Surely justice and truth matter to such a man. We shall soon find out.
DAY 158
SUNDAY 23 DECEMBER 2001
8.35 am
The Sunday Telegraph reports that I’ve written a 300,000-word novel entitled Sons of Fortune during the short time I’ve been in prison. It might seem short to them, but it’s been 158 days for me.
I actually wrote the first three drafts of the novel before my conviction. I had planned to drive from Boston (Connecticut) to Newhaven via Hartford, where the book is set, and research the final points before Mr Justice Potts intervened. I ended up spending the month of August not in the US, but in Belmarsh writing the first diary.
9.00 am
Five inmates’ names are called over the tannoy. They are told to report to the doctor, which means they’ve been charged and will later be up in front of the governor for adjudication: two for smoking cannabis, one for being drunk, one for secreting £25 in a cigarette tin, and finally Hal, who you will recall thumbed a lift back from Boston, while in possession of a bottle of vodka, a bottle of rum and a six-pack of Fosters. Hal did point out to me that it’s a twelve-mile round trip to Boston and back to NSC, and it was 2 degrees below zero. I don’t think the governor will consider these to be mitigating circumstances!
Hal loses all privileges, and has twenty-one days added to his sentence.
11.00 am
The governor, Mr Lewis, who has only a few days to go before retirement, pops into the hospital to check on the end of year audit, or was it just to enjoy a cup of coffee with Linda and a cigar during his morning break? As he’s leaving, I ask him to tell me a story.
‘What about my memoirs?’ he protests, but then recounts an anecdote from his time as governor of Oxford Prison: two brothers were charged with a burglary, but the elder did not feel his younger brother would be able to cope with a spell in jail, so he took the rap and was sentenced to six months. As it turned out, the younger brother couldn’t cope with being ‘on the out’ without his elder brother, so he stole a ladder, climbed over the prison wall and broke into jail. No one was any the wiser until roll-call that night, when the duty officer reported that they had one more prisoner than was on the manifest. The younger brother was arrested and charged with breaking into a prison. He got three months, and ended up sharing a cell with his brother.
Mr Lewis went on to tell me about two prisoners who escaped from Oxford Crown Court while handcuffed to each other. They ran down the street pursued by the police, but when they came to a zebra crossing, one decided to cross the road while the other kept on going. The handcuffs that bound them together collided with the Belisha beacon at full speed, and they swung round and knocked each other out.
DAY 159
CHRISTMAS EVE
Today is a nightmare for security. First there are the truly stupid inmates who abscond sometime during the morning and then return to the prison on Boxing Day evening. If they are also drunk, they are allowed to sleep it off, with twenty-eight days added to their sentence. Second are the group who slip out to Boston and arrive back with provisions and food. As long as they remain in their rooms and cause no trouble, the officers turn a blind eye. Should they cause any trouble, they also get twenty-eight days. This is known as ‘Nelson time’, and occurs only at Christmas.
It must seem madness to you, but when you have 211 inmates and only 5 officers on duty, it’s no more than common sense. Why aren’t there more officers on duty? Because the service is understaffed and underpaid. The average prison officer is paid £17,000 a year, and this year’s pay rise was 1.8 per cent. Why not send the offenders back to a closed prison? Because they are all already overcrowded (67,500 in Britain) and if you did, the D-cats would be empty. Then cut down on D-cats? If you did that, you would never rehabilitate anyone. Prisoners in a D-cat used to be released at 8 am (with the exception of lifers) on Christmas Eve and had to return to prison before 8 pm on Boxing Day. But Michael Howard put a stop to that when he became Home Secretary. This little break was more for the staff than the prisoners.
7.30 am
Dave (murder) is among the walking wounded, and comes to surgery doubled up with stomach cramps. Sister gives him painkillers that contain certain opiates. She then has to make out a separate form, which I take across to security because if Dave were to have an MDT he would show up positive. Sister is especially vigilant in these cases, looking out for those prisoners who fake the pain in order to get the drugs, especially when they know they’re about to be tested for heroin. In Dave’s case, there is no doubt that he’s in real pain, and any case, he’s been a model prisoner since the day he arrived at NSC. He’s desperate to impress the parole board and be released as soon as possible. He’s already served twenty-one years, and his wife says she can’t wait much longer.
9.00 am
Despite its being Christmas Eve, one inmate will not be able to avoid a nicking because he has pushed his luck a little too far. During an MDT, he attempted to exchange a tube of someone else’s urine for his while he was in the loo. It turns out that he got this drug-free sample from another prisoner in exchange for a Mars Bar.
11.00 am
Sue from accounts drops into the hospital to tell me that my private money has run out, and that’s why my canteen account only showed £1.20 in credit. Had she let me know a week ago, I could have asked Mary to top it up. However, Sue explains that she is not allowed to let a prisoner know that his money is running low, and can only inform him if he asks directly for his account balance. The reason is that most inmates are penniless, and don’t need to be continually reminded of that fact. Fair enough.
8.00 pm
Doug returns from the canteen laden with goodies, and tells me that an inmate has just been nicked for ordering a taxi to take him on a round trip to Boston. The cab company phoned the prison, so two officers were waiting when the inmate returned. He was caught in possession of forty-eight cans of lager and one bottle each of whisky, vodka and brandy. He also had six packets of fish and chips, a melon, a carton of strawberries, a pot of cream and a box of jellied eels.
The prisoner begged to be placed in the segregation cell overnight in case the inmates who had lost their ‘Christmas cheer’ thought he’d sold the goodies to someone else. The duty officer duly obliged, but he’ll still be up in front of the governor on Boxing Day.
DAY 160
CHRISTMAS DAY
Christmas Day for those who are incarcerated can be summed up in one word: dreadful. I have learned during the last 159 days as a prisoner how perverse reality is.
I go to work today, as every other day, and am grateful for something to do. At the seven-thirty surgery, only six prisoners report for sick parade; you have to be really ill to get up at 7.30 am on Christmas morning and troop across to the hospital when the temperature on the east coast is minus two degrees.
At eight-fifteen I go to breakfast, and even though it’s eggs, bacon and sausage served by the officers (Mr Hocking, Mr Camplin, Mr Baker and Mr Gough), only around forty of the two hundred inmates bother to turn up.
On returning to the hospital, Linda and I unload bags of food from her car so I can hold a tea party for my friends this afternoon. She also gives me a present, which is wrapped in Christmas paper. I open it very slowly, trying to anticipate what it might be. Inside a neat little box is a china mug, with a black cat grinning at me. Now I have my own mug, and will no longer have to decide between a Campbell’s Soup giveaway and a plain white object with a chip when I have my morning Bovril.
10.00 am
Linda leaves me in charge of the hospital while she attends the governor’s Christmas party. Frankly, if over half the prisoners weren’t still in bed asleep, I could arrange for them all to abscond. When the tabloids claim I have privileges that the other prisoners do not have, in one respect they are right; I am lucky to be able to carry on with the job I do on the outside. While everyone else tries to kill time, I settle down to write for a couple of hours.
> 12 noon
Lunch is excellent, and once again served by the officers, and shared with a half dozen old-age pensioners from the local village; tomato soup, followed by turkey, chipolatas, roast potatoes and stuffing, with as much gravy as will go on the plate. I don’t allow myself the Christmas pudding — several officers have kindly commented on the fact that I’m putting on weight (nine pounds in nine weeks).
After lunch I walk over to the south block and phone Mary and the boys. All things considered they sound pretty cheerful, but I can’t hide the fact that I miss them. My wife is fifty-seven, my boys twenty-nine and twenty-seven, and today I’m surrounded by men sitting in their rooms staring at photographs of young children anywhere from six months to fifteen years old. Yes, they deserve to be incarcerated if they committed a crime, but we should remember it is Christmas Day, and it’s not their families who are guilty.
As I walk back through the block, I notice that those not in the TV room or on the phone are just lying on their beds willing the day to pass. I have so much food in my fridge that I invite a dozen inmates over to join me in the hospital.
They all turn up, without exception. We watch The Great Escape (somewhat ironic) and enjoy Linda’s feast — pork pies, crisps, sausage rolls, shortbread biscuits, KitKats and, most popular of all with my fellow inmates, a chunk of my Cheddar cheese. This is accompanied not by Krug, but a choice of lemonade, Evian water, tea, coffee or Ribena.
They laugh, they chat, they watch the film, and when they leave, David (fraud, schoolmaster) pays me a compliment I have never received at any of my champagne and shepherd’s pie parties. ‘Thank you for getting rid of the afternoon so pleasantly.’
DAY 161
BOXING DAY
7.30 am
For those prisoners who do not return to work, Boxing Day is almost worse than Christmas Day. Very few inmates attend surgery this morning, and certainly none of them have any illness worth reporting.
8.13 am
Over breakfast, I learn another terrible consequence of the drug culture in prisons. Jim (antiques only), the gym orderly, tells me that some inmates who are addicted to heroin often die within a few months of leaving prison. The reason? The heroin they take in jail is always weaker because the dealers add other substances such as caster sugar, talc or flour. So when they are released, they are immediately exposed to a purer substance, which the body can no longer tolerate. Result? They end up dying of an overdose.
11.00 am
The governor drops in to see Linda, and gives me a Christmas present and a birthday present for Mary, neither of which he’s allowed to do, as it could compromise him should I ever come up in front of him on report. However, as it’s only a few days before he retires, I suppose he feels this is unlikely.
It turns out that the governor is a collector of farthings, and he gives Mary a farthing dated 1944 and I receive one dated 1940 — our respective years of birth. I am touched. He also brings in three volumes of The World’s Greatest Paintings: Selected Masterpieces, published in 1934 and edited by T. Leman Hare, for me to read over Christmas. He understands what turns me on.
The three volumes are fascinating at several levels, not least because of the one hundred pictures, almost all of them would be in an equivalent compilation circa 2002. The paintings include da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Bellini’s Portrait of the Doge Lorendano, Rembrandt’s Mother, Landseer’s Shoeing the Bay Mare (wonderful) and Yeames’ When Did You Last See Your Father? However, in this 1934 volume, there is no mention of the Impressionists; no examples of Monet, Manet, Van Gogh or even Cézanne. Velasquez is described as the greatest Spanish painter of all time, with Murillo in second place. I wonder if Professor Hare had even heard of Picasso in 1934, and where he would place him in the lexicon of Spanish artists in 2002.
There are only two artists I have never come across before: John MacWhiter and Millet — not Jean-Francois Millet, but an American, Francis David Millet. ‘On the out’ I visit Tate Britain regularly—I live opposite, on the other side of the river — but I don’t remember seeing either MacWhiter’s June in the Austrian Tyrol (magnificent), or Millet’s Between Two Fires. I hope Sir Nicholas Serota has them on display, because Tate Britain will be among the first places I visit once I’m released.
In his foreword, Professor Hare writes something that, in my opinion, is even more relevant today than it was in 1934:
There is so much nonsense spoken and written about art today that the average man is, naturally, inclined to be shy of the whole subject, and suspicious of those who practise the Arts. He thinks, if this mass of contradiction and confusing jargon is the result of the love of Art, he had better do without Art altogether. There is no mystery about Art, but there is mystification without end, evolved by certain critics who love to pose as superior persons. Such writers put forward the theory that the enjoyment of fine arts is reserved for a select and exclusive minority, meaning of course, themselves and their disciples. No greater error could be propounded than this, which is a comparatively modern fallacy and one which is so dangerous that if persisted, it must in time bring into contempt everything and everyone connected with Art.
1934.
2002. No comment.
1.00 pm
Linda shuts up shop for the day and goes home for a well-earned rest. She has been on duty for the past nineteen days without a break.
9.00 pm
I confess that, by prison standards, I am in heaven. But I feel I ought to let you know I’m still desperate to get back to earth.
DAY 162
THURSDAY 27 DECEMBER 2001
10.00 am
Governor Lewis has received a call from Sir Brian Mawhinney, and although he can’t divulge any details, he suspects the Shadow Home Secretary will be in touch with Mary who in turn will brief me. Mystery.
The governor sips his tea. ‘As I’m leaving shortly, I’m going to tell you a story about a present member of staff who must remain anonymous. The officer concerned had a day off, and in the evening he and his wife went to their local for a drink. When they left the pub later, the officer saw a man trying to get his car started, but it sounded as if the battery was flat. The officer asked if he could help by giving a push. The driver said thank you and the officer pushed him out of the car park. The ignition caught, and the driver gave a toot of thanks as he disappeared over the horizon.
When the officer concerned returned to work the following morning, he learned that one of the inmates had absconded. The prisoner had even managed to steal a car from a local pub with the help of an obliging member of the public, who had given him a push start.’
‘It can’t be true,’ I protest. ‘Surely he recognized the prisoner?’ (To be fair, there are over two hundred inmates at NSC and the turnover is often twenty to thirty a week.)
‘You’d think so,’ replied the governor, ‘especially as the inmate was the only West Indian on the camp.’15 He laughs. The officer concerned might have even lived it down if it weren’t for the fact that neither the prisoner nor the stolen car has been seen since.’
DAY 163
FRIDAY 28 DECEMBER 2001
11.07 am
Whenever there’s a serious injury in prison, the immediate question always asked is, ‘Was another prisoner involved?’ So when Linda and I are called over to the north block to check on an inmate who is thought to have broken his leg after slipping on the floor, Linda’s first question is, ‘Who pushed him?’
By the time we arrive the duty officers, Mr Hughes and Mr Jones, are present, and they are satisfied Ron has had a genuine accident. However, there are several touches of irony in this particular case. The inmate involved is serving a six-week sentence, and is due to be released next Thursday. Last year he broke his left leg in a motorbike accident. This time he has managed to break his right leg, and several of the pins in his left have been dislodged. Linda confirms that an officer must accompany him to hospital; although how he’d abscond with two broken legs is beyond me — and why
would he want to try, six days before he’s due to be released? However, regulations are regulations.
Normally you can’t be released from prison unless you have been given a clean bill of health by the duty doctor, and in Ron’s case it will be at least six weeks before the plaster comes off.
‘We’ll let him go,’ Linda says, ‘but only if a family member picks him up next Thursday and also agrees to take responsibility for him.’
‘And if no one does?’ I ask.
‘Then he’ll stay here until he’s fully recovered.’
DAY 164
SATURDAY 29 DECEMBER 2001
2.00 pm
Mary, William and James visit me. We talk mainly of the legal issues surrounding my trial and appeal. The topic of conversation then turns to Baroness Nicholson. Mary has written to her asking for an apology.