Cries Unheard (27 page)

“I looked at all the pictures. It was very exciting for me then …” she said and laughed, “It was very interesting.”

She said he had come back fifteen minutes later.

“And then he undid himself and rubbed himself … it… against my vagina. No, I wasn’t fighting it … I liked it. He told me to sit on him but he couldn’t penetrate because I was too tight. I was sore. I cried and I said it hurt so he stopped. If he had broken my virginity, how the hell would he have explained that? But to my massive frustration he went on rubbing me for a couple of minutes, then he told me to do it to myself and I said, ” But it’s not the same,” and then he said, ” Well, we’ll have to arrange something,” and he did, twice more that weekend, once in my room and once in the staff sleeping-in room.” On both occasions, she said, ‘it was finally mutual oral sex. He spoke dirty.

He said: “Dirty little whore.” He said it wasn’t his fault, it was my fault, because I was there and there to be fucked . No, I didn’t mind. When he masturbated me, he told me to say what I thought it would feel like if he went in. I couldn’t, because I didn’t know. And when he ejaculated in my mouth, I got sick and ran to the bathroom and vomited. The night watchman heard me and took me to my room and he gave me some cocoa from a flask he carried. “

“I asked Miss X not to tell anyone,” Mary said, almost in tears now.

“I suppose it was silly of me: after all, it was her job to report it, but I knew they wouldn’t believe me.”

Mr. Dixon, doubtless deeply embarrassed by the incident, questioned Mary and gently advised her to tell the truth. Eventually the matter was dropped as Mary’s account was considered unreliable.

“But it wasn’t,” she said to me.

“It was true.”

As we can see from the many cases that are emerging now, some of which date back thirty years, the fact is that twenty-five years ago, any child who made such an allegation would probably have found herself disbelieved, and Mary, who might have confused or even slightly dramatized some details in the telling, but who had probably essentially told the truth, fared no better. The system was not geared to accept such unpalatable truths from a child at the expense of an adult. Nonetheless, as Ben G. told me, from then on Mr. Dixon ordered that night duty should always be shared by two members of staff.

After this, Mary went through a period of considerable confusion and unhappiness.

“I had been so happy, you know,” she said.

“Red Bank, with Mr. Dixon, had come to mean so much; I knew they were good people.”

How soon had she realized they were ‘good’? (Mary often uses the word ‘good’ to describe people she likes, and it applies as much to the sense of their being nice and kind, as to their being strong and disciplined. ) “I don’t know … I don’t remember dates and times, but it was when I couldn’t get my own way, when they wouldn’t put up with my tantrums, when they were stronger than I was … ” There was the odd teacher,” she said, ‘who made me sob. There was a Hungarian I was being particularly abusive to, and he shouted at me:

“You want to get back to the hovel you came from!” And it really upset me, I really cried. And then there was this Miss X. ” who you thought I liked, didn’t you?”

Well, I said, you asked for her to be your counsellor.

“Yes,” she said, ‘and I was really wrong there, wasn’t I? She tried to get into my head. She would try out this psychodrama crap she knew nothing about. I don’t know where the information came from that I liked her. I told her please don’t tell, you know, about Mr.

Y.

; she was the one who brought it all about when I didn’t want anyone to know.

“But…” she said, ‘there were really good times: the interaction with the staff and their families; my friendships with the boys. There were two boys . I won’t say their names. But when they came they were, I think, about the same age as I was by then, thirteen and fourteen, and they were rather effeminate boys who had both been sexually abused”

They told you this?

“Yes,” she said, and repeated, somewhat defensively, “Well, I was also thirteen, fourteen by that time and we had become real friends by then and they probably needed to talk.”

Did you tell them anything about yourself?

“No, I didn’t.”

In July 1971, Mary was visited at Red Bank by Dr. David Westbury.

“You remember,” she said, ‘he was one of the two psychiatrists who had testified at my trial, and for the first time I was able to talk, not deeply you know . but normally, and I quite liked him. “

Dr. Westbury’s report to the Home Office says that after ‘a long talk with her’ he had found her ‘remarkably improved’ with ‘a loss of nearly all of her aggressive tendencies . a modification of her inclination to manipulate . land] an improvement in her relations with other people and fin] her capacity to think about the future. ” He also felt that she had gained insight into her mother’s emotional and social instability and added, significantly, that her mother could ‘hinder her progress’ even now. He concluded by suggesting that ‘one should begin to consider 1975 [when Mary would be eighteen] as a possible release date … She will be old enough [then] to stand on her own feet with some support, and, if she progresses as she has, [will] be capable of a life of her own.”

Betty used her knowledge of this report for further publicity. In an interview with a Newcastle Sunday paper she said she was determined that when her daughter was released they would change their names and move to another part of the country and make a fresh start together.

And she quoted and showed the newspaper a letter she said she had received from Mary that morning: “No matter what happens, Mam,” it read, ‘we’ll go it together. These past five years have been hard for us and everyone. I can only hope and pray things turn out for the best, mam. I love you and shall always love you. As long as you are there I’ll be OK because I want you and need you. “

“That’s the letter I was shown,” Mary recalled.

“I was dumbfounded because I hadn’t written it…”

Were you angry? I asked.

“I don’t remember,” she said, sounding tired.

“I think I was more fed up than angry, and anyway, Mr. Dixon told me she wouldn’t be allowed to visit me any more.”

Had she eventually talked to Mr. Dixon about her childhood, I asked her, either about what had been done to her, or what she had done?

Her reply was indirect, but in the effort to encourage her to speak it was always important to accept her diversions, even if they appeared to lead away from the immediate question.

“I remember telling Mrs. R.” one of the teachers I liked very much, that I had a twin sister who died and she was called Paula, and I used to cry when I talked about her. Mrs.

R.

knew of course that I had no twin sister, but she never told me I was talking a load of rubbish she just listened. “

Did you know what made you tell this tale?

“I don’t think I knew then why I did it, but I’ve thought about it since. I think I was inventing a twin who might have done what I really did … You know, perhaps, even though I wasn’t consciously able to deal with it, it was a way of admitting … of testing the temperature of admitting, so to speak.”

What do you mean by not being ‘consciously able to deal with it’? I asked, and she replied, impatiently and almost angrily, that I knew because she’d told me earlier that she had never yet dealt with it. But what do you actually mean by ‘dealing with it’? I insisted, and she slowly bent forward, burying her face in her hands, her elbows on her knees as if she was having stomach cramps.

“I think about it…”

she said, repeating the words as she did when she was upset and her voice was muffled with sobs, ‘but I can’t . I can’t, can’t can’t put it into words, not not what I did . “

She invariably lost control over her emotions when trying to talk about the actual killings. In the early weeks of our talks, her distress at these disclosures would be so intense that I sometimes became afraid for her and urged her to lie down and rest, or even to go home.

But later, too, her unhappiness was such that I often suggested a break when I would make tea, she would have a cigarette, or, if we were in the country, she sometimes went for a short walk. Her recovery from these terrible bouts of grief, however, was astoundingly quick, and at first these rapid emotional shifts raised doubts in me. After a while, though, I came to realize that they were part of the internal pattern which governs all of her feelings and her conduct. She has an exceptional range of opposing needs, all of which are constantly acute: her needs for disclosure and for hiding, for sociability and isolation, for talking and for silence, for laughing and for crying.

Only one thing overrides them all: the discipline she has created inside herself in order to give her daughter a normal life.

She said that one of the most difficult things about working with me was the transition between so intensely being “Mary’ with me and then making her way back to her family and being ‘mum’ with her child. She was exhausted after our sessions, she said, and all she wanted was not to think any more.

“I even didn’t want to go for walks,” she said.

“If I walked, I thought. All I wanted was to sleep. So finally, that’s what I did. I slept.”

As we went further and further towards her most difficult confrontation, she would increasingly associate the existence of her own child with the memory of the tragedies she had caused. Since her own child was born, she said, there was not a single day she hadn’t thought about Martin’s and Brian’s parents (she always refers to the little boys individually, by their first names, as if to emphasize their identity as children and her acceptance of it). “Especially on happy days, there’s always something that pulls me up, stops me when I think what I robbed them of… bringing their children up. It never goes. It’ll never go away and why should it? I thought about it before, too, but since I’ve had [my child] it’s become oh, so much, much more painful. Before, I would think of it just as an adult you know rather than a parent. Then, too, I would feel sad, but not the incredible sadness I feel now. I look at her and I think … Oh, God of their parents.”

There was one occasion at Red Bank, she said, when she did talk or write about what she had done.

“It was in an art class, which Mr. P. was supervising, and … I don’t know what brought it on, except perhaps…”

Except perhaps what?

“I can’t be sure but I seem to remember it was around the time one of the boys I was telling you about … you know, who’d been abused … I think it was just about when that boy had been talking to me about that quite a lot.”

And you think now that might have got you thinking about yourself?

“That’s what I’m thinking. Or else, perhaps I just wanted Mr. P.” s attention or his approval. Anyway, I was sitting at that table in the art room and I was supposed to be working on an art project and stopped and started writing on bits of paper . “

What do you mean by bits of paper?

“Well, it wasn’t one … you know … sheet of paper, art paper. I tore bits of paper off used sheets, of rubbish you know, a bit from here and a bit from there and started writing …”

And what did you write?

“About Martin and about Brian, and Norma … I wrote that I’d killed Martin, and that was the first time I’d said it.”

Did you write how you killed Martin? I asked.

She shook her head “No. Oh, no. I said it was an accident.”

And did you say that you killed Brian?

She shook her head.

“No, I didn’t. I said, like at the trial, that Norma did and I was writing quicker and quicker because, you know, I knew we only had so much time for the period and …” she began to lose the thread ‘it was an art class, with everyone around and I wasn’t doing what I ought to have been doing in the first place . “

And what happened?

“Mr. P. noticed I was writing and he told me to bring over what I’d been doing and I did and he read it and he was very kind …” She always defended the actions of the people she liked at Red Bank, however unfortunate their reactions were.

“But he said I hadn’t written it properly and he would write it out for me as it should be…”

Did he mean the look of the writing, or the meaning?

“I had written it so fast, it sounded confused. He wanted to elucidate,” she said.

“And just as he began to write it out on a proper sheet of paper, Mr. Dixon, who’d been away on a conference, came in and asked what we were doing, so Mr. P. told him and handed him my bits saying he was just going to write it out properly for me. Mr. Dixon looked at them,” she suddenly half-laughed, half-sobbed, “I got the feeling Mr. Dixon was a bit … disappointed because it had been dealt with by Mr. P. I just got that feeling, you know, but I don’t really know. He just suddenly looked terribly sad and I remember feeling sad, too, and terribly worried that I’d done something wrong when he said I was to come to his room with him.”

And what happened in his room?

“Nothing, really.” She now sounded puzzled in retrospect.

“No, nothing. He just said not to worry and to run along, and he kept the bits.”

Does she now think that perhaps Mr. Dixon realized that this was a big step in her development, but that it had been mishandled by Mr.

P.

and now he too didn’t quite know what to do about it?

“He was a big man,” she said.

“He would have been big enough to admit that to himself if that was what he felt, but I don’t know whether he did … Anyway,” she continued, diminishing this singular step in her development, quite clearly in order to avoid any diminishing of Mr. Dixon by me, or by herself, ‘it was mostly lies, so it didn’t matter, did it? “

(“Of course, this could have been a considerable shock for Mr. Dixon,” said Ben G. when I told him this story which he hadn’t known about at the time.

“We felt he always had doubts of her guilt.” )

When did she think was the beginning of this conscious remembering? I asked Mary.

“When I was around fourteen. My mother was coming again, you know, and she told me there was ” that book” now about me she meant your book and that it was all lies, and lies about her, her, her: and that she was going into the book shops and turning it around so people wouldn’t see it…”