Cries Unheard (28 page)

Did you ask her what it said?

“I don’t remember, but I don’t think I would have dared after she’d said, I don’t know how many times, that it was all lies; that it was written by … I honestly think she said Marjorie Proops [the famous agony aunt of the Daily Mirror at that time] and that I was never to see it, never to look for it…”

It was shortly before the publication of The Case of Mary Bell in 1972 that another scandal, quite unforeseen, exploded in the media about Mary. During an ‘open weekend’ at Red Bank, to which both parents and officials were invited to visit the unit, Betty Bell and her mother came to see Mary. They went to her room and in the presence of the supervising teacher someone sadly lacking in judgement-Betty Bell dressed Mary up in clothes and underclothes she had brought for the weekend and took photographs of her posing it would be said in the press later ‘suggestively’ in front of her mirror.

When the book was serialized in a Newcastle Sunday paper, Betty Bell, no doubt in an effort to counteract the effects of it in her hometown and before this latest error of judgement had become public, agreed to be interviewed about Mary by the BBC programme Midweek. The programme-makers, at first quite sympathetic to her she could appear very vulnerable and make people feel protective were staggered, they told me afterwards, when she produced the photographs to prove, as she said, how ordinary and happy a child Mary was now. Not surprisingly, the photographs were shown when the item was screened and caused a storm in the press. I thought the pictures tasteless though not extreme, but allowing them to be taken raised justifiable questions about the conduct of the school. The incident eventually became the subject of questions in the House of Commons during which the Minister for Social Affairs made an ill advised statement defending the harmlessness of the occasion.

Although Mary realizes the stupidity of this now, she felt bound to defend it, since it called into question not only the good judgement of her beloved grandmother, but that of Red Bank. She shrugged.

“I

dressed up as a gipsy,” she said, echoing her mother’s explanation on television.

“It was just playacting.”

It wasn’t long after that, she said, that two new boys came to the unit within a short time of each other.

“They were really nasty boys and that’s when I began to have a sort of… inkling, you know, when they … each separately … called me nasty names. The one who was the worst, he was a really slimy character, was sitting opposite me at dinner soon after he came and he called me a murderer and I grabbed his hair and smashed his face into his dinner. And a bit later there was the second one who said the same and I hit him; they had to pry me off him and the more they tried, the more I held on. The place was in an uproar. Mr. P. who I was always somehow scared of and whose approval I always longed to have; he could make me feel guilty even if I hadn’t done anything at all just by looking at me got me by the ear and twisted it, it felt like all the way round, and marched me down the corridor and then Mr. Dixon talked to me. You see, the thing was, for years I hadn’t had a clue what I was in for … I mean, I probably did, somewhere underneath, which is why I invented that twin, didn’t I? And by this time, of course, I had…” she suddenly smiled, “I suppose you would call it ” made another step” by writing that stuff for Mr. P.” but even that was, I think, somehow on the surface.

Consciously, or with my conscience, I didn’t know. I don’t know what I expected to happen. But nothing did. Mr. Dixon only said I had been a disturbed little girl, an angry little girl, and now I was growing up and that I was clever and what I could do one day if I let myself grow up and out of the anger and tried to make the rest of my life a good life. You can see, can’t you, that Mr. Dixon really tried, but I got very, very unhappy. “

It was about that time, in 1972, that Mary recalled telling Mr. Dixon that she hated Red Bank and wanted to go somewhere else.

“He sort of ” Madam Fusspotted” me,” she said.

“But I was serious. I felt contained, as if I had a bra on that was too tight. I stopped doing gym and I had periods and couldn’t go swimming and, you know, all the boys knew, and oh God, I was getting fat. And then I got into provoking the boys, you know, and there was one time when I stuck something into my bed to look as if I was in it, and managed to make my way out and into a boys’ dormitory and fooled around with them and then one teacher, Mr. L…. saw … and I saw his face through the observation window and I ran back down. And then Mr. Dixon came over and I felt terrible and I said to him, oh God I was a whore, a slut and he just said it was perfectly natural, he was so calm but I hated myself. I told myself, oh you slut, you prostitute…” (She was unable to explain to me how she had managed to get out of her locked bedroom and into the boys’ equally locked dormitory. ) There were many manifestations of unhappiness around this time. She took a huge dose of Senakot (a laxative) and was quite sick; there was the ‘fooling around with boys’ she told me about;

and finally she found a way of wounding herself when she broke a window and inflicted a large number of cuts into her arm.

“This is where Mr. Dixon must have got really alarmed,” she said, ‘because he told me I’d have to see a doctor at Winwick Hospital and he and Mr.

P.

took me there. I don’t think I knew it was a mental hospital till a man who was just standing there got a hold of my wrist and it was like an iron grip and I got into a total panic. Mr.

P.

got him off me:

he wasn’t afraid of anybody, Mr.

P.

” but I was. I was terrified.”

Mary didn’t remember exactly what had happened, but when I asked if she had seen a psychiatrist that day, she said she’d seen a woman psychiatrist and that her mother had been there, too. And that the psychiatrist had asked Betty questions.

“She asked her, ” Why do you think your daughter is feeling like this? ” And she said, ” What are you trying to do, get inside my head? ” She’d just been in North Gate,” Mary told me.

“Cath had had her sectioned’ committed to the largest mental hospital in the region.

It seemed strange to me that Betty should have been brought in on this, and above all that she would have been present when the psychiatrist talked to Mary. But Mary didn’t know how this had come about.

“It’s funny, though, isn’t it?” she said.

“I began to talk to this psychiatrist about the past, and she [Betty] said, ” You don’t remember, you’re too small. ” And I said I remember a man who has three fingers and … whiteness. I remember blindman’s-buff…”

What was this about? I asked.

But she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, explain to me then what she remembered about the man with three fingers and blindman’s-buff.

“I don’t remember the psychiatrist asking, or me saying, anything else. I don’t suppose there was anything to say, I mean, with my mother sitting there, I mean, about cutting myself. I just… I just… hated myself, I suppose.”

Did she think she had injured herself to get more attention?

“I had all the attention in the world, and I had Mr. Dixon’s love,” she said, ‘and yes, I did know that. So it wasn’t that. Now, in retrospect, I think that it was because I was totally confused as a growing girl with all these boys, and I suppose I had feelings I didn’t know what to do with. And then, of course, with it all, my growing inner awareness that I had done something terribly, terribly bad. ” This had been, she said, her lowest point.

“From then on, I don’t really know why, I grew up.”

It was from this time on that James Dixon began to plan for Mary’s future.

“Sometime before,” Mary said, ‘there had been a boy nicknamed Sooty,

who’d been a little bit in the same position as I was 1971 to 1973

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he had killed a policeman but had later done very well at Red Bank.

And Mr. Dixon got permission for him to go on to the [approved school] training unit and from there to college. He got an education and also learned a trade and he lived with some other boys in their own flat within the grounds of the approved school. It was really good. They were supervised but they were helped. Mr. Dixon told me that something like this was what he was thinking of for me, if I was really good, and got good 0levels. ” (She passed six in the summer of 1973 ” I took them in the Town Hall,” she said.

“I was registered as ” Miss Smith”.” ) “That’s what I expected to happen. I’d move out of the secure unit into a hostel or a room in the staff quarters of the approved school, but still under Mr. Dixon’s supervision and care, and I’d take A-levels and go to college and get myself a profession. I was so excited, so happy. I had a future.”

Her optimism lasted for about ten months.

“Till Wednesday, November 7 [1973] to be exact,” she said.

“On Wednesday afternoons the staff had their case conferences, so the rule was that we’d have early dinner at eleven thirty, and then we’d all go to the common-room and watch a feature-length film with just one teacher with us. Case conference would go on till 3 p.m. As soon as it was over, the staff started coming in and I noticed one of the masters, Mr. Hume, a really tiny chap who used to be in the merchant navy: he was white, his face just white. There was a very strange atmosphere and Miss Hemmings was drying her eyes. I told myself it had to have been a really distressful conference, and nosy as always I whispered to her, ” What’s happening? What’s wrong? ” And right away then Mr. Dixon came and said to me, ” May I have the pleasure of your company, madam? ” and he took me out of the unit to his house, which was about fifty yards away.

“And there in the sitting-room he said: ” I’ve never wrapped anything up for you apart from Christmas presents so-you are leaving tomorrow and you are going to prison. Damn,” he said, and Mrs. Dixon burst into tears.

“I said no first, sort of laughing, you know? I mean, it just couldn’t be.

“No, no.” And then I started crying and I said, “Why? What have I done?”

“And he really couldn’t speak right away, he kept swallowing. And then he told me he had tried his best, had tried for two weeks to change their minds, had told them of his plans for me and what have you, but it just didn’t work. He said he had waited to tell the staff until that afternoon because he was fighting for me and until then he’d still hoped he might succeed.

“I can’t tell you how astonished I am about that decision and how heart-broken,” he said to me. And then he said: “You’ll get to pick the hymn for tomorrow morning.” That’s what people did, on their last day. “

“We had heard rumours that Jim Dixon was talking with the Home Office about her and changes to be made because she was now sixteen, but nothing definite,” Ben G. said to me when we talked.

“And to be honest, we couldn’t believe they would do such a thing, not when she was doing so well there.”

From this point on, Mary’s account of these last hours at Red Bank is full of mistaken memories. It is almost as if her trauma was such that she was no longer totally aware of who was there and what they did with her.

“That night,” she said, “Mrs. R.Veronica as I called her later when we met again was with me all the time, but everybody dropped in…”

She listed a series of teachers’ names.

“We cooked a pot of ratatouille … Mr. Dixon kept coming in and he said I was to ” go forth as Red Bank’s ambassador”. He said, ” We all know things aren’t fair, and they were trying to convince me that you couldn’t deal with the task that lay ahead. But I don’t believe it. ” And they were all giving me presents, they were … you know… not bricks and mortar, they were people, family, you know…”

“Her memory is playing tricks with her there,” said Ben G. “Two of the teachers she mentions had long left by then. If she cooked her last meal it would have been with Barbara, the cookery teacher.”

“You see, those last months at Red Bank,” Carole said, ‘she had changed quite a lot I mean in the sense of keeping herself much more apart from the boys. She obviously made a decision not to spend as much time with them as before. We had noticed for some time before that to what extent she was . well . suppressing her femininity.

She had a nice figure but didn’t want to show it. “

“For a while I bound it, tight, you know, like Chinese women do, so that I’d look flat like a boy, and I no longer did PT or athletics or went swimming,” Mary told me.

“I did quite a bit with the female staff then, cooking and all that…”

“She quite obviously didn’t like her body,” Carole said.

“One could see it in the way she touched or didn’t touch her body, or the way she walked moving her legs across the floor without lifting them up. It was really sad how this beautiful, beautiful girl was always walking with her head down. But, given the situation, her decision to in a way separate herself more from the boys was sensible, wasn’t it?”

Did they think, I asked, that the Home Office’s decision to transfer her to prison could possibly have been influenced by a feeling that at sixteen she shouldn’t go on living in this male environment?

“I don’t think ” feeling” had anything to do with it,” Ben said.

“They were just going along with the system, applying their rules.”

I asked Mary if her mother and Billy knew she was being moved.

“I don’t know about my mother. I don’t think so, because Mr. Dixon would know she’d go to the press with it. That’s what she always did, for money, though I didn’t know the extent of it until later. But I think my father knew, because he’d been to see me the Saturday before and he had a tear in his eye when he left, and then, you know, I didn’t see him again, because he never came to see me in prison.

“There was a young American fat Red Bank] at the time as a volunteer teaching assistant,” she said.

“He was a friend of Ben G.” s they travelled through Europe together. But even so, he must have been in the same sort of work in the States, otherwise he wouldn’t have been allowed in. I quite fell in love with him. He wasn’t what you’d call handsome, you know, he wore little round glasses, he was sort of a cross between John Denver and John Hurt, a hippie . a flower-power-type person. He wrote to me for a long time afterwards and I to him, too. Well, he gave me a shirt and a message inside a shell. “