cries unheard: the case of mary bell

Gitta Sereny

MacMillan, #20

It's not often that reviewing a book also involves reading thousands of words, many of them mendacious and prurient, the week before publication. It is a dreadful irony that a book whose theme is the damage done by silence should be emerging with such a barrage of noise.

To anyone who knows Sereny's previous work (her biography of Albert Speer or Into That Darkness which tells of her encounter with the Commandant of Treblinka - or indeed her original Case of Mary Bell) there are no surprises in the style or approach of Cries Unheard. Exhaustive, forensic interviews and tenacious attention to what is verifiable make Sereny someone to whom, one imagines, it is very difficult to lie. As before, she combines this sceptical rigour with a deeply felt imaginative solidarity with others. She will not deny to her subjects the complex humanity that they may have denied to those who have suffered at their hands. In the case of Mary Bell, she excuses nothing, but at the same time profoundly believes that none of us start out as monsters. It is possible for anyone to have done bad things. Consequently, it is possible that the most heinous criminal need not have been that

way.

When she saw Mary Bell in court in 1969, Sereny recognised something from her past experience caring for children released from Nazis slave labour and concentration camps. That this child, whose ''oddness'', whose apparent equanimity was so fatally at odds with the ''normality'' of her co-accused, (who collapsed into acceptable confusion and tears) was perhaps a product of a traumatic universe, as had been the children she knew in the camps in 1945. The profound unease that the child produced (as did, years later, the children who killed Jamie Bulger) led, for example, to the suspension of the legal principle that one present and co-operative at the scene of a crime is held to share the guilt of it. Norma Bell (no relation) was acquitted on the judge's direction exactly because she acted like a child in court. Mary Bell's ''oddness'' condemned her to full blame.

In her first book, Sereny confirmed her instinctive recognition of where this oddness came from. She got an idea of what kind of traumatic universe this child had indeed inhabited. The new book has told us a good deal more about how awfully bad it was, and to what degree Mary Bell had been abused, isolated, and depraved by a life with a mother who involved her in sexual abuse as part of her specialised services as a prostitute. And none of this was investigated before the trial. When a child over 10 (eight in Scotland) commits a serious crime, psychiatric treatment is held to be prejudicial to the laws of evidence. As in the Bulger case, we were allowed to ask what, who, and when . . . but not why.

Even more astonishing is the fact that no exploration of her background was made after conviction. Her mother was allowed to visit (and to sell stories to the tabloids) all through her custody. And, as seriously, Bell herself was allowed to continue in her denial of her crime. First from misguided notions that it was better not to dwell on it, and then, from the age of 16, from the institutional indifference of adult imprisonment.

One still has to ask, in view of last week's hysteria, whether this was a necessary book to write, considering Sereny's previous work on this subject. What for me eventually justifies the book is the possibility of redemption: that an individual who has been the cause of dreadful suffering, and who has been demonized - and offered fortunes for her story (and turned them down) - has instead spoken to the one journalist who had already engaged herself with the story seriously, painstakingly. Bell must have known both the imaginative sympathy and the unsentimental grilling she was going to get. She may not have expected the intensity of what happened last week, or that the Home Secretary would encourage the tabloids to commit contempt of Court . . . but that surprised me too.

Maybe even the hoo-ha will bring benefits, if part of the result of this book is that we will hesitate, in future, to deal with complex moral issues in a sound bite. It was a retreat to the ''common-sense'' of family values that kept Mary Bell living with her mother, in a world where she was so terribly endangered, and where she became, on the day before her eleventh birthday, so dangerous.

Cries unheard, indeed.