Authors: Gitta Sereny
“Mary was distraught, really totally distraught. She said thank God the child couldn’t yet read, but how could she live putting her at such risk? It was terrible. And they said they wanted to go back south and never come back to the NorthEast. Well, I felt this was a legitimate reaction, and we then helped them move into an area in the South of England where she could have the support of an experienced probation officer.”
Samantha Connolly, who became Mary’s probation officer from October 1988, is one of the warmest and most attractive people I would meet while I worked with Mary. Now retired, she worked in the Probation Service for thirty years and, except for Pat Royston, became Mary’s wisest counsellor.
“I first met Mary on a late autumn day, in the early afternoon,” she said.
“They had managed very quickly to get themselves sensibly established on an estate farm, where the owners had given them a really nice cottage rent-free, against Mary helping in the manor for twelve hours a week, and Jim working one full day in the grounds. For the remainder of the week, he had got himself a job as a carpenter and he loved this and worked hard.”
Sam was impressed by the reception she was given by the little family.
“Mary had been very friendly, very polite, when I phoned her,” she said, ‘and she had laid out a nicely prepared tea when I came. It’s not what I’m necessarily used to when I visit clients,” she laughed.
“There’s quite often a cup of coffee or tea, but a carefully prepared little feast isn’t somehow the way they usually react. You see, she wasn’t making up to me or anything; she was a house-proud young woman and she was shy and warm … all quite unexpected. I was impressed, too, by how tactful they were: the child was not there when I arrived she had been taken to play with new friends; and Jim excused himself after a cup of tea, saying he would go and get her, but it was clearly because he realized I would want to speak to Mary on her own.
“Pat had of course briefed me to some extent and I had carefully read the file she had sent me. I learned a lot from Pat, but very little from the pre-release part of the file, which after all was supposed to cover twenty-three years of Mary’s life. I was surprised.
“But it was clear from what Pat had told me that Mary had talked to her about her childhood and I had decided not to touch upon her past unless it happened on her initiative. It seemed to me that my role was to keep an eye on how things were going, with their jobs, with their relationship, and of course in relation to the child …” For the next five years, Sam would not only supervise and counsel Mary, but (as Pat had done from the start) also keep an eye on the child, who remained a ward of court.
Sam has both humour and a sharp eye for what is behind the front people often put on, and she was to take a considerable liking to Jim.
“I felt from the beginning a kind of inner strength in him which I came to understand is absolutely crucial to Mary,” she said.
“And I watched their little girl over five years; I don’t know how Mary does this, but she is an entirely secure and happy child.
“In some way,” Sam said, echoing my own feelings about Mary,
“Mary has made herself into two people for her sake. There is the consistent Mary, capable of what I can only say is excellent gentle discipline for the child and very clear principles mixed with a lot of gaiety. And then there is the other Mary, who has a mind that ranges helter-skelter over countless things, unable to hang on to one subject for more than a moment, particularly when she is depressed, and her depression is always about her own guilt. In talking to her then, you couldn’t catch a-hold of a subject she brought up before it had disappeared in a welter of other thoughts and ideas. And if you wanted to get back to it on another day, that Mary couldn’t do it. But the other Mary the little girl’s mum was totally consistent not only in what she did, but also in her thoughts and ideas which she communicated to the child.”
Sam felt that we cannot begin to understand how, given the family model of Mary’s own childhood, together with the fact that her late childhood, adolescence and young adulthood was totally institutional, she has learned to mother a child.
“I watched her for years,” Sam said.
“It was my job, but finally it was also my pleasure. It was extremely interesting to me how she, who can stick to nothing for any length of time jobs, courses, even ideas was able to create lots of opportunities for the child. It is almost as if she can transfer if you like that buried ability in herself to the child. She is very, very loving. Quite tactile, but not overly so; not satisfying her own needs. It is a mixture of allowing the child quite a lot of freedom to do things on her own and with friends, and on the other hand, this very protective side. When she went to school, either Jim or Mary always took her and fetched her.
And they did a lot of things with her, sports, games, bicycling when she was able. But with all that, Mary was quite a disciplinarian you know, bedtime was bedtime. If she went out to play, there were places she couldn’t go to. If she wanted to go beyond an established distance, she had to come and ask, and if Mary said no, and the child sulked and said, “You are a horrible mother,” as children do, Mary appeared to be able to accept it with the kind of equanimity that helps a child get over the sulks. If the child asked a question, her mother gave her an answer; there was no fudging the issue. You see, as far as the child is concerned, Mary thinks only healthy. I remember the second time I visited her, I was having tea with her and the little girl suddenly said, “I have two daddies, haven’t I?” And Mary hugged her and said, “Yes, aren’t you lucky?”
Having said all this, Sam explained she didn’t want to give me a false impression. Mary, though one of the most interesting ‘clients’ she’d had, was certainly also one of the most difficult and draining.
“After a while, Mary did talk to me about her past,” she said.
“Quite often just in little dollops. I believe that people can only handle so much at one time. I always responded to what she wanted to bring me. There were many good times, but the bad ones could be very bad, very intense, and I remember days when, coming home, I just had to lie down I was so exhausted with it and I often thought, ” How does Jim stand it? ” because surely it all had to come down on him.”
She had not found Mary to be what she called a ‘crying’ person.
“She only cried when she was very low, when she was overwhelmed with her feelings of guilt. But then it could become storms of unstoppable sobs. You see, you can’t take the guilt away from her. It’s there.
It’s a fact. And basically, of course, it has to be. It’s only how can one help her to live with it? “
Sam had found the responsibility of supervising Mary particularly lonely.
“Our departments are very small. Everyone carries large caseloads, and though most clients are probably not as complex or as much at risk from this bugbear of publicity as Mary is, they are still difficult. fIn Mary’s case] first of all there was her hidden identity, about which there had already been that dreadful trouble up North;
then there was her high profile, and your responsibility for keeping the child safe, away from it all. And when you are dealing with a human being in such terrible pain, you become very concerned about whether, even with all you have learned, you know enough. When there is a crisis, you can’t exchange opinions with anyone. You have to carry the anxiety whether you are doing the right thing around with you alone, and that’s hard. ” At least she and Pat could communicate by phone, she said, and settle a number of Mary’s urgent practical problems together.
Within weeks of Mary’s arrival in the South there had been a report of a thirteen-year-old boy who had killed a two-year-old girl.
“The press went mad,” Sam said.
“Pat rang to say they were searching everywhere for Mary. She’d had calls from TV and press and I don’t know who else and she said for Heaven’s sake to warn Mary. I went round like a headless chicken trying to contact her; she was out on a hike with a group of children. I finally raced around to be there when she got back and told her. Oddly enough, she was totally calm.”
Mary remembered the occasion, but said it was only one of several and that it seemed the press would chase her whenever there was any crime involving children, as perpetrators or victims.
“That day,” she said, ‘all I was glad about was that I hadn’t given my mother my address; if I had, they’d have been all over me already. As it was, I felt we were safe. “
Sam said, yes, Mary had finally quite often talked to her about her mother, in turmoil about her, the need in her to belong to her, at the same time the rage against her.
“The rage was not only for what her mother had done to her in the past,” Sam said, ‘but for continuing to make her feel guilty and worthless, isolating her from the rest of the family and squeezing her dry emotionally. And then of course there is the question of who her natural father was, which seemed to torture her. ” Finally Sam thought it was in 1992 Mary had told her she wanted to go and have it out with her mother on her own.
“All three of us were going North in May, but I went earlier, for Mother’s Day,” Mary told me.
“I hadn’t been in touch with her at all.
And as soon as I came into the house, she said, “It doesn’t make any difference to me whether you come or not; you could live in the same street and I’d never see you.” But I asked her point blank, as I had done once before, you remember, after Chammy told me, and she just walked out on my question. This time I asked her much quieter, you know, and she did tell me a name, a man who was a friend of my Uncle Jackie’s. So a few days later, Jim and I went to see Uncle Jackie and I said, “Will you tell me the truth, because my mother has given me a name?” And he said, “I will if I can.” And I said, “Is L.D.
my real dad? ” And he looked … well, his face just showed total surprise … so surprised that both Jim and I had to believe it wasn’t him. After that I went to see George and asked him once more and he just said like he’d said before, ” It’s best for you not to know. “
And the next day, when they were staying with Jim’s parents, Mary and Jim’s mother were sitting in the livingroom in the evening, talking about Jim’s family, ‘and I was telling her about my granny McC. ” who’d died fin April 1981], and how my mother hadn’t allowed me to go to the funeral, because she said my Auntie Isa wouldn’t want to see me because she still blamed me for the death of her little John. I told Jim’s mother how terrible I had felt not to be there when I’d so loved my granny, and suddenly she said, ” Do you mind if I ask you something?
I’m not being morbid and I don’t want to upset you, but it’s on my mind, so I want to ask it. ” I said OK, and she said, just like that, ” Did your mother sexually abuse you? ” She said she’d read your book and she felt there had to be a reason for the way I was when I was ten; that something even more must have happened than was in your book. So you know, I told her, and she said she loved me like a daughter, and to forgive her, but she could honestly kill my mother.
But I said, “She’s sick. She’s always been sick.”
“That’s what she told me when she came back,” Sam said.
“She also said she’d have to let go of the question of who her real dad was. She was sure her mother would never tell her, that whatever it was, it was too terrible to tell. And she said that she had wanted so much, had tried so hard to be closer to her mother and that she didn’t think her mother consciously wanted to hurt her, or do what she did, or make her feel as she did. She sounded very together that day, but she wasn’t.
She was in a terrible state and it got worse all the time. “
In January 1993 Mary phoned Chammy and told him she wanted to see him before he died: she couldn’t cope with the guilt about what she had done.
“Yes, I did,” Mary told me.
“That was a time it all came at me, I couldn’t stand it. Martin and Brian were on my mind every day, any day, any ordinary day, something would just trigger it off, anything:
the sun, a beautiful evening, the word Gillette, my feeling about being a mother and what about their parents, what had they felt because of me, oh God. ” She began to cry.
“It will never be enough, it will never change … the weight of it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry … sorry … But it’s words … isn’t it? Just words …”
“That’s how it went for weeks, for months,” Sam said.
“She got terrible migraines she’d had repeatedly before; ear infections, abscesses in her mouth, colds, flu. The doctor prescribed painkillers and Jim was very worried about her. And yet, even though the pain was obviously there, she could push it aside when the child came in … But of course then,” Sam said, ‘came the nightmare of the Bulger case. “
“It was a nightmare,” Mary said.
“I felt raw.” She said that she knew none of the details of how little James Bulger met his death, that she did not want to find out by reading articles or listening to the unending news reports about it.
“But I wondered whether all of the nightmare would be repeated: whether it would all happen again as it did to me. That they would find one guilty and acquit the other. And I felt so … terrible … for that small boy’s parents. But you see for the other parents, too, I felt disgusted, absolutely disgusted with the circus that was made out of it, and which I knew would inevitably become even worse when they were put on trial as I had been, with their names disclosed and the public allowed in … queuing for hours, I heard somebody say, to gawk at them”
Once, she said, she’d been at a neighbour’s house and she’d had the TV on ‘and the boys were being taken out of court and there were people, adult people, screaming, beating, pounding on the van they were in as if they wanted to kill them. And then my blood ran cold the TV announcer commented on this and he mentioned me:
it was like a thunderbolt. Martin’s and Brian’s parents were on my mind all the time anyway, but when this happened it became worse . just think what it must have done to them to hear this; it was bad enough without making comparisons . “And everybody, just everybody talked about it,” she said.