10.00 am
In the morning post there is a registered letter from my solicitors. I read the pages with trembling hands. My leave to appeal against conviction has been turned down. Only my leave to appeal against length of sentence has been granted. I can’t describe how depressed I feel.
12 noon
Lunch. Doug nods in the direction of another prisoner who takes a seat at the next table. ‘That’s Roy,’ he says, ‘he’s a burglar serving his fifteenth sentence. When the judge sentenced him this time to six months, he said, thank you, my Lord, I’ll do that standing on my head.’
‘Then I’ll add a couple of months to help you get back on your feet,’ replied the judge.
3.00 pm
I call my barrister, Nick Purnell QC. He feels we should still go for an appeal on conviction because three elements of our defence have been overlooked. How can Ted Francis be innocent if I am guilty? How can Mrs Peppiatt’s evidence be relied upon when she confessed in the witness box to being a thief? How can I have perverted the course of justice, when the barrister representing the other side, Mr Shaw, said he had never considered the first diary date to be of any significance?
We also discuss the witness who could help me prove that Potts should never have taken the case. Nick warns me that Godfrey Barker is getting cold feet, and his wife claims she cannot remember the details.
5.30 pm
I see David (murder) in the corridor; he has a big grin on his face. He’ll be spending tomorrow with his wife for the first time in two decades. He’s very nervous about going out on his own, and tells me the sad story of a prisoner who went on a town visit for the first time in twenty-five years and was so frightened that he climbed up a tree. The fire service had to be called out to rescue him. The police drove him back to prison, and he’s never been out since.
6.00 pm
My evenings are now falling into a set pattern. I join Doug at six-thirty and have a bath, before watching the seven o’clock news on Channel 4.
8.15 pm
I report for roll-call, and then return to play a few games of backgammon with Clive.
10.00 pm
Final roll-call.
DAY 101
SATURDAY 27 OCTOBER 2001
8.07 am
There are some prisoners who prefer to remain in jail rather than be released: those who have become institutionalized and have no family, no friends, no money and no chance of a job. And then there is Rico.
Rico arrived at NSC from Lincoln Prison this morning. It’s his fourth burglary offence and he’s always welcomed back because he enjoys working on the farm. Rico particularly likes the pigs, and by the time he left, he knew them all by name. He even used to sleep with them at night — well, up until final roll-call. He has a single room, because no one is willing to share with him. That’s one way of getting a single room.
9.00 am
I check in at SMU, but as there are no officers around I write for two hours.
11.00 am
I try to phone Mary at Grantchester, but because the flash flood has taken the phones out, all I get is a long burr.
12 noon
On the way to lunch, I pass Peter (lifer, arson), who is sweeping leaves from the road. Peter is a six-foot-four, eighteen-stone Hungarian who has served over thirty years for setting fire to a police station, although no one was killed.
I have lunch with Malcolm (fraud) who tells me that his wife has just been released from Holloway having completed a nine-month sentence for money laundering. The £750,000 he made was placed in her account without her knowledge (Malcolm’s words) but she was also convicted. Malcolm asked to have her sentence added to his, but the judge declined.
Wives or partners are a crucial factor in a prisoner’s survival. It’s not too bad if the sentence is short, but even then the partner often suffers as much, if not more, being alone on the outside. In Mary’s case, she is now living her life in a glare of publicity she never sought.
4.15 pm
There’s a timid knock on the door. I open it to find a prisoner who wants to talk about writing a book (this occurs at least once a week). His name is Saman, and he’s a Muslim Kurd. He is currently working on a book entitled The History of Kurdistan, and wonders if I’ll read a few chapters. (Saman read engineering at a university in Kurdistan.) When he has completed his sentence, Saman wants to settle down in this country, but fears he may be deported.
‘Why are you at NSC?’ I ask him.
Saman tells me that he was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving, for which he was sentenced to three years. He’s due to be released in December.
DAY 102
SUNDAY 28 OCTOBER 2001
6.00 am
Today’s is my mother’s birthday. She would have been eighty-nine.
8.15 am
After breakfast I read The Sunday Times in the library. Rules concerning newspapers differ from prison to prison, often without rhyme or reason. At Wayland the papers were delivered to your cell, but you can’t have your own newspaper at NSC.
While I’m reading a long article on anthrax, another prisoner looks over his copy of the News of the World, and says, ‘I’m glad to find out you’re earning fifty quid a week, Jeff.’ We both laugh. He knows only too well that orderlies are paid £8.50 a week, and only those prisoners who go out to work can earn more. Funnily enough, this sort of blatant invention or inaccuracy has made my fellow inmates more sympathetic.
10.00 am
Phone Mary in Grantchester and at last get a ringing tone. She’s just got back from Munich, which she tells me went well. Not all the Germans are aware that her husband is a convict. Her book, Clean Electricity from Photovoltaics, was received by the conference with acclaim. After struggling for some years to complete volume one, she ended up selling 907 copies. Mind you, it is £110 a copy, and by scientific standards, that is a best-seller. I use up an entire phonecard (twenty units) getting myself up to date with all her news.
11.00 am
A message over the tannoy informs inmates that they can report to the drug centre for voluntarily testing. A negative result can help with parole or tagging applications. By the time I arrive, there’s already a long queue. I stand behind Alan (fraud) who is being transferred to Spring Hill tomorrow. He says he’ll write and let me know how the place compares to NSC and try and find out how my application is progressing.
I reach the head of the queue. Mr Vessey — he of the hatchet face who never smiles — points to a lavatory so I can give him a sample of urine in a little plastic bottle. He then places a filter into the bottle that will show, by five separate black lines, if I am positive or negative, for everything from cannabis to heroin. If two little black lines come up opposite each drug, then you’re clear, if only one line appears, you’ve tested positive and will be up in front of the governor first thing in the morning.
An inmate three ahead of me tests positive for cannabis, and explodes when Mr Vessey says he’ll be on report tomorrow. He storms out, mouthing expletives. Mr Vessey smiles. My own test comes up with only double lines, which is greeted with mock applause by those still waiting in the queue.
‘And pour your piss down the drain, Archer,’ says Mr Vessey. ‘If you leave it hanging around, this lot would happily sell it to the News of the World.’
12 noon
Lunch. I’m joined by Brian (chapel orderly and organist). He was convicted of conspiracy to defraud an ostrich farming company of seven million pounds. His barrister convinced him that if he pleaded not guilty, a trial could take ten months, and if he were then found guilty he might end up with a six- or seven-year sentence. He advised Brian to plead guilty to a lesser charge, so that he would be sentenced to less than four years. He took the advice, and was sentenced to three years ten months. His two co-defendants decided on a trial and the jury found them not guilty. Brian considers that pleading guilty was the biggest mistake of his life.
2.00 pm
Write for two hours.
r />
6.30 pm
I go to chapel to be joined by five other prisoners. Brian the ostrich man is playing the organ (very professionally). I take Holy Communion in memory of my mother, and can’t help reflecting that it’s my first sip of wine in three months. The vicar offers each of us a tiny plastic thimble of wine. It’s only later that I work out why: some prisoners would attend the service just to drain the chalice.
The vicar, the Rev Johnson, is over seventy. A short, dapper man, he gives us a short, dapper sermon on why he is not quite sure about born-again Christians. We then pray for those Christians who were murdered while taking part in a church service in Pakistan.
Covering the wall behind the altar and part of the ceiling is a painting of the Last Supper. After the service, the vicar tells me that a former prisoner painted it, and each of the disciples was modelled on an inmate. He chuckles, ‘Only Christ isn’t a convict.’
DAY 103
MONDAY 29 OCTOBER 2001
6.11 am
I wake early and think about home. I have a little pottery model of the Old Vicarage on the table in front of me, along with a photograph of Mary and the boys, and another of a view of Parliament from our apartment in London; quite a contrast to the view from my little room on the north block. The sky is grey and threatening rain. That’s the one thing I share with you.
8.15 am
Breakfast with Malcolm (fraud, chief librarian) and Roger (murder, twelve years so far). Malcolm is able to tell me more about the young man called Arnold who absconded last week. I recall him from his induction at SMU, a shy and nervous little creature. He was sharing a room with two of the most unpleasant men I’ve ever come across. One of them has been moved from prison to prison during the past seven months because of the disruption he causes wherever he goes, and the other is a heroin addict serving out the last months of his sentence. I have never given a moment’s thought to absconding. However, if I had to spend a single night with either of those men, I might have to reconsider my position.
8.30 am
Today I set myself the task of reorganizing the muddled and misleading notice board in the waiting room. Matthew and I spend the first thirty minutes taking down all thirty-seven notices, before deciding which are out of date, redundant or simply on the wrong notice board. Only sixteen survive. We then pin up five new neatly printed headings — drugs, education, leave, tagging and general information, before replacing the sixteen posters neatly in their correct columns. By lunchtime the waiting room is clean, thanks to Mr Clarke, and the notice board easy to understand, thanks to Matthew, although I think I’ve also earned my 25p an hour.
12 noon
I have to repeat that as far as prison food goes, NSC is outstanding. Wendy and Val (her assistant) set standards that I would not have thought possible in any institution that has only £1.27 per prisoner for three meals a day. Today I’m down for the pizza, but Wendy makes me try a spoonful of her lamb stew, because she doesn’t approve of my being a VIP (vegetarian in prison). It’s excellent, and perhaps next week I’ll risk a couple of meat dishes.
2.30 pm
The turnover at NSC is continual. Last week fifteen inmates departed, one way or another: end of sentence — twelve, moved to another prison — two, absconded — one. So after only two weeks, 20 per cent of the prison population has changed. Give me another month, and I’ll be an old lag.
While I’m washing the teacups, Matthew tells me that his father has taken a turn for the worse, and the governor has pushed his compassionate leave forward by a day. He’ll be off to Canterbury first thing in the morning, so he can be at his father’s bedside for the next ten days. He doesn’t complain about having to spend the ten nights in Canterbury Prison (B-cat), which can’t be pleasant when your father is dying, and you don’t have anyone to share your grief with.
4.30 pm
Another pile of letters awaits me when I return from work, among them missives from Chris de Burgh, Patrick Moore and Alan Coren. Alan’s letter makes me laugh so much, rather than share snippets with you, I’ve decided to print it in full. (See overleaf.) All my life I have been graced with remarkable friends, who have tolerated my ups and downs, and this latest episode doesn’t seem to have deterred them one iota.
5.00 pm
Tomorrow I’m going to the gym. I only write this to make sure I do.
6.00 pm
Write for two hours.
Alan Coren
26 October 2001
My dear Jeffrey:
Lots of forgivenesses to be begged. First off, forgive the typing, but not only is my longhand illegible, I should also be writing for some days, because I haven’t picked up a pen for anything but cheques since about 1960. More important, try to forgive the fact that I haven’t written before, but the truth is that I should so much have preferred to chat to you face to face ( albeit chained to a radiator, or whatever the social protocols required ) than to engage in the one-sided conversation of letters, so --- as you probably know—I kept trying to get a visit, and kept being turned down. Most important of all, forgive me for not trying to spring you: I have spent a small fortune on grapnels, ropes, bolt-cutters, fake number-plates, one-way tickets to Sao Paolo, and drinks for large men from the Mile End Road with busted conks and tattooed knuckles, but whenever I managed to put all these elements together, there was always a clear night and a full moon.
Anyway, I gather from your office that it might now be possible to arrange a visit, once I and they have filled in all sorts of bumf, and you have been given enough notice to stick a jeroboam of Krug on ice and slip into a brocade dressing-gown and fez, so I shall set that in train forthwith—if, of couurse, you agree. You are, by the way, bloody lucky not to be in that office now, these are bad days to be living at the top of a tall building next to MI6 and opposite the H of C --- and I speak as one who knows, having, as you’ll spot from the letterhead, recently moved to a house in Regent’s Park; where, from my top-floor study window as I type, I can see the Regent’s Park Mosque 500 metres to my right, and the American Ambassador’s residence 500 metres to my left. I am ground bloody zero right here: every time His Excellency’s helicopter trrobs in, we rush down to the cellar. Could by anybody, or anything. Since even I don’t know where Freiston is, I rather doubt that Osama bin Laden could find it, and you are further fortunate in the fact that, because every envelope to the clink is doubtless slit open, poked about in and generally vetted to the last square millimetre, if anybody’s going to get anthrax, it won’t be you.
Life goes on in London as normal: Anne and I have grown used to wearing our gas-masks in bed. though it’s still a bit of a bugger waking up in the night and unthinkingly reaching for a bedside drink, so there’s more nocturnal tumble-drying going on than there used to be. Giles and Victoria wish to be remembered to you, and want you to know that they’re fine, and settling down well with their foster parents in Timbuktu, where they tell me they have made lots of new friends among the other evacuees, although HP sauce is proving dificult to find. Your beloved Conservative Party has elected a new leader, who may be seen every day at the doors of the Commons handing out his business cards to MPs and officials who would otherwise think we was someone who had turned up to flog them personal pension schemes.
2
Are you writing a book about chokey? FF 8282 would make a terrific title. and since I am only one of countless hacks who envy you the opportunity to scribble away unencumbered by all the distractions that stop the rest of us from knocking out Finnegan’s Remembrance of War & Punishment, I would, if I were you, seriously consider not going ahead with your appeal: giving up the chance of another couple of years at the typewriter could cost you millions.
All right --- if we must --- let’s be serious for a moment: do you need anything, is there anything I can do, anyone I can see for you, all that? I know that you have truckloads of closer --- and far more influential --- friends than I, but because it’s always on the cards that there may just be something
you need that no-one else can come up with, I want you to know that I should do my very best to sort it out.
But if nothing else, do drop me the briefest of notes to let me know whether or not you’d like a visit. If you’d rather be left in peace, I should of course, understand. But it would be nice to meet for the odd laugh --- as if there could be any other kind of laugh, these days.
8.15pm
I sign in for roll-call. From tomorrow, as I will have completed my two weeks’ induction, I need only sign in at 11 am, 4 pm and 8.15 pm. Because I’ll be at work, in future, 8.15 pm will be the one time I have to appear in person. Doug says I will feel the difference immediately.
DAY 104
TUESDAY 30 OCTOBER 2001