LETTERS Bell toll
Sir: It may well be true that the publication of Gitta Sereny's study of Mary Bell, Cries Unheard, cannot be justified in terms of the distress caused to the victims' families. This aspect of the thing seems to have been very badly handled. Nevertheless, I find it impossible to understand why Sir Peregrine Worsthorne feels — writing, presumably, as some sort of Christian — that Mary Bell is beyond redemption (As I was saying, 9 March): 'Even if the nation could afford to lavish money on the mental health of Mary Bell . . . we would still resist doing so, not out of parsimony but on principle, believing in our hearts that the girl is, quite simply, evil and that is that.' (My italics.) It is a sen- timent which takes us back in spirit to the witchcraft mania of the 17th century.
My own, 'godless' reading of precisely the same material suggests that, thanks to the affection and confidence of a number of ordinary people — Mr Dixon, probation officers, 'Jim' and no doubt many others and aided by her own considerable courage, intelligence and growing awareness of guilt, Mary Bell has developed into a remarkably mature and responsible woman.
Since Sir Peregrine is evidently incapable of recognising any of this, it is not altogeth- er surprising that he also fails to grasp the depth of sentimentality, humbug and mal- ice associated with the life and death of the late Princess of Wales. It is not just a ques- tion of whether the Princess stood for feel- ing and image rather than for reason and reality O'Hear is too kind — but whether, thanks to her dishonest and over- close relationship with the media and men such as Andrew Morton, she was not a self- ish and destructive force, a force whose life's work culminated in the media-orches- trated vulgarity of a populist funeral.
Michael Tatham Hobbes Cottage, Ravenstone, Nr Olney,
Bucks
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