Heaven: A Prison Diary (11 page)

We finally
discuss the dilemma as to whether I should remain at NSC and take over as
hospital orderly. We decide I should still apply for Spring Hill.

I read the only
Sunday papers I can lay my hands on, the
Observer
and the
News of the
World
.
One too far to
the left for me, the other too far to the right.

Doug returns
from a day out with his family, and I hand back my responsibility as ‘keeper of
the pills’. He’s convinced that they’re lining me up for the hospital job just
as soon as he’s granted leave to do outside work, which would take him out of
the prison five days a week. I tell him that both Mary and I still feel it
would be better if I could transfer to Spring Hill.

Back to my room.
The communal TV next door is showing some
vampire film at full volume. Amazed by what the body learns to tolerate, I
finally fall asleep.

As each day
passes, I tell myself that the stories will dry up and this diary with it.

Well, not
today, because Simon has just walked into SMU.

Simon works in
the officers’ mess, and although I see him every day I have not yet made his
acquaintance. He’s visiting SMU to check on an application he submitted to
visit his mother in Doncaster. He has, I fear, been dealing with an officer
ironically known as ‘action man’. After six weeks and several ‘apps’, Simon has
still heard nothing. After I’ve promised to follow this up, I casually ask him
why he’s in prison.

‘I abducted my
son,’ he replies.

I perk up. I’ve
not come across
an abduction
before.

Simon pleaded guilty
to abducting (‘rescuing’ in his words) his five-year-old son for forty-seven
days. He whisked him off to Cyprus, via France, Germany, Yugoslavia and Turkey.
He did so, he explains, because after he’d left his wife, he discovered that
his son was being physically abused by both his ex-wife and her new partner, a
police detective sergeant. The judge didn’t believe his story, and sentenced
him to four years, as a warning to other fathers not to take the law into their
own hands. Fair enough, and indeed I found myself nodding.

A year later,
his wife’s new partner (the detective sergeant) was arrested and charged with
ABH (actual bodily harm), and received a three-year sentence for, among other
things, breaking the little boy’s arm. Simon immediately appealed and returned
to court to face the same judge. He pleaded not only extenuating circumstances,
but added ‘I told you so’, to which the judge replied, ‘It doesn’t alter the
fact that you broke the law, so you will complete your sentence.’

Ah, I hear you
say, but he could have reported the man to the police and the social services.
You try reporting a detective sergeant to the police. And Simon has files
stacked up in his room filled with dozens of complaints to the social services
with replies bordering on the ludicrous, ‘We have looked into the matter very
carefully and have no reason to believe...’ Simon had to sell his home to pay
the £70,000 legal bills, and is now incarcerated in NSC, penniless, and with no
knowledge of where his only child is.

My heart goes
out to this man.

Would you have
done the same thing for your child? If the answer is yes, then you’re a
criminal.

A call for me over the tannoy to report to reception.
Sergeant Major Daff is on duty. He is happy to release my drug-free radio. It’s
a Sony three-band, sensible, plain and workmanlike. It will do the job and one
only needs to look at the sturdy object to know it’s been sent by Mary.

A quiet
afternoon, so Matthew gives me a lecture on Herodotus. He is rather pleased
with himself, because he’s come across a passage in book four of the
Histories
that could 260/907 be the
first known reference to sniffing cannabis (hemp). I reproduce the translation
in full:

And now for the vapour-bath.

On a framework
made up of three sticks, meeting at the top, they stretch pieces of woollen
cloth, taking care to get the jams as perfect as they can, and inside this
little tent, they place a dish with red-hot stones on it. They then take some
hemp seed, enter the tent and throw the seed onto the hot stones. It
immediately begins to smoke, giving off a vapour unsurpassed by any vapour bath
one could find in Greece. The Scythians enjoy the experience so much that they
howl with pleasure.

Mr New and Mr
Simpson interview me for my sentence plan. All the boxes are filled in with ‘No
History’ (N/H) for drugs, violence, past offences, drink or mental disorder. In
the remaining boxes, the words ‘Low Risk’ are entered for abscond, reoffend and
bullying. The final box has to be filled in by my personnel officer. Mr New is
kind enough to commend my efforts at SMU and my relationship with other
prisoners.

The document is
then signed by both officers and faxed to Spring Hill at 4.07 pm, and is
acknowledged as received at 4.09 pm.

Watch this
space.

Write for two
hours.

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.

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.)

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’.

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.

Doug and I
watch the tanks as they roll into Kabul while Bush and Blair try not to look
triumphant.

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’.

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
licence, 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.

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?

I’m up early
because I have to report to the hospital by 7.30 am to take over my new
responsibilities as Doug’s stand-in, while he goes off on a three-day forklift
truck-driving course. How this will help a man of fiftythree who runs his own
haulage company with a two million pound turnover is beyond me. He doesn’t seem
to care about the irrelevance of it all, as long as he gets out of prison for three
days.

I write for two
hours.

I report to
Linda at the hospital, and witness the morning sick parade. A score of
prisoners are lined up to collect their medication, or to see if they can get
off work for the day.

If it’s raining
or freezing cold, the length of the queue doubles. Most farm workers would
rather spend the day in the warm watching TV than picking Brussels sprouts or
cleaning out the pigsties. Linda describes them as malingerers, and claims she
can spot them at thirty paces. If I worked on the farm I might well join them.

Bill (fraud,
farm worker) has had every disease, affliction and germ that’s known to man.
Today he’s got diarrhoea and asks Linda for the day off work. He feels sure
he’ll be fine by tomorrow.

‘Certainly,’
says Linda, giving him her warmest smile. Bill smiles back in response.

‘But,’ she
adds, ‘I’m going to have to put you in the san [sanatorium] for the day.’

‘Why?’ asks
Bill, looking surprised.

‘I’ll need to
take a sample every thirty minutes,’ she explains, ‘before I can decide what
medication to prescribe.’ Bill reluctantly goes into the hospital, lies on one
of the beds and looks hopefully in the direction of the television screen. ‘Not
a chance,’ Linda tells him.

Once Linda has
sorted out the genuinely ill from the trying-it-on brigade, I’m handed four
lists of those she has sanctioned to be off work for the day. I deliver a copy
to the south block unit office, the farm office, the north block, the gatehouse
amd education before going to breakfast.