Songs of Innocence (26 page)

At around the same time, an American schools reformer named John Holt argued that outdated notions had led to the young being made subservient and dependent upon adults:
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‘The words “expect” and “expectation” are on the whole badly misunderstood and misused by most people who write about children. Most
people use them as synonyms for “demand” or “insist” or “compel”. When they say we should have higher expectations of children, they mean that we should demand
that they do certain things and threaten to punish them if they do not.’ The main function of compulsory universal education, he argued, was ‘to control people’s minds, what they
thought and knew’.

Such views would always be contentious, but the notion that a child should have ‘rights’ had by now entered the mainstream. In 1973, Hillary Rodham, then a student at Yale Law School
and soon to become Hillary Rodham Clinton, wrote that ‘children’s rights is a slogan in search of a definition’.
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Soon, it
would find one, as it solidified into the notion that the child should have distinct legal rights, separate from those of its parents. That would not happen overnight, but one major step along the
way was the declaration by the United Nations that 1979 would be the International Year of the Child. In practical terms, it would have little effect. But it would get people talking about
children, and childhood, in forums which had had little to say about them up till this point. ‘Dare I say that I think some adults are tempted to spend a great deal of time telling children
or other people what is good for them, rather than listening to children and learning from them of their needs?’ asked the Bishop of Salisbury in a debate on the subject in the House of Lords
that year.
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‘If we are seriously listening to our children, then our sense
of awe is heightened, and their ability
to go to the heart of matters is constantly recognized.’

Suddenly, children were being credited with the possession of a special and unique perspective on the world; even a sort of elixir which the adult would wish to share: ‘I think it was a
Lebanese poet who said: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself,”’ mused the Bishop, quoting Kahlil Gibran.

The sky turns dark

Such exaltation of the child as a unique being with a special perspective on the world had not been prevalent since before World War One. And so as the adult world once again
began to idolize the notion of the innocent, the unspoiled and even the sagacious child in an era of rapid social change, perhaps it is hardly surprising that violations against childhood –
events which had taken place with some regularity throughout history – would again begin to impact more strongly on the public imagination.

Maybe the trail of events had begun early in the morning of 7 October 1965, when a couple named David and Maureen Smith had made their way to a phone box near the flat where they lived, near
Hyde, in Cheshire, armed with a screwdriver and a kitchen knife. The call they made, to Hyde police station, led to one of the most notorious murder inquiries of the century. The previous night,
David Smith had been at the house that his wife’s sister, Myra Hindley, shared with her boyfriend, Ian Brady. Smith had watched as Brady had murdered a seventeen-year-old apprentice named
Edward Evans, first beating him with the flat of an axe and then throttling him with electrical cord. Brady had asked Smith to help him dispose of the body the following evening, but a terrified
Smith had confessed
all to his wife. A week later, with Brady and Hindley in custody, the police found a ticket to a left-luggage locker at a Manchester station in the back
of Hindley’s prayer book. Inside were suitcases containing pornographic photographs of a young girl along with tape recordings of her screaming and begging for help. The girl was ten-year-old
Lesley Ann Downey, who had disappeared from a fairground the previous December. Her body was later found on nearby Saddleworth Moor, along with that of twelve-year-old John Kilbride, who had been
abducted from a local market two years earlier. Brady and Hindley went on trial for all three murders. Years later, they would confess to two further killings – of sixteen-year-old Pauline
Reade, whose body was eventually recovered from the moor, and of twelve-year-old Keith Bennett, whose remains were never found.

Child murder on this scale was, and always had been, sensational. The world’s press was full of the story, and continued to follow its developments over the subsequent decades. Yet there
was also a sense of propriety which surrounded such things in the 1960s.
The Times
did not run a leader on the subject until 1972, when it published a largely impenetrable piece about the
rights and wrongs of Myra Hindley being allowed to go out for a walk – an event which had sparked public outrage. The first letter ever printed by the paper on the subject was in 1968, when a
vicar named Kenneth Leech wrote to object to a proposal that a film might be made about the murders: ‘I hope that I am not alone in finding the desire to make publicity and profit out of
human suffering utterly disreputable and horrible . . . It is almost unspeakably cruel and nasty,’ he wrote. Yet despite this reticence, maybe it was around this time that a sense of fear
began to spread around the concept of childhood. Children, having become more precious to their parents as they became fewer and more expensive, were too valuable to lose. Parents began to gather
their young a little closer to them – or at least to worry more about them when they were not
close. The exhortation not to ‘get into cars with strange
men’ became universal.

The next child murder case to hit the headlines during this period was in many ways even more disturbing, for this time the perpetrator and the victims were all children, and the perpetrator was
a girl. One of the strangest aspects of the case, to the modern eye, is also one of the most mundane. It is the detail in a description of the last day of the first of two little boys who would
become the victims of ten-year-old Mary Bell.
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On the morning of Saturday, 25 May 1968, four-year-old Martin Brown, a solid boy with blond hair,
blue eyes and a round face who called his father ‘Georgie’, woke up early in his home in Scotswood, Newcastle. As was his usual habit on a Saturday, when his parents had a lie-in while
he babysat his one-year-old sister, Linda, he went downstairs to fetch a drink of milk and a piece of bread. He dressed Linda and took her into their mother’s room before having a bowl of
sugar pops in the kitchen. When he had finished the cereal he fetched his anorak and put it on. His mother, June, by now up and in the scullery, heard him call: ‘I’m away, Mam. Tara,
Georgie!’ She never saw him again. Martin spent the day playing with other children around the streets of Scotswood, turning up variously at the local shop and at the house of an
‘aunt’ – a friend of his mother’s – looking for food. At 3.30 p.m. he was found dead in a derelict house. The fact that a four-year-old boy should have spent his last
day without adult supervision, being shooed out of his aunt’s house when he did turn up there, excited no comment whatsoever. It seemed the adult world, which had begun to take much more
notice of its children than previously, still saw them largely as independent – if vulnerable – beings.

Martin’s death was initially thought to have been the result of a random accident, and even when Mary Bell and her friend Norma Bell – who was no relation – broke into a local
nursery and left notes saying things like: ‘We did murder Martain brown, fuckof you
BastArd,’ and: ‘YOU ArE micey y because we murdered Martain GO brown
you BettER Look out THErE arE MurdErs about By FANNYAND and auld Faggot you screws,’ no one took them seriously. Nine weeks later, three-year-old Brian Howe was found dead on a nearby piece
of waste ground with a carpet of weeds and flowers covering his body and with scratches and pressure marks on his neck. The two deaths were then linked, and both Mary and Norma were charged with
murder. Norma was eventually acquitted; Mary was convicted of manslaughter owing to diminished responsibility.

These murders, like the Moors murders, did not attract the kind of comment they might have provoked in later years. They certainly attracted widespread publicity, and Mary was dismissed as evil
in true pre-enlightenment terms – the judge used the word ‘wicked,’ when sentencing her. In the media, she was described as a ‘freak of nature’, ‘evil
born’ and ‘a bad seed’. Such descriptions served a useful social purpose – they allowed these horrifying and seemingly inexplicable crimes to be neatly packaged up and put
away – much as the Reverend Leech would have liked to have seen the Moors murders parked in a dark, inaccessible corner of the public mind. If Mary was somehow possessed by the devil, or if
her twisted nature were the result of some freak genetic mutation, then no one was really responsible.

The truth was far more complicated, of course. And it is perhaps surprising, given the ongoing debate at the time about the links between criminality and bad childhood experiences, that
Mary’s own early life was not examined in more detail. It has since been suggested that her mother was a prostitute who exposed her child to sexual abuse by her clients, and who tried on
several occasions to kill her. She did not know who her father was. In an account of the case written thirty years later, Gitta Sereny
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–
who befriended Mary in adulthood – argued that the girl should have been seen not as perpetrator but as victim. Sereny cited a case from 1861 in which
two
eight-year-olds beat a two-year-old called George Burgess to death in Stockport. There was never any question of the two older boys being tried for the crime, she wrote, quoting a
Times
leader on the 1861 case which said: ‘Children of that age cannot be held legally accountable in the same way as adults. Conscience, like other natural faculties, admits of degrees: it is
weak, and has not arrived at its proper growth in children.’
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If Mary’s cries for help had been heeded, Sereny suggested, she would never have become a killer. Mary’s probation officer told the author: ‘In the public’s justified
horror about these events, and their ready acceptance of “evil” as an explanation, people tend to forget that they were children who carried around a baggage of childhood experiences
unknown to or ignored by any responsible adult.’
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But that was later. For now, child killers were, it seems, simply that – children
who happened also to be killers.

It would be many years before anyone would take seriously the idea that the adults around Mary Bell could have prevented her from killing if only they had listened to her more. Indeed, the
suggestion would always remain controversial – the feeling that such crimes must be born out of an evil which was in some way inhuman, even diabolical, rather than of a twisted and damaged
childhood, ran very deep. But, even in the early 1970s, the notion that children in general should be heard, that their opinions should be taken into account, had begun to take hold.

This belief had not penetrated every corner, nor had it even penetrated very far into the system of social services which had grown up since the war. Ever since the death of Dennis O’Neill
in 1945 had caused such outrage against the authorities who would foster out a little boy without making proper checks on his safety, the role of the state in children’s lives, and
particularly in the lives of children who came from families with problems, had been growing. Indeed, as a mother named Pauline Colwell gave birth in March 1965 to a
daughter named Maria, moves were afoot to ensure that role would become even greater in years to come. The Seebohm Report, commissioned that year and published three years later,
would bring social services departments into being within local councils, and would lead to a huge rise – 10 per cent a year for several years – in the resources available to social
workers. Some social work departments ran to several thousand members of staff. And yet despite all this activity, and despite a growing awareness nationally of children’s individual needs,
it would be another twenty years before social workers would fully move on from generic work with families to putting the needs of individual children first. ‘In the early 1970s there was a
great sense of optimism about prevention to the point where some of the specifics of child protection were neglected,’ one social services director would remark later.
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‘Social workers were so focused on the family as a whole that they were forgetting about the child.’

And certainly, it must have been painfully, heartbreakingly clear to the Sussex social workers who handed little Maria Colwell over to her mother in November 1971 that they were not acting on
the child’s wishes. That morning, Maria had been taken to Middle Street School in Brighton by her uncle, Bob Cooper, who with his wife, Doris had been looking after her since she was a baby.
Later, Mr Cooper had collected her and taken her to the social services office, where the handover was to take place. Maria screamed and clung to her uncle. Indeed, so hysterical was she at the
prospect of being separated from her foster-parents that she could only be persuaded to go with her mother on the basis of a lie – that she would be allowed to return to the Coopers the
following weekend. She never saw them again, and less than fourteen months later she was dead.

Maria was the fifth and last child of her mother’s first marriage. Her father, Raymond Colwell, left just weeks after she was born and died a few months later. Pauline went to pieces,
often leaving her
children dirty and neglected and, according to an official report on the case, ‘associating with numerous men’.
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When Maria was five months old, Pauline gave her to the Coopers, both of whom became devoted to her. Her school reported that she was a nice girl, always polite and well
dressed. They saw no particular problems with her health or behaviour. But relations between Maria’s mother and the Coopers deteriorated, and Pauline wanted to end the arrangement. She had
remarried, to Mr Kepple, and had two more children. Despite the fact that these children were sometimes left outside pubs in the evenings and that the older girl had been seen with bruising and a
black eye, social services now felt Pauline’s parenting skills were ‘adequate’. And the rights of the parent took precedence, it seems, over the rights of the child. So if there
were no good reasons to keep Maria in care other than that she wanted to stay there, she was expected to go back. For some time before the final separation, Maria had been going on visits to her
mother’s house, returning distressed and sometimes with bruises which, she said, Kepple had inflicted. Sometimes she would work herself into such a state at the prospect of a visit that she
would be unable to go.