Authors: Gitta Sereny
This change that she described to me was twofold: on the one hand she decided that openly bucking the system as she had been doing for two years was self-defeating.
“If all I did was say no,” she said, “I wasn’t using my wits. What I had to do was, yes, continue to fight the system, but I had to graduate from being a prisoner to being a con, and that meant that rather than being open and angry, I had to be closed and crafty. In prison the eleventh commandment is: ” Thou shalt not be caught. ” And from now on this was the one I would obey.”
Her second decision that week” And believe me, it was quite in line with the first one,” she said ‘was to become “butch”
“As a butch,” she said, ‘you are in charge of your life. You select who to be with. You have an established and dominant position within the microcosm of society which a prison is. This doesn’t mean that you only “take” : that things are done for you, your bed is made, things are given to you, cigarettes are rolled for you, people take over duties for you. It also means that you “give” Sexually . I already told you . you never take, you only give, but quite aside from that, you are someone people come to . “
For what?
“Help, advice…”
Did you have one girlfriend at a time?
“I had a lot of them, lots of black girls. They were so beautiful.”
Did that make you sexually happy?
“No, sexually, no. But if you didn’t have relationships, though not necessarily sexual ones, you were too lonely and that would have been intolerable.”
But how did you manage sexually, for yourself?
“By myself,” she said matter-of-factly.
“But for the rest, I developed a sort of Jack-the-lad attitude. It was so easy for me to be like a boy,
because I didn’t have to pretend. After all I’d been with boys since I was eleven, I mean I knew boys like nobody else, I knew how they moved, how they sat, how they joked . I knew how they felt, too. I could be a boy. ” Over the years, she said, she’d probably had sex with (or provided sexual relief for) two hundred women.
“Well,” said Dr. Chamarette, smilingly drawing the word out, “I think the figure two hundred may be a bit exaggerated, as is her feeling now that she was more in than out of Bleak House during her first two years at Styal. But she certainly ” knew” a lot of the women, whether,” he smiled again, ‘biblically or not may not be that important. “
Norman Palmer Chamarette, consultant child psychiatrist at Macclesfield Hospital from 1954 to 1968, fondly referred to as “Chammy’ by all who know him, is now ninety-three years old: tall, slim, in excellent health; highly articulate with a remarkable memory.
For eleven years, including those of Mary’s detention, he held a much sought-after weekly group therapy session at Styal.
“I begged for two years to get into Chammy’s group,” Mary said, ‘not because I was changing or “developing” , but just as a skive a Thursday afternoon skive, something else, something new, out of the routine. And also because Alicia you remember, I told you about her was in the group. Alicia was one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen, but she was in a different block, so this was a chance to see her. Some people Puerto Rican Americans took the group very seriously, as Americans do. I knew I would never take it seriously.
But I’d heard a lot about Chammy. They said he listens to all your problems; “Lovely man he is,” they said, and that if you were in the Chammy group you were given a book and it was totally off limits to screws, or even the governor. Nobody could touch it, nobody could read it. Of course I didn’t believe that. It would be unnatural for a screw to pass up anything in your possession when you were searched, without opening it. I don’t even blame them: it’s female nosiness. If I saw something on a desk, I’d look. But I did believe them about his kindness and intelligence: prisoners know when somebody is real. ” (She had always believed that Chammy, no doubt by association of psychiatrists with Freud, was Austrian and Jewish, and she told me how much she had liked his ‘foreign accent’. I had to disabuse her of this idea, for despite his distinguished English origins, Dr. Chamarette has no discernible accent, of class or region, and is a devout Christian.
In the sitting-room of his light and airy small house in Lancashire the Bible was not only close to hand but much in his mind when we talked. ) “But the MO, through whom I had to apply, always said no,” Mary continued.
“He said what did I want with a psychiatrist? And that he knew all about me and that all I wanted was to drive the group and the psychiatrist mad, like I was driving all of them mad, and that there was nothing wrong with me that required a psychiatrist and if there had been I would have asked to see Dr. One-to-one, [‘an old goat they sent the suicides to,” she told me in an aside] and why hadn’t I done that and the answer was that I was having them on as I had done from the moment I came through the Styal gates. ” She drew a deep breath.
“That’s how it went, but finally, after more than two years, he probably got sick of me and said, ” All right then, go on, go and drive him mad. “
“Yes, I knew she was trying to get in,” Chammy said, ‘and the others canvassed for her. They kept saying, “Can’t you do something to get May in?” But I couldn’t. She had to be referred. “
Did you consider her to be popular among the inmates? I asked.
“I don’t think ” popular” is the word. She was a personality. She was important to people. And no, I don’t think it is correct to say that people thought she was ” funny” or even ” fun”. She was not at all a comedian. She was very intelligent, very articulate, markedly superior to most of the female officers, and she could argue people’s cases when they got into trouble. The prisoners would tell her things she was very trustworthy they knew, and often said that she would never ” grass” on them. They may well have told her their most intimate problems.” He laughed.
“I think she did see herself as a kind of psychologist. She certainly had great talent for it. I suspect she knew a great deal about the lives of a great many people which she never passed on to anyone else.”
What was the routine about somebody joining the group? I asked.
“I’d get a notification from the governor via the MO that so-and- so was going to join, though it did, of course, depend on my having space: I had limited the group to eight, though at times I agreed to go up to twelve, splitting them into two working groups. Yes, of course I accepted her and was interested in her. Not at all because she was particularly high profile, or because of her particular offence:
there were many women there who had committed quite horrifying of fences and, don’t forget, I knew nothing about her background. Nor, as I was to find out, did anybody else. I went carefully through her file before she came, but there was nothing in there except the court case, a few pages of police reports, a short reference to her first referral the five years at Red Bank but no details about that either and no social reports nor any psychiatric evaluations whatsoever. “
(Pat Royston, who has access to Mary’s original case file, confirms that there were no social reports on Mary prior to or as a result of her arrest in 1968. ) Was that different from other case files? I asked Dr. Chamarette.
“All I can say about that is that some case files certainly had that kind of background information and I was surprised that hers didn’t.
But I was much more surprised when, soon after that, I read your first book and saw at least some of the things that had been going on in her childhood: then I couldn’t understand at all why her file should have been so . so limited. How could there have been no social inquiry at all? How could they not have known any of these things? “
Why was Mary prevented for two years from joining your group? I asked.
“I think Styal had no idea of May being amenable to any kind of treatment. They didn’t think it cost-effective. Eric, the MO, would have said: ” She’ll only be skiving” which was probably true, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me and that anyway I had my full complement and I couldn’t handle more.”
So what changed their minds?
‘fIt was] partly because May went on and on about it, but also, and May would find this hard to believe, I think Molly Morgan exerted some influence . “
So the governor was interested in her?
“Oh, yes,” he said.
“I think so. She was a very good governor, you know, came up through the ranks, was young, energetic, very fair. Of course, the prisoners wouldn’t have thought that: you had to be a pretty tough character to do that job. But the staff certainly did. I can’t tell you how interested she was in May; probably not as intensely as May thought; there were an awful lot of women there who were very, very difficult to handle. But knowing Molly Morgan, I think she would not have been unaware or unaffected by May’s extreme youth when she came. Nobody could have been not interested in her.”
“Dr. Chammy was like Heidi’s grandfather,” Mary said.
“His group met in a separate block on Thursday afternoons and I was quite surprised when I went the first time because we were all searched, going in and then again going out. I couldn’t really understand why. Did they distrust him7. I never found out, but I finally decided it was just their usual need to show control.
“There were about ten of us. When I walked in, he took my hand and held on, or wanted to hold on to it while he said hello, but I pulled it away. It’s, you know, a dyke thing, not to hold hands with a man.
Anyway, he didn’t make a big deal about it or anything, he just said, “Hello, May, is that how you like to be called?” And then he told a story about a tree, I can’t remember what it was, and then he laughed and everyone started laughing and suddenly he banged the table and everyone stopped laughing. I thought that was amazing. It was control, but his kind of control, which the whole group accepted no, not just accepted, wanted, and it was good, very good. I thought I was going to be sceptical of him, like, you know, I was of everybody, but I found I wasn’t. I trusted him. And I realized very soon that he knew I was more aware . of people . It did me a lot of good to see that someone saw me . differently. Later I got some wonderful letters from him in which he talked about some of the girls. That, too, was good for me. He reminded me, you know, that it happened, that he knew I . understood people, and that he trusted me as I trusted him. “
Did Mary talk to you about herself in Styal? I asked Chammy.
“There was very little chance for any one-to-one,” he said.
“And it wasn’t intended to be that: it was group therapy. But of course, talking about themselves is to a large degree what people do in this sort of group work. A lot of things emerge.”
Mary’s main involvement during the time he knew her there, he said, was with the problems of the other women.
“Her way of thinking about them the way, if you like, she ” analysed” them [he emphasized the word] was quite feminine, but her way of being, of speaking and how she carried herself, was quite extraordinarily masculine. She went a long way toward persuading her world that she was masculine.” She didn’t walk like a woman, he said, “She strutted. She told us that she had worked for three months for Burton’s the tailor as a man, in men’s clothes, and making up as if she had stubble on her face.”
But did anybody believe that? I asked. Did you believe it? After all, this was an eighteen-year-old who had been under detention since she was eleven.
“Of course I knew she fantasized and probably at least some of the others did too. But it wasn’t my function ever to appear to doubt them: the whole point of the exercise is for them to say whatever they like in the way they like. In May’s case, this is what she needed to say, both publicly and privately. It supported her Styal persona, because there, too, she ” dressed up” if you like. She rolled up stockings in the shape of male genitals and she pointed this out to me in class. I think she wore these all the time, but perhaps not as obviously, not as provocatively in front of the staff, but they saw it, I know they did, and somehow they left her to it.”
“What I mainly remember about her,” said Margaret Kenyon, ‘were those very blue eyes and that dark curly hair and that politeness of hers:
she really was more like a boarding-school girl than a prisoner.
Still, I’d heard all these stories about her, you know, how angry she could be, how hard . They said she had eyes like flint. I don’t know that I felt that, the only time I really had something to do with her.
It was when she was going to be transferred to Askham Grange; when girls were about to go to open prison we’d always outfit them, you know, so I was detailed to take her out shopping, for undies you know, and whatever else she might need. She was OK, polite as ever and again a bit like a child out on the town, until we got to the lingerie section at Marks and Spencers and she said . sort of spitting out the words . “What are we doing here?” I said we were going to buy her some knickers.
‘“Knickers?” she said with contempt.
“I don’t wear knickers; I wear Y-fronts,” and for the next few minutes railed at me in that sharp and sharply enunciating little voice of hers, with the lady shoppers watching us with their eyes popping out. I’m not sure Marks and Spencers had ever seen anything like it.
‘ “Y-fronts,” she dictated, “or I’ll run away.” I’m sure she thought I’d fold up and give in, but she didn’t know the half of it.
“Go on,” I said.
“Run.” Of course, I haven’t a clue what I would have done if she had I’m sure she was faster than I, anyway, she looked like it.
But she didn’t run. “
And what did you buy? I asked.
“Knickers,” Margaret said, and giggled.
Had Dr. Chamarette ever told Molly Morgan that he thought she needed help?
“I don’t think I did,” he said, a little sadly.
“I had some very serious cases there, one girl, for instance, who had stabbed her husband seventeen times, one woman who killed her five-year-old daughter … Oh, so many very, very complicated women. By comparison May’s problems, strange as it may seem, were almost minor. You mustn’t forget either that by the time I met her she was no longer sixteen she was almost nineteen. It is outrageous that she was sent there at sixteen it is outrageous that anyone so young is sent to such a prison at all. And with hindsight, it is true, I would have taken a stronger stand about her needs had I known her earlier and more about her background, but as you know, I didn’t. Nobody did.”