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 am. Martin had already completed the ‘paper chase’, which had to be carried out the day before release. Unfortunately, before departing this morning he decided to take with him a brand-new prison-issue denim top and jeans, and several shirts. A blue and white striped prison shirt apparently sells at around a hundred pounds on the outside, especially if it has the letters NSC on the pocket.
When the theft was discovered, he was immediately sacked and, more sadly, so was the other orderly, Barry, whose only crime was that he wouldn’t grass on Martin. It’s rough justice when the only way to keep your job is to grass on your mate when you know what the consequences will be for that person – not to mention how the other inmates will treat you in the future. We will find out the punishment tomorrow when both men will be up in front of the governor.
2.00 pm
I am disappointed to receive a letter from William Payne, the governor of Spring Hill, turning down my application for transfer. His reasons for rejecting me are shown in his letter reproduced here. (See opposite.) I feel I should point out that the last five inmates from NSC who have applied to Spring Hill have all been accepted. It’s not worth appealing, because I’ve long given up expecting any justice whenever the Home Office is involved.
3.00 pm
Six new inductees: four on short sentences ranging from three weeks to nine months, and two lifers who, for the past sixteen years, have been banged up for twenty-two hours a day. They are walking around the perimeters of the prison (no walls) in a daze, and can’t understand why they’re not being ordered back to their cells. Linda tells me that lifers often report at the end of the first week with foot-sores and colds, and take far longer to adapt to open conditions.
One of the short-termers from Nottingham who’s been placed in the no-smoking spur on the south block that has mostly more mature CSV workers who only return to the prison at night — tells me with a wry smile that he couldn’t sleep last night because it was so quiet.