Cries Unheard (33 page)

What was the actual schedule every day? I asked.

“The same, always the same,” she said.

“I got up at six, did morning chores like dusting, sweeping, washing floors or toilets or whatever;

at seven thirty had what they laughingly called breakfast a slice of bread, something grainy they called marmalade, and tea and went off to the workshop at eight, came back at twelve for lunch, went back to work at one and back to the houses at four forty-five or so;

then tea and that was that. “

What about personal cleanliness? I asked. Did people have showers, baths?

“When I was on the gardens and what have you and I was particularly filthy, I would ask someone to keep an eye out and dive in the bath, but that was unofficial. Officially, unless you were working on dirty outside jobs like pipes, or you were on the engineering party, or of course in the kitchens when you could have a bath every night, it was one bath a week. But anyway, we strip-washed every day.”

Did they have their own bath stuff, oils, salts,
etc.

“Only certain types were allowed: no commercial deodorants, facial cleaners, nail polish remover,
etc.
because they contained alcohol.

For deodorants there was a powder provided in every house that you could use. There were some people who couldn’t take care of themselves and shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” she said.

“But most people were pretty clean.”

Over the years, she said, she had done every kind of work available at Styal, inside and outside.

“But the first six months it was as I said, first cutting the ruddy flippers, and then it was making football shirts on huge sewing-machines and I wasn’t much good at that either.”

She burst out laughing.

“The arm-hole for a football shirt looks very much like the neck-hole, doesn’t it?” Still laughing she said, “There was a lot of football shirts out there with three sleeves. Mary Scorse you remember, I told you about her? she was in charge of that workshop and everybody was very frightened of her and I really wasn’t any good at this. One day she started on me and one of my friends says, ” Here, next time she gives you any hassle, just say to her your name might be Bell but it isn’t Madeleine,” and I said, ” Why would I say that? ” and she said, ” It’ll shut her up. ” So show-off that I was, I did you know, open my big mouth and said: ” I might be Bell but I’m not Madeleine. ” And she says, ” You little bastard, come here, what did you say? ” And she came up to me holding out some big scissors and I was scared to death but stood my ground and it stopped right there. Later, all the girls were rolling around with laughter. They thought it was hilarious. And I says, ” What was that all about? What did I say? ” And they said that Madeleine was the name of the girlfriend she had killed when she had found her in bed with a man, and I said, ” You bitches,” and later I apologized to Mary Scorse. I was really sorry for her.

She’d been released and then recalled twice, once when she’d been in a pub brawl and then, after serving another eleven years and after only a short time outside, for allegedly taking an overdose. “

I thought people on licence could only be recalled if they committed another violent crime, I said.

“Yeah, well,” she said bitterly.

“I suppose they decided trying to kill yourself was an act of violence meriting recall. She had a pet bird, you know, a blue tit she fed every morning. I watched many times how that little bird would be sort of waiting for her, always in the same place. If anyone came by, she’d pretend to be shooing him away it doesn’t do, you see, to show kindness in prison. I liked her, but I saw her getting more and more confused, so unhappy, wandering around at night in her house. But at least there she had friends, and she knew her way around. So what did our glorious caring system do? They sent her to Durham’s top security wing. I was sick: it made me sick.”

In prison, what one was always fighting, she said, was monotony:

“As I told you, every weekday was the same and weekends were worse:

if you didn’t have a visit there was nothing to do, just simply nothing. It was boring, boring, boring, so that horrible as weekdays were you actually longed for Monday to come around because at least you could get out to go to the workshops. I’m not saying they didn’t try to make it more bearable, you know, by moving us from working place to working place every three months and even allowing us to change earlier if we applied. ” But against that, she said, in order to avoid relationships becoming ‘too close whatever that means,” they also frequently moved people from one house to another.

“There are eleven houses or blocks, and I was certainly in six of them; they moved me to and fro between them like a yo-yo and certainly every time I was on report. Let’s see,” she counted them off in her memory and simultaneously on her fingers: “Mellanby, Davies, Righton, Barker, Bleak that was the punishment block and I was in there, oh, dozens of times …”

Dozens? I said sceptic ally which she hated: “You don’t believe me, you don’t trust me … How can you still not trust me?” she would cry and I would explain, as I had done before, that memory was imperfect and, mixed up as it is with wishes, dreams and imagination, deceptive.

And that it was my function to be sceptical, to requestion, to check and then check again. Usually she would reject such explanations and, sometimes quite angrily, insist that my distrust was not of her memory but of her, just her, who had always been accused of manipulating people. But this time she just shrugged and looked dispirited.

“It seemed like dozens,” she said, wearily, carrying on with her list.

“And then I was in Fry…” She looked distraught.

“God, I can’t even remember the others, what’s the matter with me?”

I said nothing was the matter with her: she was remembering specific things very clearly about each of the houses she had been in, so the probability was that she had not been sent to any of the other five.

She doesn’t know whether this moving about had a positive effect for the prison population, helping to prevent monotony; or whether, on the contrary, it destroyed any chance of stability. What nobody could understand who hadn’t been in prison with a life sentence, she said, is that for lifers prison is not a set time, a period in or out of their lives, it is all of life, for ever.

“You fight that realization,” she said.

“But most lifers can’t fight it for long. You remember I told you how depressed I was on my second or third day there, the Saturday my mother came? Afterwards, with all the new faces and stories and experiences, I was able to suppress it for a bit. But after, oh, I don’t know, a few months, I began to feel that this was it, that there would never be anything else. And this is what most lifers come to feel, and why most of them specially the older ones kind of make a nest of their prison life, and, in the process of course, become institutionalized.”

She understood perfectly, she said, how difficult and indeed impossible it must be to run prisons such as Styal without enforcing submission. But once the prisoners had submitted a state she herself deplored and finally fought against for years they should surely be allowed that nest without the threat of destabilizing them.

Of course, she didn’t find prison life monotonous for quite some time.

“But that’s because, as you know, I’m so hopelessly curious, and in prison,” she suddenly laughed raucously, the words becoming hopelessly entangled in her mirth, ‘one has . ha ha ha . captive victims . [renewed guffaws] for one’s nosiness. ” The laughter stopped.

“Actually, I realized quite soon that women are very selective in who they will tell things about themselves. It was just at first, I think perhaps because I was so young, and of course ” new” and…” She shrugged.

“I suppose it worked both ways most of them were curious about me, too, so really for the first weeks almost anybody I went up to talked to me. After that, well, it changed. It took quite a while but then I began to have friends, not … you know … not at all necessarily lesbian friends, though that too, of course, but some were just friends. One learned: it was dreadfully painful to allow oneself to become attached to someone who had a short sentence, or was at the end of a longer one. That is the most depressing thing of all about being a lifer: to see people leave.

“I realized very soon1 had no need to ask the governor about it that there was no way that I could get my ERD [expected release date] before I was twenty-one I’d been told often enough. If Mr. Dixon’s plan had worked out it wouldn’t have mattered. Because even if I had to have remained under some restraint-like the hostel situation he was thinking of for me at Red Bank I would have been helped, meanwhile, to prepare for a future. But there was nothing like that now.”

Was there no possibility of further schooling for you? I asked.

“I already told you…” Her fear, which never quite disappeared, of being distrusted or perhaps being ‘tricked’ by ‘clever’ questions, made her and she is well mannered sound almost rude. Certainly, she was very impatient if I appeared to have forgotten something she said, or asked a question twice.

So tell me again, I said and explained again, rather more sternly, that I would ask several times over until I was sure I understood the answer. She had told me earlier on, I said, that by law she had to be provided with further education. (In fact this is only until 0level:

after that it is no longer the prison’s obligation to provide further education, though it is still, at least in theory, an option a young prisoner can select. ) Didn’t they provide educational programmes? Was there nothing you could learn?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, they provided,” she said scornfully.

“Because I was under eighteen I still had to do a certain amount of ha ha, joke … ” studying”.” (Here her account became very confused, skipping years and claiming not to remember names or activities. ) “There was this education officer, that’s right, she tried to get me over on the education block where I had to sit … a woman … I didn’t even know her name and I don’t know what the hell I was doing there to tell the truth, just discussing things, oh yeah, because the Open University came into it like, didn’t it…”

Wait a minute, I said. Are we talking about when you were still sixteen?

“No, I was eighteen then, wasn’t I? Because they said, ” Oh, aren’t you pleased that they made an exception and you can be on it,” and I didn’t even ask to go on it, I didn’t even want to go on it, and the governor was saying, ” You want to equip and arm yourself with this” Oh my God, it was like I’m going out into a battlefield, you know, and even then, after all I knew I wasn’t going anywhere for years and years

…”

Let’s go back to when you were sixteen, I said. For those first two years, didn’t you do anything intellectual or vocational?

“Yeah, I learned how to make gravy from flour,” she mocked.

What about books? Did you read?

“Yes, every Sunday the library was on. I used to go and look but it was a crap library, it was rubbish. I don’t call what they had ” books”. I mean at Red Bank, you know, there were books, real books and Mr. Shaw would discuss them with us after we’d read them, and we read Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde; lots and lots of poetry, Mr. Shaw was wild on poetry. But at Styal… I don’t mean to be rude … but I just wasn’t interested in Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland and that’s pretty much all there was. I think all the time I was there I must have got about four books out. I did read books prison visitors brought in but the only one I remember is Papillon, that was my bible.”

There were evening classes, she said, and you could do three a week.

“I did learn the guitar. There was an absolutely fantastic, brilliant teacher and I had already played it at Red Bank. But on the whole, well, they said the opportunities were there and that it was up to the individual, etc.”
etc.
Well, maybe, and yes, there were classes, but they were taught by volunteers who, of course, never stayed. I mean, they came and went. What was the point of trying to learn then? And things like music appreciation. I mean, who is interested in listening to lolanthe or other operas? I mean, listening to operas, or even any classical music, that too has to be taught, learnt or maybe, you know, lived with as a child. I mean, as I told you, there are some educated women in prison, but not most of them. You see, what happens is that there are so-called classes in things they find volunteers for and that is usually educated people, so they teach, or play, or show what they enjoy or know. But it isn’t what is wanted or needed . “

What would women in prison want? I asked her. What would they respond to?

“Well, how about first-aid courses? How about classes on kids, or on parenting, with films? People really don’t know how to be parents. I’m one of the lucky ones: I had Mr. Dixon and what have you and later Pat, my probation officer. But if I hadn’t had this help, I don’t know how I would have managed.

“And you could offer classes, also with films, on nature and animals. People would sign up for that. I would have. But as it was, one just used classes as a means for meeting up with friends from other blocks.”

There were vocational training courses and she did ask to join some of those, she said.

“But I wasn’t allowed to because they took place outside … Oh, just a hundred yards the other side of the gate. Other lifers were allowed to go but not me, of course. My God, it might actually have been something I enjoyed. Molly Morgan wouldn’t have that.”

Did she really still feel that? I asked. Was that fair? (Fairness, as taught by Mr. Dixon, is to this day a matter of honour to Mary and any suggestion that she might be being unfair is anathema to her. ) Wasn’t it more likely that everybody in charge of her, from the Home Office on down, was afraid of the media’s abnormal interest in her, which, though originating in her crimes as a child, had been stirred up continuously since then by her mother?

“That’s true,” she said thoughtfully.

“She made a living out of being my mother, didn’t she?”

By the time Mary was transferred to Styal, Betty Bell was living with her young boyfriend, George, whom she had met in 1968, just before the tragedy in Newcastle, when she was twenty-nine and he was eighteen. It was on her mother’s second visit, she thinks, that she found her with a heavy cold, in spite of which she had been sent to the workshop every morning of the week just past. (“We were not coddled,” Mary said. ) Betty, we don’t know how, had barged in on the governor and told her it was outrageous that her sixteen-year-old daughter should be forced to work when by rights she belonged in the infirmary.