All at once a hundred thousand gallons of acid poison poured out of me and a hundred thousand pounds of lead fell from my shoulders.
“Yes. Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid that you are absolutely right.”
“If you wouldn’t mind coming with us, sir? I am arresting you now and will shortly make a formal charge at the station.”
I was so happy, so blissfully, radiantly, wildly happy that if I could have sung I would have sung. If I could have danced I would have danced. I was free. At last I was free. I was going on a journey now where every decision would be taken for me, every thought would be thought for me and every day planned for me. I was going back to school.
I almost giggled at the excitement and televisual glamour of the handcuffs, one for my right wrist the other for the policeman’s left.
“If you’ll just put your hand in my jacket pocket, sir, like so …”
Of course, the hotel. The sight of a criminal youth being led away in handcuffs was no kind of happy advertisement for the Wiltshire Hotel, Swindon. Cuffed together then, each of us with a hand in his left pocket, the two of us, followed by the silent other who carried my suitcase, descended the stairs.
The two receptionists stood on tiptoe to watch me go. I gave them a small, sad, sweet smile as I left. And do you know what? One of them, the elder of the two, perhaps a mother herself, smiled back. One of the warmest smiles I have ever been given.
I expected to be pushed into a waiting police car, but no, we walked on and soon I saw the reason why. Directly opposite the hotel doors, not thirty yards away, was a huge building with a blue sign.
WILTSHIRE CONSTABULARY
“I hope I get special consideration,” I said, “for being easy on the legwork.”
The policeman not attached to me smiled. I was smiling, everyone was smiling. It was a glorious day.
“Special consideration for being such a prannett as to commit a crime within sight of a police station?” said the policeman. “Special extra sentencing more like. We do like a challenge, you know.”
The most important consideration, the only consideration so far as I was concerned, was to keep my identity a secret. They could charge me as a John Doe, or whatever the British equivalent might be—not Fred Bloggs surely?—and I would be happy. But they must never find out my real name. There was no reason that they should, I argued. I had been travelling for some weeks now as Edward Bridges. How could they connect this non-person to Stephen Fry of Booton, Norfolk?
I sat in my little police cell and hummed a hum to myself. I imagined that once they had totted up all the depredations made on the Access card I would serve at least two years in prison. Two years in which I could do some serious writing, perhaps even apply to retake my A levels. I would emerge, newly qualified, write a postcard to my parents to let them know that everything was all right, and then start life again. Properly.
In the interview room, the same two officers, a detective constable and a detective sergeant, played that fiendish role game in which each of them adopts a different stance towards the accused. The version they played was Nice Cop and Even Nicer Cop, each competing with the other for the part of Even Nicer Cop. It is hard not to crumble under such a cunningly vicious approach.
“I mean you’re a young lad, you’re well-spoken,” said Nice Cop.
Ah, that wonderful English euphemism, “well-spoken.” I was well-spoken, certainly, but not well-spoken of.
“You could only be the son of very understanding parents,” said Even Nicer Cop. “They’ll be so worried.”
“Maybe you’re on the missing child register,” said Nice. “It would take us a bit of time, but we’d find out in the end.”
“Try one of these,” said Even Nicer, offering up a pack of Benson and Hedges. “Not quite so rough on the throat as those Embassys, I think you’ll find.”
“It’s just that I’ve given my parents enough grief already,” I said. “I’m eighteen now and I’d like to take responsibility for this on my own.”
“Now that,” said Nice, “is very commendable. But let’s think it through for a moment. I reckon if you want to stop giving your parents grief, you’ll let us call them up straight away. That’s the way I see it.”
“But you don’t know them!” I said. “They’ll descend in a swoop with lawyers and things and I … I just couldn’t face it.”
“Hey up, I reckon it’s time for a cup of tea,” said Even Nicer. “Let me guess … white, two sugars? Am I right?”
“Spot on. Thank you.”
Nice and I chewed the fat awhile.
“See,” said Nice. “If we don’t know your name it’s very hard for us to charge you. We know that you have dishonestly obtained a pecuniary advantage for yourself by using a stolen credit card, but for all we know, you are wanted for murder in Bedfordshire or rape in Yorkshire.”
“Oh but I’m not!”
“Technically,” said Nice, “you have also been guilty of forgery. Every time you sign one of those credit card vouchers you forge a signature, isn’t that right?”
I nodded.
“Well now you see, it’s more or less up to us. If we charge you for forgery, you’ll go to prison for at least five years.”
“Five years!”
“Woah, woah, woah … I said if. If, mind.”
I chewed my lower lip and pondered. There was a question that had been bugging me since my arrest. “I wonder if you mind me asking you something?” I said.
“Ask away, son.”
“Well, it’s just this. How did you find me?”
“How did we find you?”
“Yes. I mean, there you were in my hotel room. Was it the wristwatch, had you followed me from the jewellers?”
“Wristwatch?” Nice frowned and made a note.
Oops. They had known nothing about the Ingersoll.
“What then?”
“It was your shoes, son.”
“My shoes?”
“When you checked into the hotel, the girl at reception, she noticed how your shoes were very tatty, see? ‘A tramp’s shoes’ she called them. After you’d gone up to the room, she thinks to herself. ‘A young man like that, nice suit, but tatty shoes. Something not right, there.’ So she calls up the credit card company and they tell her that the card you gave her when you checked in, that was a stolen card. So she rings us up, see? Simple really.”
“And what was the first thing I went out and bought?” I moaned, looking up at the ceiling like a rabbi at prayer. “A nice new pair of shoes.”
“Smart girl. Always look at the shoes first,” Nice said approvingly. “Didn’t Sherlock Holmes say that very thing once?”
The door opened and Even Nicer popped his head round, “Oh, Stephen, one thing I forgot to ask …”
“Yes?”
“Ah,” said Even Nicer. “Aha! So it is Stephen, then? Stephen Fry.”
What a pratt, I mean, what a gibbon. Not since Gordon Jackson replied to the German guard’s English “Good luck” with an instant “Thank you!” as he and Dickie Attenborough climbed aboard the bus to freedom in The Great Escape has anyone been so irretrievably, unforgivably, slappably dumb.
“Oh,” I said. “That was a bit silly of me, wasn’t it?”
“Well frankly, Stephen, yes it was,” said Even Nicer. “Stephen Fry was the name on three of the books in your suitcase, see.”
“But,” said Nice, “knowing your name does make our lives easier and when our lives are easier, your life is easier.”
I was on the register of missing children, having been placed there weeks before my eighteenth birthday so within minutes my parents had been telephoned. Within minutes of that I had myself a brief, as we lags call them. My godmother and her husband lived near Abingdon, and he was a lawyer. My parents acted swiftly.
The first night was spent in the police cells. I was in a fever of worry about seeing my parents in the magistrate’s court the next morning. I didn’t want to break down, I wanted to show them that I, and no
one else, was taking responsibility for all this. I thought that if they heard through the police that I had refused all thought of bail, it might send them the signal that I was prepared to face my music alone. Nice and Even Nicer, once they began to get some picture of the full extent of my travels, told me that it might take a long time for my case to come to trial, for there was a great deal of paperwork to be gone through from several English counties. These things always took time.
The morning passed in such a rush that I barely remember anything about it, except that I was marched up from the cells, placed in a dock, a policeman beside me, and asked my name and age.
“The question of bail?” the magistrate asked.
“Your honour, bail is not requested in this case,” said my lawyer.
A look towards me from the magistrate as of a camel inspecting a blow fly and a note was made.
There was muttering talk from the police solicitor concerning the collation of paperwork at which the magistrate grunted and placed me on remand to reappear in another two weeks, by which time the police solicitor should have framed a complete set of charges to which it would be possible for me to plead. Straight from the police court I was led, daring to look up just once to see if I could spot my parents in the gallery, into a van and towards prison.
They had been there. I had seen my mother’s anxious face, desperate to catch my eye and give me a warm smile. I had tried to smile back, but I had not known how. That old curse again. How to smile. If I smiled too broadly it might look like triumphalism; if I smiled too weakly it might look like a feeble bid for sympathy. If I smiled somewhere in between it would, I knew, look, as always, like plain smugness. Somehow I managed to bare my teeth in a manner that expressed, I hope, sorrow, gratitude, determination, shame, remorse and resolve.
There again, why should I have to design a smile or an expression? If I felt all those things, which I did, why should I have to act them? Did normal people question their smiles and looks, did they go into lathers of insecurity about the impressions they gave, the figures they cut? If I truly cared about what people thought, surely I would alter not my reactions, but my actions. I would change my behaviour, not the nuance of my smiles. Or did I think that style was parent, not the child of substance? And was I right, deep down, ultimately right, to think so?
The van, in which I was the only prisoner, sped along the motorway until we crossed the border into the brand-new county of Avon, passing by the Chippings—Chipping Norton, Chipping Hamden and Chipping Sodbury. Hadn’t there been a boy called Meade at Stouts Hill who lived at Chipping Sodbury? A dim memory returned to me of us all once crowding round Meade and teasing him about his buckteeth and of him fighting back with the gloriously pre-war riposte, “You’re rotters, all of you. Nothing but utter rotters!” I had immediately taken his side because “utter rotter” was a phrase my mother used—still uses to this day on those rare occasions when she is moved to disapproval—and this made me feel that Meade must be a good thing. Strange the ways in which loyalty to one’s parents can show itself: never when they are there and when they would cut off a finger to see the tiniest scrap of evidence of filial devotion, but always when they are miles away. I visited a boy’s parents one Sunday for tea when I was eight or nine and saw that they used Domestos in their lavatory, not Harpic which we used at home, and I remember thinking poorly of these people because of it. We were Vim, Persil Fairy Liquid and RAC, other families were Ajax, Omo, Sqweezee and AA and one pitied them and felt slightly repelled: didn’t they realise they had got it all wrong? Fierce pride in one’s parents’ choice of bathroom scourers, withering contempt for their opinions on anything concerning life, the world and oneself.
The van stopped at a large set of gates.
“What’s this place called?” I asked the policeman cuffed to me.
“Didn’t they tell you, son? It’s called Pucklechurch.”
“Pucklechurch?” I said.
“Ah. Pucklechurch.”
“But that’s so friendly! It sounds so sweet.”
“Well, lad,” said the policeman, getting to his feet. “I don’t think that’s precisely the idea.”
Pucklechurch was a prison for young offenders on remand. I think all the inmates were between sixteen and twenty-five, and either awaiting sentencing or allocation to major prisons.
You will find that there are two states of being when you are placed on remand. Con and Non Con. A non con is technically innocent of any crime: he is confined because bail has been denied him or because he cannot afford it. He has either pleaded not guilty or else, as in my case, he has not yet had a chance to plead: either way, the law regards him as guiltless until proven otherwise. The cons, however, the cons have pleaded guilty and await their trial and sentencing.
Non cons wore brown uniforms, could receive as many visitors a day as they pleased, have as much food brought in as they could eat and were not obliged to work. They could spend their own money, watch television and enjoy themselves.
For the first two weeks, that, then, is more or less what I did. I settled down in B wing, very happily, with a cell to myself. The only moment of pity and terror came when my parents visited on the third day.
I pictured them trying to decide which day might be best for a visit. Not the very first day because I would still be finding my feet. The second day too, that might still look too quick and swoopy. The fourth day would perhaps give the impression of indifference. They wanted to show that they cared and that they loved me: the third day was the best day.
You have all seen prison visiting rooms on television or in the cinema. You can picture the distress of parents, sitting on one side of a glass cage and watching their son being led forwards in prison uniform. We did our best. They smiled, they gave straight-lipped nods of firm encouragement. There was no questioning, no recrimination, no overflow of emotion.
The moment that tried me the most sorely came when, as the interview drew to a close, my mother took from her handbag a fat wadge of crosswords neatly clipped from the back page of The Times. She had saved the crossword every day since I had been away, removing the answers from the previous day’s puzzle with completely straight, careful scissor strokes. When she pushed them under the window and I saw what they were I made a choking noise and closed my eyes. I tried to smile and I tried not to breathe in, because I knew that if I breathed in the choke would turn into a series of huge heaving sobs that might never end.
There was more love in every straightly snipped cut than one might think was contained in the whole race of man.
I watched them go and lurched dumbly towards the prison officer who turned me round and led me back to my cell.
Prison officers, known of course as screws, found themselves at this point at an embarrassing sartorial mid-point. The older guard still wore the black of Mr. McKay in Porridge, their proud chests glistening with a whistle chain that led from a silver tunic button into a pleated breast pocket, while the newer officers had to bear the indignity of a sort of light-blue suiting that made them look something between Postman Pat and a mimsy Lufthansa steward. They felt it keenly, you could tell.
The prison currency then was tobacco, called “burn.” I dare say drugs are now the gold standard, but in my day I never heard of any drugs proliferating at Pucklechurch. My parents had given me enough money to buy cigarettes, so all was fine for that first two weeks, which passed in a blur of letter writing and crossword solving. I was left very much to myself, as were all non cons.
The day came, however, when I had to ride back in a police van to Swindon to make my plea. The police solicitor had decided, in the light of the dozens and dozens of uses I had made of the credit cards, that four specimen charges would be presented. You can see a photocopy of the Memorandum of the Court Order in the picture section of this book.
I pleaded guilty to all four charges, one of the straight theft of a watch, contrary to Section 7 of the Theft Act of 1968 (which raises the question, what on earth could b
e the offences covered by sections 1-6?), the other three charges being that I did, by deception, obtain a pecuniary advantage for myself contrary to that same Theft Act, Section 15. The Clerk of the Court in Swindon, you will notice, has rather sweetly typed “pecunairy” in each instance.
The moment the fourth “guilty” had mumbled from my lips I was instantly a con, convicted not by the court, but out of my own mouth and my status at Pucklechurch was to change.
For this second appearance in Swindon was by no means my trial. A probation officer was appointed by the court to look into my case, my history and my future. The trial was set for November the first, a whole month and a half away. I still stoutly refused bail and, returning in the van, resigned myself to the prospect of seven weeks of “real bird.”
The first thing to change was the colour of my uniform. Next, my accommodation. I was marched to A wing, shouted at nose to nose every time I slowed down or looked from left to right, and told that I had better get used, pretty fucking quick, to being treated like the shitty little villain that I was.
The only burn to be got now was from work. If you worked every day you might get just enough to buy a half ounce of Old Holborn tobacco to last you the week and two packs of cigarette papers, these were standard Rizla+ rolling papers, but presented in buff coloured packaging with HM PRISONS ONLY printed at an angle across the flap.
Work was assigned: you either mopped and polished the floor (a great treat because you got to use the electric floor polisher) or you worked in the “shop,” painting toy soldiers. I sometimes tried to imagine the children who received for Christmas a set of Napoleonic plastic soldiers, hand painted by prisoners, and how they would react if they knew the provenance. Now, of course, one knows that most children’s toys, from Barbie dolls to the latest Disney fashion imperatives, have been constructed under conditions often a great deal worse than those of Pucklechurch, in which young men sat, tongues out, happily plying the Humbrol in a well-heated room, like enthusiastic members of the Stouts Hill Model Club, with Simon Bates and Radio 1 blaring out good fun pop. After four weeks spent in this dozily lulling routine work, I was promoted to floor mopping, what we used to call at Uppingham “lav fag.”