Cries Unheard
by
Gitta Sereny
a
brief review
Copyright © Carmel
Bird Jan 1999. All rights reserved.
Much of my fiction is concerned with the way societies treat their children. This is an issue in my novels The White Garden, The Bluebird Cafe, and Red Shoes, as well as in several of the stories in Automatic Teller. I edited The Stolen Children - Their Stories which is an anthology of the personal stories of indigenous Australians stolen from their families.
My brief review of Cries Unheard by Gitta Sereny follows. This book is of great interest to me because it tells of the way a society was unable to help a child who had been so deeply scarred by early experience that she murdered two small boys.
REVIEW
This is the second book Gitta Sereny has written on the case of Mary Bell who was convicted at the age of eleven for the manslaughter of two small boys in England in 1968. (The Case of Mary Bell was published in 1972.) The author conducted interviews in 1996 with Mary who was released from prison in 1984. The book traces Mary's extraordinary, tragic childhood as the unwanted daughter of a disturbed and vicious mother involved in prostitution, as well as her trial and imprisonment and her life after her release. There are 'Reflections' in which Mary recalls and analyses the events which led to her conviction, and reveals the mind and heart of her child-self.
Children who kill are perhaps the most desperate and incomprehensible members of society; with a quiet compassion that is in itself strangely chilling, Gitta Sereny gently brings to our consciousness a dreadfully lucid drama of a child grossly maltreated not only by her family, but by the inadequacies of the justice system. This is one of the saddest, most abject and important books I have ever read.