Heaven: A Prison Diary (13 page)

Sixteen new
inductees turn up for labour board, all clutching their red folders. The message
has spread: if you don’t return your folders, you don’t get a job, and
therefore no wages. Because the prison is so full at the moment, most of the
good jobs – hospital, SMU, library, education, stores, officers’ mess – are
filled, leaving only kitchen, cleaners and the dreaded farm. Among the new
intake
is
a PhD and an army officer. I fix it so that
the PhD, who only has another five weeks to serve, will work in the stores, and
the army officer will then take over from him. Only one of the new
intake
hasn’t a clue what he wants to do, so he inevitably
ends up on the farm.

I have already
described the paper chase to you, so imagine my surprise when among the three
prisoners to turn up this morning, clutching his release papers is Potts. Do
you remember Potts? Solicitor didn’t turn up, took an overdose? Well, he’s
fully recovered and went back to court for his appeal.

However, he was
half an hour late and the judge refused to hear his case, despite the fact that
it was the Prison Service’s fault that he wasn’t on time. Here we are two weeks
later and he’s off tomorrow, even though he wasn’t due for release until the
middle of next year. As we are unable to have a lengthy conversation at SMU, I
agree to visit him tonight and find out what caused this sudden reversal.

The governor of
Spring Hill (Mr Payne) calls to have a private chat with Mr New. He’s concerned
about the attendant publicity should he agree to my transfer. Mr New does
everything he can to allay Mr Payne’s anxieties, pointing out that once the
tabloids had got their photograph, the
press haven’t
been seen since. But Mr Payne points out that it didn’t stop a series of
stories appearing from ‘insiders’ and ‘released prisoners’ which, although pure
fantasy doesn’t help. Mr New tells him that I have settled in well, shared a
room with another inmate and am a model prisoner. Mr Payne says he’ll make a
decision fairly quickly. I am not optimistic.

I have been
invited to attend a meeting of the Samaritans (from Boston) and the Listeners
(prisoners). They meet about once a month in the hospital to exchange views and
ideas.

They only need
me to sign some books for their Christmas bazaar. One of the ladies asks me if
she can bring in some more books for signing from the Red Cross bookshop.

‘Of course,’ I
tell her.

There’s a
cowboy film on TV, so the noise is bearable – that is, until the final
shoot-out begins.

The mystery of
Potts’s early release has been solved. A clerical error resulted in the judge
thinking the case should be heard at 10 o’clock, while Potts was able to
produce a piece of paper that requested his attendance in court at 10.30 am.
The judge subsequently agreed to hear the appeal immediately and, having
considered the facts, halved Potts’s sentence. The governor called him out of
work at the kitchen to pass on the news that he would be released this morning.
The first really happy prisoner I’ve seen in months.

Twelve new
inductees due today, and as always, if you look carefully through the list
you’ll find a story. Today it’s Cormack. He was released just over six weeks
ago on a tag (HDC) and is back, but only for eleven days.

Strict rules
are applied when you are granted an HDC. You are released two months early with
a tag placed around your ankle.

You supply an
address at which you will reside during those two months. You must have a home
phone. You will be confined to that abode during certain hours, usually between
seven in the evening and seven the following morning. You also agree in writing
not to take drugs or drink.

Cormack is an
unusual case, because he didn’t break any of these rules. But yesterday morning
he turned up at the local police station asking to be taken back into custody
for the last eleven days because he was no longer welcome at the house he had
designated for tagging.

‘Wise man,’
said Mr Simpson, the probation officer who recommended his early release. ‘He
kept to the letter of the law, and won’t suffer as a consequence. If he’d
attempted to spend the last eleven days somewhere else, he would have been
arrested and returned to closed conditions.’
Wise man indeed.

Leon the PhD
joins me for lunch. He’s the new orderly in stores, which entitles him to eat
early. He thanks me for helping him to secure the job. I discover over lunch
that his doctorate is in meteorology. He tells me that there are not many job
opportunities in his field, so once he’s released he’ll be looking for a teaching
position; not easy when you have a prison record. Leon was sentenced to six
months for driving without a licence, so will serve only twelve weeks. He tells
me that this is not his biggest problem. He’s engaged to a girl who has just
left Birmingham University with a first-class honours degree, and like him,
wants to be a teacher.
So far, so good.
But Leon is
currently facing racial prejudice in reverse. She is a high-class Brahmin and
even before Leon ended up in
jail,
her parents didn’t
consider he was good enough for their daughter. He explains that it is
necessary to meet the father on three separate occasions before a daughter’s
hand can be granted in wedlock, and following that, you still have to meet the
mother. All these ceremonies are conducted formally. Before he was sentenced,
Leon had managed only one meeting with the father; now he is being refused a
second or third meeting, and the mother is adamant that she will never allow
him to enter the family home. Does his fiancée defy her parents and marry the
man she loves, or does she obey her father and break off all contact? Seven of
the twelve weeks have already passed, but Leon points out that it’s not been
easy to stay in touch while you’re only allowed one visit a week, and two
phonecards.

Mr Berlyn
(deputy governor) drops into SMU to ask me if I’ve invited any outsiders to
come and hear my talk tomorrow night.

To be honest,
I’d forgotten that I’d agreed to the librarian’s request to give a talk on
writing a best-seller. I tell Mr Berlyn that I haven’t invited anyone from
inside – or outside – the prison.

He tells me
that after reading about the ‘event’ in the local paper, members of the public
have been calling in all day asking if they can attend.

Can they? I ask
innocently. He doesn’t bother to reply.

The problem of
whether I should remain at NSC and become hospital orderly, or transfer to
Spring Hill, has come to a head. Doug (VAT fraud and current hospital orderly)
has been told by Mr Berlyn that if he applies for a job at Exotic Foods in
Boston, who currently employ Clive (local council fraud and backgammon tutor),
he would be granted the status of outside worker, which would take him out of
the prison six days a week, even allowing him to use his own car to go back and
forth to work.

If Doug is
offered the job, then I will only do one more week as SMU orderly before
passing on my responsibilities to Carl. I would then have to spend a week being
trained by Doug in the hospital routines, so that I could take over the
following Monday.

Eight new
inductees
today,
and all seem relieved to be in an
open prison, until it comes to job allocation. Once again, most prisoners end
up on the farm, resulting in a lot of glum faces as they leave the building.
Few of them want to spend their day with pigs, sheep and Brussels sprouts,
remembering the temperature on the fens at this time of year
is
often below zero. One of the prisoners, a West Indian called Wesley, used to
warmer climes, is so angry that he asks to be sent back to Ashwell, his old
C-cat prison. He says he’d be a lot happier locked up all day with a wall to
protect him from the wind. Mr Berlyn assures him that if he still feels that
way in a month’s time, he’ll happily send him back.

Early supper
is, as I have explained, one of the orderlies’ privileges, so I was surprised
to see a table occupied by six inmates I’d never seen before.

John (lifer,
senior kitchen orderly) tells me that they’re all Muslims, and as Ramadan has
just begun, they can only eat between the hours of sunset and sunrise, which
means they cannot have breakfast or lunch with the other prisoners. That
doesn’t explain why they’re having dinner on their own, because it’s pitch
black by five o’clock on a November evening and …

‘Ah,’ says
John, ‘good point, but you see the large tray stacked with packets of milk and
cornflakes? That’s tomorrow’s breakfast, which they’ll take back tonight and
have in their rooms around five tomorrow morning.

If the other
prisoners find out about this, when they still have to come down to the dining
room whatever the weather, can you imagine how many complaints there would be?’

‘Or conversions
to Allah and the Muslim faith,’ I suggest.

I give my talk
in the chapel on writing a bestseller. The audience of twenty-six is made up of
prisoners and staff. There are five ladies in the front row I do not recognize,
seventeen prisoners and four members of staff, including Mr Berlyn, Mr Gough
and Ms Hampton, the librarian.

I enjoyed
delivering a speech for the first time in three months, and although I’ve
tackled the subject on numerous occasions in the past, it felt quite fresh
after such a long layoff, and the questions were among the most searching I
remember.

Two pounds was
added to my canteen account.

I call Mary and
foolishly leave my phonecard in the slot. When I return three minutes later,
it’s disappeared. Let’s face it, I am in prison.

I pick up my
letters from the unit office, thirty-two today, including one from Winston
Churchill enclosing a book called
The
Duel
, which covers the eighty-day struggle between his grandfather and
Hitler in 1940.

Among the other
letters, nearly all from members of the
public,
is one
from Jimmy.

You may recall Jimmy
if you’ve read volume two of these diaries
(
Purgatory
). He was the
good-looking captain of football who had a three-year sentence for selling
cannabis. He’s been out for a month, and has a job working on a building site.
It’s
long hours and well paid but, he admits, despite all
the sport and daily gym visits while he was in prison, he had become soft after
eighteen months of incarceration. He’s only just beginning to get back into the
work ethic. He assures me that he will never sell drugs again, and as he did
not take them in the first place, he doesn’t intend to start now. I want to
believe him. He claims to have sorted out his love life. He’s living with the
sexy one, and has ditched the intellectual one. As I now have an address and
telephone number, I will give him a call over the weekend.

After
roll-call, Doug and I go through our strategy for a smooth changeover of jobs.

However, if our
plan is to work, he suggests we must make the officers on the labour board
think that it’s their idea.

John (murder,
senior kitchen orderly) tells me over breakfast that two prisoners absconded
last night. He reminds me of an incident a couple of weeks ago when Wendy
sacked both of them from the kitchen for stealing chickens. A few days later
she gave them a reprieve, only to sack them again the following day for
stealing tins of tuna – not to eat but to trade for cannabis. They were then
put on the farm, where it’s quite hard to steal anything; the pigs are too heavy
and the Brussels sprouts are not a trading commodity. However, last night the
two prisoners were caught smoking cannabis in their room and placed on report.
They should have been up in front of the governor this morning. It’s just
possible that they might have got away with a warning, but it’s more likely
they would have been shipped back to the dreaded Lincoln Prison – to sample all
its Victorian facilities. They absconded before any decision could be taken.

I am writing in
my room when Carl knocks on the door. The Red Cross and KPMG have made a joint
statement following Baroness Nicholson’s demand for an enquiry into what
happened to the money raised for the Kurds.

It’s the lead
item on the midday news, and I am delighted to have my name cleared.

I call Alison
at the office to find that Mary is at the House of Lords attending an energy
resources meeting. Alison runs through the radio and television interview
requests received by Mary, but she’s decided only to issue this brief press
statement.

PRESS RELEASE LORD

ARCHER AND THE

SIMPLE TRUTH

CAMPAIGN

My family and I
are delighted, but not surprised, that KPMG’s investigation into the Simple
Truth campaign, spearheaded by Jeffrey in 1991, has confirmed that no funds
were misappropriated by him or anyone else. We have known this from the outset.
We are very proud of the work Jeffrey has done for Kurdish relief, the British
Red Cross and many other good causes over the years. We hope that Baroness
Nicholson, whose allegations have wasted much time and caused much unjustified
distress, will accept KPMG’s findings.

Mary Archer

Lady Thatcher
has come out saying she’s not surprised by the outcome of the enquiry, which
has dropped to the second item on the news following the death, at the age of
ninety-two, of Dame Mary Whitehouse.