Authors: Gitta Sereny
“Well, that’s what these hand overs feel like,” she said.
“I don’t mean it critically, not at all, but you know, it’s a routine for them. They have so many clients … that’s what probation officers, and social workers too, call their charges, and that is meaningful, isn’t it?
I mean, it means we are a kind of transaction, doesn’t it? Anyway, Ann was young and very nice but she was a very shy person. I sort of felt perhaps I should get her to talk to me rather than me to her, you know what I mean? She was very religious. She told me she’d applied for a Winston Churchill pass to go to South Africa to be a probation kind of missionary, but she had been rejected. The Quaker family she took me to were friends of hers. “
Geoffrey and Elizabeth Henderson* had two daughters, one married, the other, Mary’s age, working in an art gallery in London, and two sons, David, who was in his first year of university, and fourteen-year-old Tim, in boarding-school.
“Tim was the only one who didn’t know who I was,” Mary said.
“All the others knew. They were really good people.
Dr. Henderson Geoff was a strict sort of man he held Bible classes every Thursday. But they were truly good. Liz was rather timid, probably because he was so strong, but really nice, nice to me, too.
“
Mary said she had gone into hospital for the abortion three days after arriving at her new home, but in fact the abortion was just over a month after her release.
Her new hosts thought she had some female trouble and asked no questions.
“I was very tired when it was over,” Mary said.
“I felt awfully weepy. I just couldn’t stop crying. I remember I went to the hairdresser’s and I just burst into tears … I spent a lot of time in my room on my own and Liz and Geoff were good, you know; they left me to it. Liz wasn’t the kind of person to intrude, and anyway, I think they thought above all I was disorientated: first the change of identity, which they knew about; then the hospital. After that, all I wanted was to get a job,” she said.
“I just wanted to work, you know, I didn’t care at what and I knew it would be hard with no job record, no references, so I just walked around and applied where I saw vacancies advertised.”
Her very first job, which she got, she thinks, not more than a week or ten days after coming out of hospital, was in the local nursery.
* Changed names.
“But of course I had to tell the probation office and they said no, absolutely not.”
Well, to be fair, I said (the primary rule for prisoners released on licence is that they are not allowed to work ‘with people’): a nursery of all things . ?
“I know,” she said.
“But you see, I didn’t associate …” She stopped.
It wasn’t that she didn’t associate a job at a nursery with the rule of not working with people, but that she didn’t make the association which not only the Probation Service but without doubt the media and the public would have made at once between a nursery and the crime for which she had been convicted.
“So I went and handed in my notice and then I sort of says to myself: ” Well, enough. I’m going back. ” And I walked back, back, you know, to Askham Grange. And two hundred yards or so from the prison there was this prison officer who stopped me and asked me what I was doing. And I said, ” I don’t like it out there. “
And she she was nice you know, but of course she said I couldn’t come back, that it was hard, but I had to stick with it “out there” “
Then she went to work for a painter and decorator.
“I’d liked painting at Styal, so I helped paint the Town Hall, and then the inside of some houses.” (It was evident from her account that the Probation Service neither prepared the ground for her when she came out nor helped her later to find jobs. ) “And then I had some other jobs, a few days at this, a few days at that and somehow the months passed.
“And then one day Geoff took me along on a business trip in the direction of Newcastle and I asked whether we could go by my mother whom I hadn’t seen for months. He drove through Scotswood and along Whitehouse Road, and he asked whether I wanted him to stop the car anywhere there but I said no, no. I wanted to get away because driving along there reminded me of a dream I used to have quite a lot and it was about my dad and K. [her sister, five years younger]. The dream was me at the back of Whitehouse Road … It was windy, very windy, and I would be outside looking through the window of the bedroom. I’d be shouting, calling out, ” Dad, it’s me, it’s me, can I come in? ” And there would be just blank faces at the windows and no response.” (And there is another dream she told me she has had time and again over the years. In this one the faces at the window are those of both her little sisters, and K. asks Billy, “Who’s that?” And Billy says, “No one we know.” ) “Geoff drove me to my mother’s then … I don’t remember anything about it except that he stayed in the car I don’t even remember whether she was there, only that he took me to a restaurant for dinner on the way back and I told him about the abortion, but of course not whose baby it had been.”
How did that come up? I asked. What made you suddenly tell him, months later?
“It was a quiet place where we ate and … Oh, everything came together, you know.” She meant Scotswood, the dream, seeing or not seeing her mother.
“And he looked at me, you know, me, and said I looked tired and … It just … well, nobody ever looked at me like that and noticed … And you see, I was tired, I was awfully tired, and I suppose it was still uppermost in my mind and so I told him, and I said it had happened three months before and that’s all I said and he didn’t ask no questions.”
Mary hadn’t seen or talked to her mother for months when, very shortly before Christmas, she was ‘wandering about not far from the Hendersons’ house’, and realized there was a car ‘sort of following’ her. She thought it was a reporter and that they’d found her again: “I finally thought, ” Sod this,” and stopped. And then the car stopped and out got my stepfather, Georgie.
“Georgie is the most honest person I know,” Mary said.
“I really admired the way he’d worked his way up in life and you know, the way he loved, or anyway stuck to my mother, warts and all. And that day in that street, Christmas and all, yes, I was glad to see him. He said, and these were his very words: ” Your mother wants you to give her another chance to be a mother to you. She wants you to come home. ” And my mother was in the car and we went back to the house and Geoff was there and he was not pleased at all. He said that of course I could go out with them the next day if I wanted, but that if I returned North with them I would no longer be welcome at his house.
I wouldn’t be able to live there again because, he said, if I went back to my mother, “It totally defeats the object.”
Did you understand what he meant?
“No, I didn’t. And really, I was quite offended, you know. And he seemed so cross, like, ” That’s all there is to be said about it” … It was like an ultimatum, you know.”
Mary’s presentation of her reaction to this ultimatum was somewhat disingenuous, for I have seen her anger when she feels she is being dictated to, or when she thinks her privacy is being invaded. She becomes inaccessible then to argument or persuasion from those she thinks have offended her. There are two things that are likely to happen when she is angry: one is that she drives the anger inward, goes out, walks for hours and when she finally comes home goes to sleep, but retains that inner anger for quite a while, days and even weeks during which, unusual for her, she is cold and withdrawn towards the person whom she feels attacked or offended by. Her second reaction, rather than withdrawal, is verbal attack: her tone then, berating the offender, becomes very sharp not the terms she uses, for she is never vulgar but her voice, the timbre of which is usually both low and hesitant, rises an octave higher and the words become suddenly very precise, sharply articulated and defined.
“I am fu-ri-ous,” she will say, ‘ab-solu-tely fu-ri-ous. ” And the angrier she gets, the more middle class she sounds, and the less there is of that soft Newcastle lilt.
I could have predicted her reaction that day in Yorkshire, for certainly Dr. Henderson, for all the right reasons, was dictating to her. Her mother and Georgie went to a B&B, she said. She had stayed home but had not spoken to Dr. Henderson that evening and she spent the next day with her mother and George.
“We drove to a nearby town and it was market day when the pubs were open all day, I think. Anyway, there was a bookshop and I said I wanted to rummage about there and my mother followed me in. But she said what did I want with all these books and let’s go to the pub, so I went along and they just … oh … sort of got settled in there and I remember saying, ” God, how can you sit in here when it’s a really nice day outside? ” It was cold but sunny there was a lot of music you know like there is everywhere around Christmas; it was really pretty.
And she started out how I was living in a dream world, that it was unrealistic for me to be where I was.
“These people,” she said, meaning Liz and Geoff, and that I didn’t belong there and the life I was living wasn’t a life for somebody like me. And I listened, you know, and I felt just the contrary: I felt how different a person I was and that I didn’t, that I couldn’t belong to their . to my mother’s scene.
“But then, when she said, ” It’s Christmas, come home with us for Christmas,” I just couldn’t say no. I know now … Of course I know now that I could have handled the situation much better with Geoff…”
Were you still angry with him?
She didn’t answer.
“I liked them so much, you know; the kids were all coming home. Some were there already. I know I could have struck some sort of compromise with him, but I didn’t. I just went North that night to where they lived in the Whitley Bay area.”
So Betty, who had always known how to press Mary’s buttons, had succeeded once again. No doubt counting on the festive spirit, she had appeared on the scene just before Christmas and used the nice young stepfather, whom she knew Mary liked, to wave that magic ‘mother’ wand which had always worked. In the pub on market day, Mary had seen clearly for a moment and might have wavered. But by then, Dr. Henderson, the strong father figure of a Quaker family, had not only exerted his authority which to Mary was like a red rag to a bull but in challenging her loyalty to her mother had given her an ultimatum which she considered offensive, as much to her mother as to herself. And on this pre-holiday day, with the four Henderson children home for Christmas, it had been made clear to her or so she thought that the Hendersons’ house was not intended to be home for her, but merely a refuge from which she could be evicted if she disobeyed.
However much she liked them,
however prepared she might even have been to love them, the link was fragile.
“I think of them now,” she said sixteen years later, ‘as a distant family. “
As your distant family? I asked.
“As a distant family for me,” she specified carefully.
“I mean, it’s highly unlikely that they’d ever need me. But if pigs ever fly, you know, and they, or any of them, would need me, well, I’d be there for them.”
They had, in fact, been there for her when she needed just what they offered. And even though Dr. Henderson clearly knew that the authorities wanted to curtail Mary’s contact with her mother, he had been ready enough to accede to Mary’s wish to drop in on Betty when they were in her vicinity. It was when Betty had forced renewed contact on Mary months later, without warning, that as unaware of the complexity of that relationship as of Mary’s incapacity to give in to coercion he had presumably seen no alternative to presenting her with his ultimatum.
Christmas, Mary said, passed in an alcoholic blur.
“Between Christmas and New Year, I don’t think I was sober from morning to night. It all happened in her pub and I just drank along with everybody. But then I must have come to. I suddenly saw again that anything that had my mother in it wasn’t and couldn’t be ” home” for me. It was like another home leave I shouldn’t have gone on. And on January fourth I left and went to York, to the probation office.”
Ann Sexton wasn’t back, she said, but the probation officer on duty told her that she definitely could not go back to the Hendersons and must not communicate with them except through Ann when she returned.
“She was a very kind lady, the wife of a milkman,” Mary said, ‘and that first night I stayed with them. And then they found me a room with a school-teacher out in the country but there were no jobs there, nothing to do. So after two weeks they moved me twenty miles away to Harrogate, where they said it would be easier. But it wasn’t and for months after that it became bashing the head on the wall time. “
This was a period when, going from job to job, mostly waitressing,
Mary lived on social security in bed and breakfast places paid for by the social services.
“I had to be out by nine and wasn’t allowed back till four. There are always waitressing jobs, wherever you are, but they never last: you do well, you like the job, and then you are sacked, from one meal to the next, and you don’t know why.” It was only last year, after she had once again been sacked by a restaurant and I phoned the manager to find out why, that Mary and I both discovered that it is only by employing mostly casual labour, who can be let go before the employers’ social security contributions become due, that many small restaurants can survive.
“It was a very depressing, very lonely time,” Mary said.
“It’s no wonder, is it, that so many people reoffend?”
Mary’s state of mind about any period and the subject she was talking about was always reflected in her manner of presenting it. It is not only that both her body and her face mirror all her feelings, but that rather than her mind being in charge of the subject she is discussing, the subject appears to regulate, or as it were deregulate, her mind.
Thus the depression which was the dominating factor of those bed and breakfast months, of what she called the ‘bashing the head on the wall time’, overcame her to such a degree during the two full days she talked about these mind-numbing weeks that I was left with almost empty pages in my notebook despite several three-hour tapes full of urns, pauses, sighs, embarrassed un merry laughs and sorrys. Playing them or parts of them for my husband later, all we could do was look at each other in incomprehension.