, a lot of people, girls and POs, got really careful of what they said to me. And that Sunday I was put on report, as if it had been my fault. I was really scared I’d be sent back to Bleak,” Mary said.
“But I wasn’t that time. I was just pulled out of Davies and put into Righton. I say just, but you know, that was the worst thing Molly Morgan could have done to me because Righton was the place for what they called ” inadequates” unfortunate women who were not insane enough to be committed by Mental Health Act standards, but neither were they sane or capable enough to integrate into ordinary prison life.
“It was referred to as a ” nut-house” and putting me in there was the worst kind of humiliation. It was really for women with special needs.
We were never allowed to mix with other prisoners, not even to go to the hospital block to get medicines: they were brought to us. And my mother got onto it; the house officer told me: “I see your mother’s at it again,” and she showed me a newspaper with a story about me being held in a security block. She was so stupid, you see. I’m sure . even now I’m still sure she didn’t only do it for the money, not then any more anyway. She was married to a good man;
they had money; she didn’t need it. No, she had these drinking pals who were reporters and in her silliness she thought the stories would help me. Of course, it was just the opposite. I know now that for prison administrators there is nothing quite as difficult as so-called “high-profile” prisoners and that’s what I was, from the beginning to the end, and it was largely my mother’s doing. “
Was there anyone you could make friends with in Righton?
“No, really not. Oh, there was a girl, in her twenties I think, and she was a psychic. I had interesting conversations with her. She was quite extraordinary … she knew all about my Alsatian, my dog you know, I mean about games I played with him, and walks we took, I mean she couldn’t know about that, but she did. I honestly think that’s the only thing I learned those four months: that there are things beyond you know …”
Beyond what we can know? I asked.
“Yes, I know they thought she was mad. But she wasn’t, she was just just more … But it’s true,” she then said.
“I was … Oh, not just lonely. I was forlorn in Righton. It was terrible, terrible.”
giving Up sty al 1975 to 1977
And it was at Righton that Mary herself first experienced violence.
“That’s certainly how I remember it,” she said.
“Because I think that what they did to me was an invasion, a total invasion, which was totally unjust and I didn’t deserve … nobody deserves such a thing.
“What happened, not long after I got to Righton, there was an old lady there also called Mary, and I don’t know what she’d done, but they were taking her out of the building and she fought, so they dragged her by the hair and I was shouting my mouth off about it and calling them names or whatever. Somehow it was just the last straw, I mean, treating an old lady like that, well, I went berserk. I was letting out all the anger and frustration, not by doing anything violent you know, as people quite often did, smashing windows, throwing furniture about or kicking the doors. I just screamed and yelled and I started crying and just couldn’t stop. Any good PO could have stopped me, but the screw who was there rang the aggro bell and the mob came running and they carried me into the lock-up and sat on me, pinned me down and a sister was called and she injected me with what was called ” the liquid straitjacket”. I never dreamt for a moment that they would do such a thing to me. I mean, I knew it happened. I’d heard about it and I’d often seen Sister Watson walking around with that big syringe I’d been told about but…” She swallowed repeatedly in an effort to control her sudden emotion.
“I hadn’t done anything that required that kind of treatment…” and she began to cry.
“I’m sorry…” she hiccuped, ‘but it was hideous, bloody hideous.
“It’s a hypnotic drug, paraldehyde I think it’s called,” she said when she had calmed down a little later.
“It’s a green oily substance, horribly painful when it goes in. I was left in the lock-up all night.
I can’t remember getting downstairs but I remember coming round in the day-room, sitting up in a chair with the same clothes on. That’s all I remember, them sitting on me, the injection in the lock-up, how much it hurt, and that awful special smell of it. And then sitting in the day-room downstairs, and I went to get up and I couldn’t, and I went to say something and I couldn’t, my mouth felt all heavy and my tongue swollen. And I knew I had to pee, but you are, like, paralysed. I couldn’t move and couldn’t say and felt the warm water run down me” Again she cried, this time softly.
“Why, why would they have done that to me? Later I tried to think why and you almost hope you find a reason, but all I could ever imagine was that they just decided, ” Now it’s your turn, we1! show you, you cocky little bitch. “
You’re still very upset, I said. I haven’t seen you so upset about any one thing that happened at Styal, not even Bleak.
“That’s true,” she said.
“I came to terms … I made peace with Bleak I was there so often. And I mostly provoked them into it, so, you know I didn’t mind the seclusion all that much. I often quite liked it, and I could see or find a humorous side to most of the things that happened there, the awful food, the vulgarity of the POs: in a funny way, because one needs to be in opposition to the system in order to beat it, it was my victory. But this, this …” She stopped as if to catch her breath.
“I’m not stupid,” she said.
“I know about tranquillizers there are lots of them; they gave me an injection of Largactil, much less bad, on another occasion and I can understand their having to use them when people get out of control, but this, this poison they forcibly inject that makes you incapable of moving, speaking. You are awake but totally, totally incapacitated. How dare they? They don’t have the right. It can’t be a medication that can just be given like that. I’d like to know,” she said, “I really would like to know, whether they still do it.” (I am told that this heavy drug, widely used in mental hospitals and prisons twenty years ago, is now considered outdated. )
How long did this experience last?
“With the after-effects of pins and needles, which you have for hours as it wears off, I think almost forty-eight hours.”
At this point of her story, she digressed, as she so often did, months and even years away from the event she had just described. By now I knew that trying to force her into accounting sequentially for her years in prison was pointless. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to; it was that she couldn’t.
“I just can’t think about it that way,” she said, when on two occasions I urged her to try.
“I feel bad, I feel I’m letting you down by not telling it in some date order, but I can’t. None of it is in my head the way you want it and I have to tell it the way it comes, because when I try to find the order you ask me for, it just stops altogether.” The only way she could relate it, I realized, was to relive emotions as they rose up in her, prompted by images or whatever reason, as and when they did.
Paraldehyde was never given to her again, she said, though on one occasion later, she wasn’t quite sure when, a halfhearted suicide attempt gave her a second experience of ‘the mob’. “It was when I was very, very depressed,” she said.
“I can’t quite remember whether it was after Mr. Dixon died in the summer of 1975 lone date she would always remember], or later, when Alicia, a girl I was seriously in love with, was released.” (It was, I discovered later, on this second occasion, by which time she was twenty-one. ) “I was at Fry then. I ran a bath, put the towel over the door, which was a sign to say don’t come in, and I had broken a coffee jar and had a thick piece of glass and I went slash … It hurt-the first cut is the deepest, you know, and it really hurts, but I carried on, though I couldn’t bear slashing my wrists, so I went along my arm and then put the arm in the bath because I had heard that that made the blood flow…”
But you weren’t really trying to commit suicide, were you?
“No, no, it was just a sort of manifestation of, like … Oh, I suppose unhappiness.”
Or wanting to be noticed?
She laughed, the laughter a little shrill.
“Oh, no, I got enough of that, no …” The laughter stopped.
“Just a few times those years I just … couldn’t go on. I mean, I think I knew I would go on, so you are right, it wasn’t suicide or anything like that…” She shrugged.
“I don’t know what one could call it…”
A gesture?
“Yes, yes, but a gesture for me, you know, not really for anybody else. One of my friends at Fry House was Tricia, a beautiful gentle girl who’d been a nun before she became a prison officer, and then was sent to prison herself for seven years because she tried to help Myra Hindley escape. Tricia had seen bloody water come out from under the door,” she said, and alerted the staff.
“Next thing I knew I was being sewn up in the hospital block and, as I told you earlier, being escorted to [Bleak] because’ again she laughed that special, unamused ” ha ha” laugh ” I had deliberately hurt myself on government property. There, I suppose, because I fought them, they put a strait jacket on me, a real one this time, and forcing my arm under it burst the stitches. “
By that time two new high-ranking officers had been appointed to Styal, both of whom had managed to establish a relationship with Mary.
“Miss Fowler was assistant governor and Miss Kendall principal officer. They were both brilliant in their own way, super,” Mary said.
“Miss Fowler we dubbed her ” Filly” because there was something horsy about her she was a St. Trinian’s sort of figure. She was very mannish, with short grey hair, and she wore brogues and big tweed checks and she had that wonderful loud laugh more often than not about herself. She came when I was at my worst and was put in charge of lifers. She told the governor that if she would let her manage me, she’d get me right. She told me this, straight out, the first time she came to see me: in Bleak of course. That was when I was more in than out of there, long before that cutting-my-arm episode.
“Miss Fowler told me in that loud voice others she was incapable of speaking softly that she didn’t pull any punches with anybody,
nothing underhand.
“But it works both ways,” she said.
“If you’ve got anything to say, come out and say it and then we’ll deal with it.”
Then she told me that she and I had a very special person in common:
Mr. Dixon. She had worked at Red Bank. That blew my mind, you know?
Then she said, “If I get you out of Bleak now, where would you like to go?” Well, that’s the kind of trick question I’d heard before. We knew they’d be sure to send you anywhere but the house you asked for. So usually you guessed the opposite of the house you wanted and asked for that. At least that gave you a chance to get where you wanted to be.
But when she asked, something made me say the truth, which was that I wanted to go back to Fry and she said:
“Right. Fry it is. Tomorrow.” And that was it. “
Miss Kendall was different, she said.
“She was a very wiry sort of person, about forty years old and not very happy I think, but of course I don’t really know. She didn’t laugh so much but she cared about people. She’d do anything to avoid putting people on report.
“You behave yourself,” she’d say to me.
“I get nightmares that you’ll still be here when I finish my service. I won’t have it,” she’d say.
“So pull yourself together.” But then at Christmas, when she’d had a glass or two, she’d say, “I hope this is going to be your year. It’s got to be your year.” Every year she’d say that. It sounds sentimental, but she had real authority: prisoners always know when authority is real. She went on to Holloway later as assistant governor. “
And it was Miss Kendall who sat next to her in the cell in Bleak when Sister Watson, using a flat needle, restitched the twenty-seven cuts Mary had made on her arm (she pushed her sleeve up to show me the scars). “She held my hand and she said: ” Squeeze my hand;
squeeze as hard as you can. ” Somehow she was always there when something was really wrong with me. It happened again later. I can’t quite remember when. But it was a period when, contrary to all my intentions, I had accepted to take tranquillizers and I was supposed to come for a dose at nine and one at eleven and somehow they hadn’t written it down and when I went again at twelve, I don’t know whether because I forgot or just for the hell of it, they gave it to me, and then they couldn’t wake me up. When I did finally wake up at seven at night. Miss Kendall was sitting on my bed and took my hand and said, ” Oh, thank God, thank God,” and, you know, I was pretty blurry, but I heard that and it meant something to me. It still does.