Authors: Gitta Sereny
“She had stomachaches and headaches. She was on Valium and another tranquillizer three times a day. And she was always saying she wouldn’t stay here, that she’d run away; that she’d show them.”
By the time Mary arrived at Risley, it was 2 a. m.
“I was reassured because I knew the reception officer, Miss Ogden, from Styal.
“Oh, God, it had to be you, didn’t it?” she said and told me to strip. And after ascertaining I had no hair or body lice and supervising me having a bath, they put me in the “box” It was a narrow cubicle where there was a plank of wood placed a few feet from the floor for sitting on, but I couldn’t stretch my arms out, front or sideways. I think it’s the only time in my life I had what I later understood was a panic attack, trembling all over with sweat running down my whole body. But, thank God, the “box” only lasted an hour or so, then a matron or sister, I can’t remember which, came and took me to a cell.
I was so relieved, I just lay down on the cot and fell deeply asleep.
“
After all that, her three months at Risley turned out to be relatively benign.
“I knew the assistant governor there. Miss Harbottle; she was quite a good egg. She told me in the morning that I would have no ” association” [contact with other prisoners] till I had been seen by the VC [visiting court of magistrates] and that I was to write out a statement to explain my behaviour. I made three attempts; the first two were returned to me the governor said it wasn’t good enough.
Miss Harbottle said it wasn’t going to help me just to write that I’d felt like absconding.
“You have to do something to help them understand you,” she said. So then I wrote the statement you’ve seen. “
This statement, which Mary wrote out on a typewriter, describes both the events of her escape and her reasons for it. It begins:
Since my parole was turned down in July-August 1977 and I haven’t been given any release date I felt rather depressed, since I have seen girls come in and out and I have felt so isolated.
wanted to prove to the authorities that I am stabilised and given the opportunity I could lead a normal life just like anyone else. What happened ten years ago, although all the truth didn’t come out in court, is something I will have to live with for the rest of my life and no amount of years in prison is going to erase it from my mind. I took a life, but not in the savage way the press made it out to be. At the age of ten I did not realise the meaning of death. What happened to me could have happened to any other child of my age and circumstances . Last week by chance I saw in reception fat Moor Court] a Christmas card from my dad which I had never received and also news that my grandma [Bell] had died. All of these things started to build up and I thought I am shut away and I have never experienced any life. I don’t even know what the other girls are talking about when they come in because I have never been anywhere or done anything She then describes her escape with Annette and their meeting Keith and Clive and her subsequent arrest.
I .
told the police that Clive and Keith knew nothing about it. I didn’t want them to get into trouble because of me. They showed me that I could be normal and enjoy myself and have a nice time land] mix with people like anybody else. I am sorry for mucking up their lives because they were just trying to help me. I am grateful to them both.
I am asking now that my case circumstances and situation will be reviewed in a different light and I may be given a chance to live a normal life. Because in these three days I know I can cope with outside life and feel at ease with ordinary people. I only hope the press don’t start dragging up all the past and try to make me look a horrible person. Perhaps you don’t believe I deserve my freedom, specially after running away, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison. I plead for leniency and hope you can understand it from my side. I am sorry I have created a disturbance but I just wanted to be free. Give me a chance to be so.
transition risley, sty al ask ham grange,
1978 to 1980
Mary had thought it could be weeks before she would see the Visiting Court, but it turned out to be just two days.
“I was to see the magistrates in the afternoon, but my mother came that morning. She slapped me across the face, knocked me off the chair and shouted, ” You little slut, don’t you think you’ve dragged us through the gutter enough without this! ” I said, ” Sorry,” and she screamed, ” Is that all you can say? Sorry? Are you twisted in the head to do such a thing, making me go through hell, with the police coming to our door . ” And all about how she had to go down to the police station and how she had been looking for me all over knowing that I’d make my way to her.
And when she hauled out to slap me again I said, “Don’t!” more sharply than I’d spoken to her in years and we just sat, staring at each other.
“What could she have been thinking?” Mary said.
“That I had run off to have a good time with her7 She understood nothing. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t have gone to her because of what she had done to me when I was little I never thought of that. No, fit was] because I knew she would have handed me in, that’s why. It’s true that it’s bollocks that I planned to hand myself in after two months or whatever, but certainly I didn’t run away to get pregnant. That was the story that went around, so everybody told me later, because that Clive, he made all that money telling the papers that I told him I wanted a baby with him. God … never.”
The Visiting Court that afternoon, she said, consisted of ‘a little old lady who looked as though she belonged to every committee there might be in a rural village’, and two men.
“I was shaking inside but she was quite nice really. She said she’d show me leniency as I’d only been gone two days. They gave me twenty-eight days’ solitary confinement, loss of privileges [association and cigarettes] and loss of pay [for work]. Also, any further consideration of parole was put off by six months.”
She was so depressed and so tired, she said, she hardly minded the solitary confinement, only that the light was kept on all night.
“I
couldn’t sleep and applied to see the SMO (senior medical officer].
That’s how I met Dr. Lawson. “
She had seen him once, shortly after her arrival at Risley, when he had reassured her about her fears of pregnancy.
“He was a fair man and took time to listen. I liked him,” she said. But Dr. Lawson said he wouldn’t give her sleeping pills or any other drug. He had seen her medical records and was shocked at the number of drugs she’d been given. “What do you want to be, girl?” he said.
“A cabbage?”
“I’d done a lot of thinking by then, specially about what had happened with Clive and what had then appeared in the press, and I told Dr. Lawson that I was a transvestite and would he help me toward a sex change … ?”
What? I looked at her. Were you mad?
“Well, no, and yes. I mean, in reality it was nonsense, but it was something to think about, a road I could follow in my head, you know:
the idea of not being me. I knew I wasn’t and didn’t want to be a man.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to be me, either. It was just exploring things, using Dr. Lawson as a sounding-board. He just listened. I could say all kinds of things to him. I didn’t think for a moment I was conning him and I know he didn’t think I was trying to manipulate him it would have been impossible even if I had wanted to. He just let me get it out of my system which was so kind of him.
And then he said that with my prattle about sex change and all that, I was going to the ridiculous, that my brain, with nothing to focus on, was obviously just meandering: “I salute your intelligence,” he said, “but what do you want from me?”
“After this stint out and the terrifying fear that I could be pregnant, I said I needed something to aim for, not so much my ERD, which I knew was now far removed, but what I desperately wanted, I said, was to get back to Sty aL And he said, ” Right, we’ll see what we can do. ” And much later I learned that he had written a letter to the Home Office and told them that I was a catastrophe ready to happen, and if they didn’t want that, they’d better get me released, the quicker the better.”
In fact, three months after her escape, she was told ‘to my joy’, she said that she was going back to Styal.
“In the next shipment, the governor said, and two days later I found myself in a van on the road back to Cheshire and after a few hours I was back with all my friends.”
Given the many weeks Mary talked to me about her seven years in prison, she had virtually nothing to say about the next nine months at Styal.
“It was peaceful,” she said.
“It was home. I was with Diane and I had other good friends. I was quite prepared to stay there, for however long.”
Her last letter to Carole and Ben, written in the summer of 1978, shows her state of mind.
We’ve had beautiful sunshine up here, it’s been tropical. I was on the grass yesterday splashing myself with ice water. When it’s like this, it always reminds me of Rimington Park [where Carole and Ben had taken her on an outing from Red Bank five years earlier]. I’d like to return there one day, it’ll be like walking back in time. (Years later, she was to take that ‘walk back in time’. “Somebody drove me to Red Bank,” she said.
“But when we got there, I couldn’t even get out of the car. I just looked across at what had been such an important part of my life, by then more than fifteen years before, remembered myself, four foot and some inches high arriving, remembered Mr. Dixon, and then couldn’t stand it.
“Please let’s go,” I said, “please…” And she never got to Rimington Park. )
The next lines are a sad reminder of what happens to many boys despite benefiting from the comparative excellence of a place such as Red Bank and the influence of a James Dixon:
I’ve got some news from abroad. Remember Derek C? I had a letter off him about three weeks ago, he’s in Freemantle State Prison serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery. I nearly fell through the floor.
He said on visits they have glass screens and machine guns, and I don’t think they have a parole system over there. Also Tommy C. has got five years for snatching wages from the docks. And Ray C. has just got out; he’s had an accident and is paralysed from the neck down.
It is now 9 pm. I got called over to the MO before I could finish writing this. I’ve been feeling a bit rundown and had a couple of headaches, so have been on a tonic for a couple of days. We had a dance last night; I did my “John Travolta’ a bit … exhibitionist to this very day, eh? The deputy governor and a few girls made a fantastic float, a huge papier-mache show, the old woman who had lived in a shoe. The staff kiddies were inside watching from various windows. It won first prize. Well, I’ve given you the newsy bits.
I have some not-good news which mounted up to my running away. My granny Bell died, and my dad hasn’t been seen in over a year now. I think our P. [Mary’s brother whom she had not seen since she was eleven and he was ten years old knows where he is but won’t say. My old nana McC. is deteriorating in her geriatric home, which really cuts me up. She doesn’t remember anyone and lives in a world of her own.
“I phoned my Nana,” she told me, ‘and she didn’t recognize me. She thought I was someone else. I said, “No, no, I’m Mae.” But it meant nothing to her. That was the first time I talked to her in what is it?
Five, six years? And of course, she didn’t remember me. It made me feel I didn’t exist. “
I feel so helpless not being able to do anything except hope that she feels happy in her own little way. To be honest, its my da I’m really pining for. I haven’t heard from him in years, not a birthday card or anything, and you know how much I love him. Still, worrying won’t make anything better. He’s well capable of looking after himself.
Except for the Christmas card she was never given and only saw by accident at Moor Court shortly before she ran away. Billy Bell had never communicated with her or been to see her at Styal.
“Did you ask him why after you were released? I asked. And she shook her head.
“I
didn’t. I hardly saw him. What is there to say after what was, after all, a lifetime? “
Even though we haven’t written for a while I want you both to know that you’re never far away from my thoughts. I often think of you and wonder how life is treating you. It is now Thursday. I went to the hairdresser today and had my hair streaked. It looks okay. This afternoon I have been to group therapy so all-in-all it hasn’t been a bad day. It’s been very warm again today, although we’ve had some thunder and lightning rain. Probably scorching hot tomorrow. I’m on the garden next week so I’ll be in the fresh air, thank God. I hate indoors work, yuck. So monotonous and moronic. Well, I have to go, as I have things to do believe it or not, some washing and ironing waiting for me down there. We’re certainly not molly-coddled I guess we have everything but shoe parade and rifle inspection ha ha. Well, I really have to sign off now, hope to hear from you soon and until then remain just okay so tara for now, love as always, Mae. Just received your address card, over the moon to hear you’re having a baby!
It was nine months after her return to Styal that at 1 p. m. on a midweek day “I’ll never forget it,” she says she was called to the governor’s office.
“When I went in. Miss Fowler and Miss Starr, the two AGs, were there too and Miss Morgan had this big sheet of paper in front of her. She said, ” I think you’d better sit down. ” Well, I’d only sat down in her presence once in six years so I said I’d rather stand.
“So she started in that formal voice of hers in which she had adjudicated me a hundred times or whatever: ” The Parole Board have recommended to the Home Secretary that you be”-and then she broke off.
“Oh, the hell with it,” she said.
“You’ve got your parole: you are going to be released in May next year.” And when I just stood there, stiff as a board, she said: “Well, you could look a little more pleased. Most people are ecstatic.” And I said and I know now that was less than gracious because I think she was pleased for me, and not only because she was at last getting rid of me “Well, it wasn’t you who gave it to me, was it?” Nasty, wasn’t I?