by Gitta Sereny
“Of course,” said one teacher, “with Mary one always tends to read something into every reaction.” Nevertheless, the staff felt that Betty, much of the time, was as if play-acting with Mary—“She acted being the mother.” She “played” with her—inventing things and stories. She seemed, say the staff, to “bewilder” Mary who said once that she did not think Betty was her mother—she “just wasn’t like a mother.” As time went on, the teachers (many of them, as can be seen, very perceptive) noticed the ambivalence in Mary’s feelings: at one moment she seemed to idolize her mother, mostly for being “so smartly turned out.” At other times she said she hated her—as she put it, for leaving her “father and the bairns” (i.e., herself).
On 21 April 1970 Mary herself decided to stop her mother’s visits. She told her counselor and Mr. Dixon, the headmaster of the Unit, a fatherly man to whom she appears very attached, that she didn’t want to see her again, and Betty was written to and asked to stop her visits.8
Just about that time the people in charge of the Special Unit decided (correctly enough) that it would be good for Mary to see her father who was in prison not too far away. Unfortunately, instead of arranging a meeting somewhere on “neutral ground,” which doubtless—the Home Office having always shown their willingness to help—could have been organized, Mary was taken to visit Billy in prison.
In the early hours of the morning following this visit the night-watchman called the housemaster on duty and told him that Mary was lying on her bed, crying bitterly.
“I saw my dad in that place,” she sobbed. “It isn’t a nice place at all.” She was inconsolable and the master called the headmaster. “He came over in his pajamas and sat with her for more than two hours. He finally got her to go back to sleep. She’ll do anything for Mr. Dixon,” he said later.
Mary’s relatives felt that the solution that had been found for her—the Special Unit—was the best under the circumstances.
“May’s probably getting better schooling than ours ever will,” said one of her aunts.
“She writes to us every two weeks,” says Isa. “She sounds that ordinary in her letters. . . .”
In some of her letters she does sound like any child away at school:
“Dear Auntie, Uncle, bairns, Dog,” reads one of the early ones, “How’s everything with you? . . . I am feeling low today, homesick I guess. Ten, eleven months is a long time, but time passes quickly. I think I feel sad when there is a slow record on. Now there’s a fast one and I am better. I got fifty-two points today for good behaviour . . . lots and lots and lots of love, Mary.”
When she gets lots of “points” she gets a reward; in the case of the other children the “points” automatically get them closer to the time when they are allowed outside the Unit, and even weekend and holiday visits home. In Mary’s case this was impossible for a long time. Her reward would be a visit to the headmaster’s home, the opportunity to play there with ordinary children, or, on very rare occasions, a drive in a carefully locked car. Slowly the manifestations of her condition became less immediately obvious. “We are doing miracles with her,” some of the young staff exulted.
“My mother went to see her,” said Billy Bell’s sister. “She says she’s lovely; she says she is so grown up and well-behaved and calm.”
“She used to fight other children, used bad language, lied, bit, and scratched,” said one teacher, “but she doesn’t any more. She never attacked the adults, only children.” But the trouble was still there—underneath. A visitor who played a game with her remonstrated when he saw her blatantly cheating. “You can’t do that,” he said. “Oh yes,” she replied, “I can.”
Early in her detention, on at least two occasions she was involved in the more or less mysterious demise of some hamsters which died of neck injuries.
“But she has a budgerigar,” said a teacher, anxious to prove how well she was doing. “She hasn’t killed that, has she?”
Some members of the staff are naturally glad to point to things which tend to prove how normal she really is—or has become. Sometimes, too, she is “tried out.”
“Not long after our baby was born,” said a member of staff, “I said to my wife, ‘Let’s show it to Mary; let’s see what she makes of it.’ We did. She wasn’t at all happy—she felt very uncomfortable—you could see it. . . .”
Somebody else talked about the young woman teacher who, while she was Mary’s counselor, became convinced of Mary’s innocence. “Miss H . . . has tried all kinds of things with Mary.”
“What kind of things?”
“Oh—psychiatric drama and that.”
“Psychodrama? Is she trained in that?”
“Well, she trained in drama.” (Psychodrama, frequently very effective with disturbed children and adolescents, can in fact be used by lay therapists, who however need to be carefully instructed in its applications, effects and above all evaluation; and therefore—as with all therapy—need themselves to be stable and mature individuals.)
When the case of Mary Bell arose there was manifestly no suitable provision for her. The simplest, most direct and constructive way to deal with the situation would have been—and still is—to turn the existing superb facilities at Red Bank into a Unit that can deal, medically as well as environmentally, with psychopathic children or adolescents in need of special security provisions. This would require comparatively minimal changes and could be done with comparatively minimal resources. It could even be expanded to include something like a hostel which would make it possible—if necessary—to extend treatment for young people as seriously ill as Mary, to a time when a modicum of liberty should be offered.
A psychiatric treatment Unit for severely disturbed children between eight and fifteen has now opened in Southern England (and three more are planned for the country as a whole). But for obvious reasons, treatment, to be effective, must start as early in the child’s life as possible.9 And a number of children, including Mary, are presumably now too old for this particular place.
The attractive surroundings, the orderly way of life of the present Unit, and above all the concentrated attention and affection Mary has been receiving have no doubt helped her to some extent. She has learned to want the approval of the other children, talks far more about herself, discusses at times her greatest problem, her relationship with her mother, and she does now cry. These are steps forward for her.
In the spring of 1970, during or just before the renewed separation from her mother she had herself requested, she wrote Betty a letter in the form of a poem. This letter, an extremely important step in Mary’s development whichever way one looks at it, has necessarily been seen by a number of people (and has, since the publication of the book in England, been printed in several newspapers and recited on a BBC TV program).
‘MAM’ [it said],
I know that in my heart
From you once was not apart
My love for you grows
More each day
When you visit me mam
I’d weep once your away
I look into your eyes, so blue and
they’re very sad. you try to be very
cheery. But I know you think IM Bad so Bad
though I really dont know If you
feel the same,
and treat it as a silly game
a child who has made criminal fame
Please mam put my tiny mind at ease
tell Judge and Jury on your knees
they will LISTEN to your cry of PLEAS
THE GUILTY ONE IS you not me
I sorry it HAS to BE this way
We’ll both cry and you will go away
to other gates were you are free
locked up in prison cells.
Your famley are wee,
these last words I speak, on behalf
of dad . . . and me
tell them you are guilty
Please, so then mam, Ill be free, Daughter
May
It i
s inconceivable that Mary—at thirteen—could have had any real understanding of the concept “freedom through atonement.” One must therefore assume that—at least as far as that extraordinary sentence is concerned—her way of expressing herself was the result of instinct rather than intellect. But anyway, it is very difficult to interpret Mary’s motives for doing anything.10 She may also have written it as a result of learning about the content of the articles which had appeared the previous December in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, which dealt in some detail with the problems of her mother. Although efforts were made by the magazine and others to keep her from this knowledge at that time, in the final analysis it may not have been possible to do so. “All the children know everything that goes on,” said one of the teachers. “They know on the one hand by some sort of osmosis and, on the other, there are those who believe that they should be told everything as a matter of principle.”
It is unfortunately only too possible that those who hold such opinions would take it upon themselves even to show Mary—as an experiment in honesty they might think—such published material. And it is equally possible that boys from the Unit, returning after Christmas spent with their families, brought back copies of the magazine. Reading this could well have prompted her to write this letter.
There is still a third possible explanation: she must know that letters from children in the Unit are read by the staff, more often than not by each child’s particular counselor.
It was also just about this time that Mary had requested a young woman teacher to be her new counselor. As almost everything Mary does is done for immediate effect, it also could be that this letter—although addressed to her mother—was really written to influence the attitude of this teacher whose affection and sympathy she was very anxious to have. This young teacher was also involved in the next dramatic episode in Mary’s life.
On the early evening of Monday, 15 June 1970, Mary told her that during the weekend just past, one of the housemasters, a thirty-five-year-old married man who had been at the Special Unit since its inception four years before and was about to emigrate to a similar job in Canada, had indecently assaulted her.
“When she told me about it, it was not in the nature of a complaint,” the teacher was to testify later, “she was just upset about it. It was not a complaint, in the sense that she was not asking for anything to be done about it. She was saying that she was distressed by what had happened.”
Mary too, much later, was to say, “I wasn’t trying to accuse him. I told Miss H. ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ but she did anyway.”
It is not likely that this was pathetically true? That Mary, in her need for her counselor’s affection and attention, had built up this story on the flimsiest pretext? Is this not a classic manifestation of an emotionally deprived girl? And might it not have been treated with more skepticism at the outset?
Mary’s counselor, when confronted with this tale, did what she had to do: she told her superior, who in turn informed the headmaster and the principal of Red Bank.
Although it was known that three months earlier Mary and a boy had already plotted to accuse another master of assaulting her and although—quite aside from similar incidents—it was known that three days before this alleged “assault” Mary had, by invitation, watched a boy masturbate in the pigeon shed (“She told someone, who told the headmaster and the boy got a thrashing”), Mary’s allegations were taken seriously without any attempt to seek psychiatric advice. The Unit’s consultant psychiatrist was not told although he paid three of his weekly visits to the Unit during the initial investigation. He finally read about it in the Guardian.
The police were called, the housemaster, whose name was subsequently widely published, was taken off his duties, and the result was a committal hearing and a trial.11
The committal hearing was held in the small Magistrate’s Court at Newton-le-Willows on a hot day in August (1970). The slim, blond housemaster, pink and embarrassed, sat next to his counsel, Mr. John Stannard, and tried to look as if he was certain that no one could possibly take the proceedings seriously. His attractive wife, seven months pregnant, pale but with a determined smile, sat in the back row of the public seats next to her mother. The case having received some advance publicity, with Mary’s name mentioned in one or two papers, there were quite a number of reporters.
Mary’s grandmother, sitting next to Betty, looked thinner and more worn than ever. Betty, with a new white-blond long and smooth wig, wore a crimson jacket, a miniskirt and white shiny boots. Her face ravaged and ashen, she affirmed in a low voice that Mary was Mary Flora Bell and was born on 26 May 1957.
Mary, tremendously changed even in the four months since I had seen her last, seemed heavy and tired. Brought in holding the hand of the Unit headmaster, Mr. Dixon, she walked with a defeated shambling sort of gait. Her face pasty and white, her eyes flickering uncertainly from wall to wall, she was a long way from the chirpy, self-assured eleven-year-old who had dominated the nine-day trial at the Newcastle Assizes eighteen months before.
Mary was on the witness stand for two hours. The first five minutes consisted of innocuous questions which she answered readily enough. She said that the housemaster had allowed her to come to the “duty-room” with him during the rest period after lunch, when she asked him to. Why had she asked him? Because she didn’t like to be locked in alone. Had she done this before? No. She was asked what they had talked about in the duty-room, but she said she wouldn’t answer in front of all these people. There was a commotion in the back row when her mother called out, “But you must—she must answer that” and began to cry. The magistrates consulted briefly and the Court was cleared.12
Mary then claimed that the housemaster had said to her “Are you getting any hair down there yet?” and that he had then begun “to mess about.”
The rest of her story was haltingly told, with many instances of what appeared to be desperate embarrassment at having to pronounce sexual words. Her twisting, turning, and hiding her tensely pale and frozen face in her hands was incredibly convincing. In view of the circumstances of her life these terms can hardly have been new to her, and her show of distress was certainly perturbing. She made the allegation that the housemaster, preparatory to visiting her and masturbating on her bed early the following morning, had given her a book called Oral Love with instructions to read it before he came back to see her. Her palmprints had been found on page 18 of this book, and cross-examination was directed at discovering how it could have come into her posession other than the way she had described. A tastelessly written book with over a hundred tawdry, pseudo-sex-education photographs, it was—it turned out—the property of the housemaster who (so the evidence continued), aside from lending it to his mother-in-law, had also passed it on, over a period of several months, to at least two other teachers, one of them Mary’s then counselor. But it was they—not he—who had taken it in and out of this closed unit for disturbed children.13 When Mary’s own testimony was over (and had been read out to the press, who were readmitted before the general public), the Magistrates called a short recess. Mary, sitting momentarily on a bench at one side of the near-empty room, looked now, the ordeal over, pink and excited. “Miss H. . . . is next,” she said to me, referring to her counselor. “You like her best, do you?” “Oh yes,” she answered, her eyes darting from one door of the courtroom to the other, so as not to miss the young teacher’s entrance. She was out of luck because she was then taken out and back to the Unit and wasn’t allowed to listen to the rest of the hearing. The testimony that followed—the public now readmitted—finally revealed that the book had on at least one occasion been left unattended in a staff duty-room in which, although it was off limits, children had in the past been found. This was by no means conclusive proof one way or another, but it did establish another possibility where Mary could have seen and touched it. Even so, the magistrates felt the allegation had neither been proved nor disproved and sent the case to trial. (Someone close to the Co
urt said later, “I think they felt that there is something so terribly wrong at the school, something had to be done.”)
Six weeks later, after four months of waiting for the housemaster whose Canadian job had meanwhile been filled, the trial began at Liverpool Quarter Sessions—and ended within hours.
Once again the press benches were full. Once again Betty Bell, her mother next to her, attended. But the Mary who entered this courtroom was a very different girl from the one who had faced the Newton-le-Willows magistrates in such a manifestly troubled state of mind. Rosy-cheeked and clear-eyed she was dressed in what looked like a new outfit and strode up pertly, smiling hello at her relatives. She seemed entirely unconcerned about the much larger audience and undaunted by the far more formal Court. This Mary had evidently overcome her apprehensions about the unexpected consequences of an impulsive act or decision and, delivering a more than fluent recitation of the alleged events, seemed confident of victory. Far from having any compunctions now about describing all the details, she seemed to relish the occasion. She got testy once or twice at probing questions, but when asked by counsel whether she had hated and protested against what she claimed the housemaster had done to her, her reply—sadly honest under the circumstances—was “I wasn’t fussy.”
After listening to Mary’s testimony and a few minutes of Mr. John Stannard’s cross-examination which pointed out glaring discrepancies in her different statements, the Court adjourned and the prosecution withdrew to consult the Director of Public Prosecutions in London. The next morning, Judge William Openshaw, who had shown impeccable concern for Mary throughout, directed the Jury to find the defendant not guilty—a fact which, the sensation evaporated and the court almost empty, was barely mentioned in the press next day.
“She has told four stories,” the Judge said, “and having told four stories, it is inconceivable that the Jury would believe any one of them. She has fabricated,” he continues. “She is a very sick child. One can only hope that she can be given treatment to help her. . . .”