by Gitta Sereny
“Oh, she was that bonny,” say her aunts who, just like her grandmother, doted on Mary from the moment they set eyes on her.
But Betty appeared to feel no joy.
Betty went back to work, Isa was at school, Cath came over often with her own baby boy, and Mrs. McC. looked after Mary. Betty was not maternal, but everybody was working, the babies were healthy, and life seemed good enough.
“Betty was that gay . . .” Cath says, “that funny . . . and she was that good a dancer . . .” Around Christmas that year, Cath and her husband Jack met Betty’s boyfriend, Billy Bell, and Betty and Billy told them they were going to get married.
“Billy Bell used to be a good dancer,” says Mrs. McC. “They’d clear the floor for them to dance,” she adds, with an attempt at pride.
Billy Bell was twenty-one when he met Betty, a tall dark good-looking boy from a respectable working-class family. His father is blind now but has worked regularly all his life, and so did Billy, from the age of fifteen. When he met Betty he was working in a coke plant and had a room at 241 Derwentwater Road, in Gateshead not far from the McC.s.
But on 18 March 1958 Billy and Betty were married and he came to live with Betty, Isa and Mary at Mrs. McC.s flat in Red-heughbridge Road.
It is seldom an ideal solution for young couples to live with their parents or parents-in-law. But flats were not easy to come by, both of them wanted to work, Betty hated housework, and there was Mary who had to be looked after.
Mrs. McC. is a very private and an intensely loyal woman who, half of her adult life, has been torn by the conflict between her love for Betty and her reluctance to seek outside help. Even now, after eleven years of intolerable pressures had driven her granddaughter into catastrophe, Mrs. McC. can hardly bear to speak about these years. Hers is a conflict that defies solution, demanding a choice no woman should be asked to make. But it is obvious that her need to surround, to protect her daughter continued even after Betty’s marriage. Someone as perceptive as Mrs. McC. could not fail to see that the young Billy Bell, however decent and honest, would be hard put to deal with eighteen-year-old Betty’s complex problems. No doubt the decision to live together was prompted as much by her apprehensions as by the young couple’s practical considerations.
But it would seem that the tide of tragedy that started so long ago could not now be stemmed by any precautionary half-measures.
In May 1958, when Betty was pregnant with her second child, Mary, just one year old, almost died. This was to be the first of a series of inexplicable accidents and events involving her and extending over more than four years, which Mary, it appears from all accounts, remembers only too clearly.
Her grandmother took pills for her nerves (“Mum’s always had them,” said her daughters). But Mrs. McC. was a very responsible woman. With no lockable cupboards or drawers in the flat, she had carefully put the bottle out of reach in the back of the used needle compartment of an old gramophone and hid the knitting needle she used to extricate it in another place. Despite all these precautions, on that day in May 1958, Mary somehow got hold of a number of these acid-tasting pills and ate them. To achieve this, the baby had to find the knitting needle, get up to where the gramophone stood, open it, dig out the carefully hidden bottle, unscrew it, and take out and eat enough of the unpleasant little pills almost to kill her. As it happened she was found in time and rushed to hospital, her stomach was pumped out and she recovered.
Six months later Betty’s second child was born, a boy. By this time Gateshead Council had given Mrs. McC. an excellent council house at 27 Huxley Crescent. Almost a garden community, these houses, probably nearly new at the time, spacious, with large windows, well-starched curtains, and carefully tended gardens front and back, are awarded only to the most reliable tenants. Two big rooms on the ground floor give on to the road, and a cloakroom and kitchen in the back overlook the garden. The three bedrooms upstairs and the bath and W.C. are fair sized, light, and airy. There is no traffic here, no noise, no smoking factory chimneys, no railway line, no dilapidation. Mrs. McC. must have hoped that surely now, no longer cramped for space, no longer lacking privacy, surrounded by quiet streets, trees, and flowers. Betty would settle down, be content with what she had, learn to accept love—and to love. But if Mrs. McC. permitted herself to have these hopes after the move to Huxley Drive, they were soon to be disappointed.
We can only guess at the tensions which built up between Mrs. McC. and the young couple. Billy Bell, deeply in love and instinctively protective of Betty, like most people could not fathom what lay beneath her problems. If for no other reason than for his own protection, he probably reduced them to a level he could deal with and therefore possibly chose to blame on her mother Betty’s temper tantrums, her wild sobs, her extreme impatience (and perhaps what he instinctively recognized as the beginning of her rejection of him.)
Whatever the immediate grounds of the explosion, coming home late one afternoon from a day’s outing, Mrs. McC. found her front door locked against her and all her possessions, her suitcases, gramophone, dishes, and furniture in a heap, in the street.
By rejecting, for good reasons or bad, this stabilizing influence in their lives, Betty and Billy had removed an important restraint. Mrs. McC. and Isa returned to live in Glasgow, and the family life of the Bells began to disintegrate before it had ever really begun.
Billy Bell, tall and well-built, has an almost classically handsome face, a wide mouth, thick black hair, and rather small blue eyes with long lashes. On his hands he has various tattoos; across the knuckles of the right hand: TRUE, underneath: PADDY and MAM; on the left hand: LOVE, underneath: BETTY. “I got up and did the bottles in the night,” he said, trying to describe his life with Betty. “She couldn’t be bothered. I did the cooking. She cleaned like . . .”
Eloquent enough with his family and friends, Billy Bell is embarrassed and inarticulate with outsiders. “I am thick-skinned,” he says, blushing. and looks down at his hands. He means that his thoughts and words come slowly. “Billy wasn’t ever good at book learning,” his sister said, “but he was a good boy and a good regular worker.”
Slow or not, he was unfailingly loyal to Betty, even later. Whatever she has done to him, his love for her would die hard. “She likes dancing,” he said dreamily. “We . . . we danced for years.” But there must have been periods without dancing. For, beginning in 1959, just about a year after they married, Betty began to go off on her own. “Yes,” Billy agreed, “she left me many times. She’d just leave a note saying she couldn’t settle.”
The first time when Betty left home altogether was when her baby B. was six months old. Even before this, however, she had taken Mary many times to stay with various relatives and friends and already the two-year-old girl was showing the first warning symptoms of disturbance.
“I don’t know where Betty had gone,” says Audrey, “but she just went off. The baby went to stay with my mother, and Billy and May came here.”
Audrey is devoted to her brother who in the course of a few years she saw change from a “decent hard-working lad” into someone who, as she put it, “you wouldn’t have known . . . was the same man.”
The three-bedroom house in Scotswood she lived in until recently was warm and welcoming, and Audrey’s two boys and a girl were open-faced, bright, and happy children.
On that first occasion when Billy and Mary came to stay for several weeks, Audrey’s own daughter had not yet been born and she was delighted to have a little girl about the house; “May didn’t have much to wear when she came,” she says. “She was that bonny, I wanted to get her some things. I went to the secondhander and got some little nylon dresses and bows for her hair. I dressed her, but you know, the moment she was out of the house—I was watching her out of the window—she tore the ribbons off and mucked the dresses all over.” Audrey still sounded sad. “She was only a baby then, but she wouldn’t have anything done for her. She wouldn’t let anybody hug or kiss her. It was always like this. She’d turn her fa
ce away.”
Just as there had been for Betty, there was a wealth of love available for Mary. But both of them seemed unable to accept it.
The people who saw perhaps most of Mary during the first critical six years were her Aunt Cath and her Uncle Jack. They are hard-working and articulate, with a special gift for bringing warmth and color into their home. If Cath, an active but delicate woman who suffers from chronic bronchitis, can be a little emotional, she is neatly balanced by her husband, a man of unfailing calm.
“When May was just two,” said Cath, “you see, we’d had her so often, she was with us more than she was at home. . . . Jack and I wrote a letter to Betty and asked whether she would let us adopt May. We loved her that much. Not just me, Jack too.” Jack nodded.
“You see, Cath had an operation. She has only one lung,” he said. “And after our F. was born, we didn’t think we could have another one. The little one came six years later. . . .” They laughed. “A surprise . . .”
“Betty came the very next day,” Cath went on, “the day she got the letter, and took May away. As if she was afraid.”
She took her away, only to bring her back again two weeks later and countless times after that. “I can’t cope with two,” she always said.
But that wasn’t the real reason; considering all these events now in the context of the whole story, one can see how Betty wavered between her impulse to eliminate Mary from her life and her perhaps equally strong—even obsessive—attachment to her. Almost every one of the acts of rejection during the following years contain also in a strange and hapless way an element of protection of Mary and—as so often happens—a mute cry for help.
The next instance in this sequence of macabre events occurred when Mary was two and a half, in November 1959. Betty arrived distraught at Cath’s house late one afternoon. Cath and her family then lived in a rather isolated place in the country, an hour or so’s journey from Newcastle. Betty told Cath that Mary had had a terrible accident—a lorry had run over her. “They had to cut the clothes off her, she is that bad,” she said, sobbing bitterly. Cath was so shaken by the awful news she never questioned why Betty hadn’t stayed at the hospital with Mary. “They told me to come back tomorrow,” Betty added, unasked. The sisters agreed that Cath would phone the hospital the next day and then go in and see Mary.
By the first post the next morning, before Cath, who didn’t have a telephone at the house, had a chance to get out, a letter arrived from Betty saying that it was not true, that Mary wasn’t hurt, but that she had “given May to the D.s.” The D.s, old friends of Cath and Jack who lived in a small market town nearby, had taken considerable interest in Mary, and had also in the past repeatedly offered to adopt her.
“I didn’t know what to believe any more,” said Cath. But she rushed to the D.s’ house, ten miles or so away, to make sure they really had Mary. When she got there, they asked her whether she had come to take Mary back. It then emerged that Betty had not actually “given” Mary to this couple—a solution which might have been a lifesaver for Mary—but, saying that “things were bad just then,” had merely asked them to keep her for “a couple of weeks.” Mary was returned to her mother a few days later.
It would seem that Mary remembers this incident well: In a shopping expedition with her aunt and grandmother two and a half years later, when she was five, she caught sight of Mrs. D. in the market and hid behind her granny. “Don’t let that lady see me,” she said. “I don’t like that lady. Me mum gave me away to her when I was two, and she cut off my hair.” Mrs. D., a motherly woman who had cropped Mary’s hair when she was brought to her because, as was almost always the case, she had lice, gave her a present of half a crown that day. (Isa too remembers this incident well.)
The next accident happened in the spring of 1960: Cath came to visit the Bells, who—although not for much longer—were still living in Huxley Crescent. She brought a bag of “dolly mixtures” for each of the children: Mary, then three, and her eighteen-month-old brother.
The sisters went to the scullery to make tea, and when Cath returned to the room where they had left the children, she found them sitting on the floor munching sweets which had been “spilled all over.” To her horror she saw among them a number of little blue pills which she recognized as being Drinamyls (Purple Hearts). “Did you eat any of them bonny little blue ones?” she questioned the little boy. He nodded twice. May said she had also eaten two. Cath shouted for Betty to come.
“I don’t remember exact words any more,” she said later. “It was all panic stations. But Betty said something like, ‘Here, they must have taken the bottle out of my handbag.’”
“You just don’t leave anything dangerous like this around for kids to get hold of,” Cath retorted angrily. “I got a glass of hot water with salt in it and made the kids drink it,” she says, “and they were both sick in the sink. Then I ran out to get Billy who was in the road and told him to take them quickly to the hospital. In the hospital they said they were all clear—it had all come out.”
(Isa remembers this accident too—the only one any of Betty’s other children were involved in. “You mean the Drinamyls Betty was taking?” she said. “That was after we’d gone back to Glasgow.”)
Just after this time, Cath and Jack wrote yet another letter to Betty and Billy Bell. “We said we wouldn’t ever again talk about adopting May,” they said. “But would they let us have and keep her until she finished school, and then May herself could choose where she wanted to live? We said could we go and see a solicitor and make it all regular and legal?”
Their action was certainly partly prompted by their devotion to Mary, and their growing and nagging anxiety about her. But partly—and they agree now that this was so—a lot of people sought after Mary’s affection, nobody knows quite why. It wasn’t just because of her looks, although everyone comments on how pretty she was.
(“I never felt I could reach May,” said Audrey. “There was a wall between her and others. . . . It was the same for Betty,” she added. “She had that wall too.” Was it that, already this early in her life, Mary provoked in adults this need to prove that they could reach her, they could communicate with her, they could make her into an ordinary child?)
Jack and Cath say that Mary “never cried when hurt” but had temper tantrums, screamed, stamped on the floor when not given what she wanted, was never spanked at home, but stopped her tantrums at once when they gave her the occasional slap on her backside. They can only remember one occasion when they saw violence in her, and that was just about the time they had suggested fostering her. As usual Mary had been staying with them and they’d had a letter from Betty in the morning to say that she and Billy were coming that afternoon to pick Mary up to take her home. “Jack was sitting here,” Cath said—in his usual chair in front of the fireplace in their kitchen dinette, “and May sat there,” opposite him. “She was playing with a big red toy gun and Jack said, ‘Your mam and dad will be here soon to pick you up.’ ‘I’ll bash your face in,’ May shouted at her uncle. And she did, with that toy gun. He still has the bump on his nose from it.” They say that many times since, Mary has asked her uncle if he remembered the time she “bashed his face in.”
A number of snapshots and photographs of Mary from the age of two to when she was about five or six show her looking strained, her face “tight” as her uncle Jack puts it. In only one of them does she look like an ordinary, happy, laughing little girl. “She was stopping with us then, for a long time,” Cath said.
Three months or so later, in the summer of 1960, the little boy deposited once again with his paternal grandmother in Newcastle, Betty Bell took Mary, now three and a half, to Glasgow, to stay with her mother. Mrs. McC. was working as a receptionist in a hospital at the time and had a flat on the third floor of a terraced building. The lavatories were on the ground floor and, to save taking the child downstairs, the family was in the habit of letting her “wet in the sink.” One day, the window next to this sink w
as wide open, Philip and Isa were both in the room, sitting on the settee, about six feet away, when Philip saw Mary, whom Betty had been holding straddling the sink, falling out of the window. He lunged across the room and somehow managed to grab her ankles and pull her in. “He was off work for three weeks after that because he hurt his back catching her,” the sisters say.
Betty’s family had now become really anxious, and Isa was instructed by her mother not to let Betty and Mary out of her sight.
A few days later she followed Betty when she took the child out for a walk. Betty took Mary to an adoption agency. A woman came out of the interview room crying and said they would not give her a baby because of her age and because she was emigrating to Australia.
“I brought this one in to be adopted. You have her,” Betty Bell said, pushing the little girl toward the stranger, and walked out.
Betty had seen Isa follow her and had shouted at her in the street in the rough language her sisters say she always used now. “I was that embarrassed,” said Isa. But she had stuck to her as ordered by her mother, and Betty was perfectly aware that her sister was present when all this happened. Could she really have imagined that Isa would do nothing when she saw her apparently give Mary away? Or was this senseless act, which was surely likely to have a tremendous impact on a small girl, yet another sign of despair? Another cry for help from a very frightened woman.
Isa followed and took down the address where Mary was taken, then raced to the hospital to tell her mother. They rushed home and Mary’s grandmother apparently told Betty that if the child was not back inside two hours she would notify the police. Mary was fetched with some dresses the woman had already bought her and allowed her to keep, and Betty took Mary back to Newcastle.
Only weeks after this, in Newcastle, Betty had a miscarriage. When she returned from hospital, the Bell family moved out of Huxley Crescent to a flat in the Newcastle slums. “We had a fight with some of the neighbors,” Billy said. “We lived in some awful places . . . after that.” Elswick Road where they moved is now gradually turning into a desirable residential neighborhood with excellent council flats. But in 1960 it was very different. And No. 28 (now boarded up and awaiting demolition), a shop of sorts on the ground floor, and upstairs the dank and dark two-rooms plus scullery, was a dreadful comedown from Huxley Crescent. It was here that a new pattern began to emerge for their lives. Betty’s absences from home became more frequent. Billy stayed away from work—”Somebody had to mind the kids,” he said. But he also sought companionship and escape in pubs. On Betty’s returns (she was soon to be away a few days regularly every week) one must assume that the atmosphere could hardly have been peaceful. Billy seemed like a man who did not know what had hit him. But at least now he knew vaguely that Betty was sick. In the beginning he must have sought a more acceptable interpretation for her behavior. Even his far more articulate sister tried to minimize and normalize it: “Betty likes a fling,” she said.