Cries Unheard (47 page)

“Content. Even though Rob handed in his notice on 10 May, and I came to understand later how bad that was, for him and for us, it didn’t bother me then. He was involved with me and the baby, that’s all I cared about then. We were all ready: Beatrix Potter wallpaper, stripped-pine chest, pictures on the wall, an ABC mobile. I got the date wrong, of course. She came before we expected her. But it was all right. I remember more laughter than anything else: Rob coming in with a mask, I laughed and laughed, and they said, ” That’s good, keep on laughing. ” And Rob kept saying, ” Come on, you can do it,” like a horse race, and that made me laugh some more. And then they said, ” It’s a little girl. You’ve got a little girl,” and I burst into tears and I held her and they said they had to take her away to clean her up and I said, ” No, I want her here,” and they took her anyway and brought me some tea and toast. And then they brought her back all swaddled and I held her to me and there she was, so tiny, with a sort of orange-coloured lick of hair that just came up and went phut and I said, or I thought, ” Hello, I’ve been waiting a long time to see you,” and then she was in a cot next to me. Sometimes she woke up in the night and I would pick her up and nurse her and the nurses said I shouldn’t, but I felt it was right.”

She suddenly stopped, giggled, and then whispered to me as if

* The supervision order was lifted in 1992, which meant that the parents were considered capable of looking after the child, by then eight.

telling a secret: “I woke her up sometimes so that I had reason to hold her.” She laughed, “And she would wake the others and then she would go back to sleep and so would they.”

“No,” she said, when I asked her about her mother.

“I never thought of her. I hadn’t seen her, oh, for a year or so.”

Do you think that was the moment you were freest of her? She looked at me.

“It never occurred … [I had] no thoughts of her; it was my time, my baby’s time.”

‘take THE thing away from me’

1957 to 1966

As I had discovered that first day in 1996 when Mary and I met to talk about the possibility of this book, she had not read The Case of Mary Bell until, at the age of twenty-four, she finally opposed her mother and read as she put it to me then ‘little bits of it’. Betty had always told Mary the book was all lies, that the family had told her they had never met me, and that Mary was never to read it or speak to me. It would be another fourteen years before her Uncle Jack would tell her it had all been true.

In 1969 and 1970, when I was preparing that book, her aunts and uncles and her maternal grandmother, horrified by what had happened and hoping that knowing more about Mary’s life might make people be kind to her in the following years, had told me as much as they knew, or perhaps could bear to say, about her earliest childhood. I think Mary understood from the moment we started our talks that what had happened to her as a child, and then the deaths of the two boys, would have to be central to the story she would tell me and which I would write.

On the first two days we spent together in the summer of 1996, as I said at the beginning of the book, she talked only about her child-and by extension about herself as a mother. It was on the third day that I told her we needed to talk about her own childhood now, as far back as she could possibly remember. How much did she know, I asked, about what her family had told me about her mother?

Did I know, she asked, countering my question without a pause, 330 / childhood that her mother was hidden away in a convent when she was pregnant with her?

No, I said, I hadn’t known that. Who had told her that?

“She did,” she said.

“One night when she was … oh, drunk I suppose, to show me how hard it was on her, how hard the nuns were, how hard she had to work, just like it was in old times for Catholic girls who had an illegitimate child”

She said then that she knew I had written about some of the things her mother had done to her very early on, but now she wanted to know whatever I knew.

“Then,” she said, with a curiously abrupt shake of her head, Til tell you. ” I told her then that her Aunt Cath had said she and her grandmother couldn’t understand when the first thing Betty had said when they tried to put the baby in her arms was, ’” Take the thing away from me. “

Cath said you were the bonniest baby. “

“Well,” Mary said, her voice hard, ‘that’s when they should have taken me away from her for ever, shouldn’t they? “

There was never any possibility of Billy Bell being Mary’s biological father. Betty had only met him a few months after Mary was born in 1957. She married him in March 1958, and P. ” her second child, Billy’s son, would be born that autumn. They were living with her mother and her younger sister Isa in a pleasant flat in Gateshead, just across the river from Scotswood. Betty’s mother, Mrs. McC.” despite suffering from migraines and tension, for which she took medication, had always been good at making a comfortable home. She was very careful about where she kept her pills, as she would tell me in 1970:

‘specially when there were kids about’. She kept the bottle in the back of the used needle compartment of an old gramophone which stood on top of a small chest, and kept the knitting-needle she used to extricate the bottle from its hiding place in a drawer.

Despite these precautions, one-year-old Mary somehow got hold of these pills and ate them. To achieve this, the baby had to find the knitting-needle, climb up to where the gramophone stood, reach to the back of it with the knitting-needle to dig out the bottle, unscrew its safety top and eat enough of the unpleasant-tasting pills to almost kill her. As it happened, her grandmother found her in time;

she was rushed to hospital, her stomach was pumped and she recovered.

A year and a half later, in November 1959, when Betty and Billy and the children had moved away from Mrs. McC. ” Cath, Betty’s sister, received a letter from her saying that things were bad for her and that she had ‘given May to the [D.s]’, friends of Cath and her husband Jack who lived in a nearby market town and who had always shown interest in Mary and repeatedly asked to adopt her. Cath rushed to the D.s and Mary was returned to her mother.

Six months later, when Mary was almost three. Cam came to visit her sister and brought two bags of dolly mixtures, one for Mary, one for her brother P. ” who was now eighteen months old. The sisters went into the kitchen to make tea and when Cath came back she found the two children sitting on the floor munching sweets which had spilled onto the floor. To her horror, she saw among them a number of little blue pills which she recognized as Drinamyls (purple hearts) and the children said, yes, they’d eaten some of them. Betty said the kids must have taken the bottle out of her handbag. Cam rushed to get a glass of hot water with salt in it. Both children were sick in the sink, and were then taken to hospital, but the doctors said everything had come out.

A few weeks after this. Cam and Jack, by now seriously concerned for Mary’s safety, wrote to Betty and Billy, as they had done twice before, and asked to be allowed to keep Mary ‘not to adopt’, they specified, to make it easier for her, but to keep her until she finished school. Betty said no.

Three months later, in the summer of 1960, Betty and Mary were visiting her mother in Glasgow. Because her flat was on the third floor and the lavatories on the ground floor, the family was in the habit of letting the little children ‘wet in the sink’.

One day while Betty’s mother was at her receptionist’s job at a nearby hospital, Betty’s brother Philip and younger sister Isa were sitting on the settee about six feet from the sink. Next to the sink was a window which was wide open. Suddenly Philip saw Mary, whom

Betty had been holding straddling the sink, falling out of the window.

He lunged across the room and somehow managed to grab her by the ankles and pull her in: “He was off work for three weeks after that because he hurt his back catching her,” his sisters told me later.

Mary has a vague memory of scratches or bruises on her legs and angry voices associated with them on that occasion. She also remembers part of what happened next. Betty’s family had now become anxious, and Isa was instructed by her mother not to let Betty and Mary out of her sight. A few days after the window incident, Isa followed Betty as she took Mary into an adoption agency. A woman had come out of the interview room crying and said they would not give her a baby because of her age and because she was emigrating to Australia.

“I brought this one in to be adopted. You have her,” Betty said, pushing the little girl towards the stranger, and walked out.

Isa, who later told me the story, followed the woman and Mary and after noting the address where she was taken raced to the hospital (where Mrs. McC. worked) to tell her mother. They rushed home and Mrs. McC. apparently told Betty that if the child was not back inside two hours she would notify the police. Mary was fetched, with some dresses the woman had already bought her and allowed her to keep.

“That is what I remember,” Mary said.

“A nice house, and lots of new clothes, and Isa, I think, coming and taking me away. Why did they do that?”

she asked me, her voice childlike, as it was to be repeatedly throughout the next days.

“Why didn’t they leave me with that lady who wanted a child?” She suddenly sounded more thoughtful.

“That would have been a chance for her as well. It would have stopped her, stopped whatever it was. She is not to blame,” she said then.

“You must say she is not to blame. I don’t want her to come out like ” Oh, what a bitch, what a horror” - ‘cause she wasn’t, she wasn’t.”

What do you think it was in her? I asked, and she shook her head.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Mary’s worst ‘accident’ happened about six months later, when she was almost four. The register at Newcastle General Hospital states: “Mary Flora Bell, 28 Elswick Road, Newcastle/ Tyne 6/3/61 to 9/3/61: under care of consultant Dr. Cooper.”

Cath had rushed into Newcastle after a policeman came to tell her (she had no phone) that Mary was in hospital. By the time she arrived, Mary’s stomach had been pumped and she had regained consciousness.

Betty was standing outside the ward.

“Don’t believe her,” she implored her sister, crying.

“She says I gave her those pills.”

This time Mary had apparently swallowed a number of her mother’s iron pills. When she woke up she said to the doctor: The mam gave me the Smarties. ” and kept saying this on and off for twenty-four hours.

And here there had been a witness, a little girl of five, Mary’s best friend. Cath met her in the street a few days later and she said:

“May’s mam gave her the Smarties in the back yard.”

After this incident there were bitter words between Betty and her family.

“Once is an accident, even twice it just might be,” Cath remembered saying to her, ‘but three and now even four times is impossible. ” Shortly afterwards, Mrs. McC. and her other daughters received letters from Betty Cath later showed me hers-saying she never wanted to see them again and they did not see her for more than a year.

In The Case of Mary Bell, from which I have taken most of the descriptions you have just read, I finished this section about Mary’s childhood by saying that even though the family didn’t see Betty for a year, in a way their concern had the desired effect, for this was to be the last of Mary’s accidents at home. But I was terribly wrong.

I do not think for a minute that any of Betty’s family knew of the dreadful use her mother made of Mary from a point some time soon after she stopped seeing them. However reluctant they might have been in the first four years of Mary’s life to let anyone outside their family know of Betty’s pathological feelings towards her first child, had they had any idea about what happened next, and would carry on happening during the next four years, they would, I am sure, have acted to save her.

Mary remembered both the hospital and being given the pills.

“I

remember I was on a tricycle. I’m sure they were in a Smartie tube and, you know, Smarties, the colour comes off, I remember that, and I remember getting sick and feeling “glassy” And I remember a white bed and people in white standing around me. And I remember one of the doctors saying, “Look at those eyes.”

“Then I remember, not long after that, I walked in on her with the landlord: I suppose she was paying the rent,” she said grimly.

“She hit me and the landlord was trying to get past me doing his trousers up at the same time. She dragged me by the hair and threw me into the scullery. Westmoreland Road, where we lived, had a sort of livingroom where my parents and K. [her baby sister] slept, but mostly Billy was away, and K. was with my Auntie Audrey. And that room was full of crucifixes and hanging rosaries they were everywhere, when you were on the bed, they touched you. Then there was the kitchen-scullery and a room in the back, formerly a sort of coal-bunker, where P. and I slept. Billy made a hutch for my rabbit. There were other rooms in the house: Harry Bury, Billy’s friend, lived on top, and his brother had a room, too, and a woman called Frizzy, who had a baby. Everything was all right when my dad was there. But he wasn’t, often.”

The story sounds as if it was all one memory, told in one breath, but it wasn’t like that at all. I was, I must admit, at first so sceptical about the details that she remembered, and so concerned at the horrific nature of them, that I made her tell me three times over the months.

The first time was two weeks after we began to talk, in July 1996. The last time was at the beginning of December. In July it took her four days to get it out, sometimes in a monotonous voice but more often in deep distress, her face growing paler and paler, breaking into a sweat, and finally, she would speak through desperate sobs, reverting at times, as she had done before under extreme emotional pressure, to the present tense.

She couldn’t remember how old she was, but she thought four or five.