Authors: Gitta Sereny
“I was sent out then and I started to do cart-wheels and then I put my wellies back on’ it was about September, she thinks ‘and ran as fast as I could to tell Diane who was in the kitchen of her block. I suddenly felt awful. Here was my best friend and she didn’t have her release date and I had. I was looking through the door; I was white.
She said: “What’s the matter, have you seen a ghost?” I said, “I’ve got my release, next year.” She burst into tears and we stood there, with our arms around each other and she said, “We can’t cry. You’ll be taking me with you. Part of me will be with you, and you’ll be here with me.”
Mary has only once dared to offend against the strict ruling which forbids communication between prisoners or ex-prisoners. After Diane was released, she once talked to her for an hour on the telephone.
“She and I had promised each other that one day we would meet up again. We made a date, at Marble Arch, on a certain day of the year.
But finally I didn’t dare. I think they very much wanted to keep us apart and I couldn’t bear to harm her by risking anything. “
How would it be if you simply and honestly asked for permission to see her? I asked.
“I’ve thought of it,” she said, ‘but what if they say no? ” Are you a bit afraid that perhaps Diane wants to forget that time, wants not to be remembered?
“No,” again a quick reply, “I’m not, I’m not,” and then in a tone of voice that brooked no further discussion: “We are friends. I’ll never not be her friend; she’ll never not be mine.”
A lifer’s last period of imprisonment before release is quite carefully and thoughtfully worked out. During the final nine months or so at an open prison, they first work inside and then outside the grounds. Already they will have had regular contact with a probation officer, but they will also be allocated a prison visitor whose function is to help introduce them back into society.
“In my case it was an Asian girl called Pam,” Mary said.
“She was a student of sociology whose boyfriend. Mark, was a male nurse. She was real nice, introduced me to a circle of their friends, took me to Bonfire Night.”
What did she know about you? I asked.
“She knew my name, but we never spoke about anything.”
Did you think that was a good system?
“It is in a way, if you get on with your prison visitor; there were others I saw and heard about, well-meaning people but with whom I couldn’t have managed.”
Didn’t you think it was thoughtful of them to give you a young visitor? I asked.
“Yes,” she said at once, ‘it was. I had my difficulties with Pam, too, because I was being forced in a way to slip in and out of character, but then, I probably would have had with anybody. I always felt I had to be respectable with Pam-she was very well-spoken and gentle, very much like the people I had known at Red Bank. And why not? If she hadn’t been, she probably wouldn’t have offered to do the job. It wasn’t the effing and blinding crowd, however kind and familiar with the kind of people who end up in prison they might be,
who were going to offer to be, or be accepted as prison visitors. But it was disconcerting. It was unreal. “
Askham Grange was another beautiful old building set in large grounds, she said: “Lots of character, a huge library, real books this time, a big ball-room, several dining-rooms and a mother and baby wing. It’s one of the few prisons in the country Holloway is another, now, too where mothers can keep their new babies for a while. Also the food was really good: for breakfast we had cereal, beans on toast, tea, good jam; for lunch, curries, rice, spaghetti and fruit; then for tea there were salads, or pigs in blankets [bread wrapped round sausages], meat pies, or that sort of thing; and later at night we had supper poached eggs on toast, sandwiches, cocoa. It was all very, very different from the other places. People were nice to each other, you know. I was given things like shampoo and all kinds of nice-smelling stuff. And you could do sort of interesting things aside from the obvious cleaning: there was an archaeological dig; there was a duck pond to clean, gardening, helping in the library, but it was all sort of relaxed.
“The governor was known as a ” clean-up governor”. Typically for the place, when I got there I wasn’t taken to him, you know, like in handcuffs or whatever. No, he came to the small dining-room I’d been taken to to be given a cup of tea and he said, in his Liverpool sort of voice, homey, you know: ” Hello, I hope you’ll enjoy your stay,” and he told me I was quite free to go for walks in the grounds whenever I liked outside working hours.
“Just don’t go beyond the gate; and be there for the head count at 8 p.m.”
So, did you think again about running away?
“It wasn’t that I didn’t think, but it was different thinking … sort of playing with the idea in my mind. And very soon I realized I no longer imagined, as I had done before, that I was the kind of prisoner, like POWs you know, who have an obligation to escape. Nor did I feel the need to run that I’d had at Moor Court. Perhaps it was simply because I now had my ERD, but though it must have played a part, I
don’t think that was all of it. It was because the place, the atmosphere was different: I was ready . ready to be me again, you know? ” She laughed, half embarrassed: ” Like Mr. Dixon had said, to go forth and be the ambassador of Red Bank. Slowly, off came the jeans, on went a skirt . it was for myself: I felt that though I didn’t seem to have learned anything practical that would be useful for my life, in eleven years of it I had established the fact for myself quite aside from for others that I couldn’t be pushed around. There was a girl there I got very quickly friendly with called Phoebe, a very educated woman who was in prison for tax evasion, and she said:
“Why do you insist on swearing, speaking the way you do?” She said she could see there was an intelligent person underneath just putting on a front of aggression.
“Why bother?” she said. And though she wasn’t quite right, because it was more complicated than she understood to keep the various strands of “me” apart and going, it was true enough, I had no need to be aggressive any more. “
The prisoners’ move from the main part of the prison to a hostel depends not only on their behaviour, but on when a hostel place becomes available. The move is always combined with the beginning of outside employment in nearby villages or towns. In Mary’s case, it happened after she had been at Askham Grange for three months.
“The hostels are a number of bungalows in the grounds,” she said.
“By comparison to the main house, they are sparsely furnished, you know, more like doctor’s waiting-rooms, but you do have your own room.” The women made breakfast for themselves and in each hostel there was a set evening meal. The prison is dependent upon local employers offering jobs to inmates, “And there aren’t that many who are willing,” Mary said.
“Most girls worked as cleaners in a nearby mental hospital. One souvenir shop did take a few as salesgirls, but mostly it was cleaning and waitressing. That’s the job I got, waitressing at St. William’s College restaurant. And I had a friend at my hostel, Jane, and we used to meet either during our lunch breaks, or after we could get evening passes, which happens after a few weeks if your behaviour and work is OK then you can stay out till 10 p.m. and we’d go to pubs and come back dead drunk. I can’t even believe how we managed to stagger in.”
What about drugs? I asked.
“Well, as I’ve said before, everybody smoked hash, in all the prisons I knew. And yes, there were drugs; by comparison to high-security places like Styal where you can see hard drugs have to be rare because prisoners look so healthy, open prisons are notoriously easy to get drugs and drink in. At Askham Grange and Moor Court of course I saw heroin, and certainly people smuggled in bottles. But I didn’t see crack or coke and angel dust and all that muck, but then I didn’t go in for it and that was known. Even so, I think the papers, at least then, exaggerated their reports of drug use, certainly in women’s prisons. Most of the drugs I saw in Askham Grange, and before that in Moor Court, were medicinal things like Largactil, Librium, Hemeneverin, Halcyon and Nembutal. You could always get those off the doctors, though only short-term.” She shrugged: “Of course, that’s relative, isn’t it? Short-term prescriptions over years spell addiction. Still, believe me, you don’t think of that if they make life bearable, and they did.
“For me though,” she said, ‘as time went on, my nightmare was the press. I never could understand what they wanted from me. “
The media had always been exceptionally aware of Mary, thanks in large part to her mother’s initiatives while she was in Red Bank and Styal.
But her escape from Moor Court somehow created a determination in the British tabloids, and in some foreign magazines for a long time the most persistent to ‘get’ her, not, one must believe, because they were really interested in the more serious aspects of her life, but because of whatever sensation, presumably about prison life, she could provide.
“It made me very wary of people,” she said.
“From the time I was allowed outside, people pointed me out to each other and reporters waylaid me. I never knew how and why. On one occasion, one lot pulled my friend Jane into a car, mistaking her for me, and she led them on till she was sure I was safe. Later, some time after my release, I was helped to change identity. But even so, some people found me, and others kept looking.”
Was there any supervision in the hostels? I wondered.
“Absolutely. There were sleeping-in officers; they were OK, they were good to me, never got me into trouble even when I was trouble. And when I was in trouble, with the press stalking me once they found out I was there and on outside work, they quite often came to my aid by driving me to the job or getting me from there.
There is no doubt that over her years in detention Mary had given way to outbursts of anger. In Red Bank, among physically responsive boys, this was acknowledged as normal and contained by Mr. Dixon’s rules. In prison, where physical aggression was against the norm and unacceptable to the other women inmates, she had largely learned to suppress her feelings. Her many spells in Bleak House were almost invariably for acts of rebellion against the staff, rather than for acts of aggression against other prisoners, and she never shied away from describing these episodes of rebellion to me, treating them as a part of her ‘tough’ prison persona.
“Something bad happened one day,” she said.
“There was a girl who was in for child abuse and she started in on me when I jumped a queue in the dining-room all lifers jumped queues; it was accepted, you know, nobody ever said anything. But she did and I suppose I’d just been waiting for a pretext, so I went and beat her up. I broke her thumb and smashed some ribs and she was taken to the hospital wing. Some friends of mine had got me out in the kerfuffle and when the police came we were sitting in the library reading newspapers. But the governor called me to his office and he said that he knew it was me who’d done it and if he got proof, I was looking at another five to seven years. The girl finally said she didn’t know who’d beat her up.”
When it came to telling me about the most important or the most difficult thing that happened to her during her time in Askham
Grange, Mary was very much in two minds: not about telling me which she obviously felt a need to do but about seeing this part of her experience appear in print. I too felt reluctant, and yet the consequence of it at the end of her twelve years of imprisonment for having killed two little boys at eleven was so appalling, I can’t see how, in a story of this young woman’s life, a mention of it, however brief, can be avoided.
It would appear that while she was at Askham Grange a respected married man in the community fell in love with her. She was living a somewhat freer life, working days outside the prison in preparation for her approaching release. After various meetings and conversations, her first home leave was being prepared.
“When you get close to your release,” she said, ‘they give you some home leaves so you can find out where you want to be. So I applied to go to my mother. I mean there wasn’t anywhere else. ” (Interestingly enough, Veronica, one of Mary’s counsellors at Red Bank, had written to the Home Office and offered to have her to stay, but was rejected, probably because, like Mr. Dixon, she was known not to have believed that Mary had killed the little boys.) For this first home leave she was given a pass for three nights. But before she left, the man suggested that she should stay for only two nights with her mother.
“He said for me to take a train after that and he would pick me up at Darlington.”
You knew what he wanted, I said. Did you want it?
She sat for a bit, saying nothing.
“You see, there was the home leave first of all and … you know … I went under another name, and it was all a thing of shame, you know. My mother made it into shame, blame, guilt, more guilt. She told me right away not to tell anyone, anyone ever, who I was. And at the pub the first night she told her pals that I was her cousin and that my parents were dead and that’s really how it went, both days. She had all these pills, sleeping tablets, Nembutal capsules, and she always gave me those when I couldn’t sleep. She fed me drink as a cure-all for colds and whatever, not to harm me, I think.
“Apparently that first time I had a cold and I got drunk as well,
and she and George said I screamed in my sleep . Well, no one who has shared a dorm with me has ever heard me scream. I never woke up screaming, and, you know, I didn’t believe it. But I remember getting drunk. “
I’m surprised George would allow you to get drunk on your home leave, I said to her.
“He was always saying about going easy, always ” Go easy,” but my mother would be slipping me … putting more stuff in the drink. Yes, it was whisky and orange.”
Why did she do that?
“I don’t know, but I got up early in the morning and the first thing I was given was a drink. A whisky. To stop me snivelling. My nose was running and I was shaking. That was the cure.”
For her?