system prevailed which demands that juveniles upon reaching sixteen must serve their
* And also in Germany and France.
introduction /XXV
punishment in prison, and she was removed from the emotional security and academic structure to which she had responded and sent to a maximum security women’s prison. Battling for seven years against being institutionalized, rebelling and using sex to manipulate this environment, she lost virtually everything she had gained in the previous five years, until, like most adolescents sent to adult penal institutions, she finally emerged into the conditional freedom of a “Schedule One’ released prisoner on licence, as an emotionally and sexually confused twenty-three-year-old in chaos.
She recounts then the years since her release from prison, back in the sway of her mother to whom she has always been tied in a mutual bond of love and hate. In 1984 she has a child, and with the support of her probation officer, Patricia Royston,* fights for the right to keep it.
For the first time in her life she feels total love and through the child gains a purpose and a framework for her life. But with her love for her child comes a terrible realization of what she has done, and a new and agonizing awareness of conscience which intensifies her inner chaos.
Finally, I return to her early childhood which, as we talked, slowly began to unravel from her mind, which had blocked the confrontation with it for so long. Here she speaks, with excruciating difficulty, about the sexual abuse she was subjected to as a small child upon her mother’s direction and in her presence; and in fits and starts over months searches her memory for the events in her life from the age of eight to the day before she turned eleven when she killed Martin Brown. She eventually talks haltingly and despairingly about those fifteen minutes on 25 May 1968, at the end of which the four-year- old child was dead, and about the following nine weeks leading up to the killing (I write about both acts only as far as seems necessary to me) of three-year-old Brian Howe.
* All names of people in the public sector who have spoken for this book have been changed.
xxvi/ introduction
There are ways and ways of writing about events. One can report on them, describe them, quote the witnesses, the victims, and sometimes the heroes, of them. And although, being human, one can never hope to be entirely objective, one must do all this with a large measure of detachment. On another level of the narrative one must also comment on the events, evaluate their significance and, if one can, put them into the context of life as we live it, measure them against the rules and principles which by our choice govern our existence.
From all these perspectives, this book has been extraordinarily difficult to write. It is one thing to write, as I have done elsewhere, about men or women who, at least partly as a consequence of unhappy childhoods, became iniquitous adults. It is very different to write about a person who has committed, not once but twice, the worst of iniquities when she was a child, but who against all expectations and entirely without the props we have come to take for granted trauma therapy and psychiatric treatment appears to have become a morally aware adult.
The difficulty throughout has been to believe. It has demanded on my part a continuous review and renewal of an act of faith in the possibility of metamorphosis; that is, in the integrity of an adult who I knew at one point to have been a pathologically disturbed child, and for years afterwards an alarmingly manipulative adolescent. I was tempted time and again to look at a human being as if she were not one but two people: the child and the adult. And this is, of course, not so: she is one, as we all are, from the moment we are born to the moment we die. So when I finally realized I must deny myself that consolation, I had to accept that the mystery starts with the question of what,