Authors: Gitta Sereny
The person who was most conspicuous, however, and impossible to ignore, was Betty. Anything but silent, she exclaimed volubly, sobbed wildly, and time and again, the straggly blonde wig that incompletely covered her jet-black hair askew, demonstrated her indignation at what was being said about her child by stalking furiously out of the court on her high clicking heels, only to return, just as ostentatiously, shortly afterwards.
Billy Bell, tall and handsome, with black hair and red-blond sideburns, sat hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his hands supporting his head, for much of the time hiding his face. I never saw him speak to anybody, though the policewomen who guarded Mary would tell me that he was gentle with her during breaks, and while so taciturn in the courtroom, worked quite hard downstairs to make Mary laugh. Except for an almost obligatory kiss on leaving, her mother never comforted her unless she noticed someone watching. But Billy hugged and kissed her every time he came and went, and she, who several of her relatives said had never allowed herself to be kissed by any of them and ‘always turned her head away’ when they tried, clung to him.
(Mary told me later she was very frightened of her mother during the trial.
“She became more and more…” More what? I asked. ‘. Angry with me,” she said, using the same words and tone of voice she had used before.)
It was a long time after the trial that three social workers told me about their first experience with Betty Bell. Before the case finally arrived at the Assizes, the two children had been remanded four times.
Billy Bell and Audrey, with Mary’s grandmother, had attended the first remand hearing in Juvenile Court on 8 August, the day after their arrest. But to the fury of the Newcastle Children’s Department, Betty was absent. The social workers were disgusted, they said, and on the late afternoon of the day before the second remand hearing on 14 August, three of them, signing themselves out on a half-day holiday for the purpose, drove up to Glasgow.
“Officially, of course, we weren’t allowed to do this. But it was bad enough that we knew so little about that child, we weren’t going to have her be unsupported by her mother for one more day.” They found out Betty’s pub and her ‘stand’, as they put it, in a Glasgow street.
“We just went and grabbed a-hold of her and bundled her into the car and drove back to Newcastle in the night. She screamed and yelled, effing us, the department and the court, but she was going to be there to support that child in the morning if it was the last thing we did.”
It was an interesting act, less of compassion than of principle, for all three admitted to me at the time that they didn’t ‘like’ Mary, and that in fact she gave them ‘the willies’. (And all these years later, Mary, searching her memory, would add what she remembered about seeing her mother the first time after her arrest.
“She came to see me, I think it was in the cells at West End police, and she went totally hysterical, shouting at me, what had I done to her this time, having people track her down … It was my fault and what a shameful thing I was in her life.” )
As the two children sat through the proceedings in court, Norma’s attention span, we would see very quickly, was short: she would listen carefully for a few minutes, then begin to squirm, look around the court, and turn to speak to her mother who, invariably, turned her head back to face the judge. One would then see the effort in her face to listen, until, seconds rather than minutes later, her head would again begin to swivel up and down the room and the galleries and yet again back to her mother who, with infinite though one felt weary patience, repeated the process of directing her attention to whoever was speaking.
Mary, on the contrary, was astonishingly attentive. She hardly appeared to notice her mother’s dramatics, nor did she seem puzzled or particularly distressed. The general impression she gave was one of intense interest. Her face, intellectually alive when she spoke either in whispers to her solicitor David Bryson, who sat next to her, or later when she testified, had a perpetual listening quality, though it was, except in anger, emotionally blank. Mary’s body was almost completely still; her nerves were in her hands. Disproportionately broad, they moved constantly, as if a separate part of her. Apparently absent-mindedly she stroked her dress, her hair, herself and constantly had a finger, though never a thumb, in her mouth. Every few minutes she took it out, wiped her lips with the back of her hand, and then rubbed first the back of the hand, then the finger, lengthwise dry on her skirt only to immediately put it, or another one, back in her mouth. (And twenty-five years later, under almost identical circumstances, I would see a repetition of this extraordinary manifestation of disturbance, when one of the two ten-year-olds who murdered James Bulger demonstrated similar, sometimes identical mannerisms. He too sat much of the time of the trial with a finger, or in his case usually his thumb, in his mouth or in his ear, and he, too, off and on, wiped it absent-mindedly dry on his trousers only to immediately reinsert and move it around or to and fro in his mouth. ) Mary appeared to listen to every word, even when she quite clearly could not comprehend the formal language. But in marked contrast to the other child, she seemed isolated from her surroundings. Except for her young solicitor, who three or four times during the nine days responded to questions from her, no one talked to her. And except for the few times when, obviously tired, she fidgeted, and (as she had remembered that first day we talked twenty-eight years later) received a sharp tap on the back of the head from her mother, or on the day of the verdict when she began to cry and David Bryson for a moment held her, no one touched her.
By the time of the trial, the two children had been on remand for four months. Court-appointed solicitors prepared the case for each child and instructed barristers who would represent them at the trial, all paid by legal aid. Norma was represented from the start by a highly reputed barrister, R.
P.
Smith, QC, one of the youngest and (so I was told) brightest silks in the country, who within days of her arrest had persuaded a judge in chambers in London that she should spend the period of the remand as a patient at a nearby mental hospital being ‘observed’ by nurses and doctors.
Mary was represented by a distinguished older barrister, Mr. Harvey Robson, whose long legal career had included several terms as Attorney General in the Southern Cameroons, and after that many criminal cases in the NorthEast of England, though none for murder. Mr. Harvey Robson, I was later reliably told, had not tried to obtain a hospital order for Mary’s remand. (Her solicitor would later tell me it was because he considered it a hopeless endeavour. ) She was sent first to an assessment centre in Croydon, and then to a local remand home at Seaham, in County Durham, run by the prison department for girls between fourteen and eighteen, and amongst whom, both because of her age and her alleged offence, she immediately figured as a star.
In cases of children accused of serious crime in Britain, it is very unusual for psychiatrists to be involved before a trial except to establish that the accused minor is capable of distinguishing right from serious wrong, and that the child was mentally responsible for his or her acts at the time they were committed. Any other kind of psychiatric attention before a trial is held to risk adulterating the
* Queen’s (or King’s) Counsels. Barristers appointed annually by the Crown on the basis of ability, experience and seniority.
evidence. It was astonishing, therefore, that permission was given for Norma to spend the months of remand in the children’s wing of Prudhoe Monkton Hospital under the supervision of psychiatrist Dr. Ian Frazer.
While both Norma’s hospital and Mary’s remand home were benign places, and neither of the children appeared unhappy, the difference in the arrangements which had been made for them a medical environment for Norma, a quasi-punitive one for Mary became known very soon.
It is almost impossible nowadays for people, however disciplined or determined, not to be affected by what they read in our aggressively intrusive press or see on the ever-present screen. Considering the amount of public interest cases such as this are bound to attract, there is a measure of hypocrisy in continuing to rely on the objectivity of juries or even of the courts. And even thirty years ago, the inevitable publicity at the death of the two toddlers, the arrest of two (at that point unnamed) little girls on suspicion of murder, the conditions of their remand (first rumoured but then disclosed at the trial), and finally on the occasion of the trial itself all no doubt considerably influenced the eventual attitude of the court and, arguably, the outcome of the trial.
It was before the jury was seated and the children were brought into court that the judge. Sir Ralph Cusack, asked the defence lawyers whether they wished him to prohibit the girls’ names from being published. Both barristers replied they had no objection to the publication of the names. Their reason, unconvincing to me at the time, was that the identity of the children was already known in Scotswood and that, unless the two girls were named, a slur could conceivably remain on other children whose names would come up in the course of the trial. Twenty-five years later, it was the precedent set by the Mary Bell case that persuaded the court in Preston to allow publication of the names of the two ten-year-old boys accused of killing James Bulger. That decision has caused the same damage to the boys’ families and will reverberate in their own lives as has the one taken by Mr. Justice Cusack in 1968 in Mary’s and in Norma’s lives.
mary reflections 1
Mary spoke a lot about Norma when we talked, but her memory of her is only of the child, and when she tries to transpose this into adult terms she speaks of her only with sympathy. The resentment she bears, although associated with Norma, is not against her but against the system which she now thinks consciously used Norma, as, of course though not consciously she used Norma, too.
“Norma’s family moved in next door to us in Whitehouse Road a week after we arrived (in the spring of 1967],” she said.
“When I heard they were called Bell, too, I asked my dad whether they were related to us. He said, ” Not a chance. “
“I was fascinated by their having eleven children. I was terribly curious how they lived, how they managed. You know, their house was just like ours: a kitchen, a scullery, a bathroom, and a livingroom downstairs and three bedrooms and a lavatory upstairs. How did they put thirteen people in there? Later I found out that they ate in shifts.
“They were good people, you know. I got to like her mother a lot. I can’t imagine how she managed. She must have worked her fingers to the bone. And she was nice, you know. She used to sing. I could hear her ” My best friend was a girl called Dot who had lived near us in Westmoreland Road la then notoriously rundown section of Newcastle where the Bells lived before they moved to Whitehouse Road], but she moved to a different area just about when we did and so our friendship sort of dwindled off. I very quickly became friends with
Norma’s sister Susan, who was my age, but she turned out to be a whinger, a goody-goody, so I started playing with Norma. She was a couple of years older and they said later she was young in her mind, but I never thought so. I was always caught red-handed when I did anything, but she could always get out of anything by being sort of “glaicky” that means glassy, hot quite with it. She was very good at making herself look like that, and her appearance those eyes, you know helped that along. But she was pretty canny. And she was witty, quite funny. She used to make me laugh and I made her laugh. “
Looking back now, I asked, did she think she had been an angry child at the time?
“I was a ” dare me” child,” she said. And thinking about it her voice became dreamy and she jumped from memory to memory rarely completing a sentence.
“I wanted to … You see, when you are a child … I used to think I could be in a sort of Jesse James gang, you know, ride a horse and break someone out of prison by wrapping a rope round the bars and getting the horse to run off, dragging the bars like I saw in Westerns I watched with my dad on TV …”
Quite aside from Westerns, did she think that as a child she fantasized about crime and prison?
It was one of the questions that made her ponder for a long time the pondering, I soon came to understand, was hardly ever because she was afraid of ‘incriminating’ herself, but rather when she knew that her answer would be revealing something private, something she considered her own.
“Well, you know, my dad … Well, nobody told me anything, you know, but I used to hear bits and bobs and I was aware of the police and that he was sort of like a gangster person. Well, in a very small way, you know. He was just robbing, wasn’t he? He never hurt anybody, he never would have, but he was often, you know, on the run, sort of. And though I didn’t know it then, I know now that our way of life … my family’s, you know … was anti authority The police, the social services, the government, laws, all of it was treated with contempt and derision. And so was work, I think.
“My mother never referred to anybody in authority without the fword.
Apart from my Uncle Philip my mother’s brother in Scotland who’d been in the army and my Auntie Audrey’s husband, my Uncle Peter, who was a long-distance lorry driver, and Auntie Cath’s husband Jack who’d worked in the mines till he got ill, I didn’t know anybody who worked. Of course graft was “work” , and you know what my mother was doing, and it was called being away “on business” I didn’t know that then, but the words “work” and “business” were totally distorted.
If people went out to burgle a shop or nick things off lorries, it was called going to work or, again, “doing business” The police would come to the door and my dad would be out the back like a flash, and I’d say he was away, or that he didn’t live there. I loved him and he was a hero to me because he was always good to us. But now I know that if families live like that, then it’s not only the police who are the enemy, anyone in authority is.