Authors: Gitta Sereny
I wonder how Miss Kendall is. “
Mary isn’t sure when it was that Mr. Dixon came to see her the first time.
“He came three times,” she said, but oddly enough she remembered almost nothing about his visits.
When he told you about your transfer to Styal, I said, trying to help her remember, he said you have to be Red Bank’s ambassador there. Did that come up when he visited you?
She shrugged.
“He said for me to sit up straight.”
About a year later, while I was completing this section of the book, I asked her why, given how uniquely important Mr. Dixon had been, and indeed still is to her, she had not been able to remember more about his three visits to her in Styal.
“Thinking about it now,” she said, “I wonder whether somewhere, in spite of all my love for him, or perhaps because of it, I was angry.
To me, you see, he was so powerful. Perhaps I felt that he should have been able to get it right for me. Perhaps I did somehow blame him that he didn’t. But then, too, it was very, very difficult to talk to visitors, anyone from “outside” , even Mr. Dixon. What was there to say?
How could one tell anybody except those who shared that life, what this life, which was all of life, was like? No, all I could do and that is what I did for all those years, was to put myself away.
Eventually I could write letters, about the weather, about the work I did, about what other people wrote to me. But the things I really saw and really felt could not be put into words to those outside. “
“Jim Dixon never talked about visiting May,” Carole G. said when I asked her about it.
“This is the first time I learn that he did. But he felt so deeply about her, I would imagine that seeing her at Styal was traumatic for him.
“Ben and I went to see her, I think it was six months after she’d gone there. She had written to invite us.” (Mary, though speaking fondly of Carole and Ben, does not remember their visiting her at Styal. ) “We went to see her twice,” Ben said.
“First in the spring of 1974, and then about a year later. She came to the visiting room to meet us; it had a stage and tables and chairs.”
How had Mary impressed them on that first visit? I asked.
“We saw the May we knew,” he said.
“Obviously older, but still quite herself, quite feminine, you know. She came and gave us a big hug and Carole and she both cried. The only thing was, she wore prison garb, a heavy sort of canvas dress, and we hadn’t expected that.”
“I guess I didn’t tell them: I must have been on punishment,” Mary said to me when I told her.
“They made you wear that horrible uniform for a while if, for instance, they caught you in somebody else’s clothes. Silly, but there you are: we had three lots of everything and that’s what we were to wear, nothing else.”
“The whole thing must have depressed us, too,” Ben said, ‘because I remember, when we left and got to the car, both of us cried. “
The second time Carole and Ben G. went to see her was in the late summer or autumn of 1975, just before they left Red Bank to work in the south of England.
“By that time she seemed really changed,” Ben said.
“She looked so different. She had these deep shadows under her eyes, they were sunken in her face. She collapsed into tears when she saw us, but when we sat with her and we stayed for several hours she was just very subdued. All that bubbliness, that vivaciousness had gone. We were very, very worried about her when we left.”
By mid-1975, Mary had had a number of letters from Carole and Ben, the last from a holiday in the United States. On their return they found Mary’s reply, written on successive evenings, in which, to their surprise, she had asked whether they would do her a great favour, if she withdrew some money from her account and sent it to them
* Prisoners’ earnings were banked for them in an account, which was intended to accrue for their release and from which they were given
weekly pocket After thanking them for their letter and postcard and telling them how much she longed to travel to increase her knowledge of the world, she tells them that she had begun that night an Open University prep course and already learned a lot within two hours.
“And, look,” said Carole, showing me the letter, ‘she asks us there to buy her a battery stereo. “
I can’t ask mum [Mary writes] because I want to surprise her and show her what a little money-wise daughter she has. Really, you’d be doing me a favour, after all, that’s what friends are for. I’m not trying emotional blackmail but let me know how it works out. I shall close for now, we have to be tucked in and lights out so I’ll leave this, probably until tomorrow night, because I have work on tomorrow for another eight hours how do I do it? So I’ll get my head down, do my yoga relaxation spiritual and fly to you in my dreams. Wish me a bon voyage, good night, good rest. Your sleepyhead.
It’s now eight-thirty Wednesday night [the letter continues] I’m bathed and in bed. I’ve been to beauty culture tonight, had my eyebrows plucked, had witch hazel purple skin cleanser on my face. It still looks just the same. I expected a miraculous change in two hours: it took nearly an hour for my eyebrows to be plucked properly.
[She then asks about some of the Red Bank counsellors and Jeff, the G. s’ young American friend whom she had been a little in love with. ] I hope that if and when I meet him again I shall be strong enough to stop this really weird feeling . like a mother or an analyst. It’s hard to admit that your hero is just another person. I was only 14 I know, but some things take a while to sink in. Although, it would be nice to see him again and see just how I’ll react now.
money. They could ask permission to withdraw larger amounts for presents if they had someone on the outside to buy them for them.
Not much to write about is there ever? I don’t know how I manage four pages. The stars are out now. I really love to lie in bed and look at them all. What do you see, stars or bars? Difficult question in here. I’m afraid I only see the stars and sky
etc.
Bars I hardly notice, only now and again when I feel down. I must close now, friends, take care until next time.
Mary was kept at Righton for about six months, she thinks.
“I suppose until they thought I was civilized enough to join the ranks of other prisoners. I had no idea they were moving me … we never had any warning of anything. It was Miss Kendall who came one day and told me she was taking me to Barker’s: ” Let’s try that,” she said.”
Barker, at that time, was the elite block of the prison, home to about a dozen selected lifers.
“It was the ” show house”,” Mary said.
“That’s where they took film crews who came to do documentaries about women in prison. It was really unbelievable, like a mad hatter’s world. These women lived there like in an old folk’s home, a rest home you know.
They had their own bedspreads, they were allowed to wear watches and there was knitting all over the place and flowerpots on doilies. All the furniture was covered in chintz. The house screws were treated like guests, you know, brought cups of tea and all. I couldn’t believe any of it. They were totally institutionalized, content, you know.
Later I found out that nobody had ever, ever been put on report from Barker’s. ” She guffawed: ” I changed that in a hurry. That morning when I was taken there, I charged up the stairs to recce the place and Pearl, oh, she was about fifty and she said, in that schoolmarmish tone they all adopted: “We take our shoes off when we come into the house,” and when I told her that I’d kick her teeth in if she ordered me about, she says, “Your reputation has preceded you,” and, “I’ll put you over my knee and smack your backside.” So I told her that she was a bloody pervert and that I’d knock her head off if she touched me.
Actually we became good friends later, she was all right, old Pearl.
“
Much later, after Mary had left Styal, I spoke to a former Styal era woman in her mid-thirties, about Mary.
“She could be terribly aggressive, terribly rude,” she said.
“She used terrible language, about the officers and even to them.” And what did the officers do about it? I asked. She shrugged.
“Nothing. They treated her differently from any of us. She was different. She was like a lady. Compared to me, she was a lady.” Despite the rudeness? Despite the terrible language? She shrugged again.
“If anybody else had behaved like that, they’d be in a cell in minutes. With her … they just let her be.” Was that resented by other prisoners? I asked. She shook her head in a perplexed sort of way.
“I didn’t like her when I met her first,” she said.
“But afterwards and I was never close to her,” she said quickly “I came to feel she was in the wrong place, just completely in the wrong place. She should have been in a hospital. She was eleven, just eleven when she did that awful thing,” she said, sounding angry.
“Eleven … I have two kids and one is eleven. If he did such a thing I’d know he was sick. So perhaps the officers thought like I did that she shouldn’t have been there and perhaps that’s why they treated her as a star prisoner. Resented?” she said then, picking up my previous question. She shook her head.
“No.
She had good friends,” she said.
“She could be terrible, quite terrible, but she was a good friend to a lot of people.”
Margaret Kenyon*, an attractive young woman passionately involved in the reform of women’s prisons, is a serving prison governor who, at the beginning of her career, was at Styal prison when Mary was there.
“I wasn’t much involved with her,” she said, ‘but everyone knew about her. She was different from most of the other prisoners. She was not just ingenuous, but, contrary to many of the others, she hadn’t lived on the streets. Although obviously intelligent, she was curiously naive and somehow pure; there was a sort of maternal feeling about her, not even so much among the staff, but certainly among the prisoners. Particularly the older women wanted to keep her as she was;
I think they saw her as a surrogate favoured daughter.
* Changed name.
Of course, she was so young-even when she had been there for years, she still seemed so young . “
When Mary told me about Barker House she realized that by then she would have been at Styal for over a year.
“I was seventeen,” she said, ‘and the wonderful thing was that Diane was there, too, and so was Angie and they were eighteen. For the first time, I was with girls of my own age, and though I didn’t like Angie because she was a suck-up, Diane became my best friend, the best friend I’ve ever had. “
She was to stay on Barker for nine months, her longest period in one house.
“And somehow, between Diane and me, we treated it like being kids in boarding-school,” she said.
“We laughed and cried a lot together, we played jokes on everybody and on each other, silly, silly things like once at night I was just dropping off to sleep when I suddenly felt my pillow move under me. I jumped out of bed in horror thinking, you know, of mice or rats, and then heard Diane giggling under the covers: she had sewn a thread to the underside of my pillow and was holding the bobbin and pulling. The next night I paid her back when after lights out, of course we were playing ” jump”, which meant climbing up on top of the high wardrobe and jumping down onto the beds. When it was Diane’s turn, I pulled her bed away and told her she had to sing before I’d put it back and then, as she sang, and sang, and sang, sitting on top of the wardrobe, I pretended to go to sleep. But it was all in good fun, I mean really childish nonsense.
“But above all, there was this wonderful closeness between us. We’d lie in bed at night looking through the bars and talk about freedom.
We had a dream, she and I, that one day we’d go to Disneyland, both of us wearing big hats, hers white, mine blue. Disneyland was everything we believed freedom would be, where people were laughing and happy, where life would be perfect. Every New Year’s Eve we’d look out and find the brightest star in the sky and we’d make a wish. Even now, each New Year just before twelve, I go off by myself a moment and look for the brightest star and I
know Diane is doing it too, to keep our pact lest we ever forget what it was all about and that we did a lot of growing up together. ” Did you have a sexual relationship with Diane? I asked.
“Most people thought we had, but no, we didn’t, we couldn’t. It would have been like incest, you know. We did try it once, but it didn’t work both of us just burst out laughing. Even so,” she sounded puzzled at this memory, “I think both of us were jealous of the relationships each of us had with others. Funny that, isn’t it?”
It was during 1975, when Mary was now eighteen years old, that she made many decisions.
“I think it all … crystallized,” she said, ‘after Mr. Dixon died.
“
It was a lovely day in June, she said, and she was on a gardening detail in the afternoon, when she began to feel ‘re ally down you know, so down I didn’t know what to do. I parked the rake against a tree and I just lay in the grass and went to sleep. And when Mr. Walker, the gardener, found me and woke me up I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t think what, but I could hardly bear the feeling. And all I wanted was to be alone.
“They come around in the evening and ask is there anyone wanting to see the MO, Welfare or the governor. And I asked to see the governor, because I wanted to go down on rule 43 [solitary], because I was fed up, I just wanted time by myself. They said, no, I couldn’t see the governor for that. So the next morning I just stayed in bed because I knew they’d have to put me on report and that’s what happened and they sent me to Bleak. And at four that afternoon I was called into the adjudication room where Miss Morgan, for the first time, showed her humane side and told me, quite gently, that Mr. Dixon had died at 4 p.m. the previous day. And I had known: at four o’clock I knew didn’t I? Something died in me that day and it didn’t come back to life until…” she counted ‘. until nine years later when [her baby] was born. She gave life back to me.
“I went back to my cell that day and just sat there. I couldn’t cry, not until several days later when I was back at my house and there was a concert on TV and I suddenly found myself sitting there sobbing unable to stop. And I think when I stopped sobbing I had changed.”