by Stephen Fry
That’s the key to my contentment at Pucklechurch. I’ve said it before in interviews and it’s been taken as a witty joke, but life in prison was a breeze for me, because at that point I had spent most of life at boarding school. I didn’t mean to suggest by that, as was supposed, that boarding schools are like prisons, I meant that prisons are like boarding schools. I knew how to tease authority enough to be popular with the inmates and tolerated by the screws; I knew how to stay cheerful and think up diversions, scams and pranks. I knew, ironically, given my inability to do so in real boarding schools, how to survive. Some of the sixteen-year-olds at Pucklechurch had never left home before. Nearly all of them were inside for TDA or TOC-ing, which is to say “Taking and Driving Away” or “Taking w/out Owner’s Consent”—there must be some difference between the two offences, but I’m dashed if I know what it is. Also, the vast majority of them were from South Wales and the West Country. I found something immensely endearing about that. I had been trained by television to believe that all lags are either Scottish, Liverpudlian, or, most especially, Londoners. I had expected Sweeney accents and Glaswegian brogues, not Devonian burrs and Chepstow lilts.
There was little free time. Up at six, fold up all the bedding material, pick up one’s potty and slop out in the lavatories.
“It is not a potty! It is a slop pail!”
“Well, I prefer to think of it as a potty, sir.”
“You can fucking think of it what you fucking like. You will not call that cunt a fucking potty, you will call that cunt a fucking slop pail, got it?”
“Very good, sir. It shall be as you wish.”
After slopping out (a practice that Oscar Wilde, a hundred years ago, had written to the newspapers to protest about and which the Howard League for Penal Reform has finally, I believe, managed to push into desuetude) one would be handed a safety razor (in my case a fruitless offering, since I was still so testosterone light that I had not even the faintest traces of down on my cheeks or upper lip) and the ablution ceremonies would be performed, just as at school, only conducted in complete silence, save for the rhythmical brushing of teeth and scraping of stubble. Next, we were marched down to breakfast for a completely familiar (to me) prep-school tea of tinned tomatoes and grey scrambled egg on fried bread. Then we were led to work.
In the evenings there came Association. Association was the prison’s major carrot and stick.
“Right! You, off Association for a week.”
“First one to clear up this fucking mess gets an extra ten minutes’ Association.”
Association took place in a large room, where there was a television, a dartboard and a Ping-Pong table. To me it resembled exactly the games room of a French youth hostel, only without the appalling smell. It was on my second night’s Association that a large con put his hand on my knee and told me that I was cute.
“Ere, why don’t you fuck off and leave ’im alone,” a Bristolian car thief next to me said.
There was no fight. That was it. No terrible moment later in the showers when I was told to bend down and pick up the soap. Just a hand on the thigh, a squeeze and a shy withdrawal.
Later that evening someone came up to me and said, “Two’s up then!”
“Sorry?” I said.
“Two’s up with you!”
I agreed with him pleasantly and wandered off. As I was finishing my cigarette another con approached and said, “I’ll take that off you, mate.”
“Fine, help yourself,” I said, handing him the weedy little butt of my roll-up.
“Oi!” a thump on my back. “You said you’d go two’s up with me!”
“I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “But I had absolutely no idea what ‘two’s up’ meant.”
Those who had run out of their supplies of burn lived on the fag ends of others, going two’s up with the smallest, thinnest butts, collecting dozens together to make new roll ups or burning their fingers and lips by smoking each one down to a millimetric strip.
My accent and vocabulary endeared me to everyone. Again, I had expected nothing but jeering cries of “Oh I say! How absolutely topping, don’t you know?” and similar inaccurate mockeries, but I think the inmates enjoyed the confusion I caused to the screws who found it difficult to talk to me without thinking of me as Officer Class or suspecting me to be some Home Office official’s son, planted to keep an eye on things.
“Don’t think me some awful antinomian anarch, sir,” I might say to one of the screws, “but is the rule about drinking hot cocoa in precisely forty seconds not perhaps dispensable? The ensuing scalding of the soft tissues about the uvula is most aggravating.”
Pathetic, I suppose, pathetic, vain and silly, but in circumstances where survival is the key any human characteristic or quality you can dredge up must be used. If you are strong physically, you use your strength, if you have charisma and inner dignity, you use them, if you have charm, you use charm. The smallest sign of servility, subservience, flattery, sycophancy or sneakiness is loathed by screws and cons alike. The screws will act on “information received” but they won’t thank the grass or protect him when he is duly punished by his victim.
The only unpleasant moment within my eye- or earshot came when a sixteen-year-old who was ungovernable in his stupidity, insubordination and insolence (I thought he was suffering from some sort of mental illness, for he would giggle and became so manic that it sent shivers down my spine) was, after pushing things too far, taken into the bathroom along from my cell by three of the screws. There was the sound of much pummelling and exceptionally dull thumping and I realised, with a shock, that he was being expertly beaten up. He came out alternately giggling and weeping. As he was led down the corridor, in great physical pain as he was, he tried to kick one of the screws. This was not a Jimmy Boyle refusal to be broken, this was not Shawshank resilience, this was illness.
I wanted immediately to write to the Home Secretary and talked to Barry, a witty Welshman whose cell was opposite to me, about doing so.
“They reads your letters, see. Won’t do no good. And when you’re out of yurr you’ll forget all about it.”
He was right of course. When I left, I made no representation to anyone.
Barry, as it happens, couldn’t read at all, so I set about teaching him. He it was who dubbed me “the Professor,” which was to become my prison nickname. Most people are “that cunt” but the possession of a nickname puts you a little higher up the ladder than the others. I was lucky enough to have a whole cell to myself, back in those days of disgraceful prison undercrowding, and would alternately sleep on the top and the bottom bunk to help demarcate the days.
We had the treat to look forward to every Sunday of a visit from the prison chaplain, who, bizarrely, went by the name of the Reverend Chaplin and, more bizzarrely still, looked exactly like Charlie Chaplin: exceptionally thin, with tight black hair and a toothbrush moustache. With the usual inmate irony he was referred to as Ollie, as in Hardy. He let me play the piano for the Sunday service, attendance at which was optional, but which became, on account of the eccentricity of my playing, the hottest event of the prison week. I was allowed six hours off work a week without loss of pay so that I could practise the hymns. I entertained hugely by performing, not accurately (“Anyone can play accurately, but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte.”) but with massively self-important arpeggios and symphonic style endings.
Thus, after “The Church’s One Foundation” for example I would end with a Daaaaaah-dum! Da-dum-da-dum-da-um-da-dum-daaaaaaaaaah DUUU-MMMMM! And just as everyone was sitting down, I would add a high Dum-di-dum-di-dum. Dum DUM! Dum. (Pause) Dum (pause) Dum (bigger pause, followed by a tiny) Dim … That surely must be the end, but no … a sudden quick bass Tara-tara-DOM. And finally it was over.
The bishop of Malmesbury came to visit one Wednesday. A group of us was selected to sit round him in a circle while he asked us to speak frankly about prison conditions and how we
were being treated and what we thought of ourselves. There were screws standing against the walls, eyeing the ceiling, and we all knew better than to complain. All except Fry, of course.
“I would like to draw your lordship’s attention to one thing that has been bothering me,” I said. “It is, I fear, a very grave matter and the source of aggravation and discomfort to many of us here.”
There was a hissing in of breath from the others and a meaningful clearing of the throat from one of the senior screws.
“Please,” said the bishop, “please feel free.”
“I am sure,” I said, “that Her Majesty has many calls on her time and cannot be expected to know everything that goes on in her name within the walls of institutions such as this.”
“No indeed,” agreed the bishop, blinking slightly.
“However, I must urge you to draw her attention to the quality of the soap available in our bathrooms.”
“The soap?”
“The soap, my lord bishop. It lathers not, neither does it float; it doesn’t smell nice, it doesn’t even clean you. The best that can be said for it, I am afraid, is that it keeps you company in the bath.”
This was from an old Morecambe and Wise book I had bought years ago at Uppingham.
The bishop burst out laughing and the screws dutifully joined in with smiles, shaking their heads at the jollity of it all.
“If your lordship will undertake to make urgent representation in the right quarters?”
“Certainly, certainly! Um, may I ask you, young man, I know this not good prison form and you really don’t have to answer, but may I ask you none the less … what, ah, are you in for?”
“Oh the usual,” I said carelessly. “Churchmen.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The senseless slaughter of clerics. I murdered four minor canons, two archdeacons, a curate and a suffragan bishop in a trail of bloody carnage that raged from Norwich to Hexham last year. Surely you read about it in the Church Times, my lord? I think it made the third page of the late racing extra.”
“All right, now. That’s enough of that, Fry.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, Bishop, you must forgive my freakish humours. In here we laugh that we may not weep. It was theft I’m afraid, my lord. Plain old credit-card fraud.”
“Oh. Oh, I see.”
I continued to teach Barry to read, while I practised the piano, zoomed along the corridors with my silver electric polisher and wrote letters to Jo Wood and other friends.
Barry had, when I had collected my wage packet at the end of my first week as a con, told me that the best way to make your burn go further is to pre-roll the cigarettes and lay them out to dry on the radiator pipe of your cell. I had dutifully done this and returned from Association to find every single one of my beautifully rolled cigarettes gone.
“Lesson number one, matey,” he said. “You can’t trust no one on the inside.”
What an arse. The cell door is left open during Association, it is only closed when the occupant is “banged up” inside. The idea that in a building full of thieves I could cheerfully have left tobacco lying around and expected it to be there on my return was absurd. Barry enjoyed my cigarettes and every now and then would let me have half of one as that first pitiful burnless week dragged by.
We were walking towards Association one evening the following week when Barry and I thought it would be amusing to drag our heels on the floor, which always left a black rubber mark. I stopped doing it as I heard approaching footsteps and Barry was caught mid-streak.
“Hughes! Off Association two days.”
“But, sir!” said Barry.
“Don’t whine, you miserable cunt. Three days.”
“Sir, I feel I should confess that I am just as guilty,” I said. “I was doing exactly the same thing before you came round the corner. In fact I made the worst marks.”
“Is that right, lad? I didn’t see you, though, did I? I didn’t see it, you didn’t do it. Extra hour’s Association for honesty.”
“Lesson one, matey,” I said to Barry as the screw passed by. “Baffle them.”
Every two or three days or so I would receive a visit from my court appointed probation officer. The great question facing me was the nature of the sentence likely to be passed down from the bench. Most of the experienced cons told me to expect DC, Detention Centre—the “short sharp shock” that Home Secretary Roy Jenkins had proudly added to the judiciary’s roster of available sentences. DC came in three-month packages, from a three months’ minimum to a maximum, I think, of nine months or possibly a year. It sounded foul. Up at five, run everywhere, gym and physical jerks at all times, running to dining halls, ten minutes to eat while standing up, more physical jerks and weight training, and what would now be called zero tolerance of all offences. The DC inmate emerged physically powerful, immensely fit and utterly zomboid in manner. An ideal candidate in fact for a job on the outside such as the bouncer at a seedy nightclub, which would usually get him back on the inside for aggravated assault within a matter of weeks. This time he would be in Big Nick and a full-blown member of the criminal classes.
Borstal was the other option, an indeterminate sentence, which was completed by the inmate rising up the ranks, winning a series of different coloured ties, until such time as the governor thought him fit to be freed. That sounded ghastly too.
“Or of course, there’s just good old Nick. Six months, prolly,” some of them reckoned.
Mr. White, the court-appointed probation officer, who generously left me a pack of B&H at the end of every visit, was less pessimistic. He believed that it was essentially down to his report and he saw no reason so far not to recommend two years’ probation. These were first offences, I had solid upright parents, I had learned my lesson.
I had learned my lesson, hadn’t I?
I nodded seriously. I had learned my lesson, all right.
I cannot claim that prison politicised me in any way. It was not until years later, starting with those inevitable late-night student conversations at university, that I began to look seriously at the world through political eyes, but I do remember shivering with embarrassment at something that was said to me. Embarrassment is not a political emotion, it may be the British national emotion, but it is not political: rage is political, hatred can be political and so too can love, but not, I think, embarrassment.
What was said to me and I can’t remember who said it (one of the Londoners I think, for Pucklechurch, in spite of that preponderance of West Country and Welsh inmates, was also used as an overspill prison for Wormwood Scrubs, taking moderate and non-dangerous offenders, usually those who were serving sentences for the non-payment of fines) but it was said none the less, just as it had been said to Oscar Wilde.
“Person like you shouldn’t be in a place like this,” the con said to me.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve got an education.”
“Not really. I’ve got some O levels, but that’s it.”
“You know what I mean. These places aren’t for the likes of you.”
I wish I could pretend he hadn’t used that phrase “for the likes of you, “but he really did. This is how Oscar Wilde relates a similar experience in De Profundis.
—the poor thief who, recognising me as we tramped round the yard at Wandsworth, whispered to me in the hoarse prison voice men get from long and compulsory silence: “I feel sorry for you: it is harder for the likes of you than it is for the likes of us.”
A hundred years on and still Britain is Britain. I tried to reply with the obvious, but none the less deeply felt by me, reply that I thought I deserved prison if anything more than he did. I had had every opportunity, every love, every care lavished on me. He heard me out in that non-listening way that convicts have and said:
“Yeah, but still, eh? I mean, it’s not right, is it? Not really.”
The day for my court appearance drew near. I had received advance notice by letter fro
m my mother that their old friend Oliver Popplewell, at that time not yet a judge, but a Queen’s Counsel none the less, would be speaking for me in court.
It was immensely kind of him to do so, but how I wished he would not: the idea made me writhe with embarrassment. A West Country magistrate’s court was not his milieu. He was not even a criminal barrister, he specialised in commercial and insurance law. It must have been embarrassing for him too, knowing (for he was no fool) that the Swindon bench would go out of their way not to be impressed by this smart London silk, brought in by middle class parents to keep their son out of the hands of the penal system. Maybe they might think that they had paid for him, paid the staggering sums that QCs cost. How alienating and infuriating that would be …
I arrived feeling very nervous and deeply pessimistic. Popplewell did a magnificent job however, no forensic rhetoric, no Latin, no appeals to law or precedent, merely straight, slightly nervous (real or cunningly assumed I cannot tell) representation. He had done this out of friendship for my parents and he performed the task with great humility: whether they asked him or he offered, to this day I do not know. He spoke to the bench as one who had known me from my birth and one who knew my parents as friends. He was aware that their worships would take the probation officer’s report into consideration and hoped that they would take into consideration too the remorse and foolishness felt by an intelligent child who had gone off the rails, more as an act of teenage rebellion than as a threat to society. That the stability and unreserved love of his parents would also be taken into account, he was sure, as would be the very real promise that a young man of such intelligence showed the very real good he might do, at this turning point in his life, to the society he had scorned in this temporary fit of adolescent mutiny.
Oliver sat down in a swirl of black gown. The three members of the bench nodded to each other and asked for the probation officer, Mr. White, whose report they had now read, to ask what sentence he thought proper.