Cries Unheard Read Free Page A

drive us out,” she told me.
    “It’s time for us to face reality and live with it.”
    January 1999 introduction
    Many, perhaps most of you, who first turn to this page will not know what happened in the lovely old northern city of Newcastle upon Tyne in the spring of 1968. You have forgotten, you were too young, perhaps not even born, or lived in other countries that had their own problems in the late sixties.
    Briefly then, in the course of nine weeks two small boys, aged three and four, were found dead. Some months later, in December 1968, two children, both girls, were tried for their murder; Norma Bell, aged thirteen, was acquitted; Mary Bell (no relation) was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The case caused uproar, the trial was widely publicized, and Mary Bell was demonized across the country as the ‘bad seed’, inherently evil.
    I have already written one book about the tragedy that happened there that year. In The Case of Mary Bell, first published in 1972, I reported on the facts of the case as the police found them and as they were presented at the Newcastle Assizes in December 1968 in a nine day trial which I attended. In that book, too, I told as much as I found out over the subsequent two years from family, friends and teachers about the eleven-year-old who was found guilty in that trial and sentenced to detention for life at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
    Twenty-six years later. The Case of Mary Bell remains in print both in Britain and in several European countries, and is available in public and university libraries. For the purposes of this book it remains an essential grounding to the case, and for this new work I have borrowed from it some descriptions and original statements integral to the story. My account there already strongly reflected my misgivings about
    a judicial system which exposed young children to xxiv/ introduction bewildering adult court proceedings and considered irrelevant their childhood and motivations for their crime. But it also indicated clearly my suspicion that there were elements of Mary Bell’s story which were either unknown or hidden from me. And in a preface to a new edition of The Case of Mary Bell, published by Pimlico* in 1995, I expressed the hope that one day Mary Bell and I could talk. By finding out not from others, but from her, what happened to and in her during her childhood, I felt we might achieve a step towards understanding what internal and external pressures can lead young children beyond a breaking-point to commit serious crime and murder. And by talking to her about her twelve years in detention and her life since her release, we might discover what effect imprisonment has on children growing into adulthood and how the way they are dealt with by society equips them for the future.
    So I have been hoping for many years to write the book I am presenting to you here, in which Mary Bell, an exceptionally intelligent child at eleven, released from detention in 1980 when she was twenty-three, and now forty years old, speaks to us. She tells us what she did and what she felt, what was done to her and also for her, and what she became.
    She describes the months leading up to the two killings, her friendship with her neighbour and co-accused, Norma Bell, and their fantasy life together which was to result in the tragic death of the two toddlers. She recalls the voices of all the learned men at her trial who, for what seemed to her like years, spoke in incomprehensible terms, and she recreates her horrifying certainty that they would send her to the gallows.
    Mary Bell takes us through the twelve years of her detention, the first five (from eleven to sixteen) in a secure unit where for most of that time the only girl with twenty-odd boys she had no psychiatric care, but where she found in the headmaster, a former naval officer, the first honourable adult she could respect and love.
    At sixteen, however, irrespective of her mentor’s pleadings, the