Andrew O’Hagan CRIES UNHEARD by Gitta Sereny (Macmillan, R88)
There is nothing more stupid and corrupt than the collective mind of Britain’s tabloid newspapers. In a spirit of moral outrage they set out to molest the very people who often require protection, sympathy, understanding. The cry of the mob is vicious and total. In full heat it has a degree of what used to be called the killer instinct.
That is something Mary Bell never had. She was just a sickened little girl. Her even sicker mother tried to kill her, and she put her into bed with naked men and whips, and made her feel like nothing. In 1968 the girl put her hands around the necks of two poor infants, and she squeezed. She didn’t know what murder was. She thought the boys would be back in time for tea.
In terms of human suffering, it would not be easy to think of anyone who had been through more than Bell, not even the boys she killed, nor their families, or those who continue to demonise that damaged little girl, and who now pursue her as a woman, and inflict damage on her own child.
Yet it was not the tabloids or the public who exposed the adult Bell to all of this. It was Gitta Sereny. It was a writer who thought Bell’s full story would make a great book. For Bell, and for the daughter who every day redeems something of the marred little girl Mary used to be, the business of this book has opened up a whole new nightmare. Reasonably good books are worth something, but they are not worth this.
Sereny, the author of the acclaimed Albert Speer:His Battle with Truth, is no novice. She’d been publishing long enough to understand publicity and hypocrisy and the price of things. It can only be regretted that she did not reckon the price to be too high in this case.
Bell had once tried to write a book herself. If Sereny was properly interested in Bell – and not in a bestseller – she would have helped her to say what she needed to say in her own book, something she had somehow never managed to say.
The best parts of Sereny’s book are the parts where Bell speaks for herself. Why did Sereny not see this, and help the young woman to help herself? One of Sereny’s few advisers, Dr Virginia Wilking, ”bluntly” advised Sereny to give up on the effort altogether: ”She was concerned over the unrelenting intensity of these sessions which would normally, under therapeutic treatment conditions, have probably stretched over a period of years.”
But Sereny charges on in her high-minded way, determined, against all the difficulties, ”to tell her story as completely as it could be told, but also to use what had happened to her, and the reactions of others, as an example and a warning”.
She thinks all this would be good for Bell, good for society, and good for Sereny. It may be good for Sereny and it may help society see how wrong it is to simply punish brutalised children who become brutal. But when it comes to the broken girl herself, Cries Unheard is a production which is deficient of hearing.
The trouble with Sereny is that she has a sensationalist manner and takes pleasure in feeling personally close to the people she writes about. Here we find her messianic role in bringing Bell into the realm of truth. She opines that what Bell was saying in this book was her ”telling the nearest she would probably ever get to the truth”. A good way of advertising a story, but perhaps not true of Mary Bell.