Authors: Gitta Sereny
You think now there had to have been panic. But what was there? What did you feel?
“Quiet,” she said, ‘it was very quiet, very still, I wasn’t aware of noises anywhere, in my head, outside, not from anybody. Martin . he it was so . so quiet. ” She stopped.
She was motionless for what seemed a long time before she looked up, her eyes seeing me now, not as she had put it earlier looking at the past as through a curtain.
“Dr. Godfrey at Styal told me I would never understand until I had a child of my own and he was right. I didn’t, but I do now.” And now her voice sounded tired but unusually clear.
“I didn’t want… didn’t intend to hurt Martin; why should I have? He was just a wee boy who belonged to a family around the corner …”
From the very beginning of our talks about the two killings, there had been a vast difference in the way she spoke about the death of Martin and that of Brian and it would take a long time before I understood the reason. From the moment she was arrested, throughout her trial, her imprisonment, and the fifteen years that followed twenty-eight years in all she had denied having killed Martin Brown, but she had admitted first a passive part in the killing of Brian Howe, then the inoffensive small part of covering him with flowers. The reason, now that I think I understand it, is that killing Martin was her own decision, or her need. She was alone when she felt it, alone when she did it, and she has been alone ever since with having done it. And even though she had hidden it from herself, just as she had hidden the memory of that dreadful abuse, somewhere inside, the growing child knew she had done something terribly wrong, and that only one person could explain to her what and why, and that was her mother.
She had tried once, at Red Bank. And she had been rebuffed with a finality “Don’t ever talk about it to no one’ that had stopped her ever asking again.
Killing Brian was different in many ways. Not only, or not so much, because she was not alone whatever part Norma played or didn’t play, she was present but because where she had had no conscious wish or need to kill Martin Brown, she said, or, more than that, to leave her ‘mark’ on him, nine weeks later whether it was because no one had paid attention, or no one had understood there had been an urge to manifest the doing of it.
I had pointed out to Mary time and again that in the case of Brian she could no longer persuade herself that death did not mean for ever. It was a question I put to her over and over: if she understood that she had murdered Martin Brown, why had she continued with Brian Howe? And she would not, I had to conclude could not, answer it.
Her descriptions of Brian’s death, both at the trial and also to me, were almost entirely about Norma. She pays lip-service to not feeling angry with or bitter about Norma, but it is not, nor can it be expected to be, true. Whatever that young girl did or did not do that July day of 1968, her very presence was a reassurance and confirmation of purpose for Mary.
I know you try to deny this, I said to her, but however much I condemn what the court did with Norma, I have always been certain that here, too, you were the stronger and therefore had to have a part in the killing of Brian.
“Yes, I accept that,” Mary said.
“Though when one is the stronger, and the other weaker, the weaker makes the other stronger by being weak…”
We will probably never know exactly what happened on that summer afternoon, except for two things which Mary finally told me. It was just after she had described what I firmly believe to be entirely true how Norma, seeing the child lying there, had begun to scream:
“I touched his face [she touched her own face as she spoke], his eyes weren’t open, he wasn’t getting up. And so I used one hand and closed his throat.”
So it was actually you who killed him? I said.
She didn’t answer. She had said it, and she would not, could not say it again.
“And then,” she said, “Norma began laughing hysterically … and there were weeds and tall flowers … I covered him over with the bulrushes” And then she told how they had come back later, with a razor blade and scissors. (And in their statements, Norma had said one thing and Mary had said another, and we probably never will know who cut little Brian’s hair, or drew the letter N altered to M into the skin of his tummy. ) So you would have cut his hair? I asked her.
“Yes, and …”
This is after you came back?
“Yes … and … to cut, trying, trying to cut… to cut his, penis.”
Who wanted to cut his penis? I said, startled. She did or you did?
The. “
But this didn’t happen, did it?
“No, I wasn’t successful.”
Do you have any thoughts on this? I asked her.
“As an adult I do have,” she said.
“I can see all the reasons, all the pointers, all the … the … Everything, you know, yes, what had happened to me and blah, blah, blah. But maybe it was just … I think it was just because … It wasn’t for a trophy, you know. It was … I can speak now but not for then, I can use words now which I didn’t know then: you know, sort of symbolically castrating, taking away the offending organ.”
And then weeks later, when I asked her to tell me once again what happened with Brian, just as I had with Martin, and she told the whole story exactly as she had done before at the trial and later to me but added as she had done in our first talk about it a few months before, that it was she who had ‘closed his throat’, she did not mention the scissors.
When you told me about this before, I said, you said you tried to cut his penis.
“I didn’t say that.”
Yes, you did.
“No, no, no, she … I … the razor blade and the marks on his tummy and my initials, you know…”
But you said it was Norma who put that. “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”
Then I asked you what did you do with the scissors and after long hesitation you said: “I tried to cut his penis but I wasn’t successful.” Do you remember that?
“No’ she said.
“No, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.”
I’ll show it to you, I said.
“When, when did I say this?”
Weeks ago now; it’s on the tape. It must have happened, otherwise you wouldn’t have said it.
And a little later a cigarette later she said, “No, that’s right, I wouldn’t have invented. God, no. I must have …”
You were very upset.
“I mean, to remember … to sit here and say, yes, I said that. I’m so shocked because why would I forget saying something so horrid as that, so horrid to me.”
But, I said, horrid as it is, in connection to what had happened to you years before, it is actually an explanation of your state of mind.
Still obviously in a state of shock, she asked whether she could phone Jim, her partner.
“He knows everything. If I said that, he will know.”
After a long telephone conversation with Jim, she came back, looking drained.
“Yes,” she said, her voice almost without tone.
“He says that’s right. I did.”
I faltering steps 1984 to 1996
I don’t think that Mary sees the first eleven years of her child’s life as being determined by her unconscious desire to keep as much distance as she could between her mother and the child. But the fact is that while from shortly after her prison release until into her pregnancy she could not resist her need for her mother, nor Betty’s for her, by the summer of 1985 she had not seen her for almost two years and Betty had not seen the baby.
“I didn’t want her [the child] to feel the vibes of her [Betty],” she said.
In 1985, Mary had had a hysterectomy because of suspected cancer, and three weeks later, as Pat Royston told me, she had to go back to hospital with an infection.
“It was the day Mary came home,” Pat said, ‘that Betty suddenly appeared at their house, extraordinarily enough wearing purple satiny trousers. Extraordinary,” she added, ‘because it was the sort of get-up she would have worn years before, but none of us had ever seen her in since she had lived respectably with George.”
“I was sitting holding the baby,” Mary said.
“I couldn’t believe she [my mother] had just come like that, uninvited, you know. I mean, this was my home; I didn’t want her there. I didn’t even want her to see me with the baby, so I said nothing, just left my face in the baby’s hair. Pat said to my mother, ” What do you think of your granddaughter?
Isn’t she gorgeous? “
“I don’t have to speak to you,” my mother answered, and walked out.
“
Didn’t you give her the baby to hold? I asked.
“God forbid,” she said in a heartfelt tone of voice, but by now almost with wry humour rather than anger.
358 / beginnings of a future
It was also at this time that Mary’s marriage showed the first cracks.
Rob, she told me, and Pat confirmed it, was too young to understand the physical and emotional effects of a hysterectomy on a young woman.
“I heard that he was making jokes about me to his friends,” Mary said.
“And he told everybody I was frigid.”
He did more than that, however. He began to exist on Mary’s notoriety.
(“Really, like my mother had always done,” Mary said. ) He increasingly talked about her past, not only to friends, but to strangers.
“When we’d first become friends,” Mary said, “I’d made the fatal mistake of telling him about that offer of a huge cheque for my story from the foreign magazine, and I now realized that had stayed in his head ever since. When he packed his job in, he’d said he wanted to spend time with the baby, and he did that it was true, he loved the baby but he had other plans, too.”
At some point later that year, urged by Rob, Mary spent a week (seventy-two hours in one go, she told me) writing down some of her story nothing about her childhood, nothing about her mother, a repeat performance of her statements in court about her crimes, but a lot about her years of detention.
“Prison was easy to write the truth about,” she said, and shrugged.
“But the rest was mostly lies.” She shrugged again.
“Sensation: I thought that was what people wanted.”
It was to be many years before she developed enough moral judgement to understand that ‘sensation’ was precisely what people would reject coming from her, as indeed the agency which agreed to handle her draft demonstrated when they stipulated that fifty per cent of whatever such a book would earn was given to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
“I thought it was entirely hypocritical,” Mary said.
“It was sycophantic, tasteless and tacky. It felt as if I would be saying, ” Please like me, I am a nice person, because I’m giving to charity and to a children’s charity at that. ” Ugh, it was sick. And I didn’t think [that] to decent people that would make me into or prove that I was a nice person. So I told them to fuck off.”
A year or so later, when her own marriage was near breaking1984 to
1996 /359
point, George came to see Mary and told her he had left her mother.
“He said she had put all her miseries, her lies and her guilt on him for twenty-one years, and he couldn’t take it any longer. He said he would see that she would always be financially OK, and for me, he’d always be my friend, but that was it.
“Well, I was sorry for her then. I rushed over and she was sitting there like a dying duck and she pleaded with me to get him back to her. But that was impossible. He’d found somebody else very nice, and I knew that would be his life from then on.”
But Mary’s life, too, was about to change. For several months, while Rob was increasingly ‘out on the tiles’ as she put it, she had got to know, at a rock club she occasionally went to with friends, a young man called Jim whom she liked.
“I didn’t think about him seriously, you know,” she said.
“But because the relationship I was in was really, really rocky, I fantasized. But I never dreamed that he Jim was thinking about me in the same way. I would never have dared…”
They had become friends, and when, a few months later, in early May (1988), a really major row (about Rob’s going round talking about Mary as if she was ‘some sort of a freak show’) finally put an end to the marriage, it was to Jim she went.
“You understand, I had to get out,” Mary said.
“For twelve years it had been drummed into me that I must control myself and I did: I not only learned it, I felt it. But that evening, after a girlfriend had told me what Rob was saying about me, that control broke. I hit him and punched him and then I stopped myself and rushed out … I knew he loved [the child, who was then almost four] and was more than capable of looking after her for a night, and I had to go.”
“I’d been watching their relationship those four years,” Pat Royston said, ‘and I had realized quite soon that Rob was just too immature.
Mary is, of course, a very, very complex person, and he couldn’t cope.
In his frustration he had repeatedly been violent to her and she had taken it. But when it finally got too much for her, she found herself responding violently to him and, quite rightly I thought, walked out when she realized she was losing control. “
Next day there was a meeting in the probation office and Pat brought the child to Mary. Four days later, Jim, Mary and the little girl moved south. It had been their intention to settle there, and Jim quickly found a job making precision tools. But only six weeks later he walked out of his job in protest at the sacking of a fellow worker -sacked, Jim was convinced, simply because he was black.
“Jim just won’t take that,” Mary said, ‘but we had no money saved, so we just had to go back where he had his parents and I had Pat. “
Pat had worked for years on building up Mary’s fragile self-esteem and had helped in emergencies.
“But the next one was really catastrophic,” she said.
The three of them had settled down in a little village.
“Wherever Mary (or any released lifer) goes to live,” Pat said, ‘her probation officer has to inform the Chief Constable of the region, and he in turn must tell the local police. In this instance, a policeman in the village, on learning who she was, told his wife. ” Together with other villagers she got up a petition and soon people were parading through the street with banners: ” Murderer Out’. “Of course, I had to move them at once,” Pat said.