Third age
October 2012
A friend’s aunt (a contemporary of mine) used to come to the breakfast table at her home in NZ in the mid-1950s to find that there were holes in the newspaper where articles had been cut out. She was 15, and the censorship was occasioned by reports of the crime and trial of two Christchurch schoolgirls who murdered the mother of one of the girls with a brick.
I was 17 when I heard about them, a student, struggling a little with growing up and away from my own family. It gave me the shivers, this case of murder and matricide by girls close to my own age. The reports of the behaviour of these two teenagers rocked everyone’s world a bit, especially as one of them, Juliet Hulme, then 15, was the daughter of an upper middle class, academic family at the centre of the then very Anglo society of Christchurch. Pauline Parker, whose mother Honora Parker/Rieper was killed, was 16, and from a less advantaged background.
It was a horrible crime, planned (in her diary, Pauline called it the “moider”), but hardly thought out, by a ratty pair of girls infatuated with each other and the fantasy life they had created. The idea was to prevent adults separating them. Highly intelligent they may have been, but out of touch with reality they certainly were. That didn’t stop them being found guilty, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure (in different prisons) and the evidence of psychiatrists being set aside in favour of “bad not mad.”
This crime has contemporary ramifications, as some readers may know. In 1994, Juliet Hulme was found living in Scotland – and famous as “Anne Perry,” a writer of Victorian crime fiction; almost as successful as she had been, 40 years before, reviled and infamous. The “outing” was precipitated by the Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures. Ugly things happened. How on earth could any human being cope with such a revelation about her past, even if she had half-expected it every day of her life since leaving prison some five years after the crime? A new book, The Search for Anne Perry, by Joanne Drayton (HarperCollins), tells how.
Anne Perry is now in her 70s, still writing: some good mysteries, some not so good (one of them was my bad book of the year once). But many people love her books, which have sold in the millions.
Third Agers will find her story of special interest for we are now all dealing with our past as never before as it looms so large compared with what we see as our future. Even the squirm factor often keeps us awake into the small hours: stupid things we’ve said and done. We all have regrets; but shame is something else.
How does Perry cope with the shame of so brutally and stupidly ending someone’s life? Are we the same person at 15, 16 as we are now in our third age? Don’t we mostly like to think that we are, and that our basic values have not changed despite maturity? Anne Perry certainly can’t afford to think that. To survive and flourish as she has, she must see her teenage self as an aberration caused by several factors: illness, long separations from her parents, infatuation, inability to see consequences of planned actions, extreme adolescent nuttiness. Without necessarily excusing herself, this gifted woman probably also acknowledges that her parents were too distracted by goings-on in their own lives to help her navigate a difficult girlhood. Her father Henry Hulme, by the way, abandoning her after her arraignment, denouncing her from on board the ship to UK, went on to have a big career as head of the British hydrogen bomb program, with glowing obituaries in The Times and other London papers. Life did go on (rather splendidly for him), and for her mother, stepfather and brother and for her partner in crime Pauline, and also, eventually, in a rewarding way for Anne Perry. Pauline’s family did less well. And of course, her poor mother died. It does not do to think what that woman‘s final thoughts were, after wondering what the dear girl was doing with that brick in her hands.
Joanne Drayton tells the story well. It is fascinating. Just the way Perry’s publishers and agents coped with the bombshell after thinking they had known the genteel, matching-handbag-and- shoes woman for decades is worth a read. Incidentally, the Mormon church comes out of it well for its support of its 1968 convert Perry when the secret was known by very few. But the book provokes deeper thought about dealing with the past, duration of guilt, and the question: who are we?
The skeletons in our closet may never be as ghastly as Perry’s, but we are all involved in rearranging memories and justifying some things. Anne Perry has had to do it, big time, in the public glare, a very rough deal indeed.
Shirley Stott Despoja
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