Books: The 9 O’Clock Walk

YIELD TO THE NIGHT (190 pp.)—Joan Henry—Doubleday ($2.75).

Mary Hilton knew she probably would not choke to death. She knew the knot and the drop would break her neck and that they would leave her hanging for an hour to be sure that she was dead. Then she thought of Jim, of her face become black and blue, of her “tongue protruding from dry lips that he once kissed.” “O God,” she thought, “take me out of this terrible place … I can’t go on. I can’t stand it . . .”

For killing her lover’s other mistress in cold blood, Mary Hilton was going to take “the 9 o’clock walk,” that morning stroll in which England’s condemned cover their last mile. Yield to the Night is the story of Mary Hilton’s last three weeks on earth and the price she pays for murder. It is a high price in accumulated terror. The emotions that British Novelist Joan Henry uncovers in her artful portrait of an ignorant but intelligent homicidal type are not profound, but intense.

The story is told by Mary in an inner monologue. Everyone is solicitous of her health (“You can catch your death this weather”), but death is so close and horrifying that she cries: “I am too afraid to be sorry … I want to be brave but I cannot.” Feeling like an animal because she is always watched, Mary knows only two inescapable realities: prison and fear. Gradually her fear mounts to hysteria. She loses all control, screams in her sleep, abandons even vanity. Using lipstick would be indecent now, she thinks, “like painting the face of a corpse.” In the end Mary cannot even think any more, and her execution, even to her executioners, seems meaningless and barbaric.

Yield to the Night has an authentic flavor because Novelist Henry is something of an expert on life in English prisons, having herself served an eight-month term in 1950 after being convicted of knowingly cashing forged checks (she pleaded, and still pleads, not guilty). She is 40, pretty, a cousin of Bertrand Russell, and a great-great-grandniece of Sir Robert Peel.* In prison Author Henry was called “the lidy,” and told, “You talk lovely, but it don’t get you far, do it, if you end up here?” But she turned her experience to good account with Women in Prison, a 1952 British bestseller, and now with Yield to the Night, which, though falling short of the tragedy it might have been, is a powerful argument against capital punishment.

* Founder of the London police force and known as Bobbie the Peeler, after whom London cops are nicknamed bobbies.