soaked in milk. The same bowl I’d used to shave in earlier this morning.
4.20 pm
It’s not until after four has struck that I am allowed to leave the cell again and join the other prisoners for forty-five minutes in the exercise yard. I quickly learn that you take any and every opportunity – from religion to work to exercise – to make sure you get out of your cell. Once again, we’re searched before being allowed to go into the yard.
Most of the inmates don’t bother to walk, but simply congregate in groups and sunbathe while lounging up against the fence. Just a few of us stride purposefully round. I walk briskly because I’m already missing my daily visit to the gym. I notice that several prisoners are wearing the latest Nike or Reebok trainers. It’s the one fashion statement they are allowed to make. One of the inmates joins me and shyly offers ten pages of a manuscript and asks if I would be willing to read them. He tells me that he writes three pages a day and hopes to finish the work by the time he’s released in December.
I read the ten pages as I walk. He is clearly quite well educated as the sentences are grammatically correct and he has a good command of language. I congratulate him on the piece, wish him well, and even admit that I am carrying out the same exercise myself. One or two others join me to discuss their legal problems, but as I have little knowledge of the law, I am unable to answer any of their questions. I hear my name called out on the tannoy, and return to the officer at the gate.
‘Mr Peel wants to see you,’ the officer says without explanation, and this time doesn’t bother to search me as I am escorted to a little office in the centre of the spur. Another form needs to be filled in, as James had phoned asking if he can visit me on Friday.
‘Do you want to see him?’ he asks.
‘Of course I do,’ I reply.
‘They don’t all want to,’ Mr Peel remarks as he fills out the form. When he has completed the task, he asks how I am settling in.
‘Not well,’ I admit. ‘Being locked up for seventeen hours…but I’m sure you’ve heard it all before.’
Mr Peel begins to talk about his job and the problems the prison service is going through. He’s been a prison officer for ten years, and his basic pay is still only ?24,000, which with overtime at ?13.20 an hour (maximum allowed, nine hours a week) he can push up to ?31,000. I didn’t tell him that it’s less than I pay my secretary. He then explains that his partner is also a prison officer and she carries out her full overtime stint, which means they end up with ?60,000 a year between them, but don’t see a lot of each other. After getting his message across, he changes the subject back to Belmarsh.
‘This is only a reception prison,’ he explains. ‘If you’re convicted and not on remand, we move you to another prison as quickly as possible. But I’m sorry to say we see the same old faces returning again and again. They aren’t all bad, you know, in fact if it wasn’t for drugs, particularly heroin, sixty per cent of them wouldn’t even be here.’
‘Sixty per cent?’ I repeat.
‘Yes, most of them are in for petty theft to pay for their drug habit or are part of the drug culture.’
‘And can they still get hold of drugs in prison?’
‘Oh yes, you’ll have noticed how rudimentary the searches are. That’s because prison regulations don’t permit us to do any more. We know where they’re hiding the drugs and every method they use to bring them in, but because of the Human Rights Act we’re not always allowed to carry out a thorough enough search. Some of them are even willing to swallow plastic packets full of heroin, they’re so desperate.’
‘But if the packet were to burst?’
‘They’ll die within hours,’ he says. ‘One prisoner died that way last month, but you’d be surprised how many of them are still willing to risk it. Did you hear the fire alarm go off last night?’
‘Yes, it woke me,’ I told him.
‘It was a heroin addict who’d set fire to his cell. By the time I got there he was cutting his wrist with a razor, because he wanted to suffer even more pain to help take his mind off the craving. We whisked him off to the medical wing, but there wasn’t much they could do except patch him up. He’ll go through exactly the same trauma again tonight, so we’ll just have to mount a suicide watch and check his cell every fifteen minutes.’
A horn sounds to announce that the exercise period is over. ‘I suppose you’d better get back to your cell,’ he says. ‘If you weren’t writing a book, I can’t imagine what the authorities imagine will be gained by sending you here.’
5.00 pm
I return to my cell and continue writing until supper. When my door is unlocked again I go down to the hotplate on the ground floor. I settle for a Thermos of hot water, an apple and a plastic bag containing tomorrow’s breakfast. Back in my cell I munch a packet of crisps and with the aid of half the hot water in the Thermos make a Cup a Soup – mushroom. The cell door is slammed shut at five thirty, and will not be opened again until nine thirty tomorrow morning, by which time I will have used the other half of the water from the Thermos to take a shave, in the same bowl as I eat the soup.
I spend the next couple of hours following the Open Golf on Radio 5 Live. David Duval, an American, wins his first Open, to see his name inscribed on the silver claret jug. Colin Montgomery and Ian Woosnam put up a spirited fight, but are not around at the seventy-second hole.
I flick over to Radio 4 to hear Steve Norris (Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party in charge of women’s affairs) telling the world he always knew I was a bad man. In the election among Party members for candidate for Mayor of London, I defeated Mr Norris by 71 per cent to 29 per cent.
I turn the radio off and read a couple of chapters of
Day 5 Monday 23 July 2001
5.53 am
The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day. I’ve been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement. There is a child of seventeen in the cell below me who has been charged with shoplifting – his first offence, not even convicted – and he is being locked up for eighteen and a half hours, unable to speak to anyone. This is Great Britain in the twenty-first century, not Turkey, not Nigeria, not Kosovo, but Britain.
I can hear the right-wingers assuring us that it will be character-building and teach the lad a lesson. What stupidity. It’s far more likely that he will become antagonistic towards authority and once he’s released, turn to a life of crime. This same young man will now be spending at least a fortnight with murderers, rapists, burglars and drug addicts. Are these the best tutors he can learn from?
12 noon
I am visited by a charming lady who spotted me sitting in church on Sunday. I end up asking her more questions than she asks me. It turns out that she visits every prisoner who signs the pledge – I fear I didn’t – and any inmate who attends chapel for the first time. She gives each prisoner a Bible and will sit and listen to their problems for hours. She kindly answers all my questions. When she leaves, I pick up my plastic tray, plastic bowl, plastic plate, plastic knife, fork and spoon, leave my cell to walk down to the hotplate for lunch. [16]
One look at what’s on offer and once again I return to my cell empty-handed. An old lag on his way back to the top floor tells me that Belmarsh has the worst grub of any jail in Britain. As he’s been a resident of seven prisons during the past twenty years, I take his word for it. An officer slams my cell door closed. It will not open again until four o’clock. I’ve had precisely twelve minutes of freedom during the last twenty-two and a half hours.
4.00 pm
After another four hours, I’m let out for Association. During this blessed release, I stop to glance at the TV in
