Authors: Gitta Sereny
By lunchtime, however, Brian and John had met up and were out playing.
When Rita went looking for them about 1. 30 p. m. ” she found them sitting on the ground watching workmen pull down one of the old houses in St. Margaret’s Road.
“I went mad,” she told me.
“I screamed at the men and said didn’t they know better … than to let them sit there where they could get hurt? And then I hit the lads so hard, one after the other, my hands were stinging. I put John to bed and I gave Brian some biscuits and … told him to tell Pat he’d been to the old buildings but she was not to hit him because I’d already hit them.
That’s the last I saw him. “
We don’t know whether Brian went home because Pat, knowing that Irene was in the house, had gone into the city with friends. When she came back at 3. 20 and asked after Brian, Irene said he was ‘playing out the back’, and indeed a number of children later said they’d seen him playing in the street off and on in the early afternoon with his brother Norman and two little girls on bikes whom they all knew.
Lassie, they all said, was with him. Nobody was worried. All the kids were always all over the place, and anyway. Lassie was with him. It wasn’t until about 5 p. m. ” when Pat had prepared tea, that she went out into the street calling his name. Mary Bell, who was eleven, the eldest of four children, and lived with her father Billy and her mother Betty at 70 Whitehouse Road, was sitting on the doorstep of number 66 talking to Maxine Savage it was Maxine’s younger sister Margaret Pat Howe had been out with that day. Pat asked May, which is what everybody called Mary, whether she’d seen Brian. She said she hadn’t but she would go with Pat to look for him. Norma Bell, Mary’s best friend, who lived with her parents and ten siblings at number 68, strolled along for a while, too. They looked for Brian at Davy’s shop, a magnet for all the kids, and then down the hill at the Vickers Armstrong car park, another major attraction. Then they went back up on the railway bridge from where they could see all over the Tin Lizzie, but they didn’t see any children. Mary Bell suggested Brian could be playing behind or between ‘the blocks’ down there (huge concrete slabs), but Norma, who knew Brian well as she often baby-sat John for Rita, said, ” Oh no, he never goes there,” and Pat didn’t think he would either, not alone he wouldn’t. Pat decided they’d have one more look, in Hodkin Park and along the streets, and if they hadn’t found him by seven o’clock, she was going to call the police.
The police, using searchlights, found Brian at’ll. 10 that night.
“We’d all been looking for him for hours,” Rita told me.
“Hundreds of us it seemed, till it got dark. It was very hot that night. I think everybody was still up when we heard the police cars rushing down with all the sirens going. People called to each other out of their doors I don’t know who knew first it went from street to street and house to house.”
Mary Bell, who was a light sleeper, came downstairs at’ll. 30 and joined her father, who was standing outside the front door watching the commotion in the street.
“What’s going on, then?” she asked.
“They’ve found Brian Howe,” Billy Bell said, ‘over on the Tin Lizzie.
“
“Oh,” said Mary.
Brian was lying on the ground between two concrete blocks on the Tin Lizzie. His left arm was stretched out from his body and his hand was black with dirt. Lying on the grass nearby was a pair of scissors with one blade broken and the other bent back. His body, fully dressed and most of it apparently unharmed, was covered with a carpet of the long grass and purple weeds which grew all over the Tin Lizzie. There were, however, scratch marks on his nose, traces of blood-stained froth at his mouth, his lips were blue and no possibility of an accident here -pressure marks and scratches on both sides of his neck. Later they would find other, small, inexplicable injuries. He was dead.
It is strange how these dead toddlers’ families perhaps an unconsciously self-protective reaction remembered them later as so mature.
“Lots of people loved Martin,” June said a long time afterwards.
“He was that kind of lad grown people could talk to him, like.” And, “I miss him,” Eric Howe said of little Brian.
“I miss him so; he was my life. He was only a hairn, but we used to talk like, you know, really talk. I think of nothing but him. It’s destroyed us,”
he said, tears running down his cheeks, ‘we’re not a family any longer. “
“We talk…” said Pat, her face tight. She was sixteen by then, married, with a baby son, but the larger house in a pleasant street the council had moved them to showed no colour, was almost sterile in its sadness. “… But we don’t say anything.”
In writing about human beings whose actions have brought havoc into the lives of others, one can never forget the pain that they have caused and the bitterness that inevitably remains in those they have hurt, however long ago it may have been. When writing about such tragedies writers, searching for explanations for them and for the deficiencies in the system which contributes to them, are apt to forget at their peril that there are wounds that can never heal. This is an awesome cloud over an undertaking such as this. Not one word Mary Bell has ever said to me, not one word I have written, can be interpreted as an excuse for what she did.
1995: the north of england
The first time I saw Mary Bell was on 5 December 1968 in the Moot Hall in Newcastle upon Tyne, where the Assizes were held, and where she, then eleven, and her friend, Norma Bell, two years older, stood accused of the murder of the two little boys. She was small then a lot smaller than the older girl and really exceptionally pretty, with short, dark hair and intensely blue eyes. I had seen her again several times in the following years while she was still a child. The last time had been when she was thirteen, in the summer of 1970, two years into her detention.
Twenty-five and a half years later, in November 1995, when we sat down together in a small room in a probation office in the North of England to discuss the feasibility of this book, she would tell me that she remembered that last occasion not because of me, but because her mother, seeing her speak to me, had been angry, ‘. so angry,” she said.
She was very nervous that day. Her hands were ice-cold and a trifle humid, there was a sheen of sweat on her face and her voice was not hoarse, but husky. She was slim, as I thought she would be, unsuitably dressed for the time of year in something beige, chiffony, in a coloured flowery pattern, with dark woollen stockings and clunky shoes (“I get everything from Oxfam,” she said, almost at once), and her long hair was curly, shiny and smelled of shampoo. She in fact altogether smelled not of scent but some quite delicate soap: as I would notice often later and as all kinds of people under whose care she has been over the years confirmed to me, she has constant baths;
she is very clean. I put my arms around her and held her for a moment,
an entirely impulsive gesture, not at all because it was expected or even appropriate, but because I suddenly felt like it.
She had been part of my memory for so long, and the reason for our meeting now was so complex, her motivations so mixed, my feelings about the ethics of this project so ambivalent, that the tension in the small office lent to us by her probation officer, Pat Royston, was tangible, almost electric.
Of course, at the time of her trial in 1968, I couldn’t speak to Mary, nor, I know now, was she, traumatized by the events and the formal trial, able to ‘see’ anyone.
“It was a blur,” she would say later.
“It was all like a swirl… I couldn’t understand a lot of the words Someone told me, ” That’s the jury,” and I said, ” What’s that? ” and they said, ” The people who decide what’s going to happen to you,” and I said, ” How? ” and they said, ” Shh. ” And then they said the judge was the man in the big chair in a red robe and that he was the most important man so I always turned to him to answer when anybody asked me anything. And then my solicitor said that was rude and I must look straight in the face of people who asked me questions that I had to try and ” make a good impression”. And my mother, who sat right behind me, kept hissing, ” Stop fidgeting! ” every time I moved, and she slapped me with her flat hand on the back of my head or right between my shoulders each time I did it again and it hurt, but I couldn’t not do it,” she suddenly smiled at me, interrupting her stream of words ‘my bum got tired. “
It was one of the things I would come to recognize during the months we talked: in her vocabulary, her tone of voice, she sounds entirely like a child when she talks about herself as a child sometimes discursively, as imaginative children do, but more often intelligently, sometimes with humour but most often with despair. The reason for this, I would come to understand, is not that it was a reaction to searching her memory, nor in any way is it playacting.
(Nor, I hasten to add, is it a symptom, as some psychiatrists have conjectured, of a split personality. ) It is, I believe, because this is someone who has not had a childhood, and who speaks as the child she never was, but within herself still is, or needs to be. Her child ness not childishness finally comes to be less surprising than those times when she is exactly what she is: a mature and thinking adult in deep conflict with herself.
After the trial, at the end of which Norma was acquitted and Mary found guilty of manslaughter because of diminished responsibility and sentenced to detention for life, I had spent months in Newcastle investigating the background of the trial and the disposition of her case and, with the help of some of her family, tracing as far as they could or would assist me in doing so, the events of her childhood her first ten years with her mother, Betty Bell.
Mary was born on 26 May 1957, when Betty McC. was seventeen. Ten months later, in March 1958, Betty, then two months pregnant with her second child, married twenty-one-year-old Billy Bell, whom she had met a few months earlier. In September 1966, by which time Billy and Betty Bell had had three children together, Mary’s birth was re-registered under Billy Bell’s name. This is a comparatively rare procedure which can replace formal adoption and provides the child with a birth certificate in the mother’s husband’s name, cancelling out the original certificate in which the father’s name would have been blank.
“Take the thing away from me!” Betty Bell had screamed when they had tried to put the new-born baby into her arms. And according to what I would learn during my months of research in 1969 and 1970, this is the cry Betty had silently screamed again and again ever since, audible though, one would think, to anyone who had known how to listen.
I couldn’t know at the time of the trial what Mary’s relatives (her aunts and uncles, her ‘dad’. Billy Bell, and her fragile grandmother Mrs. McCall dazed and bewildered by the tragedy, would eventually bring themselves to tell me about Betty’s rejection of Mary. But
* In order to protect living family members, I do not use last names unless they have already been made public.
what I discovered was that in the first four years of Mary’s life her mother had tried repeatedly to rid herself of this unwanted child.
Time and again she attempted to hand her over to relatives and, twice, even to strangers. Four times she tried to kill her. On three occasions her eldest sister, Cath, and Cath’s husband Jack were so concerned they asked either to adopt Mary, or at least to be allowed to care for her until she had finished school. What I did not know until Mary, with enormous difficulty, told me last year, was that between the ages of four and eight her mother, then a prostitute, had exposed her to one of the worst cases of child sexual abuse I have ever encountered. Her brother, eighteen months younger than Mary, would have been too young to understand or articulate it, and I am certain that none of her relatives had any awareness of this part of Mary’s early life. Before talking to me they had never and I understand have never since spoken to anyone about Betty.
In 1968, neither the Newcastle Social Services, Education or Health authorities, the police, nor, most importantly, any of the psychiatrists who examined the eleven-year-old prior to the trial (and thus eventually no one in the court) knew anything at all about Mary’s childhood. This almost total ignorance of the traumas she had suffered left a large question mark in my mind about the opinion of two court-appointed psychiatrists even before I knew of the totality of her troubles. They, no doubt for want of a better explanation, labelled her with that catch-all diagnosis (considered highly question able by most specialists when applied to children) of ‘a psychopath’.
Thus labelled, the prosecutor would go on to describe Mary as ‘vicious’, ‘cruel’, ‘terrifying’; even the judge was to allow the word ‘wicked’ to slip into one of his perorations. Was it surprising that the media, not so much creating as responding to the tone set by the court and to the public outrage and fear, called Mary ‘a freak of nature’, ‘evil born’ and (no doubt after the popular book and the film in the fifties) a ‘bad seed’?
But I couldn’t believe this: the fact that somehow or other Mary’s mother’s pathology had to have been the cause of the unbalancing of Mary’s mind long before she killed the little boys became clear to me,
even in my first year of research, and this conviction underpinned all my writings about her and about the case. Two long articles in the Daily Telegraph Magazine in December 1969 were followed two years later by my book The Case of Mary Bell, which recorded the police investigation of the case, parts of the trial verbatim, and as much as I was allowed to disclose about the first years of Mary’s detention.
Given that the subject of both articles and book was a child, and her relatives were living, these writings were, of course, subject to many legal limitations. But the articles and the book would open many doors to me and enable me to follow Mary’s life and, when it appeared useful, comment on it throughout the twelve years she was detained.
Mary’s case, and her life since her release in 1980, has raised an extreme and to her deeply disturbing amount of media interest. Given how interested I have been myself in her for thirty years, I cannot blame my colleagues in the media. She was and is exceptional, with an exceptional life and exceptional gifts for expression. I never wrote about her after her release and never passed on, either to colleagues or even friends, information I had about her whereabouts and circumstances. I thought she would need years of readjustment, and felt she should be enabled to live in anonymity for a long time. But I had also believed for many years that if anyone could ever help us one day to understand, firstly, what can bring a young child to the point of murder, and, secondly, what needs to or can be done with and for such children, then with that strange intelligence of hers which I assumed would endure, Mary would be able to. I always thought the day would come when she herself, without outside pressure, would want to tell her story.