Authors: Gitta Sereny
“My friends, too, why wouldn’t they? I can’t tell you what it was like to hear ” Mary Bell” time and time again, countless times, and there were some lies. Once I turned on the radio and happened on some chat-show host who said I had phoned him. I thought I’d faint. I never phoned anybody. I never talked to anybody, after a while no longer even to friends. I was terrified somebody might find me out, recognize me from the old photos which suddenly reappeared in the papers. There was a phone-in a friend told me about, where they asked people what they thought about having a curfew for children. And one woman called in who said that she remembered a day when she didn’t come in when her mother called her, and when she did her mother shook her and said, ” If you don’t come in when you are called, Mary Bell will get you. “
“It just seemed as if I couldn’t get away from the name. I finally couldn’t think about anything else: couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I knew from Sam the papers were looking for me, and she told me frankly she was concerned about the local police. She was afraid one of them would give me away as I had been given away before. I thought it was only a question of time before they would find me and I was frantic about it. I don’t know now which I thought about more:
what had been done to the little boy and what would happen to the little boys who did it, or my awful apprehension about people connecting it with my past and chasing me.
“Yes,” she said, “I was frightened not only of the press, but also just of people attacking me if they found out who I was. And it was so difficult for Jim and I did know that he was dreadfully concerned with my reaction, the way I connected that case with myself and the pain I felt and my panic. It was just that keeping it all away from [her child] was as much control as I could manage. It helped me a little to have to do that: it somehow forced me to take a breather, but outside of that, like during the day when she was at school, or at night when she was asleep, I felt I was falling apart.”
It was Pat Royston who finally decided the only safe thing was to bring them back to the NorthEast and establish them in an area where she knew the chief constable and could trust the local police.
“I had to advise them to go,” Sam said.
“Jim didn’t mind that much; true, there was a recession in the North, but by now it had hit us too and he’d been made redundant and they had been on social security for eight months. Mary hated to go. She didn’t want to bring the little girl up in the NorthEast. Above all, she didn’t want her or herself anywhere near her mother. But I agreed with Pat that Pat’s resources for keeping them safe were better than mine. They had to go.”
Although Mary and Jim occasionally worked over the next two years, they mainly lived on social security.
“I just hated, hated to be there,” Mary said.
“I hardly saw my mother. I’d become angrier about her after my granny McC.” s death. She had no right, did she, to alienate me . from everybody? The whole family went to my granny’s funeral. Only I didn’t. What must they have thought? That I didn’t care? I didn’t know any of them. How could they know how much I cared?
“And she did something even worse when my Aunt Cath died. I was actually at her [Betty’s] house, and I said I was going to pop in to see Auntie Cathleen, and she didn’t tell me she was dead. The funeral had been two weeks before. And there I popped in like the angel of death, asking for Auntie Cath, and they looked at me as if I was mad, as well they might have. I went next door to where her oldest boy lived, my cousin R.” and that’s where I went berserk. He had a terrible time calming me down. Then we went back and looked at photos with my Uncle Jackie.
“But all that was in me … It had gone on for so long, and I was just so weary of it, of her.”
But then two things happened almost simultaneously. First, about three weeks before Christmas 1994, Betty contacted Mary and asked to see her and Jim.
“She sounded … somehow small,” Mary said, ‘and Jim said we’d meet her at a pub and she asked what we were doing for Christmas, and Jim, on an impulse I think, said why didn’t she come and spend Christmas with us. And then I did talk to her about [the child]. She’d only seen her once, as a baby, and I showed her photographs and suggested she should meet her before she came for Christmas.
“You are her granny,” I said.
“There’s no way we can have any of that my being your cousin crap,” and she nodded, you know, compliant-like, as I’d never seen her. “
Mary had always told her little girl that her granny was sick and that was why she wasn’t around.
“So that night when I told her we’d have a day out with her granny at the Metro Centre la large shopping centre in Gateshead] before Christmas, she said, ” Oh, good. Is she better, then? ” And I suddenly thought, and Jim did too, that I didn’t really have any more right to withhold her granny from my child than my mother had to alienate my family from me.”
The date was for a week before Christmas.
“We went along there and there were hundreds of people and [the child] was looking about and she asked what colour Granny’s hair would be and I joked and said orange, but of course it wasn’t. I saw her sitting near the fountain;
she didn’t have a wig on and her hair was very thin, just a bit of it, sort of per med and grey . she wasn’t old, you know, just fifty-six, but she looked like a terribly thin little old lady. [The child] ran up to her, nearly ran her down with all that energy she has, and called out “Hiya, Granny!” and over the next four hours while we shopped and ate and walked, she absolutely wore her out, basically just by talking. She was such a chatterbox, my girl. But it was a good day, a really good day. I was happy; my mother was happy as well, and later [the child] asked what was the matter with her.
“She seems OK,” she said. And so I told her that her granny had a drinking problem and she said, “Can’t she stop?” And I explained that if one had that problem, one could only stop if one wanted to very badly, and that I didn’t think she wanted to. I had to tell her: Jim and I always try to tell her the truth as far as we think she can cope with it.
“We had two really good days when she came for Christmas,” Mary said.
“Perhaps it was because it was short enough that we didn’t get on each other’s nerves, but long enough for her to get to know [the child], and yet for me to be calm because I knew it wouldn’t be long enough for her to have any influence on her.”
She felt the child was in no danger from her mother, firstly because she wasn’t her mother’s responsibility, but also because the child was so secure.
“And she could make her granny laugh … to hear her laughing, really laughing, was just amazing.”
Betty had left them in a taxi on the morning of 27 December. Mary had phoned her that night and there was no reply.
“I phoned her next on Hogmanay [New Year’s Eve] and there was again no reply. I thought she was at the pub, or with her friend Maggie …”
It is not known exactly when Betty died.
“The neighbours saw her on New Year’s Eve,” Pat Royston said.
“They raised the alarm on January third.” When the police broke in they found her nude in a chair very close to the gas fire which had been on, and which had burnt one side of her. The post mortem and inquest concluded she’d had peritonitis, but they gave pneumonia as the cause of death. She’d obviously had some sort of attack, had managed to get up, clear the sheets off the bed and leave them and her night-dress in a pile on the bathroom floor. It appeared that she’d then had a bath or sponged herself clean and sat down in her chair.
“I know Mary thinks she wanted to die,” Pat said.
“But the police didn’t think it was suicide. There were potatoes and vegetables cleaned and ready to cook in a pot of water on the stove. The telephone was more or less within reach, and she had this good friend downstairs: had she shouted, she would have been heard. There were neighbours but it’s true, she didn’t shout.
“George rang to tell me she was dead and that he was going to see Mary to tell her,” Pat said. Mary phoned me after he left and both she and the little girl cried on the phone.
“By the next day, when I took her and Jim to Betty’s flat, she showed a mixture of upset, relief and anger. When we got there, the flat was full of the family, all looking through her things, looking for the will. It was that ” book” they were looking for. That’s where they thought she would have put the will.
But they never found the book and they never found a will. “
Did you think that asking to come and stay with you for Christmas was your mother’s way of saying goodbye? I asked Mary.
“Yes, yes …” she said, tentatively.
It’s good that you and Jim and your little girl gave her these two days, isn’t it? I said.
“She gave them to me, sort of,” she said.
“At the funeral, I was at the front with Jim and Auntie Isa … All the family were there, except the girls and P.” he was in some trouble. But I saw him later and it was good, good. I’ll always love him, whether I see him or not.
And I think he feels something for me. Something from long ago.
“After the funeral, the greatest surprise to me was Isa’s boy D. He’s a great big bloke, a professional foot baller and he came up to me and, you know, I expected he was just going to shake my hand which was the most anybody else had done, but he sort of pulled me to him and said, ” Let’s have a hug,” and he gave me a big bear hug. That was wonderful, just wonderful.
“But even afterwards, I never got any closer to my family. I did finally go and see my sisters. They were polite, you know, but I knew they didn’t they couldn’t want me in their lives. What was there between us? Our lives had been too different. I think I can understand theirs, but they cannot possibly understand mine. They have their families, their children. Too much time has gone by and we are strangers. I do wish it wasn’t so, but it is.
“A week after my mother’s death, I went to her flat on my own. I sat there, waiting, I don’t know what for. Not a visitation, not voices I just sat, looked around, it was empty, there was just the chair;
I think I was hoping, waiting for an imaginary pat on the head . something like a “well done” , but nothing came . I was hoping, oh, I just wanted . ” she put her hand on her stomach, ‘… to feel and then I thought, ” Oh, shit. You come to me. You came into my home, played at grandma, and then you go away and die the first time you had been a normal person around me . “And then Jim rang and said come home, and I nodded, ” Yes, I will. “
It was because Betty’s ‘book’ had disappeared that Mary thought her mother had killed herself or perhaps just let herself die.
“She was never, never without that book,” Mary said.
“Everybody scavenged about but it wasn’t there. And if it wasn’t there, she had destroyed it. And she wouldn’t have destroyed it if she was going to go on living.”
While everybody had been looking for it, the day after Betty’s death, Mary had opened one of her mother’s drawers.
“And it was full of letters from me to her,” she said.
“They began ” Dear mam,” and ” Dear dear mam,” and I had written none of them.”
conclusion
I believe Mary Bell’s childhood experiences, as you have read about them here, to be the key to the tragedy that happened in Scotswood in 1968. I believe too that, if properly investigated, comparable childhood traumas will be found in the background to most similar cases wherever they have occurred in Britain, in Europe, or in America. I further believe that children below twelve years of age do not necessarily have the same understanding as adults of good and bad, of truths or untruths, and certainly of death. I think that the primary responsibility for the behaviour and the actions of young children lies with their parents, their carers and, to a degree, their teachers. This is not meant to provide an excuse, or an out for children who commit violent crimes: even if they really don’t know the degree of the wrong they have done, they always know that they have done wrong. And so, while they need to be helped at once to understand this ‘degree’, they also need quite quickly to be punished, for cause and effect is the way of the world and they have to learn it. If I write this, it is not because I am either indulgent or tough, but because as is so often forgotten we are speaking of children, not of miniature adults.
I believe, with many other people in this and other countries, that in a civilized society children under fourteen should be dealt with by a formal authority if they commit crimes, but cannot be held criminally responsible, and they most certainly should not be tried in an adult court, or by a jury.
As I said in my introduction, my purpose in undertaking this book was manifold. I said that although Mary Bell’s story, with its many tragic elements, can justify a book, my purpose went beyond that. It was, I said, to use Mary and her life.
It was to show how such a terrible story comes about, with all the many flaws it uncovers primarily within the family, but also within the community: from the fact that relatives, closing ranks against outsiders, tend to protect their own, unmindful or unaware of the consequences; that neighbours close their ears to manifestly serious troubles next door; that over-extended police officers underrate the potential dangers in conflicts between parent and child and almost invariably side with the parent against the child (unless children, on the rare occasions that they do so now, complain of sexual abuse);
that social workers protect their relationship with parents at the expense of children; and that overworked primary-school teachers are seriously under-trained in the detection of disturbance in their charges. In the Anglo-Saxon world, we are not just discreet in Britain, we make a fetish of privacy. We do not look carefully at our neighbours’ children. Above all, we do not listen to them; we do not forgive me for repeating it yet again hear their cries.
Fundamental to my determination to write this book was the interest I conceived in that small girl I watched in that Newcastle courtroom thirty years ago, and my unease about her then and in the years that followed. It was the first time that I had seen children being tried in an adult court and I found it shocking. And, while horrified for the parents of the two little victims, I found shocking too the blind anger, the irrational fear and the curiously mindless revulsion about her I sensed both in the court and outside it. As I have said in the preceding pages, I was not unfamiliar with evil: I had seen its effect in children I cared for in DP camps in Germany at the end of World War II and had met it head-on when watching and listening to the accused in war crimes trials there twenty-two years later a year before sitting in that court in Newcastle.