Bouncers and Bodyguards (19 page)

It was all about material possessions. For instance, if you had one and a half ounces of tobacco, a half ounce of that was worth another ounce, because if you borrowed a half ounce from me, you had to give me back one ounce plus the half ounce you borrowed. This was when the majority preyed on newcomers, because the person who had just come into prison didn’t have anything. This was when you got the intense intimidation and bullying. For example, some people were intimidated into pretending to have a back ache to get the doctor to give them medication. Other prisoners did little things to frighten and intimidate people, like walking into your cell and picking up your things. I told one person to fuck off when he tried to do this. He did, but many people were too frightened to tell another prisoner to fuck off, so the intimidation continued.

Prison teaches people how to improvise. Prisoners made their own 90 per cent proof alcohol. I met people who were doing their sentence brain-dead because they had drunk too much ‘hooch’, or ‘moonshine’ as it is known in the US. They just slept their prison sentence away. Prison is all about drugs and medication, and prisoners will do almost anything to get sleeping tablets, painkillers or any form of medication. They’d walk around the landings shouting down, asking who had what available. You’d then see people passing stuff up over the landings, which eventually went for four or five times its original value.

Someone can go into prison for just three months and come out a complete bastard, a liar and totally untrustworthy. You see, it is easy to lose your morals if you are intimidated, as you have to intimidate back in order to survive. For instance, you can sit and be friendly and chat to someone in his cell, before leaving a few seconds later after having stolen something that you have already sold for a few ounces of tobacco. There are no rules. The long-termers feed off the short-termers, and people who are bullied or whose stuff is stolen can’t go to the staff and say they are being bullied, because then they will really get beaten up. And being a grass in prison is taboo – it’s almost as bad as being a sex offender. You will be beaten, no matter what, and people will just step over you.

The regime in prison was degrading. You had to ask for everything: for shampoo, soap, toothpaste, everything. You even had to ask for an envelope. You were allowed one envelope a day. One fucking envelope! If I’d used that envelope and wanted another, I’d have to borrow one, and then I’d have to pay it back.

There are different classes of people in prison: you have the right scumbag, the lesser scumbag, the scumbag and eventually the nearly human. I struck lucky with my first cellmate, a bloke from Wymondham. He got nine months and a £55,000 fine for health-and-safety violations. He came into prison about two weeks after me and was on the same sort of moral level as I was. At first, he was on another landing, and I could see he was just a normal person in a very abnormal world. He was in complete shock. His wife was pregnant, and he was getting got at in prison. I liked him, and I took him under my wing and helped him cope a little bit. He was a nice bloke, and we became good friends.

It is amazing how people make a life for themselves in prison. Just sitting watching everything that went on was amazing. As well as physical violence, intimidation was rife. The fours intimidated the threes, the threes intimidated the twos and the twos intimidated the ones. Each landing had their little crew running all the scams, but I managed to make friends with other prisoners without joining their ranks.

Nobody wanted a job as a landing cleaner, because you’d be used to move drugs around. So you’d refuse the job, which then gave the pushers and dealers an opportunity to get someone they wanted. It was important to pick and choose your jobs because of the wider implications of what each entailed. I was lucky, as I worked in the printing shop, where I was treated a little bit better and more like a human being than in many of the other jobs. But even in the printing shop, I saw people take the pots of glue used to join the pages together and sell them as solvents.

The prison authorities tried to move me twice: once to Wayland and once to Highpoint. However, I refused to go, because I knew that if I could stay in Norwich I would eventually be sent to Britannia House, an open prison that was a lot more comfortable. It was just a matter of time, and I was eventually transferred. However, I was sent to Peterborough Prison for a week while I was at Britannia House, as I broke my bail conditions. By then, I was working at the YMCA on day release. I left work, went to ASDA and drove down Drayton Road, which I wasn’t meant to do – I still wasn’t allowed to go past my ex-girlfriend’s house. I was seen, arrested later that evening and sent off to Peterborough Prison for a week. Peterborough was very different – it was private and run like an American prison with gangs. I wasn’t there long enough to judge, but people did say that the facilities there were much better than at Norwich and that the food was much better.

Norwich was such a cold prison. Visits lasted only an hour, whereas in most prisons visiting times are two hours minimum and sometimes up to four hours. Norwich was not a nice prison to be in. For instance, if you had to make an appointment to see the dentist, it might take three weeks or more to see him. You could have an abscess and a horrendous toothache and be in pain for weeks.

Eventually, I went on a course and became a ‘listener’ – somebody people could call at any time for a talk. I made friends with John, a lifer who’d killed someone and been given 15 years. He’d then stabbed his cellmate and been given life. He’d served 27 years. His skin was sallow and grey, he had prison tattoos on his neck and arms, he was covered in scars, and his eyes were dead – there was no sparkle or life left in them. He was never getting out. He looked a bit like Robert De Niro in
Cape Fear
.

One day, we were chatting when a black man came into the cell and interrupted us, asking if we had any ‘burn’ (dope). From his sock, John took out a blade he had made from two toothbrushes melted together with a lighter and told the guy to fuck off or he would stab him there and then and leave him to bleed. We then returned to our discussion as though nothing had happened. He would have killed him just because he’d interrupted our conversation. John had nothing to lose. That is what it is like in prison.

Lifers who will never get out, who have no family, who no one writes to, who have nothing and who have nothing to lose make their life a little better by intimidation and running the prison as best they can. Their only home is prison, which is why they are the way they are.

Lisa wrote to me every single day while I was inside. I could not have done it without her. A lot of problems with prisoners is that they don’t have anyone to keep them strong. They get depressed and try to hang themselves. They self-harm. They don’t wash. They stink.

Compared to Norwich Prison, Britannia House is brilliant. It is really for people who have only made one mistake and shouldn’t have been put in prison in the first place. In Britannia House, you eventually become a human being again, and after a while you can do charity work or get a day job. However, you have to work hard to get to Britannia House – you have to be a listener or a Samaritan, you have to keep out of trouble and you have to be seen to be a bit of a mentor to other people. It was a little bit easier for me, because I was well known around Norwich and well respected, and I became a mentor to a lot of young people coming into prison. Usually, if you do all of these things, you can get to Britannia House after about half of your sentence, but I was transferred in just ten months, mainly because I stayed in Norwich and used my reputation and the people I knew.

At Britannia House, you are allowed out every day, but you have to report back every night for the duration of your sentence. It is still prison, and if you don’t return one night or are late, or if you do something wrong, you are sent straight back to Norwich Prison. You can lose your place in Britannia House just like that. There could be an argument in which someone gets hurt and you get sent back to proper prison just for being a witness. Or if you get stopped when on day release for not wearing a seat belt or for not having a tax disc on your car – in fact, if you have any kind of run-in with the police at all – that will be it.

I sometimes stop at The Prince of Wales, the last venue I worked at, on my way back to Britannia House. If there has been an argument, part of me wants to sort it out, but the other part says, ‘I am invisible. I am not here.’ Because of who I am, I could so easily get dragged in. While I am in Britannia House, I have to be whiter than white.

One of the most moving and emotional experiences I had while in prison was on my first New Year’s Eve inside. Because I could see into the car park, Lisa told me she would come and visit me. I kept looking for her and eventually saw her waving up at me. On the stroke of midnight, and just as the fireworks exploded nearby, she shouted, ‘I love you, Bob.’ Suddenly, one of the other prisoners shouted, ‘She loves you, Bob.’ A few seconds later, the whole prison was filled with the noise of inmates banging their mugs on the railings and shouting, ‘She loves you, Bob. She loves you, Bob.’

I would never be allowed to work the doors any more, but, to be honest, I don’t think I want to. Prison has allowed me to get out of the door game. I did almost 27 years and left the industry with my reputation and more importantly my dignity intact.

Bob Etchells started working the doors when he was just 17 years old at The Festival House, one of the toughest pubs in Norwich at that time. He ended his career in 2005 when he was charged and found guilty of possessing a firearm. For almost 27 years, Bob ran some of the toughest and busiest clubs and pubs in Norwich, as well as following his managers to work the doors with them in Plymouth and the Welsh borders. However, Norwich was his home, and he always came back.

Bob ran a number of door companies, at one time employing over 50 doormen throughout the region, as well as providing debt-collecting and other security-related services. He has never applied for his SIA badge, nor is he ever likely to.

Bob will soon be due for parole.

I
t was mid-december. Christmas decorations sparkled annoyingly in every shop window and on every street corner. Stupid-looking Santas stood in shopping malls and on high streets, ringing their irritating bells and demanding money for some good cause or other but probably pocketing half of it themselves and spending the rest in the pub at the end of their shift. People raced around frantically, looking morose and stressed, worried that they wouldn’t be able to do all their shopping on time or that the gift they’d bought their uncle’s cousin’s first nephew’s fucking sister wasn’t expensive enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas . . . really. I love waking up on Christmas morning next to my gorgeous wife and presenting her with a gift I have tried – although admittedly not always successfully – to think carefully about buying. I love the Christmas morning shag and a hearty English breakfast – although not always in that order. And I do love vegging out in front of the TV after an excessive Christmas dinner, trying to keep my eyes open but never quite managing it. I just hate all the crap that goes with Christmas and the obscene commerciality of it all. It drives me mad, and every Christmas since leaving the Foreign Legion I have vowed to escape to somewhere better, sunnier and infinitely more exciting.

But I didn’t really expect to be going to bloody Iraq again!

After my first stint in the hellhole of the universe, I was told many times, by many people, that one tour would never be enough. Like a virus, the bug of war wiggles its wretched way into the soul of a true soldier and embeds itself for all eternity – or at least until the nagging wife really does pack her bags and leave. Even then, I have met many soldiers who have endured failed marriages and relationships just to get back to the front line, listening to the sweet sound of bullets whizzing by their heads and the thud and mayhem of the mortar shell. After my first spell in the ‘sandpit’, I half-heartedly said I wouldn’t be going back – that one tour was enough – but I think deep inside I knew I would. Just one more trip, and it
would
help with the bills and go towards a nice car. It might even pay off a bit of the mortgage.

I am a former French Foreign Legion soldier, or a Legionnaire as we are usually more affectionately called. For some reason, I didn’t fancy joining the British Army and joined the Legion in 1992 when I was just 18 years old – I was young, incredibly foolish and most definitely off my tiny trolley. One evening, while getting high on grass and drunk on cheap Tesco lager, I had watched a fascinating documentary on the National Geographic Channel about the French Foreign Legion and decided there and then that a Legionnaire’s life was definitely the life for me. Surprisingly, I thought the same the very next day when I had a blinding hangover and had to clear up my vomit-stained carpet. And the day after, I still wanted to join. As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, I made my plans to escape the mindless teenage world of grass, cheap beer and puke and do something constructive with my life. And one day, I just woke up, packed my bags and headed to Marseilles.

After the initial basic instruction and tests, I trained to be a medic, as that almost guaranteed a posting to some god-forsaken hellhole where the action really was. It was just kicking off in Somalia at that time, and I knew they wanted as many medics as they could muster, so I was first in the queue. If you finish high in the rankings, you get to choose which regiment you go to, and if you finish low, you go wherever you are sent! I finished 12th out of 65, which I was surprised at. I chose to go to the 13th DBLE (
Demi-Brigade de Légion Étrangère
) based in Djibouti on the Somalia border. It was a fucking crazy hellhole. I was in Djibouti for just three weeks before I was sent into Somalia, and I ended up doing two tours there altogether – out of my two years in Djibouti, I spent nearly eighteen months in Somalia. There were bad bits, of course, and war had a huge impact on me mentally, as I witnessed a lot of really bad things when I was still very young. Africa was, and still is, fucked – life there is worth shit. Also, having to learn a foreign language and being away from family and friends at that age was also sometimes very hard, and losing friends in accidents or incidents had a profound effect on me.