DAY 118
TUESDAY 13 NOVEMBER 2001
5.51 am
Write for two hours.
8.30 am
There are no new inductees today and therefore no labour board. Mr New will not be on duty until one o’clock, so Matthew and I have a quiet morning. He gives me a lecture on Alexander the Great.
12 noon
I phone Chris Beetles at his gallery. His annual Illustrators’ Catalogue has arrived in the morning post. There is the usual selection of goodies: Vickie, Low, Brabazon, Scarfe, Shepard, Giles and Heath Robinson. However, it’s a new artist who attracts my attention.
The first edition of The Wind in the Willows was illustrated by E. H. Shepard, and after his death for a short time by Heath Robinson. But a new version has recently been published, illustrated with the most delightful watercolours by Michael Foreman, who is one of Britain’s most respected illustrators. Original Shepards are now changing hands for as much as £100,000 and Heath Robinsons can fetch £10,000. So it was a pleasant surprise to find that Mr Foreman’s works were around £500. I decide to select one or two for any future grandchildren.
So in anticipation I turn the pages and begin to choose a dozen or so for Mary to consider. I have to smile when I come to page 111: a picture of Toad in jail, being visited by the washerwoman. This is not only a must for a future grandchild, but should surely be this year’s Christmas card. (See below.)
4.00 pm
An inmate called Fox asks me if it’s true that I have a laptop in my room. I explain politely to him that I write all my manuscripts by hand, and have no idea how to use a computer. He looks surprised. I later learn from my old room-mate Eamon that there’s a rumour going round that I have my own laptop and a mobile phone. Envy in prison is every bit as rife as it is ‘on the out’.
5.00 pm
I receive a visit from David (fraud, eighteen months). He has received a long and fascinating letter from his former pad-mate Alan, who was transferred to Spring Hill a week ago. Alan confirms that his new abode is far more pleasant than NSC, and advises me to join him as quickly as possible. He doesn’t seem to realize that the decision won’t rest with me. However, there is one revealing sentence: ‘An officer reported that they’ve been expecting Jeffrey for the past week, has he decided not to come?’ David feels that they must have agreed to take me, and are only waiting for my sentence plan, which was faxed to them yesterday.
Incidentally, David (the recipient of the letter) was a schoolmaster in Sleaford before he arrived at NSC via Belmarsh. Three of his former pupils are also residents; well, to be totally accurate, two — one has just absconded.
7.00 pm
Doug and I watch the tanks as they roll into Kabul while Bush and Blair try not to look triumphant.
10.30 pm
I’m back in my room, undressing, when a flash bulb goes off.8 I quickly open my door and see an inmate running down the corridor. I chase after him, but he disappears out of the back door and into the night.
I return to my room, and a few moments later, an officer knocks on the door and lets himself in. He tells me that they know who it is, as several prisoners saw the culprit departing. So everyone will know it was by this time tomorrow; yet another inmate who has been bribed by the press. The last three have been caught, lost their D-cat status, been shipped back to a B-cat and had time added to their sentence. I’m told the going rate for a photograph is £500. If they catch him, I’ll let you know. If they don’t, you’ll have seen it in one of the national papers, captioned: ‘EXCLUSIVE: Archer undressing in his cell’.
DAY 119
WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER 2001
8.15 am
As I walk over to breakfast from the south block, I pick up snippets of information about last night’s incident. It turns out that the photographer was not a prisoner, but Wilkins, a former inmate who was released last Friday. He was recognized by several inmates, all of whom were puzzled as to what he was doing back inside the prison four days after he’d been released.
But here is the tragic aspect of the whole episode. Wilkins was in prison for driving without a lic
ence, and served only twelve weeks of a six-month sentence. The penalty for entering a prison for illegal purposes carries a maximum sentence of ten years, or that’s what it proclaims on the board in black and white as you enter NSC. And worse, you spend the entire term locked up in a B-cat, as you would be considered a high-escape risk. The last such charge at NSC was when a father brought in drugs for his son. He ended up with a three-year sentence.
I look forward to discovering which paper considers this behaviour a service to the public. I’m told that when they catch Wilkins, part of the bargaining over sentence will be if he is willing to inform the police who put him up to it.
2.30 pm
There’s a call over the intercom for all officers to report to the gatehouse immediately. Matthew and I watch through the kitchen window as a dozen officers arrive at different speeds from every direction. They surround a television crew who, I later learn, are bizarrely trying to film a look-alike Jeffrey Archer holding up one of my books and claiming he’s trying to escape. Mr New tells me he warned them that they were on government property and must leave immediately, to which the producer replied, ‘You can’t treat me like that, I’m with the BBC.’ Can the BBC really have sunk to this level?
DAY 120