Authors: Gitta Sereny
“But that letter of May’s can make one cry,” Carole said.
“It’s very revealing, though, isn’t it? You can almost hear her thinking, about her need to be alone and yet not alone; about that beautiful girl, Alicia; about how feeling love is making her softer … And, perhaps as a result of this, and because of her very first contact with a real psychiatrist, one who obviously remained a human being, her confronting for the first time the enormity of her crime.” (What Carole meant by a ‘re al’ psychiatrist contrary to all those perfectly real psychiatrists whose task was to evaluate Mary for the benefit of the Home Office is one who, like Chammy, even in group therapy, sets out to treat people. ) I told them what Mary, in her lucid. Red Bank voice, had said to me about Alicia and the curious emotional morality she applied to her relationship with her: that she had loved her so much, they lay on a bed together sometimes and cuddled “We held each other,” she said but she did not have sex with her.
“I wanted to, but it wouldn’t have been right,” she said.
“She was going to leave. She was going to have a normal life. I couldn’t be … I had to not be … part of it that way, not even as a memory for her.” That selfless view seemed to me a kind of victory. However, as I told Carole and Ben, despite her determination not to become institutionalized at Styal, though appearing outwardly to achieve this goal, inwardly perhaps inevitably she succumbed to the worst aspect of it.
“What happened at Styal,” she said, ‘is that every twelve months, or maybe it’s eighteen, I hardly know any more, they review your case and then you go before the LRC the Local Review Committee composed of, you know, upstanding members of the community like a magistrate or a retired judge or doctor or what have you. When they see you, they would have looked at the so-called six-monthly progress reports to which all the POs contribute they write reports on each of us daily, can you imagine it? They used to threaten us with that. And then the governor of governors from the Home Office, Madam Perry it was for me, would ask you inane questions, like did I know the price of bread? How the hell would I know the price of bread? lAnd] what did I intend to do? What was I going to do when I got out? Totally idiotic given that I wasn’t being trained to do anything. I wasn’t allowed to take vocational courses, and I didn’t have a hope in hell to study for anything I might want to do, such as be a vet, study biology, chemistry, psychology, because the law says and I knew it that anyone released on licence is not and will never be allowed to work with people. So what’s the point? “
But wasn’t it possible to talk to these people on the review committee? I said to her. Couldn’t you explain your interests and ask to be allowed to study? God knows, you were articulate enough.
She told me patiently it was the “What’s the point?” I didn’t understand. If in Red Bank, yes, she had learned to be ‘articulate’, as I put it, in Styal she had been virtually forced to unlearn all that.
“Red Bank took me out of my environment and replaced it with something
I came to accept as better. But Styal put me right back into a four letter-word environment. I’m not saying that’s how everybody in Newcastle or Scotswood spoke, but my world did, and so did what became my world at Styal everything reduced to “fuck this” , “fuck that”
You’d have to be incredibly strong much stronger than I was to maintain verbal opposition rather than give in and return to what had been, after all, the familiar language of your childhood. Oh, sometimes one or another friend and I agreed to try to stop all the effing and blinding, which meant that every word you said contained the fuck-addition, for instance, “hospfuckingtal” I mean, can one believe it? But that’s what it was and . [here again she made that strange quick switch from memory to evaluation] . language does affect behaviour rather than the other way round. I see it in people who are now the age I was then, in films, in the streets they don’t speak as they behave, they behave as they speak, one follows the other. And what I came to understand, and to accept in Styal, was that while I could rebel against the system and for a long time take strength from that rebellion, I couldn’t remain, or perhaps pretend to be, a socially different person from those around me, who were . who had to become my friends. “
Red Bank’s acceptance of Mary as an individual, and her adoption of the ‘difference’ in social attitudes as a proper and happier way of life, had given her for the first time a sense of self-worth. Her enforced removal from this new way of life back into the world she had learned to reject led her down a path from what she called honest rebellion to ‘con’ resistance, and finally setting her up, as we will see, for the ultimate kind of prison exploitation to the weary “What’s the point?” of the institutionalized prisoner.
She knew perfectly well she thought that there would be no hope of parole for her for years.
“So all these Review Committees were nothing except opportunities for boards to feel important,” she said “And I was sick of it. And I finally decided I wasn’t going to any of the LRCs any more. Styal was going to be my life and I didn’t want their bloody release. Why?” she repeated my question.
“That’s like me asking you why don’t you want to live on Mars.”
|: And she told me about the day in ‘1977 or ‘78, I’m not sure, but I know I was still twenty,” when she was on a painting detail and they called her to attend the LRC and she said she was damned if she’d go.
“Miss Kendall came and I said, ” No, no, no. I’m not going to eat any carrots. I’m not a donkey. ” And she took me by the ear and dragged me, paint-covered as I was, to the parole hearing.
“If you think I’m spending the rest of my service here with you,” she said, “you’ve got another think coming. In with you,” and she opened the door and pushed me into the room, paint and all. “
The system, as we have seen, is concerned, on the face of it, with protecting the public while being humane toward the prisoners.
Inevitably, however, given the number of prisoners involved, the extent to which it can be adapted to their individual personalities is limited. By mid-1978, ten years after Mary had committed the crimes for which she was sentenced, the authorities realized a first move had to be made towards her release. What they didn’t indeed as we can see now, couldn’t know was that her apparent compliance to discipline only thinly covered not only intellectual frustration which they recognized and rather naively hoped to alleviate by moving her from one day to the next into a more stimulating and demanding environment but profound emotional confusion and resentment.
It was two days after her paint-spattered appearance before the Local Review Committee that the governor called her in and told her she was being sent to Moor Court in Staffordshire the next day. (The reason for not warning Mary of any moves in advance was because of the authorities’ knowledge of her mother’s habitual indiscretions to the press. ) “Miss Fowler,” said Mary, ‘who was there too, said that it was a great step forward.
“Oh, yes, I knew it was an open prison,” she said.
“One knows all those things. I can tell you about every prison in the country. I told Miss Fowler I didn’t want to go. If they’d said Holloway or Durham I would have been quite happy. But I didn’t even have my ERD [expected release date] and I wasn’t twenty-one yet, so I knew I couldn’t get it. So I didn’t want to be in an open prison. It wasn’t a ” step forward” as she said. It was pure cruelty. My feeling was that Styal was my life, my way of life, and being sent to an open prison was like being sent to prison, because you see you are more in prison when it’s open.”
You mean you were afraid of Moor Court because it was open? I asked.
“It wasn’t a question of being afraid,” she said quickly; she was not to be thought afraid of anything, ever.
“It was an unnecessary process because either way I didn’t want to be released; the pressure to run away would be too great. Anyway…” she changed tack, “I didn’t want to leave Diane. Well, whatever … Of course I had to go. I don’t remember the date, but I know I still had my birthday at Styal: I remember because Diane baked me a cake and lots of the girls gave me presents. Before I left, Diane and I wrote together to Madam Perry at the Home Office appealing for permission to write to each other. We didn’t think they’d give it, but they did.”
She arrived at Moor Court in June 1977. “A seventeenth-century manor-house,” she said.
“Ridiculous for a prison.” But she found she knew a lot of the girls there and all of them seemed to know about her principally about her position as a ‘butch’. But in contrast to Styal, this aspect of her ‘identity’ appears to have been avoided rather than welcomed.
“It was a different world,” she said “There were more short-timers than lifers there, and what everybody wanted was their boyfriends, their men.”
At Moor Court, she said, lifers and short-timers were not separated.
“It was the first time I was with nineteen-year-olds who talked about nightclubs, boyfriends, dressing up and going out, getting drunk, having a laugh you know, strobe lights and all kinds of things I’d never seen.”
The prison, set in a valley among the hills of Staffordshire, was very pretty, she said, too pretty for its purpose.
“It was a beautiful building with winding stairs and lovely views of fields and trees.
They had very comfortable dormitories, about a hundred beds, four to a room, with chintzy curtains, nice furniture, sitting-rooms with armchairs, a dining-room where pretty wooden tables were laid for meals and food prepared by cooks. It’s a waste as a prison,” she said.
“Just think what most of the people there are going back to: high-rise flats, two-up-two-downstairs houses. It’s a disgrace to use such beautiful places for people who scar the wood. Prison is prison, you know I don’t mean it in a punitive way, but it ought not to set unrealistic ideals. Red Bank was pleasant enough, with colours on the walls and all that, but even so, it was institutional. Because it was for boys up to eighteen it had a fish tank, but it wasn’t artificially homey or cosy and I think that’s right. Styal was a horror, and that’s right too. Moor Court, you’d have to be a millionaire to live somewhere like that: it sets unrealistic standards, it leaves people with a feeling of discontentment, feeling they are better off in prison than outside.”
But if you are in a place like this for years, does it not create different standards in you that you might aspire to, even on a less extreme level? I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“But the sad thing is, that unless you have inner resources to meet those standards, all I can see and saw it doing is creating very unhappy people.”
Miss Leichner was the governor of Moor Court.
“There was nothing wrong with her,” Mary said.
“She was a nice woman and I liked her and I told her the moment I met her that I didn’t want to be there but wanted to stay in Styal; that I didn’t want to be released and that I would run away. It was all I could do, be honest with her, give her fair warning.”
What did Miss Leichner say?
“What could she say? She said I should give it a fair try. That at Moor Court ” open” meant open: that my being moved to an open prison meant that my case would be reviewed regularly by the Parole Board and release was now a practical possibility within two or three years. She said it all depended on me: that I had been living in enclosed conditions for more than ten years and that I now had to. find out whether I could withstand the pressure of being put on trust. Because, she said again, ” Open here is open: you can go for walks, you can go and lie in the grass, you can be alone or be with others. The only thing you can’t do is go outside the prison perimeters. What we are doing is requiring you to make your own decisions. ” Did I understand this?
“Well, I nodded, but I didn’t understand a thing except that they were asking the impossible of me and I didn’t want it. I couldn’t do it.
How could I suddenly without you know any, any. “
Bridge? I asked.
“Yes,” she said, sounding grateful.
“Bridge. How without any bridge could I make my own decisions and not just any decision like to be obedient or disobedient which I had made a hundred times, but the decision whether to be in prison or free, when for ten years I had been locked in every night of my life?
“Miss Leichner finally said I was to take an office management course, typing and all that, to equip me for a job. Well, I’d already touch-typed since Red Bank Mr. Dixon put me on a course for that quite early.” She sounded angry: “Wouldn’t you think they’d have known that? They didn’t care, you see: they didn’t know anything about me because they didn’t care about me.”
But surely there was something you could accept to learn? Were there no books again, nothing for your mind?
“They had what you’d call ” inspirational books”: I was so desperate I read some of those. I remember there was one called From Prison to Praise. So after a few weeks of that I thought, if this guy can do it, so can I. And so I went into the chapel they had a nice chapel and threw myself on the floor and said; ” Please let me feel something.
“
And you didn’t?
“Nothing,” she said.
“All I felt was unused, dead, like a double decker bus could drive through my stomach. All I wanted was to feel, just feel… Maybe it was the pills,” she said.
At Moor Court almost everybody was on medication, she told me, and though in Styal she and the medical officers between them had largely managed to keep her off drugs, at Moor Court she finally gave in to them.
“It wasn’t long, a few weeks I think, I was called in to see Miss Leichner and she said the Parole Board had reviewed my case and at that stage I’d been refused a pre-release date. She said it was normal,
that it often happened, but I thought it was quite abnormal. People were leaving every day, every day, among them lifers who . Oh, I wasn’t judging or comparing, but they had been grown up when they did what they did: I was a child.
“Miss Leichner said my behaviour had to improve. I had to finish the typing course and then they’d review me again. But for me it was a kind of end: it was all pointless; I was quite ready to never be released. If I ever was, what was I going to do? Where would I fit in?