Authors: Gitta Sereny
“Yes, that’s it. She said, ” This will stop it. ” Because I was going, ” Tea, tea, I want some tea. I want some milk, I want something. Why is my mouth like this? ” No matter what I drank I still felt thirsty. And she said, ” Just hold your nose and drink it. ” So you know, I was just so glad when the two days were over and I could leave.”
And then were you looking forward to seeing him? Were you excited?
“He had said we were going to a little town on Teesside where there was a nice hotel and I did sort of feel… anticipation.”
You knew what would happen at this hotel?
“I knew I wasn’t going for coffee,” she said drily.
But did you want what was going to happen? I repeated.
“I was … sort of… in a way excited.”
Was he attractive to you?
“I wasn’t unwilling. He said he was determined to show me I wasn’t a lesbian. It … it was a power thing, you know. He knew it, I knew it, and he even said it, that it was … that I was like an animal that needed to be trained. He … talked a lot…”
Oh, Mary, I said. Did you need that? Did you want that?
“I don’t know. I don’t know now. But, it was different … I felt different.”
It doesn’t sound as if it was a good experience for you.
“Well, it was an experience.” She stopped.
“I was immature, you know, very immature. It was hard for me not to think of sex as dirty…”
Did you think sex dirty with the girls?
“No, that wasn’t sex.”
Well, it was a kind of sex, wasn’t it?
“No, it wasn’t, it wasn’t. That was different. But men … it must have been because of my … what must have been my memories and associations…”
Did you ever say no to him?
“Oh, that wasn’t in it… And, he was nice to me. He was OK. He wasn’t bad to me, he was always concerned, protective, basically he is a good person. You know, people always think of women having problems at a certain age, but they overlook that men go through crises, too, and I think that’s what happened to him.
“I think he did love me, or at least, fell a bit in love with me. On a second home leave he took me on a trip and we stayed in a hotel in Finchley for four days. But not long afterwards he told his wife, and I met her. She was so nice, so honest with me. I couldn’t… you know, I couldn’t see him ruin his life and his marriage.”
And was that the end of it?
“Yes, he came to say goodbye to me when I was going to be released and he gave me a golden ring.”
Unfortunately however, it was not quite the end. Months before this, at the beginning of her pre-release scheme, the Senior Medical Officer at Askham Grange had suggested she should go on the pill.
“But I thought that was quite offensive,” she said.
“I said: ” What are you inferring? That I’m going to go on a rampage, jump on every male I see? ” And he said, no, that they just offered it to women on pre release so that our bodies would get used to it. Well, I thought that was really invading my privacy, also, I was scared of these pills, I’d read of the possible side-effects and, you know, I wasn’t planning anything. And then, when this happened with this man [which was her first contact with a man except for her brief fumble with Clive more than a year and a half before], well, he was in total control, and he seemed to know what he was doing. I didn’t question I didn’t think.
“Anyway, then I realized I was pregnant. I had to talk to somebody, so I told the Askham Grange probation officer, who was particularly nice.
I lied of course about who it was. And she said I had to think about what I wanted to do, and I had to talk to . the man. So I told him.
He took me out to lunch at a restaurant and I told him I didn’t want to get an abortion, I said I wanted to be pregnant. And he said it was my decision, entirely my decision. He held my hand, sort of stroking it, and he told me not to be worried, that it was entirely up to me He said that if I had the baby of course it would be very difficult . but it didn’t matter, we would find a means of . a way of living.
“Well, you know, it was impossible, wasn’t it? So I had the abortion.
But if I think that almost the first thing I did after twelve years in prison for killing two babes, was to kill the baby in me . ” Mary was crying now.
“But, I mean, it was the only thing to do … wasn’t it.”
part four after prison 1980 to 1984 A try AT life
1980 to 1984
Mary’s accounts of her last nine months at Styal and just under a year at Askham Grange had become strangely quiet, tidy and sometimes quite gay. The relationship with an adult man, however much some aspects of it upset her now in retrospect, and whatever we may think of the ethical aspects of it, was curiously useful for her:
“He’d say, ” I love you whatever you’ve done,” she said,”
“for all your bad points and your good points.” It was amazing for me. ” It is certainly significant that it was in the course of this relationship that, for the first time since she was four or five, she ceased to be enure tic
“I couldn’t believe it had stopped,” she said.
“It had been with me for ever it seemed, and suddenly it was gone. I was … clean.”
The inevitable break with this man, her pregnancy, and her release, all contributed to what, under any circumstances, would have been a traumatic transition. When she left prison in May 1980, as she told me, half of her was in a state of euphoria at the idea of freedom, half of her was entirely incapable of looking ahead.
“Where was I going? What was I going to do? What … what would I do without my friends?” In prison Mary had created a kind of life for herself and, oddly enough, because of her talent for friendship, a sort of feeling of self-value.
“It all went,” she said.
“Went, I think, as I passed through the gates. Outside I felt… I was as in a void.”
She had not had a home outside prison; she had not had a friend who was not a prisoner; she had essentially no family, although there were many relatives, good and kind people.
“I had been to my Auntie Cath’s on my home leave, and they were kind,
you know. It wasn’t 300/ after prison that they didn’t welcome me. Uncle Jackie was brilliant, as if I’d just been to the corner shop and come back. But, realistically, I didn’t think it was on. I’m different from my family. I had a different life. They were OK with me, but they wouldn’t want me around their doorstep. I’m an embarrassment.”
It was four weeks before the abortion could take place, and that month, with its painful doubts and realizations, was the beginning for Mary of what would be, with two significant exceptions, almost two years of a floating existence without purpose. It was not only the result but an exacerbation of the destructiveness of prison life.
The usual routine for longterm prisoners with families is to be released to them. Years before, Molly Morgan had told Mary that it was highly unlikely she would ever be allowed to live with her mother, but the precedent had been established by her home leaves, and Mary says she expected to be released to Betty. It is entirely consistent with Mary’s ambivalent reaction towards anything to do with her mother that she did not remember that both she and Betty had requested she should not be sent there. All she remembers is having ‘mixed feelings’ when the deputy governor of Askham Grange, who was dealing with her release formalities, told her that the decision had been made against returning her to the NorthEast, and that as yet they didn’t know where she was to go.
In fact, the authorities were looking for the best solution for her:
we have Carole and Ben G. “s testimony that they were asked quite early on whether they could have Mary to stay. One of the many reasons why the Home Office had such difficulties in placing or lodging Mary was that she had always been a high-profile prisoner. Her mother, of course, right from the beginning of the trial and throughout Mary’s detention, had fanned this media interest for her own complicated reasons, and for financial gain. On her second home leave, Betty introduced Mary to one of her old drinking pals who was a reporter for the News of the World, she said, and suggested in a conspiratorial whisper that he would be the right person with whom Mary could ‘write a book’. ” And you can imagine the arrangement she had in mind when she suggested that,” Mary told me.
“When I did get out he was one of the people who always seemed to know where I could be found.” But even without that and also discounting my book, which doubtless added to the public interest Mary’s notoriety had endured, above all, in the North of England, and there was every reason to fear that her release from prison would reactivate both the trauma for the victims’ families and the media’s pursuit of Mary.
In the end it was only just before her release, on 14 May 1980, that she was told of her first destination.
“There wasn’t anything I could have done for myself,” Mary said.
“What did I know? Who did I know?
What could I do? My friends in prison were appalled that nothing was prepared for me, and one of them even tried to get her family to have me to stay. They were a nice mining family in Yorkshire, and they said they would, gladly, but of course it was disapproved. “
One of the most important things that had to be done before Mary was released was to establish a new identity for her. It was the governor who had suggested a new first name: “He said that if he had had a daughter, that is the name he would have given her and it made me feel he cared,” Mary said. With help from the deputy governor she then decided on a new surname, and someone came from the Social Services in York to give her her social security and national insurance numbers made out in her new names. She took them, but she understood nothing.
“You know, that woman handed me some papers, I said thank you. But I didn’t have a clue. About P45s, National Insurance, National Health, taxes … ? Don’t make me laugh. Oh, the girls chatted endlessly about this and that, but that was all about how to con the system, not how to obey it: half the people in open prisons are there because of tax evasion, for God’s sake. And the new name? God, I was Mary. How was I going to be somebody else? How could I remember that I was? It was like being an alien.”
The name or the lack of one only resurrected the identity crisis she had gone through in 1977, when she found out in Styal that Billy Bell was not her biological father. It was to be a long time before she could respond to her new identity, and it was never real to her.
Indeed the new name is not helpful: it neither looks nor feels like her, and although, slightly altered, it eventually became her statutory name, she has used many others since every time a newspaper seemed close to finding her, and as pseudonyms on various documents. Like many of us, she has a pet name used by her family and friends, which suits her, and it is what I too call her now. But it was a huge step towards her commitment to the process of self-examination necessary for this book when she suddenly said, about a month into our talks: “I want you to call me Mary while we talk.
That’s who I am, aren’t I? “
Late in the afternoon of 13 May, twelve hours before her release, she was told that early the next morning the hostel officer and her husband would drive her to Cambridge, where a senior probation officer who was a friend of the governor would be waiting to take her for ten days to a small village in East Anglia.
“There was no reason for me to go there, except that this was where that probation officer had a house. She usually worked at a nearby prison but she took the ten days I was there off. What it felt like was that they didn’t know what to do with me, so they did this until the next place I was due to go to was available or whatever. That was a Quaker family back in Yorkshire, just ten miles from Askham Grange, who, you know, took people in who needed a roof over their heads, prisoners or whatever.”
The village in Suffolk was tiny, Mary said.
“It sure wasn’t anything zippedydooda, you know, like Blackpool, which I suppose I must have been hoping for. I just met two people there, an old lady who knitted, a very Dickensian character; and a bearded chap who used to be a monk and became the village butcher; he wore shorts under his apron and sandals, very hippyish.” But she didn’t really talk to them much.
“The probation officer was nice, you know, but not somebody one could talk with. I think she was sort of at a loss herself what to do with me.”
So what did you do for those ten days?
“I went for some walks, but mostly I slept. I ate a lot of macaroons and cheese. Brie, she had lots of Brie, I don’t know why. I felt lonely, incredibly lonely. I didn’t know one could feel as lonely. I was very preoccupied with the coming abortion.”
Did you have doubts about your decision?
“Not doubts,” she said.
“Just many thoughts. Given what happened to me as a child, I felt that I ought to have been aborted. Had there been common sense and an iota of responsibility in my sixteen-year- old mother’s family, surely I would have been? That is why I had no doubt.
I wouldn’t bring a child into this world that I wasn’t ready for, and would or might ultimately resent. Nine months out of prison: what kind of a mother would I have been? And anyway, I wouldn’t have been allowed to keep it and it would have been emotionally as deprived as I. Had I not committed murder as a child, I think the moral argument about abortion would not have occupied me as much as it did. It was terrible that the first responsible decision I had to make was one so gravely. ” she paused, ‘… linked.”
When you decided to have the abortion, was it your own childhood that was uppermost in your mind, or was it Martin and Brian? I asked her.
“It was both,” she said.
“I was thinking very mixed …”
She was trying to say and it was the first time she had ever expressed it, I believe even to herself that her childhood and the murders she had committed were not divisible.
“It was just totally impossible,” she said.
“I talked … apologized to the baby in me in my own way: ” Next time round,” I said.”
Ann Sexton was the third of many probation officers she would have “I seemed to go through them like they were going out of fashion,” she quipped “Ann took receipt of me again in Cambridge—’ I interrupted. Took receipt?