‘Saw it in the Papers’,  a poem by Adrian Mitchell.

I will not say her name
Because I believe she hates her name.

But there was once a woman who lived in Yorkshire

Her baby was two years old.
She left him, strapped in his pram, in the kitchen. She went out.
She stayed with friends.
She went out drinking.

The baby was hungry. Nobody came.
The baby cried. Nobody came.

The baby tore at the upholstery of his pram. Nobody came.

Nobody came.
The baby died of hunger.

She said she’d arranged for a girl, Whose name she couldn’t remember, To come and look after the baby While she stayed with her friends. Nobody saw the girl.
Nobody came.

Her lawyer said there was no evidence of mental instability.
But the man who promised to marry her Went off with another woman.

And when he went off, this mother changed
from a mother who cared for her two-year-old baby into a mother who did not seem to care at all. There was no evidence of mental instability.

The Welfare Department spokesman said: ‘I do not know of any plans for an inquiry. We never became deeply involved.’

Nobody came.
There was no evidence of mental instability. When she was given love
She gave love freely to her baby.
When love was torn away from her
she locked her love away.
It seemed that no one cared for her.
She seemed to stop caring.
Nobody came.
There was no evidence of mental instability.

Only love can unlock locked-up-love.

Manslaughter: She pleaded Guilty. She was sentenced to be locked up In prison for four years.

Is there any love in prisons?
She must have been in great pain.

Now she is locked up There is love in prisons, But it is all locked up.

What she did to him was terrible.
There was no evidence of mental instability. What we are doing to her is terrible.
There is no evidence of mental instability.

Millions of children starve, but not in England. What we do not do for them is terrible.

Is England’s love locked up in England? There is no evidence of mental instability.

Only love can unlock locked-up-love.

When I read about it in the papers I cried.
When my friend read about it in the papers he cried. We shared our tears.
They did not help her at all.

She has been locked up
For locking up her love.
There is no evidence of mental instability.

Comments by Ira Maine esq. Poetry Editor

In the majority of cases, partnered or not, young women cope very well with being pregnant and having babies. Contrary to popular opinion, these pregnancies are not spontaneous. Neither are they produced by magic or witchcraft. They are produced in reality by that force of Nature which simply demands the race continue. To achieve this end, the mechanism involved in the getting of babies has been made so pleasurable, so irresistible that it is amazing that we have managed to keep its practice off the streets and out sight.   Roger McGough, in one of his poems, imagines, in an ideal world, a bus load of commuters, in the warm confines of a Liverpool double-decker bus, indulging in group sex on the way home from work!.

Because they are theoretically capable of having a child at any time from puberty onwards, Nature of necessity appears to endow young girls with a much higher level of maturity than that allotted to boys of the same age. Nature also prepares women for the time immediately following the birth by providing other, additional, more subtle mechanisms which help the new mother to love, succour and nourish the new child. All of this involves an astonishing level of chemical juggling, particularly as the child grows in the womb. The mother’s body must provide every single essential ingredient both for herself and, in absolutely different mixtures and quantities, for the growing foetus. The body’s chemical producing factories go into non-stop, need-driven hyperdrive. This is, as we know, an everyday occurrence, one we almost take for granted. It is no less miraculous for that.

When the child is finally born, it takes quite a while for the physical and psychological effects of this chemical maelstrom to subside. Some women are changed utterly by it, others hardly affected at all. If there is such a place as ‘normal’, most girls after the birth eventually find their way there. It may take months or even years, but they get there. Sadly, some girls never get there at all.

When a man kills his own children and then kills himself he is either mad, or so mad with jealousy or rejection that he wants an ultimate, shocking revenge. This killing, this unspeakable act is designed to break the heart of the woman involved. Deliberately killing the kids in order to destroy the mother is entirely sadistic. Horrifyingly, it is how the murderer demonstrates his power.The killer’s final act of taking his own life must never be read as an act of remorse.  By removing himself from the world, the killer demonstrates his absolute ability to completely avoid the consequences of his crimes.

The truth of all this, as we all know, is much more prosaic. What has happened here is nothing more than an act of contemptible cowardice which will affect the lives of those around the killing for years. I find this type of bastardry almost impossible to forgive.

Women on the other hand, abandon their kids in supermarkets, drive them into rivers and drown them or, as in Adrian Mitchell’s case, simply leave them at home to starve whilst they go off on holiday. In my view there is not the slightest suggestion of sadism in this. I cannot in my wildest imagination, think that any woman, in her right mind, would kill her own kids. But there again, and if we consider again the post birth chemical cataclysm that so effects some women, it must be seen that some of those women, for years, are not in their right minds at all.

‘…There was no evidence of mental instability…’

Add to this the appalled sense of abandonment, the loneliness, the loss when the new father walks out and leaves the mother with the sole responsibility for  the kids. Half the time the mother is not much more than a kid herself. And all of those demented chemicals are still churning away inside her. She’s now required to feed, wash and clothe the kids, keep the place warm, pay the rent and everything else involved. One day she wakes up, out of her mind, with a level of responsibility that’s simply too much to bear. Sections of her mind simply close down. The worry, the torment, the tedium gradually slip away… unbearable relief floods in… She can do what she likes… Off she goes, happy as Larry and mad as a Hatter, out into the day…and never comes back…

Or…she busies herself making sure the kids are safely buckled up in the back seat of the car, fussing over them, checking and rechecking before taking off, driving the car into a lake and drowning them all.

“…there was no evidence of mental instability…’

Women do awful, irrational and grotesque things in the years after childbirth. We should forgive them, again and again and again. They are not generally into revenge, or sadism or the pursuit of power. They are, 99.9% of the time, simply out of their minds and cannot be held responsible for their actions. Perhaps, one day all laws applying to women will be written by women. Perhaps women should sit down  and draft a wholly new set of laws for themselves and tell the men to simply butt out.

After all, absolutely all of the laws regarding women have been written by men. Women have been ‘unclean’, ‘unchaste’ and ‘unholy’. They have been ‘witches’, ‘agents of the devil’, ‘scarlet women’ and shameless ‘temptresses’. They have been burned and drowned and tortured. And they have, since time began, been beaten up, raped and murdered.

I reckon it is time things changed.