Cries Unheard by Gitta Sereny

Author:Gitta Sereny [Sereny, Gitta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447266587
Amazon: 1447266587
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2014-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

Actually we became good friends later, she was all right, old Pearl.

“

Much later, after Mary had left Styal, I spoke to a former Styal era woman in her mid-thirties, about Mary.

“She could be terribly aggressive, terribly rude,” she said.

“She used terrible language, about the officers and even to them.” And what did the officers do about it? I asked. She shrugged.

“Nothing. They treated her differently from any of us. She was different. She was like a lady. Compared to me, she was a lady.” Despite the rudeness? Despite the terrible language? She shrugged again.

“If anybody else had behaved like that, they’d be in a cell in minutes. With her … they just let her be.” Was that resented by other prisoners? I asked. She shook her head in a perplexed sort of way.

“I didn’t like her when I met her first,” she said.

“But afterwards and I was never close to her,” she said quickly “I came to feel she was in the wrong place, just completely in the wrong place. She should have been in a hospital. She was eleven, just eleven when she did that awful thing,” she said, sounding angry.

“Eleven … I have two kids and one is eleven. If he did such a thing I’d know he was sick. So perhaps the officers thought like I did that she shouldn’t have been there and perhaps that’s why they treated her as a star prisoner. Resented?” she said then, picking up my previous question. She shook her head.

“No.

She had good friends,” she said.

“She could be terrible, quite terrible, but she was a good friend to a lot of people.”

Margaret Kenyon*, an attractive young woman passionately involved in the reform of women’s prisons, is a serving prison governor who, at the beginning of her career, was at Styal prison when Mary was there.

“I wasn’t much involved with her,” she said, ‘but everyone knew about her. She was different from most of the other prisoners. She was not just ingenuous, but, contrary to many of the others, she hadn’t lived on the streets. Although obviously intelligent, she was curiously naive and somehow pure; there was a sort of maternal feeling about her, not even so much among the staff, but certainly among the prisoners. Particularly the older women wanted to keep her as she was;

I think they saw her as a surrogate favoured daughter.

* Changed name.

Of course, she was so young-even when she had been there for years, she still seemed so young . “

When Mary told me about Barker House she realized that by then she would have been at Styal for over a year.

“I was seventeen,” she said, ‘and the wonderful thing was that Diane was there, too, and so was Angie and they were eighteen. For the first time, I was with girls of my own age, and though I didn’t like Angie because she was a suck-up, Diane became my best friend, the best friend I’ve ever had. “

She was to stay on Barker for nine months, her longest period in one house.

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