Authors: Gitta Sereny
“I wasn’t yet in school,” she said. She remembered being made to sit in the livingroom and that there was a man on the bed with her mother.
“What I remember, this man’s penis is all white, that’s what
I remember, really white and when he . er . you know, stuff comes, I just couldn’t understand it, where it came from, you know, or what it was. ” She moved her nose as if she was smelling something nasty.
“There was this smell, horrible, nasty like … But it was horrible, and then I was on the bed, and then … they turned on me.”
As she answered my questions, one memory went into another.
“I had these little white socks on and just a little top and, um, a nappy, a nappy-type thing … and my mother,” she sighed deeply (my notes say, ‘letting her breath out bit by bit’), ‘my mother would hold me, one hand pulling my head back, by my hair, the other holding my arms back of me, my neck back like, and . and . they’d put their penis in my mouth and when . when, you know, they. ejaculated, I’d vomit.
“Sometimes she would blindfold me she called it ” playing blindman’s-buff”. And she would tie a stocking around my eyes and lift me up and twirl me around, laughing. And then she’d put a thing … a silky thing around my face to … to keep my mouth open and it was so dreadful, with the rosaries you know, bumping into me, you know, I felt so bad, so bad.”
You told me that when your dad was around, you always felt safe, I said. So why didn’t you tell him then? Why didn’t you ask him for help?
“I was so frightened because before it, or later, she says if I ever told anything I would be taken away and locked up. You know I told you about the sentry-box on the Tyne Bridge? That’s where she said I would go. And she said nobody would believe me. And anyway, I think I must have thought it was my fault. I had done wrong and was being punished.
I.
I.
” She cried and cried. It was one of the very worst moments of our time together.” I felt so . so dirty. “
How often did this happen? I asked.
“I don’t know. Not that often perhaps, or maybe quite a few times. I don’t know.”
What is clear is that both the image of the white penis and the obscene blindman’s-buff her mother subjected her to had been in her unconscious memory all along. For the ‘game’ had come up unexpectedly and out of context in Mary’s visit, at age fourteen, to a pyschiatric hospital where her mother was present. And in 1983 she spoke to Pat Royston about memories of white penises and people being beaten, without detailing the rest of the abuse. I knew that a medical examination before she went to Red Bank had shown her to be intact.
Did the men touch you, below? I asked. It was very, very difficult for her to find the words for the answer.
“Yes, but … and I don’t mean Not, you know, I don’t think it was there with their penis, I don’t think … I don’t … I mean I was held down on my stomach. It hurt like hell, it hurt … it really, really hurt. I was gagged but I screamed, ” It hurts, it hurts. ” And she said to me, softly you know, ” It won’t be long now, it won’t hurt for long. ” But it did. I was sore. For going to the toilet, I was sore, and I had marks, scratch marks on my legs and marks where I had things stuck into me.”
Things? What sort of things?
“They were … sort of bullets, like a shot-gun kind of bullet, with a brass thing, a suppository-type of thing … I used to have them twirled into me.”
Where into you?
“My … bottom … Up on my legs.” She pulled up the skirt of the long dress she was wearing and showed me some curious round scars.
Did you ever wonder why they did that?
She shook her head.
“Perhaps to make me cry? But I didn’t. I wouldn’t cry.”
You are crying now; you are crying here.
“I wouldn’t cry then,” she repeated.
Did your mother give you things afterwards?
“Yes, sweeties, and she was nice to me, and she laughed. I can remember times when I had these games, I felt afterwards she loved me.
I had a bag of chips and I wouldn’t get hit. I remember her then as very pretty and she didn’t call me names, and even taught me to knit.
But then she ripped all the stitches off and threw the stuff at
It is of some significance that when Pat Royston and I talked she had never yet read my first book.
“Mary told me not to read it,” she said.
“So I didn’t. It is how we work in the Probation Service: if I had read it I would have had to tell her and could have lost her trust.
Her early childhood memories,” Pat said, ‘seemed entirely focused on punishment, whether it was with beatings, or being given away to strangers, or being made to do other awful things she didn’t specify but which felt bad, hurt, tasted bad, smelled bad or whatever, all of these terrible memories dominated by her recollection of her mother directing this hate-filled look towards her of her mother looking at her with hate. She told me about these constant beatings at home, but also whippings, with a whip, I understood in the presence of men who she recalled having erect penises. It was an incredibly emotional account. I remember feeling that I had to sit down to record it all at once, but I felt totally exhausted by her despair. I remember coming home that night and my partner, Martin, just had to hold me, I was so distraught.”
How long did this horror go on for? I asked Mary.
“At Westmoreland Road,” she said.
“And also in another room nearby, in Elswick Road, which I think belonged to her friend, Elsie. I think while I was small, you know, really small, four, five, six. After that, she or Elsie would take me to rooms where old men lived and leave me.”
And what would happen?
She shrugged.
“Not that much. They’d touch me. They’d masturbate. I didn’t care.”
She cared. And she demonstrated this in an extraordinary way when she was about seven going on eight she thinks.
“I told you about dad’s friend. Harry Bury, the rag-and-bone man who lived upstairs in Westmoreland Road? He was brilliant. He called me his lucky mascot.
And one day I went up to his room and he’d probably had a drink and was asleep lying on his back. And I went up and fiddled with his trousers You know . I opened his buttons or zip or whatever and took it out.
“
You took his penis out? Why?
“I wanted to see whether he’d be like all the others. And he shot up and he was absolutely disgusted and said, ” What the hell are you doing ? “But then, almost right away, he was, like, ” It’s all right, it’s all right. Let’s go and have a cup pa tea and feed the cat. ” And after that I was OK, you know. The next time it came up, I told my mother I wouldn’t do it no more …”
In 1970 I’d talked briefly with Harry Bury. How did he think it happened whatever it was that happened to Mary? I asked him.
“When she was very small,” he said quickly, ‘that was when it started, like. “
A decision 1966 to 1968
After Mary’s extraordinary experiment her ‘test’ of Harry Bury’s character she said she spent a lot of time trailing round after him, helping with his rag and bone collecting, and in some ineffectual way Harry Bury probably appointed himself her protector. He would no doubt have been aware of Betty’s profession the fact that women were prostitutes and had their speciali ties was not rare in that part of the city but I am sure he had not known how she used her child.
What Harry Bury could not protect Mary from was the anger that was emerging in her and which, after her decision to resist her mother, began to show itself in her behaviour. Even at this late point, when she began, unconsciously but with deliberation, to make herself extremely conspicuous, if somebody with judgement and compassion had taken notice, the terrible things that were about to happen might never have happened.
One has to imagine the chaos of those lives. Betty and Billy, Betty and six-and-a-half-year-old P. ” Betty and eight-year-old Mary, all in mutually destructive relationships, each seeking his or her own way out: Betty’s prostitution, Billy involved in more and more small crimes, repeatedly in trouble with the police; six-and-a-half year-old P. up to his own capers, for which he was now beaten with increasing severity by his mother; Mary, beginning to take her revenge by using, rather than being used by men: ” I’d get pennies for watching the old guys masturbate,” she said.
Just over a year later, when they moved to Whitehouse Road, she would graduate to provoking men in cars: “I’d go up to the window and they’d ask me in. They’d expose themselves, some asked me to touch them and masturbate them. I used to hate them, threaten them, point at someone and say, ” That’s my uncle over there, he knows I’m in this car. ” (By this time, of course, Betty had told the children they had to call Billy Bell ‘uncle’ so she could claim social security as a single mother.) ” They’d tell me to get out of the car,” Mary continued.
“But I’d take my time until they were really scared. They made me feel dirty, but I kept on doing it. And then they’d offer me sweets, and I said, ” You’ve got to be kidding,” and then they’d give me half a crown and I’d laugh, and I remember the black marks down my legs, dirt and sperm …”
And your mother didn’t know this?
She laughed scornfully, “She’d have asked me for the money.”
Did you do this often?
“I did it for about a year and a half,” she said, now sounding tired.
“I think maybe only four or five times.”
But what about Billy, your dad? Couldn’t you have told him?
“He would have murdered them,” she said at once, then added impatiently, “But I told you, he was never there when she was there and she was always there when she wasn’t in Glasgow.”
After the move to Whitehouse Road, Betty began to live a double life.
The new house, in a much better street, right across the road from her sister-in-law, was her respectability, and from this point she transferred her ‘business’ to Glasgow, disappearing for days at a time. The two youngest girls now lived almost permanently with their Aunt Audrey in her spotless house.
“Audrey was immaculate,” said Mary.
“I was ashamed to go over there … Denise, her daughter, was always well turned out, you know, her hair was always plaited. I always thought Audrey was bothered that I would get lice on Denise; [before we moved] the whole family used to trail up there from Westmoreland Road for a bath.
“P. and I were alone for days, weeks it seems to me,” Mary said.
“He was all over the place; he had lots of sidelines. He was much more of an entrepreneur than I. He knew when the bakery opened and we could swipe sweets and rolls and stuff-he could do things without confrontation or violence, in and out, that was him. I’d hold him up. I had to pay to be with him. He paid me for going away. I’d say, ” I’ll give you sixpence to play with me; he gave me sixpence not to.
“
“Sometimes when she [Betty] went, my dad came, but not otherwise. And when he was there, he and Harry brought things to eat, and he cooked and we ate together. When my mother was there, it was pies and sausage rolls and fish and chips I was sent to get, and she never ate with us and there were constant screams and beatings. She hurt P. too. She was horrible to him, called him all kinds of names like ” spastic bastard”, ” thick bastard”. He hated her.”
Did your mother ever beat the little girls? I asked.
“No, she didn’t,” Mary answered.
“We wouldn’t have let her. She only beat P. and me. I loved my little sisters. We wouldn’t have let her touch them.”
Did Billy ever beat you? I asked.
“Never,” she said firmly.
“He couldn’t beat any of us. I remember my mother telling him to give me a beating one day, and he took me upstairs and told me to jump up and down on my bed and make a noise so that it would sound as if he was beating me, but he never did, not P. either, ever.”
But though she was ‘always away’ Betty always returned to Scotswood.
It was as if she could not bear to be parted from the object of her love and hate. Perhaps, under the pressure of the life she had created, she became more violent towards both children and, because of Mary’s ever more obvious rebellion against her, particularly savage towards her.
“It was a Sunday and she was out or away, so I thought I’d draw myself a bath,” Mary said.
“But she came back when I was in the water, and I had used all the hot water and she went berserk and made me fill it full of cold and then she pushed my head under and held it down and I found … from somewhere … found …” Strength? I asked her, but she went on, disjointedly, without hearing me.
“Perhaps from the lack of oxygen, I held my breath and I put my hands up and tried to grab something and was hit on the back with something and I tried to jump up and she pushed me back down. But then I managed to jump out and put my foot in a hole on the floor and ran outside and sat on the back step with no clothes on and then P. came and we went in together and she started on him and me too, with a dog chain. The police came that night. By this time I was wearing an old brown baby-doll thing of hers, torn and ripped, but she just said it was nothing and they just went…”
the breaking point 1968
During that year, Mary became best friends with her new next-door neighbour, Norma Bell, and Mary was now approaching the weeks before that first incident which would bring her and Norma to the attention of the police: the pushing of little John Best down the ‘embankment’ near the Delaval Arms.
After the murders, in the hysteria they created, people in Scotswood came forward claiming to have seen Mary committing all kinds of violent acts: strangling a bird, killing a cat, putting her hands round the throat of a baby none of them proved; all of them rejected by the court.
All Mary remembers is an enormous build-up of tension in her during those weeks. We know from neighbours’ accounts that she came at that time to the attention of a lot of people who, however, ascribed her behaviour to her usual naughty ways and ignored it.
But, rightly or wrongly, she has come to associate ‘the day of Martin Brown’, as she described it, with a specific fight with her mother.
“She’d sent me to the shop that morning for a brush. And when I got there, I didn’t know if it was a brush head or a [whole] brush, and I was too frightened to go back and ask, and I thought it was a broom she wanted, so I came back with that and she pulled the long bit that goes into the brush out and beat me with it and I ran upstairs into P.” s room to hide under the bed and she was poking me with it. And I grabbed it and she dragged me out hanging on to it. And I says, “You whore!” and punched her in the stomach and she hit at me and hit at me while I raced down the stairs and then I was out. That was the first time ever I’d stood up to her, the first time I called her a name or hit her back. “