Heaven: A Prison Diary (5 page)

All the lifers
at NSC are coming to the end of their sentence and are being prepared to
reenter the outside world. The very fact that they have progressed from an
A-cat, through B, C to D over a period of twenty years, is proof that they want
a second chance.

One of the
fascinating things about murderers – and we have a dozen or more at NSC – is that
you cannot generalize about them. However, I have found that they roughly fall
into two categories: those who are first offenders and unlikely to commit
another crime, especially after twenty years in jail, and those who are evil
and should be locked away in an A-cat for the rest of their lives.

Almost all the
lifers at NSC fall into the former category; otherwise they would never have
made it to an open prison. Bob, Chris, Mike and Roger are all now middle aged
and harmless. This might seem strange to those reading this diary, but I feel
none of the fear when I’m with them that I do with some of the young tearaways
who only have a few weeks left to serve.

Matthew starts
cleaning out the cupboard and drawers, while I concentrate on the new inductees.
There are fifteen of them, and it’s lunchtime before the last one has all his
questions answered.

Lunch is
memorable only because Wendy says my menu sheet is missing. She suspects it’s
been stolen and will appear in one of the tabloids tomorrow. She supplies me
with a new one, but asks me not to put my name on the top or sign it, just hand
the sheet over to her.

While clearing
out the drawers, Matthew comes across a box of biros marked 1987, and a ledger
with the initials GR and a crown above it. Two hours later, every shelf has
been washed and scrubbed.

All the
documents we need for inductees are in neat piles, and we have three bin bags
full of outof-date material.

I join Doug and
Matthew for supper: vegetarian sausage and mash.

Back in my room
I write for two hours. Tomorrow I must–I repeat, must – go to the gym.

Today is labour
board. All inductees, having completed their other interviews, must now be
allocated a
job,
otherwise they will receive no
income. The board consists of two members from management (the farm and other
activities) and a senior officer. Before any inductee faces the board I brief
them on what to expect, as I went through the process only a week ago. I tell them
it helps if they know what they want to do, and one of them, a bright young
Asian called Ahmed, tells me he’s after my job. Another, Mr Clarke, informs me
that he’s sixty-seven and wants a part-time cleaning job, perhaps a couple of
hours a day. I immediately go upstairs and ask the board if he could be
allocated to this office, which would allow me to concentrate on the weekly
inductions and the several prisoners who pop in during the day to talk about
their problems. They tell me they’ll think about it.

I return to the
SMU after lunch to find a drugs officer in the kitchen. His black Labrador Jed
is sniffing around. I melt into the background, and listen to a conversation
he’s having with Mr New. It seems there’s going to be another clampdown on
drugs. The drugs officer tells Mr New that last
year,
thirty-six visitors were found with drugs on them, two of them solicitors and
one a barrister. I am so surprised by this that I later ask Mr New if he
believes it. He nods. Ironically, the headline in today’s
Times
is, ‘Cannabis to be legalized?’ I leave the office at 1.30 pm
as I have a visit myself today.

Alison, my PA,
David, my driver, and Chris Beetles are sitting at a little square table in the
visitors’ room waiting for me. After we’ve picked up Diet Cokes and chocolate,
mostly for me, we seem to chat about everything except prison; from Joseph my
butler, who is in hospital, seriously injured after being knocked down by a bus
on his way to work, and the ‘folly’ at the bottom of the garden in Grantchester
being flooded, to how the public are responding to the events of 11

September.

Alison and I
then go through my personal letters and the list of people who have asked to
visit me at NSC. These weekly visits are a wonderful tonic, but they also serve
to remind me just how much I miss my friends, holed up in this God-forsaken
place.

I return to the
office, to find Mr New and a security officer, Mr Hayes, waiting to see me.

The
photographers just won’t go away. One has even offered Mr Hayes £500 for the
charity of his choice if I will agree to pose for a picture. I refuse, aware
how much more will go into the journalist’s pocket. It’s against the law to
take a photograph of a serving prisoner, not that that seems to bother any of
the vultures currently hovering around. Both officers promise to do their best
to keep them at bay. Mr New then tells me that a second camera has been found
in an inmate’s room, and the prisoner involved was transferred back to a closed
prison this morning. I try to concentrate on my work.

I visit the
canteen to discover I have £18.50 in my account: £10 of my own money, and £8.50
added as my weekly wage. My Gillette blades alone cost £
4.29,
and two phonecards £4.00, so there’s not a lot over for extras like toothpaste,
soap, bottles of Evian water and perhaps even a bar of chocolate. I mention
this only in passing lest any of you should imagine that I am, as the tabloids
suggest, living the life of Riley.

I stroll across
to the hospital, and enjoy the fresh country air, even if the surroundings are
rather bleak. Doug tells me that my application to Spring Hill is being
processed.

How does Doug
know before Mr New? It turns out that he has a friend (inmate) who works in the
administration block at Spring Hill.

I have a long,
warm bath.
Heaven.

Mr Simpson
(probation) and Mr Gough (induction officer) are the first to arrive in the
office. They supply me with today’s list of appointments. This has two
advantages. I can process those inmates who have booked in, while dealing with
the ones that just drop by on the off chance. Mr Clarke (crime not yet
identified), our sixty-seven-year-old cleaner, also turns up on time. Matthew
runs through his duties with him, while I make tea for the officers.

Mr Hocking
(security officer) appears in the kitchen to let me know that a
Daily Mail
photographer (whose hair is
longer than that of any of the inmates), has entrenched himself on a local
farmer’s land. He’ll be able to take a picture whenever I return to the north
block. Mr Hocking is going to seek the farmer’s permission to eject him.

Mr Clarke has
done a superb job; not only is the office spotless, but tomorrow he plans to
get a grip on the waiting room – which presently resembles a 1947 GWR tea room.

I have lunch
with Malcolm (fraud and librarian orderly). He’s quiet, well spoken and
intelligent, and even in prison garb has the air of a professional man. What
could he have done to end up here?

Mr New appears,
then
disappears upstairs to join Mr Simpson, the
probation officer. This afternoon they’ll conduct interviews with three
prisoners to discuss their sentence plans. That usually means that the inmate
concerned only has a few months left to serve, so judgments have to be made on
whether he is ready to take up work outside the prison, and if he is suitable
for tagging.

The main
factors in any decision are:
a.
Is
the prisoner likely to reoffend based on his past record?
b.
Has he any record of violence?
c
.
Is he, or has he been, on drugs?
d.
Has he completed all his town
visits, and his week’s leave, without incident?

Ticks in all
those boxes means he can hope for early release, i.e. a two-year sentence
becomes one year with an extra two months off for tagging. All three of today’s
applicants leave SMU with smiles on their faces.

Mr Hocking
returns, accompanied by a police officer. He tells me another camera has been
found in an inmate’s room. Once again, the prisoner concerned has been shipped
off to a C-cat prison.
The third in less than a week.
No doubt whichever newspaper was responsible will try again. A few weeks of
this, and I’ll be the only prisoner still in residence.

Mr Lewis the
governing governor calls in to discuss the problem of lurking photographers. He
asks me if I wish to return to Wayland.

‘You must be
joking,’ are my exact words.

Mr New later
explains that he only asked to protect the Prison Service, so that when a
picture eventually appears in the press, I won’t be able to suggest that I
wasn’t given the opportunity to return to closed conditions.

Supper with
Malcolm (fraud),

Roger (murdered
his wife), Martin (possession of a firearm which went off) and Matthew (breach
of trust). All the talk is about an absconder who missed his girlfriend so much
that he decided to leave us. He only had another nine weeks to go before his
release date.

A century of days in prison.

Breakfast.
As it’s Friday, we’re offered weekend provisions:
a plastic bag containing half a dozen tea bags, four sachets of sugar, some
salt and pepper and a couple of pats of butter. Those of you who have read the
previous two volumes of these diaries will recall my days in Belmarsh when I
was on a chain gang, along with five other prisoners, putting tea bags into a
plastic bag. Well, they’ve finally turned up at North Sea Camp. Prisoners do
make useful contributions that can then be taken advantage of in other prisons,
thus saving the taxpayer money, and giving inmates an occupation as well as a
small weekly wage. For example, the tea towels in the kitchen were made in
Dartmoor, the green bath towels in Liverpool, the brown sheets and pillowcases
at Holloway and my blankets at Durham.

Now don’t
forget the tea bags, because Doug has just told me over his eggs and bacon that
a lifer has been shipped out to Lincoln Prison for being caught in possession
of drugs. And where were they discovered?
In his tea bags.
Security staff raided his room this morning and found sixty tea bags containing
cannabis, along with £40 in cash, which they consider proof that he was a
dealer. But now for the ridiculous, sad, stupid, lunatic (choose your own word)
aspect of this story – the prisoner in question was due for parole in eleven
weeks’ time. He will now spend the next eighteen months in a B-cat, before
going on to a C-cat, probably for a couple of years, before being allowed to
return to a D-cat in around four years’ time.

Doug adds that
the security staff didn’t know what he was up to, until another prisoner
grassed on him.

‘Why would
anyone do that?’ I ask.

‘Probably to
save
their own
skin,’ Doug replies. ‘Perhaps he was
about to be shipped out for a lesser offence, so he offered them a bigger fish
in exchange for a reprieve. It happens all the time.’

When I arrive
at SMU, Mr Clarke is already standing by the door. He immediately sets about
emptying the bins and mopping the kitchen floor. While we’re working, I
discover that it’s his first offence, and he’s serving a fifteen-month sentence
for misappropriation of funds and is due to be released in March.

In the morning
post there is a registered letter from my solicitors. I read the pages with
trembling hands. My leave to appeal against conviction has been turned down.
Only my leave to appeal against length of sentence has been granted. I can’t
describe how depressed I feel.

Lunch.
Doug nods in the direction of another prisoner who
takes a seat at the next table.

‘That’s Roy,’
he says, ‘he’s a burglar serving his fifteenth sentence. When the judge
sentenced him this time to six months, he said, thank you, my Lord, I’ll do
that standing on my head.’

‘Then I’ll add
a couple of months to help you get back on your feet,’ replied the judge.

I call my
barrister, Nick Purnell QC. He feels we should still go for an appeal on
conviction because three elements of our defence have been overlooked. How can
Ted Francis be innocent if I am guilty? How can Mrs Peppiatt’s evidence be
relied upon when she confessed in the witness box to being a thief?

How can I have
perverted the course of justice, when the barrister representing the other
side, Mr Shaw, said he had never considered the first diary date to be of any
significance?

We also discuss
the witness who could help me prove that Potts should never have taken the
case. Nick warns me that Godfrey Barker is getting cold feet, and his wife
claims she cannot remember the details.

I see David
(murder) in the corridor; he has a big grin on his face. He’ll be spending
tomorrow with his wife for the first time in two decades. He’s very nervous
about going out on his own, and tells me the sad story of a prisoner who went
on a town visit for the first time in twenty-five years and was so frightened
that he climbed up a tree. The fire service had to be called out to rescue him.