Authors: Gitta Sereny
“What can they be thinking about?” he said.
“A girl who’s been detained since she was eleven;
they release her into a world of strangers, no trade, no education, with hand-outs for subsistence? She’s right,” he said.
“It is no wonder that so many people reoffend.”
Finally Mary got a room in a house belonging to the owner of a school for English as a foreign language and here her luck turned.
“He said it was ridiculous for me to be living in this void and he got me into college.” Altogether she spent six months (two terms) then at a College of Higher Education in West Yorkshire the ‘uni’ as she calls it studying psychology, philosophy and English Literature. The first term was probably the most carefree time she remembers. She was living ‘in hall’, with no financial worries, a grant covering both her tuition and living expenses: “I had more fun than I’d ever had, than I ever knew one could have,” she said.
“At the uni, you know, I wasn’t Mary Bell. No one sort of knew … I really felt I was [her new name], that I was a different person, but I was able to be me, the me that Mr. Dixon would have been proud of, that he knew I was. I loved the lectures, I loved the library. I had a nice room, a study bedroom, you know, all to myself; and there was lots going on, lots of people I liked.”
I was to find her curiously restrained about the details of these happy first months. It was as if too much had happened in a very short time, all of it happy, but none of it adding up to experiences of any depth to make them worth remembering or relating one by one.
Did you go out with anybody? I asked.
“I didn’t want any involvement… We went swimming, to football games, car-racing, yeah, dancing too.”
Was there any drug taking?
“I had tried LSD while I was still bumming around in Yorkshire. It sort of locked my jaw and I went into fits of laughter, and then all those intensely coloured lights … But I ended up feeling very tired, so I wasn’t very keen to do that too often. And when I had some amphetamines at uni like everybody else did, it didn’t do anything for me it was supposed to do; you know, it didn’t pep me up or anything, it also just made me tired. I don’t think I’m an addictive personality.”
Hmm, I said. What about all the drugs in prison? What about the cigarettes you can’t give up?
She shrugged.
“What else is there to do in prison?” And she added defensively, “Cigarettes? I only smoke when I’m alone or out of doors.”
Did people at college ask you about your parents, your home?
“I … I didn’t lie, you know, I sort of omitted,” she explained.
“I
said that Dr. and Mrs. Henderson were my aunt and uncle. I mean it wasn’t a misrepresentation that was going to harm anyone. “
And about your parents?
“I said I didn’t get on very well with my mother and that she and my father were estranged, and that was really it.”
How did your mother feel about you being in college?
“As if it was her achievement.”
Did you see her?
“Yes, I went to see her a couple of times. She told people I was her cousin from Liverpool, ” the one at university”. And that Christmas [1981] I stayed with her but I really spent all my time with college friends.”
She had begun to think of herself either as a teacher or as a budding therapist.
“Dreaming, more like it,” she said.
“You know, of pioneering new methods or whatever. But then, just after I came back for the new term, my probation officer, who apparently hadn’t realized until then what I was studying or planning, told me that I’d never be allowed to work in either of those fields, that these were prohibited professions for me. So I wrote a letter to the college board asking to transfer me to a beautician’s course, and they wrote back saying no.
And the principal, who had been told by the Probation Service who I was before I started, invited me to dinner with his wife at their home but I said no, you know; I felt uncomfortable at the idea because nobody else I knew had been asked to dinner there, so I thought. Oh, you know . like . like . “
You felt like a show piece?
“Yes,” she said.
“Something like that. So then I was called to his office and he said he was concerned at my trying to move out of the academic field. He thought I should stick with the kind of like minded people I now knew and that was where my talents would develop and I would eventually find my way into something I both wanted to do and could do. He meant well, I knew that. So after that … well, I returned to studying rather halfheartedly, but finally I just couldn’t see where I was going, what I was doing, I couldn’t think of an academic area I could fit into and, you know, do something with in the future. I was trying to balance an unknown future with what my mother called ” real life”.”
By this time, too, she had got herself into a financial mess, with a large overdraft which the bank said had to be paid off.
“I’d just bought clothes and clothes and clothes no point to it, just angry, just restless, just stupid.” George paid off the overdraft and at Easter Betty had again talked to her about facing reality.
“She told me which reality to live in with ” my kind”, she said. So finally I thought, ” She’s probably right,” and I asked George to drive me back to pick up my stuff and then I went back to stay with them.”
Two people she was to meet over the next months were to be decisively important for her. The first was a young man (we will call him Rob), at eighteen almost still a boy, whom she met at a party in September and only saw occasionally for several weeks. Did you sleep with him? I asked.
“Of course not,” she said, sounding indignant.
“Not for the first month. The NorthEast wasn’t like London, you know. Not then, anyway.” Eventually Rob would become the father of her child.
The other person was Pat Royston, who took over as her probation officer in October 1982. By this time Mary had been working for six months, the longest period she has ever sustained a job, again in a geriatric home, as she had done before, but by now hoping that she could work towards some sort of qualification in geriatric nursing.
“Pat told me right away that though she appreciated I liked the work, I would have to give it up. I wouldn’t be allowed to qualify, however good I was at it,” Mary said.
“She said I should imagine that I had a relative in hospital and found out that the nurse in charge had served a life sentence for murder, how would I feel? Well,” she said pugnaciously, but then sounding resigned, “I’d feel that it depended on the circumstances and on what that person had become. But there wasn’t any point in saying that, even if I’d known her better; she has to follow rules, too. And anyway, I understood what she was saying. It was quite true, there would always be people who would object to me doing such work, perhaps even more if I had a qualification and was put in responsible positions.”
I asked Pat Royston why neither of the two other probation officers who preceded her in Mary’s supervision after she had returned to the NorthEast had objected to her working in the geriatric home, and she shrugged and said only that the first one had been too young for the assignment. The second one, an older man who she thought had been appointed in the hope that he would become a sort of father figure for Mary, was probably too protective of Mary and, finally, collusive with her mother: rare for any of Mary’s probation officers, he had formed a friendly relationship with Betty, and her mother wanted Mary in a job ‘fitting her station’ and staying at home.
“It’s hard to say no to people who are needy,” Pat said by way of further explanation.
“And both mother and daughter were very needy.”
What Pat did not say, because there is a limit to what she can disclose to outsiders, and what the probation officer who preceded her certainly didn’t know, was that while this neediness arose from very different roots Mary’s starving for love from her mother;
Betty’s need to control her daughter the result was that each almost compulsively sought out the other.
Pat said she had read the reports on Mary very carefully before taking over.
“There was a good deal about the trial, of course, the crimes, the defence, the judge, the sentence, but, except for the fact that she had always been enure tic had a disturbed childhood, the mother a prostitute there was nothing at all about the child:
Mary* as a person. Once she was away from home, there was quite a bit about her tantrums at Red Bank, her various acts of rebellion in prison, the worrying circumstances, implied more than described, of
* Neither Pat nor Sam, Mary’s probation officer between 1988 and 1993, ever address Mary by her past name, or as Mae (as she was soon to spell her name);
both use her pet name which, for my purpose, I have replaced throughout with Mary.
her abortion, and the many difficulties my predecessors had experienced with her since her release. And here there were a number of observations about her personality, such as that she tended to exaggerate or dramatize in describing events in prison and afterwards.
“She is a drama queen,” one of my colleagues wrote.
“But what emerged very clearly from this fourteen-year record was what I would be able to confirm for myself very quickly when I met her.
Which was that Mary was emotionally very screwed up with a near-catastrophic self-image, and despite evidence of considerable intelligence had enormous difficulty sustaining any intellectual effort or job. The three-year course she had been accepted for at the college-a tremendous chance for her and they wouldn’t have given her a place if they hadn’t considered her able was a telling example:
when, after just one term, she found out she wouldn’t be allowed to teach or practice, she immediately abandoned the academic side without considering other possible careers. And when she then applied for a health and beauty course and was told there were a lot of applications but that she had a good chance of getting in from a waiting list, she immediately declined. Basically she doesn’t believe she can succeed in anything. So she preempted what she was certain would be failure, gave up her grant, and left to go to the one place where I very soon realized she should never be: her mother’s house. “
Pat started working with Mary immediately, seeing her once, and often twice a week for several hours.
“I’d go and see her at the Whitley Bay Probation Office,” Mary said, ‘a depressing old building with creaking floor-boards, where we’d sit in a dark dusty office with green chairs and a defunct fireplace, or we’d go for drives. “
“When we began,” Pat said, ‘she was very confused. She talked without stopping. Her mind seemed to lack any direction and she resisted structuring. It was almost as if she was exploding with the need to get words out, never mind what they meant. She gave me a feeling of someone horribly repressed, emotionally isolated. “
Had she felt right away that Pat was someone she could really talk to?
I asked Mary.
“I felt that she was responsible, not in the sense of responsible for me as a probation officer, but as a human being. I felt that this was going to be long term: that she was on my side.”
Pat said: “I had told Betty I wanted to meet her, so that we could get to know each other, but that anyway I had to see the home environment as Mary was living there. Still, it took some time before she agreed.
I have to say that her home was very unexpected. Outside it was a beautifully painted end-of-terrace house that had obviously been extended. Inside it was a real House Beautiful creation, as Betty would imagine it. I’ll never forget it: the livingroom carpet was turquoise blue, a really deep pile that showed every footstep. I’d noticed right away that, incongrously, there was a garden rake standing up against the wall inside the room, near the door. Just as soon as I had crossed the room and sat down, she picked it up and raked the carpet where my footsteps showed. I almost felt embarrassed perhaps I should have taken my shoes off. But she said, quite nicely, sort of apologetically, that it was one of her quirks. It was really, well, weird, given what Mary later told me about her housekeeping when she was a child. And after George finally left her in 1987, the flat she rented and where she died was just as immaculate, even though she became a near-total alcoholic.
“We talked for a while but it was very, very difficult. That first visit was in the same week that French television. Heaven only knows why just then, had been trying to locate Mary perhaps that, too, had something to do with Betty’s sudden agreement to see me. Betty, I think, was terrified of it being found out that she was leading reporters to her, either for money, under the influence of alcohol, or for some other psychologically complicated reason nobody could ever have understood. Of course I didn’t let on that I suspected or knew that. I impressed on her and George, who was there too, not to speak to anybody from the media, but I didn’t have much hope about Betty:
she had already spoken to so many of them. ” (And then Pat told me again about the foreign magazine’s 250,000 offer for Mary’s story, and about the letter on record confirming the offer, and of the magazine’s now long retired London correspondent’s many approaches, both to Pat and to Mary’s solicitor.)
“George was not at all how I had imagined him,” she went on.
“He was very quiet, well spoken, tall, slim and nice looking: really just a nice person, with a friendly face. But she, oh dear, she was a very strange lady, thin, gaunt and … cold, just cold, no warmth emanating from her at all. It was, I don’t know, almost eerie. She was very well dressed; I would notice that every time I went to see her. Later, when she was not expecting me and wouldn’t let me in, she was always obviously at home, too well put together, you know, careful makeup, good clothes. But talking with her was almost impossible: one was reduced to chatting very much like one report from Red Bank describes her and Mary’s meetings: that they talked ” about nothing”.
“I was there for some time that first visit. They offered me a drink.
But the only thing of any significance she said, suddenly, apropos of nothing significant because it confirmed what Mary had told me was that she preferred to think of Mary as her sister or cousin. But when I tried to use that as a starting-point for some sort of real conversation, she clammed up. “