My name is or rather was Marion Reynolds, my dad was killed on D-Day, storming the beaches of Normandy, he was in the first wave of soldiers, just one of 20,000 soldiers that died that day.
My dad died not knowing that his new wife was pregnant with me, I was born in Glasgow in January of 1945.
Mum struggled to bring me up on her own, my playground was the bombsites of the Gorbals, we lived near my nan, so, she would look after me while mum was at work.
When I was ten, mum met John Lister, he was a mechanic at the bus garage where mum was a Clippie, a year later, they got married.
When mum was working the late shift, that is when it happened, the sly looks, the “accidental” touches, I tried telling mum, but she just said that I was lying or imagining it.
Within six months, the touches had turned into full-on groping, when I hit puberty, it progressed to full sex, and this went on for months.
Then, I started feeling sick in the morning, mum heard me one day and asked me what was wrong. I once again told her about what John was doing to me.
Mum slapped my face for lying about John, she said, “John is a good man, he wouldn’t do something like that.”
That night she dragged me off to some dirty, dingy backstreet, to a filthy basement flat, the door opened to mum’s knock.
Mum held a whispered conversation with the person who answered, I couldn’t tell if it was male or female.
We went inside the disgusting, smelly hovel, personally, I wouldn’t have let a dog live in there, under the light of a single light bulb, hanging from a frayed cord, I could see that the person was a woman.
I couldn’t even guess her age, she had matted grey hair, and warts on her chin complete with grey hairs protruding from them, she looked like a caricature of a storybook witch.
She had filthy hands with thick nails encrusted with some dark substance, that looked like blood or shit, plus she smelled worse than the tenement block toilets during the summer months.
I was led to the table in the middle of the room, it was cluttered with junk that she cleared by sweeping it onto the floor with her arm.
Mum helped her lay me on my back on this rickety table, then mum held my shoulders down on the table while this old crone, pulled my navy-blue school knickers off, and inserted something metallic inside me.
It hurt so much that I passed out from the pain, when I came around, mum smiled brightly and said, “all done and dusted.”
We left there and made our way home; I would barely walk because of the pain and because of the thick pad of material that I had pressed between my legs.
When we got home, I was feeling faint, but mum made me apologise to John for accusing him of wrongdoing, and then I was sent to bed.
I awoke two days later in a hospital bed, my stomach was sore, and mum was sitting beside my bed, holding my hand.
Apparently, mum had come in to check on me before she and John had gone to bed, and found me lying in a blood-soaked bed, an ambulance had been called and I was raced to the hospital for emergency life-saving surgery.
Just then the door opened, and a man walked in, he introduced himself as Dr McKenzie, checked my chart and causally sat on the side of my bed.
He said, “now then Marion, what have you been up to.? And at your age too. Was it a boy from school? Or someone from the tenement block.?”
Mum squeezed my hand hard as if to say, “don’t say a word.”
Dr McKenzie shook his head silently at my refusal to speak, then he turned to my mum and said, “well, whatever butcher tried to sort out her little “problem” nearly killed her,
whatever they used, perforated her uterus, if you hadn’t checked on her when you did, she would have bled to death before morning.
But the damage they inflicted was so severe that we had to perform an emergency hysterectomy, which means that Marion will never be able to have children.”
Mum started crying at the doctor’s words, so I started crying as well. Dr McKenzie left the room as mum, and I sat hugging each other.
I was in the hospital for nearly a week, the day before I came home there was an arson attack on a filthy basement flat in a dirty, dingy backstreet,
Somebody had wedged the only door shut and poured petrol through the letterbox, the only occupant perished in the flat, and there were no suspects.
When I got home, mum told me that she had informed the headmistress of the school that I attended, Mary Magdalen, Roman Catholic School for girls, that I had been in the hospital with a burst appendix.
This would explain the scar on my stomach, plus it would get me excused from P.E for the rest of the year.
Mum had to return to work the next day, due to missing a lot of time while I was in the hospital, so, John was going to be watching me, I inwardly shuddered.
Two nights later, John said to me, “now that you can’t get pregnant, we don’t have to be careful do we.?”
We were in the living room, so I backed away from him, he steadily advanced toward me, so I snatched up the poker that was laid by the coal fire.
I held it up in front of me and warned him to stay back, he laughed and said, “you haven’t got the guts to do it, go on then, try it.”
All of a sudden, all of my pent-up rage took over and burst out, I screamed in rage, “you bastard, you stole my childhood and now you have stolen my ability to have children in my future.”
And I brought the metal poker down over his head. He collapsed back and fell down breaking a wooden chair as he fell, he tried to pick up a broken chair leg.
I grabbed it first and brought it down over his head, shoulders and neck, screaming about how he ruined my life.
The neighbours called the police, and they turned up, to find me standing over John’s battered body, still hitting it with the chair leg.
I stood there panting from the effort of hitting John, one of the policemen said, “come on lass, put the chair leg down, and sit down.”
I was sitting down on the sofa when two ambulance men arrived, one of them said, “it looks like a blood bath in here, how many are you looking for.?”
The policeman looked at him, and said, “she did it.” Pointing at me. The ambulance man said, “you’re joking, it’s always the quiet ones isn’t it.?”
At that point my mum arrived, she flew at me, screaming incoherently, trying to scratch and slap me.
I was taken down to the police station where I was signed in, searched and then locked in a tiny cell for the night,
the cell was cold and smelt of stale piss, the mattress was thin and lumpy, and I only had one itchy ex-army blanket to cover myself.
The light in the cell was kept on all night, so the only way I could attempt to get any sleep was to cover my head with the blanket, but as it was so thin, it didn’t block out much light.
At seven thirty am, I was woken up by a big, burly policeman, he unlocked the cell door and brought in a battered metal tray, which had two slices of burnt toast and a cup of cold, grey, watery tea.
These he placed on the cold concrete floor, then turned and left without saying a word, as hungry as I was, I couldn’t stomach the tea and toast.
Sometime later, a different policeman came and led me to an interview room, there I sat in a chair that was bolted to the floor, the policeman stood with his back to the door, and we both waited in silence.
About ten minutes later, the door burst open and two plainclothes officers entered the room, one of them looked at me and said, “why isn’t she wearing handcuffs, she’s in here for murder. So, get some cuffs on her now.”
The other plainclothes officer said, “hold on Robbie, she’s only a wee bairn, I doubt if she weighs more than six stone wearing a soaking wet donkey jacket, I’m pretty sure, that the three of us can cope with her.”
I sat there, shocked by these two big men, both of them looked like they wrestled gorillas for fun.
This started my interview, that afternoon, I was taken to the court, and two hours later, I was formally charged with murder and remanded in custody.
I was taken by police van to a remand centre, where I would spend the next six months awaiting trial, when the other girls found out that I was on remand for murder, I was elevated in their eyes.
Eventually, I was taken to Glasgow Crown Court for trial, I was sitting on a cushion on a wooden bench in the dock, looking at a sea of faces.
Then a voice called out, “all rise.”
The warden next to me said quietly, “stand up.”
Then a door that I hadn’t seen opened behind the big desk at the front of the court, a man entered, he was wearing a long black robe and a white wig.
He walked slowly to the seat behind the desk, and sat down, the court usher said, “please be seated”.
The judge picked up and read the sheaf of papers on his desk, quickly read through them, and then looked over the top of his half-moon glasses at me, looked at the usher and nodded.
The usher stood and said, “today is the crown versus Marion Alison Reynolds, you are charged that on the night of November the seventh 1958, you did wilfully and with malice aforethought, you did murder, John Angus Lister. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty.?
My court-appointed lawyer stood up and said, “my client pleads not guilty to murder but guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.”
Then followed a week of legalese, that I didn’t understand, then on the third day, my mum took the stand, the story she told, painted me in the blackest light possible.
She said that I was jealous of her and John, and that is why I told lies about him, then when I got pregnant by some spotty boy from the tenement block.
And when that didn’t work, I killed him in a fit of temper. My lawyer argued that the police had scoured the block and couldn’t find anyone who had seen me with a boy of any age.
But the damage had been done, I could see the way the members of the jury looked at me as if I was a piece of shit on their shoes.
The jury was sent out to deliberate on a verdict, so, I spent another weekend on remand, on Monday morning, I was driven back to the court, where I sat in the cells below the court.
After lunch, the jury returned, so I was taken back to the dock, the judge came back in, and he asked the foreman if they had reached a verdict.
The foreman stood and answered yes.
The judge said, “do you find the accused guilty of the crime of murder.”?
The foreman said, “no.”
The judge said, “do you find the accused guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.?”
The foreman said, “yes”
The judge said, “is this the verdict of you all.?”
The foreman said, “yes.”
The judge then asked the foreman to retake his seat.
The judge then turned his attention to me, and the warden beside me nudged me to get me to stand.
I stood and looked at the judge. He removed his glasses, and after a few seconds he spoke, he said, “Marion Alison Reynolds, you have been found guilty of the heinous manslaughter of John Angus Lister, for this crime, you will be taken to a secure unit until you are eighteen years old,
Upon reaching this age, you will be released on licence, this means if you break the law for anything, you will be taken straight to an adult jail, to serve out a normal term for manslaughter.
If you had been an adult now, I would be donning my black cap and sentencing you to be hung. Wardens, take her down.”
As I was led down the stairs from the dock, I looked across at the gallery, my mum was sitting there with a look of pure hatred in her eyes, that was the last time I saw my mum. She drank herself to death within two years.
I was taken back to the holding cell below the court, I was numb. Later I was taken upstairs and out to the courtyard behind the court and was placed in a prison van.
This was the first time I had left Glasgow, we travelled northeast for about two hours and arrived in Perth, to a large stone-built building that stood on a hill outside of the town, it was surrounded by a high stone wall.
We drove through a heavy wooden door and into a large grass-covered courtyard, this was the place where I was going to spend the next five years of my life.