Hell (17 page)

Overslept, but
then woken by the Alsatians off on their morning rounds. They are every bit as
reliable as an alarm clock, but not as cheerful or optimistic as a cockerel. I
put on a tracksuit, sit down at my desk and write for two hours.

A bowl of cornflakes with UHT milk, plus the added luxury of a
banana which Del Boy has smuggled out of the canteen.
I sit on the end
of the bed and wait to see what fate has in store for me.

I’m told I must
report to the workshops, despite putting my name down for education.

Another long trek to a different part of the building.
This
time we’re escorted into a large square room about the same size as the chapel,
but with whitewashed, unadorned brick walls. The first person I recognize is
Fletch, who is seated next to a prison officer behind a trestle table at the
top of the room.

He’s obviously
the works manager.

The work room
has five rows of tables, each about thirty feet in length, with prisoners
seated on both sides making up a chain gang. My group consists of four inmates
whose purpose is to fill a small plastic bag with all the ingredients necessary
to make a cup of tea. In the
centre
of the table
placed between us are large plastic buckets heaped with small packets. At the
bottom end of the table sits a silent Serb, who places four sachets of sugar in
each bag and then pushes his contribution across the table to a Lebanese man
who adds three sachets of milk.

He then passes
the bag on to an inmate from Essex who drops in three teabags, before it’s
passed over to me. My job is to seal up the bag and drop it in the large open
bucket at my end of the table.

Every fifteen
minutes or so another prisoner, whose name I never discover, comes and empties
the bucket. This mind-numbing exercise continues for approximately two hours,
for which I will be credited with two pounds in my canteen account.

The Serb
(sugar) who sits at the other end of the table is, I would guess, around
thirty.

He’s unwilling
to discuss anything except the fate of ex-President
Milošević
,
and the fact that he isn’t cooperating with the European Court in
the
Hague. He will not talk about his crime or the length of
his sentence.

Ali, the
Lebanese man (powdered milk) who sits opposite me, is more forthcoming.

He’s been found
guilty of ‘breach of trust’. Ali tells me that he worked for a well-known
credit-card company, and after several years was promoted to manager of a
London branch. During that time he became infatuated with an American lady, who
could best be described as high-maintenance, and used to the sort of lifestyle
he couldn’t afford. Ali began to borrow (his words) money from the company safe
each night. He would then take her to a casino, where they would have a free
meal, before he began working the tables. If he won, he would put the money
back in the safe the next morning. If he lost, he would borrow even more the
following evening. One night he won £5,000 and returned every penny the
following day.

By the time his
girlfriend had dumped him and flown back to the States, Ali had ‘borrowed’
£28,000. He decided to come clean and report the whole incident to his boss,
assuring the company that it was his intention to repay every penny.

Ali then sold
his house, cashed in his
lifeinsurance
policy, pawned
a few valuables and reimbursed the company in full. He was later arrested,
charged with breach of trust, and last Friday sent down for eighteen months. He
will probably end up serving seven months and is due to be transferred to Ford
(D-cat) next week. He is fifty-three, an intelligent and articulate man, who
accepts that he will never be able to work in this country again. He plans to
go to America or return to the Lebanon, where he hopes to begin a new life.

My former
secretary, Angie
Peppiatt
, the Crown’s main witness
in my case, admitted to the same offence – breach of trust – while giving
evidence at my trial. In her case she wasn’t able to explain how thousands of
pounds went missing, other than to smile at the judge and say, ‘I have done
things I am ashamed of, but it was the culture of the time.’ I have recently
asked my solicitor to place the full details in the hands of the police and see
if she is subject to the same rigorous inquiry as I was. You may well know the
answer by the time this book is published.

The Essex man
(teabags) sitting next to Ali boasts to anyone who cares to listen that he is a
professional gangster who specializes in robbing banks. The gang consists of his
brother-in-law, a friend and himself. He tells me they make a very profitable
living, but expect to spend at least half of their working lives in jail. He
and Ali could not be more different.

The prisoner
who turns up every fifteen minutes to empty the large bucket at the end of the
table doesn’t hang around, so I can’t discover much about him, other than he’s
twenty-three, this is his first offence, his case hasn’t come before the court
yet, and he’s hoping to get off. If he doesn’t, he tells me, he’ll use the time
to study for an Open University history degree. I don’t think he realizes that
he’s just admitted that he’s guilty.

A hooter blasts
to indicate that the one hundred and twenty minutes are finally up, we are all
escorted back to our separate spurs, and banged up again until lunch.

12
noon
Lunch.
What’s on offer is so bad that I have to settle for a small tin of Heinz potato
salad (61p) and three
McVitie’s
biscuits (17p). As I
return from the hotplate I see Andy leaning up against the fence that divides
the spur from the canteen area. He pushes a bottle of Highland Spring through a
triangle of wire mesh – the high point of my day.

The Chaplain,
David
Powe
, makes an unscheduled visit to my cell.
He’s wearing his dog collar, the same beige coat, the same dark grey trousers,
and the same shoes as he has at the previous meetings. I can only conclude that
he must be paid even less than the prison officers. He’s kept his promise and
got hold of some drawing paper for Derek Jones, who can’t afford more than one
pad a week.

The Chaplain
goes on to tell me that he and his family will be off on holiday for the next
three weeks, and just in case he doesn’t see me again, he would like to wish me
luck with my appeal, and hopes I’ll be sent in the near future to somewhere a
little less foreboding than
Belmarsh
. Before he
leaves, I read to him my description of the service he conducted last week. He
chuckles at the Cain and Abel reference – a man able to laugh at himself. He
leaves me a few moments later to go in search of Derek, and hand over the
drawing pads.

It was some
hours later that I felt racked with guilt by the thought he must have paid for
the paper out of his own pocket.

My door is
unlocked by
Ms
Taylor who enters the cell carrying
what looks like a tuning fork. She goes over to my window and taps the four
bars one by one.

‘Just want to
make sure you haven’t loosened them, or tried to replace them,’ she explains.
‘Wouldn’t want you to escape, would we?’

I’m puzzled by
Ms
Taylor’s words because it’s a sheer drop of some seventy
feet from the third floor down to the exercise yard, and then you would still
have to climb over a thirty-five-foot wall, topped with razor wire, to escape.
Houdini would have been stretched to consider such a feat. I later learn that
there’s another thirty-five-foot wall beyond that, not to mention a few dozen
Alsatians who don’t respond to the command, ‘Sit, Rover.’

I can only
conclude it’s in the prison manual under the heading, ‘tasks to be carried out,
once a day, once a week, once a year, once in a lifetime’.
*

I’ve put my
name down for the gym again as I’m now desperate to get some exercise.

When an officer hollers out, ‘Gym,’ I’m first in the queue that
congregates on the middle floor.
When the gate is opened, I’m informed
by the duty Gym Instructor that only eight prisoners can participate from any
one spur, and my name was the twelfth to be registered
The
low point of my day.

I return to the
ground floor and watch the first half of a Humphrey Bogart black-
andwhite
movie, where Bogey is a sea dog who plays a major
part in winning the war in the North Atlantic. However, we are all sent back to
our cells at five, so I never discover if it was the Germans or the Americans
who won the last War.

I have an
unscheduled visit from two senior officers,
Mr
Scanell
and
Mr
Green. To be fair,
most meetings in prison are unscheduled; after all, no one calls in advance to
fix an appointment with your diary secretary. They are concerned that I am no
longer going out into the yard during the afternoon to take advantage of
forty-five minutes of fresh air and exercise. They’ve heard a
rumour
that on my last outing I was threatened by another
prisoner, and for that reason I’ve remained in my cell. They ask me if this is
true, and if so, am I able to supply them with any details of those who
threatened me. I tell them exactly what took place in the yard, but add that I
am unwilling to name or describe the young
tearaway
involved. They leave twenty minutes later with several pages of their report
sheet left blank.

I ask Tony what
would have happened if I’d told them the name of the two culprits.

‘They would
have been transferred to another prison later today,’ Tony replied.

‘Wouldn’t it be
easier for them to transfer me?’ I suggest.

‘Good heavens,
no,’ said Tony. ‘That would demand a degree of lateral thinking, not to mention
common sense.’

Supper.
Vegetable stew and a lollipop.
The lollipop was superb.

Fletch visits
my cell and tries to convince me that it’s my duty to name the cons who
threatened me in the yard, because if I don’t, it won’t be long before they’re
doing exactly the same thing to someone less able to take care of themselves.
He makes a fair point, but I suggest what the headlines would be the following
day if I had given the officers the names:
Archer
beaten up in yard; Archer demands extra protection; Under-staffed prison
service doing overtime to protect Archer, Archer reports prisoner to screw
.

No, thank you,
I tell Fletch, I’d rather sit in my cell and write. He sighs, and before
leaving, hands me his copy of the
Daily
Telegraph
. It’s a luxury to have a seventy-
twopage
paper, even if it is yesterday’s. I devour every page.

The lead story
is a poll conducted for the
Telegraph
by
youGov.com showing that, although Iain Duncan Smith is running 40–60 behind Ken
Clarke in the national polls, he is comfortably ahead with the Party
membership. It seems to be a no-win situation for the Conservatives. The only
person who must be laughing all the way to the voting booth is Tony Blair.

I have a visit
from Paul, a tea-boy – which is why he’s allowed to roam around while the rest
of us are banged up. He says he has something to tell me, so I pick up my pad,
sit on the end of the bed and listen.

Paul is about
six foot one, a couple of hundred pounds and looks as if he could take care of
himself in a scrap. He begins by telling me that he’s just been released from a
drug-rehabilitation course at the Princess Diana
centre
in Norfolk. It’s taken them eight months to wean him off his heroin addiction.

I immediately
enquire if he now considers himself cured. Paul just sits there in silence and
avoids answering my question. It’s obviously not what he came to talk to me
about.

He then
explains that during his rehab, he was made to write a long self-assessment
piece and asks if I will read it, but he insists that no one else on the spur
must find out its contents.

‘I wouldn’t
bother you with it,’ he adds, ‘if it were not for the fact that several prisoners
on this spur have had similar experiences, and they’re not necessarily the ones
you might expect.’ He leaves without another word.

If you were to
come across Paul at your local, you would assume he was a middleclass
successful businessman (he’s in jail for credit-card fraud). He’s intelligent,
articulate and charming. In fact he doesn’t look any different to the rest of
us, but then why should he? He just doesn’t want anyone to know about his past,
and I’m not talking about his ‘criminal past’.

As soon as my
cell door is closed, I begin to read the self-assessment piece that is written
in
his own
hand. He had a happy upbringing until the
age of six when his parents divorced. Two years later his mother remarried.
After that, he and his brothers were regularly thrashed by their stepfather.
The only person he put any trust in was an uncle who befriended him and turned
out to be a
paedophile
. His next revelation I would
not consider for a plot in a novel, because it turns out that his uncle is now
locked up on House Block Two, convicted of indecent assault on an
underaged
youth. The two men can see each other through the
wire mesh across the yard during the afternoon exercise period.