I attend a rock concert tonight, performed by the ‘Cons and Pros.’ The standard is high, particularly Gordon (GBH) on the guitar, who sadly for the band will be released tomorrow.
8.00 pm
Doug returns from his second day at work. He has driven to Birmingham and Northampton in one day. He is exhausted, and fed up with his room-mate, who leaves the radio on all night. I’m in bed asleep by ten-thirty. You will discover the relevance of this tomorrow.
DAY 147 WEDNESDAY 12 DECEMBER 2001
2.08 am
The night security officer opens my door and shines his torch in my eyes. I don’t get back to sleep for over an hour.
5.16 am
He does it again, so I get up and start writing.
8.07 am
On my journey around the prison this morning handing out ‘off-work’ slips, I have to drop into the farm. It’s freezing and a lot of the inmates are claiming to have colds. I bump into the farm manager, Mr Donnelly, a charming man who I came to know from my days at the SMU when he sat on the labour board. He introduces me to Blossom, a beautiful creature.
Blossom weighs in at twenty-six stone, and has a broken nose and four stubby, fat hairy legs. She is lucky to be alive. Blossom is the prisoners’ favourite pig, so when her turn came for slaughter, the inmates hid her in a haystack. When Mr Donnelly was unable to find Blossom that morning she was granted a week’s reprieve. Blossom reappeared the next day, but mysteriously disappeared again when the lorry turned up the following week. Once again Mr Donnelly searched for her, and once again he failed to find her. The inmates knew that it couldn’t be long before Blossom’s hiding place was discovered, so they put in an application to the governor to buy her, so that she could spend the rest of her days at NSC in peace. Mr Donnelly was so moved by the prisoners’ concern that he lifted the death penalty and allowed Blossom to retire. The happy pet now roams around the farm, behaving literally like a pig in clover. (See below.)
Blossom and his friend Blossom
8.30 am
On my way back to the hospital after breakfast, I sense something different, and realize that Peter (lifer, arson) is not on the road sweeping the leaves as he does every morning. A security officer explains that Peter is out on a town leave in Boston; the first occasion he’s left prison in thirty-one years. I’ll try to have a word with him as soon as he returns, so that I can capture his first impressions of freedom.
9.00 am
The new inductees report to the doctor for their medical check-up. I now feel I’m settling into a routine as hospital orderly.
12 noon
Call Mary to assure her that the courts have now located my papers, and to wish her luck with our Christmas party tomorrow night. She will also be attending Denis and Margaret Thatcher’s fiftieth wedding anniversary at the East India Club earlier in the evening. She promises to call me and let me know how they both went. No, I remind her, I can only call you.
4.08 pm
An announcement over the tannoy instructs me to report to reception. I arrive to be told by Sergeant Major Daff that I have been sent two Christmas cakes – one from Mrs Gerald Scarfe, better known as Jane Asher, with a card, from which I reproduce only the final sentence:
I’m baking you a cake for Christmas with a hacksaw and file inside.
See you soon, love Jane
– and one from a ladies’ group in Middleton. As no prisoner is allowed to receive any foodstuffs in case they contain alcohol or drugs, Mr Daff agrees that one can go to the local retirement home, and the other to the special needs children. So it’s all right for the children to be stoned out of their minds and the old-age pensioners to be drugged up to the eyeballs, but not me.
‘It’s Home Office regulations,’ explains Mr Daff.
5.00 pm
I spot Peter (lifer, arson) coming up the drive. He looks in a bit of a daze, so I invite him to join me in the hospital for coffee and biscuits. We chat for nearly an hour.
The biggest shock for Peter on leaving prison for the first time in over thirty years was the number of ‘coffin dodgers’ (old people) that were on the streets of Boston doing their Christmas shopping. In 1969, the life expectancy for a man was sixty-eight years and for a woman seventy-three; it’s now seventy-six and eighty-one respectively. Peter also considered many of the young women dressed ‘very tarty’, but he did admit that he couldn’t stop staring at them. Peter, who is six foot four inches tall and weighs eighteen stone, was surprised that he no longer stands out in a crowd, as he would have done thirty-one years ago. When he visited Safeways supermarket, it was the first time he’d seen a trolley; in the past he had only been served at a counter and used a shopping basket. And as for money, he knows of course about decimalization, but when he last purchased something from a shop there were 240 pennies in a pound, half-crowns, ten shilling notes and the guinea was still of blessed memory.
Peter was totally baffled by pelican crossings and was frightened to walk across one. However the experience he most disliked was having to use a changing room to try on clothes behind a curtain, while members of the public walked past him – particularly female assistants who didn’t mind drawing back the curtain to see how he was getting on. He was amazed that he could try on a shirt and then not have to purchase it.
I suspect that the process of rehabilitation – accompanied town visits (six in all), unaccompanied town visits, weekend home visits, week visits, CSV work, followed by a job in the community – will take him at least another three to four years, by which time Peter will qualify for his old-age pension. I can only wonder if he will ever rejoin the real world and not simply be moved from one institution to another.
10.00 pm
I listen to the ten o’clock news. Roy Whiting has been given life imprisonment for the murder of Sarah Payne. Once the sentence has been passed, we discover that Whiting had already been convicted some years ago for abducting a child, and sexually abusing a minor. His sentence on that occasion? Four years.
DAY 148 THURSDAY 13 DECEMBER 2001
6.00 am
Orderlies are the prison’s school prefects. They’re given their jobs because they can be trusted. In return, they’re expected to work for these privileges, such as eating together in a small group, and in my case having a single room with a television.
There are over a dozen orderlies in all. Yesterday both reception orderlies were sacked, leaving two much sought-after vacancies.
Martin, the senior of the two reception orderlies, was due to be discharged this morning, two months early, on tag (HCD). The only restriction was that he must remain in his place of residence between the hours of 7 pm and 7
