Gitta Sereny

It is possible that this could apply to a child; it is possible for children to be sufficiently hurt to be damaged for life. But an enlightened society cannot presuppose this. An enlightened society, it seems to me, has to believe in the essential guiltlessness of children. And if a child’s intrinsic goodness fails, then this enlightened society must surely ask the question why.

However, what has emerged since as the important aspect of this and many subsequent occasions is that this emphasis on Mary’s “cleverness” in instances where this “cleverness” can also be interpreted differently, that is as a cry for help, greatly added to the impression which seems to have been generally accepted: that, irrespective of medical evidence, what we had here was not a “sick” child, but a clever little MONSTER. A conviction which may be at least in part to blame for the fact that few if any questions were asked or information aired about her background and her life during the trial, and that the dispositions made for her by the authorities concerned when the trial was over were never really questioned in the sense of being unsuitable for her—only that they might cause discomfort to other people.

That night too, Mary had asked Policewoman O. the meaning of the word “immature.” “The lawyer said Norma was more immature,” she’d said. “Would that mean that if I was the more intelligent I’d get all the blame?”

If it had been apparent all along that the attitude toward Mary of many of those in Court was very different from that toward Norma, this became even more obvious now when Mary took the stand. Norma’s obvious bewilderment evoked the protective instincts any adult feels toward a helpless child. Mary’s extraordinary self-possession, on the other hand, seemed to bar this reaction and resulted in many people—rather than showing or even feeling compassion—watching her with a horrified kind of curiosity.

For Mary too, though, it was not something she had done, for none of Mary’s actions were committed for the sake of doing but rather for the sake of feeling. Incapable of connecting her compulsive need to feel with the consequences of her actions, she simply could not conceive that every action has a consequence. It is perhaps as if a connecting link is missing in her brain and in her deepest self.

(It could not escape the Court’s attention that she remembered sufficiently precisely the details of her own statement made five months previously—a lie though it was—to correct Mr. Smith. Mary could never resist her impulse to show how clever she was, even if it worked against her own advantage.)

Mary had begun to cry in a tentative sort of way when she heard the verdict, but no one touched her. Billy Bell sat, leaning forward, his chin cupped in his hands as he had throughout the trial. Betty Bell, her handkerchief already wet, sobbed and dabbed her eyes. Mary’s grandmother, her face frozen in misery and disbelief, sat motionless. Only her Solicitor, David Bryson, sitting next to her, bent down and whispered to her when she cried. Outside of this brief contact, it seemed as if there was a gulf between her and those around her. If they cried or mourned, or suffered—it was for themselves, not for her. She seemed alone.

HOWEVER INURED TO violence we are in our time, violence done to a child causes a momentary pause—a stillness in our minds. And then we turn away, return to our daily life, thank God it wasn’t us, or ours: those to whom these things happen, or who cause them, are “different,” must be different.

“May’s afraid of nothing,” said Cath, “except to be thought afraid. She never, never cries when hurt.”

Somehow Betty and Billy had worked out some kind of “modus vivendi.” Their children until the events in 1968 were never “in care” and, in a haphazard sort of way, the Bells were a family unit—which cannot fail to make us question, once again, the validity of the social work theory which claims that “any family is better than none” and that “keeping the family together at all costs” is the best guard against maladjustment and delinquency in children.