Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  So we wrapped a couple of towels around his arms and off we toddled.

  It can be a cruel job on everyone – you don’t eat well, sleep well, live well and often drink too much. Nobby rarely had anything for dinner. If I’d a spare buttie I’d give it him, or save him a couple of bangers off the servery. He did though get a sudden urge for orange juice and began bringing a litre in. One day he said, ‘Listen, prick, if you want a drink, just ask.’

  I told him I didn’t know what he was on about.

  ‘It’s disappearing from the fridge. I have some, put the carton in, when I come back it’s empty.’

  I suggested he poured some orange in a little bottle and diluted the rest of the carton with water. He liked the idea but took it a step further. He began to urinate in it. This went on for six months. At some point every single day, usually locking time, we’d look at each other and say, ‘I wonder who’s drunk the piss today?’

  That might not impress some people, but humour was how you got by. If you hadn’t taken work too seriously and no one got hurt, that was a good day in Strangeways.

  I was on with Nobby Nobbler one morning on K Wing when I saw a prisoner I knew. His name was Johnny Gell, and I’d first met him in the segregation unit at Forest Bank.

  Short, stocky, ginger and scruffy, he was assaultative like you don’t know. At Forest Bank he actually went to a medium-secure mental health unit for a couple of weeks before being sent back to us. He assaulted three nurses – two males, one female – and hospitalized one of them. He actually floored me at Forest Bank, twatted me good from behind. I was wobbling all over. I’d been unlocking his cell door to let him back in. On a three-officer unlock he still banjoed me. Luckily, the lad I was working with was an absolute giant who’d put him on his arse straight away. In prison from an early age, Gell was a very violent and unpredictable individual. Two weeks of calm, then he’d lamp some fucker without warning. Bash. Straight out. He took some watching all right.

  Here he was on K Wing. Only in for a week, he said, out Friday. This was Monday. I warned Nobby, ‘Don’t put your chin in front of him,’ and went to see Bertie.

  ‘We’ve a lad here who shouldn’t be,’ I said. ‘He should be down the seg’. He’s not good with crowds, best confined on a small unit in his own company. He will hurt somebody.’

  Bertie got on to security, who confirmed his chequered past. Gell hadn’t been in prison for a while, but had a record of dirty protests, cell fires and staff and prisoner assaults. ‘Yeah, he’s a bad ’un.’

  Segregation, though, weren’t for having him. Even Bertie couldn’t convince them, so he went upstairs to see Captain Hurricane, the governor.

  ‘Stick him behind his door for now and we’ll get him moved,’ the governor said.

  For two more days this lad stayed on K Wing, so we locked him up and got him out like they do on the seg’, followed their routine. A couple of times he had to be restrained. He’d far more strength than his size indicated. One morning, Nobby was talking to Bertie across the landing when who should I see heading towards me but Gell. The situation didn’t register at first, but suddenly I realized, ‘Who the fuck’s let him out?’ Instinctively I knew something wasn’t right, and as he went by, out of the corner of my eye, I saw his face change. Too late – bang! He’d belted me again, right on the jaw, and nearly taken my head off my shoulders.

  I stayed on my feet, don’t know how, and must have staggered a couple of metres. Gell was behind me now so I wasn’t looking at him, I was looking at Bertie. He was in shock. Nobby spun round, I spun round, and Gell glared straight back: it was like High Noon, only he was the Clanton–McLaury gang combined and had already fired the first bullet. He must have been thinking, Why is he still stood up?

  I was quite definitely thinking, You’re fucking dead, you, lad. This is the second time you’ve caught me unawares.

  For a prop, my nought to ten metres is pretty quick. Gell set off running and I followed him, towards the stairwell at the bottom of the landing. It had a locked gate, barred vertically and horizontally. When I hit him it was with the force of a rugby tackle in his shoulder, and he hit the deck hard. Pretty much as soon as we landed, I felt the force of Nobby – all eighteen stone of him – coming in as well. I was on top of Gell and Nobby was on top of me. We had an ace cleaning warder on K Wing, the floor was like glass, layer upon layer of polish, mint: we slid four or five metres, like a ride at a fairground.

  What happened next was a car crash moment, when everything went into slow motion. We built some momentum and I could see what was coming. All three of us slid into the bars. I put my hand over my face, Nobby ducked, and Gell lifted his head just in time to crust a horizontal bar. The thing lifted his fucking scalp like a spoon on a boiled egg.

  All hell broke loose now. Alarm bells clanged, and by the time we’d come to a halt, the troops were there. Bertie was back on form, shouting orders, and somebody had dragged me up, slapping either side of my face, which was clever given how my jaw was still ringing. To be honest, I was dazed. Anyway, the melee went on. After the initial impact Gell lay quiet, but then he started fighting again – half his head might be hanging off but he wasn’t going to go peacefully. Eventually they got him to his feet, a waterfall of fruity Bordeaux gushing down his face. Blood everywhere.

  Gell was stitched up and sent to seg’ eventually. The incident was placed on report and went to the police, but nothing happened. Where assaults on prison officers are concerned, it seldom does. In fact, he got out as planned the next day after refusing medical treatment. When he left reception, he was still covered in blood with a massive swelling on his nut. There was little the nurses could do other than suggest he went to casualty.

  Bertie told them to take me to hospital. Not only was my jaw throbbing, there was concern I might have dislocated my shoulder. The doc there didn’t bother to X-ray me, just got me to pull a few faces, and as the week went on I developed lockjaw. Turned out later that I’d cracked the bastard. It gave me grief for a good six months did that. Nothing was ever made of it. I wasn’t the type to put in a complaint anyway.

  On the Sunday I rang Spongebob. ‘What the fuck are you calling me for?’ he said. ‘Don’t be a hero, phone back in a week.’ Then he put the phone down. But them were the good old days.

  People do not age well in the prison service. Take the Hat Collector, who was close to retirement. I’ve no idea how old he was – anywhere between fifty-five and ninety. He was five foot five and seven stone, an officer who organized prisoners’ work patterns in the Labour Control Unit, a natty little job in a gated office near the servery, safely out of trouble. That nickname: back when screws wore caps and jackets, hats would fly everywhere during restraints, and our old boy’s self-designated role was to gather them up and take them back to the office.

  I was on running in the top jail one day, ferrying prisoners back and forth for visits, and as I walked on the twos and started bellowing names I saw the Hat Collector pop out of a cell on the threes. He must have been there on overtime. Anyway, he spotted me and began gesticulating. ‘Here! Now!’

  Up I went to find Bertie and another officer struggling with a handy-looking lad who was having none of it. As usual it was a wrestling match rather than a fistfight, though you can get punched if you’re not smart. Restraints look violent but are usually controlled; people know what they’re doing. So in I steamed, third man – we don’t fight fair – we got him to the deck, no mither, and he was hauled off to the seg’.

  In the office, someone complained that the Hat Collector hadn’t got stuck in and that, if he had, there’d have been no need for me to get involved. But as I told them, he was jockey weight – he’d have made no difference. In fact he’d have got in the way. What he did very well was, first, alert me, and then have the presence of mind to undo the gate and hit the alarm. We’re not all fighters. Very often you can see why those who aren’t stay out of the way.

  Reg Urwin was another old-timer among our
team on borrowed time. Small in stature and about sixty years old, he’d worked in the prison service since Winston Churchill smoked sweet cigarettes, not cigars. On K Wing, he ran the store. If officers came asking for replacement shorts, shirts, toiletries or whatever for the prisoners, he’d tell them to go and look ‘store’ up in a dictionary. Stores were for storing things, in his view. If he kept giving stuff out he’d have nothing to store, would he? To get anything, if you could, you went behind his back.

  We had a prisoner on basic regime, the Charmer, an arsey little twat five foot tall but as wide as he was long and nasty with it. He’d been on K Wing eight months but didn’t have long left. Just as well – he’d threaten staff, that type of carry on. His language was atrocious, especially to women, a non-stop stream of vulgar sexual insults.

  One day he was sent down to the stores for clean boxer shorts, because that could happen too. Soon, him and Reg were toe to toe.

  ‘You old twat,’ this kid was saying. ‘I’ll fucking knock you out . . . I’m going to find you, I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill your wife . . .’ I’d been alerted to the commotion at the store by then along with some other staff and we dragged the kid upstairs to his cell, effin’ and jeffin’ every step. Not that Reg gave a toss, he’d heard it all before. By the look of it, we’d had a run on underpants and Reg was not letting another pair go.

  Reg was also a cleaning warder – a job I did from time to time – supervising orderlies. That was important on a wing as big as ours; it took some cleaning. Not easy with so many people around. Clean an empty house – piece of piss. Now try doing a four-storey one with forty overgrown kids on every landing.

  Reg took cleaning to a new level. Every day he had a project. He’d pick the biggest badasses you can imagine, lads you wouldn’t want to face on the out, tough guys with tough reputations, and put them in greens – trousers, T-shirt, boots, the usual kit for working in – and make them graft. He’d have them stripping and polishing floors, as Gell found out, painting . . . he got a lot of work done.

  Cleaning warders run the servery too. They are in charge of all the domestics. Now as I’ve said, the servery can be a flashpoint. Normally, there’d be a cleaning warder on there, an SO and maybe a couple of other members of staff outside the area, looking on. This day, I was on the servery with Reg and the Charmer came swaggering down the landing. He’d maybe got two days left with us, this obnoxious scrote, and then he’d be out of nick. So he got his dinner, took an apple, and wanged it straight at Officer Urwin. He obviously held a grudge.

  Well, it hit Reg hard in the chest. I heard it – a real thud. If it had got him in the face it would have broken the old lad’s nose.

  Thing is with prisoners, if they know they are going to be in a brawl, when it’s pre-meditated, they’ll oil up, to make themselves slippery. This lad was greasy as a gigolo’s dick, baby oil all over him. We struggled to get locks on, even when four or five more joined in. So I kicked his legs from under him. Bang! He hit the deck hard. I went down like a stone too, his skanky breath in my face, and there was this enormous crack as my head bounced off the floor. I felt my eye swell straight away. This prisoner was dragged off again, to seg’ this time.

  Next morning I walked in the office with a plum on my face. Reg had his back to me, arms wide, and was telling the story of how he’d twatted this con.

  As soon as Nobby Nobbler saw me he cottoned on. ‘Was it a right or a left?’ he asked.

  A little shit had tried to knock him out with an apple – but the guy’s sixty years old and ready for retirement, so why not have a war story? I went over to the kettle, my back to him, while Nobby still egged him on. Telling his tale Reg got more and more excited. People were laughing by now, the ones who’d clocked my eye. I got my brew and sat down, looking right at him with my good peeper. Mid-flow in Jackanory, he did a double take and the room erupted.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, head in hands. He apologized every day, did Reg Urwin, and retired three months later.

  The Space Cadet was one who came straight through G Wing, the induction unit, so we knew he’d be a handful. I never knew what he got locked up for; he was a remand prisoner, could have been anything. He’d been telling them the aliens in his cell were threatening to beam him up. He came to us one morning on the twos, high as a kite, LSD by the look of it. You couldn’t converse with him – he was staring off into the farthest reaches of the universe, nanu, shazbot.

  At dinnertime, we’d served the fours and threes and then it was the twos’ turn. When I looked into the Space Cadet’s cell, I saw he’d been cutting.

  Also on our landing that day was Dylan, a young officer who’d started when I did, a former marine that I got on very well with. But hey, he’d only just clocked on and I was on an early shift and wanted to get home. This oddball prisoner wasn’t dying: he was trying it on and I didn’t need delaying with paperwork. So I stepped to the next cell and Dylan, not noticing, unlocked the Space Cadet instead. I’m not proud of that. All I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time. When the con came out on the landing, arms bloodied, as soon as Dylan touched him that was that. He started flailing and we were at it.

  You are taught to restrain prisoners on their feet, but in pretty much every restraint I’ve been involved with we took them to the floor. It ended up needing six or seven staff to control this lad. We were not getting locks on and he had the uncanny strength prisoners get when they are in that zone – possessed by demons, they’d have said in medieval times. This lad, for example, was tall but not big, no muscularity about him at all.

  I tried my best to get the Space Cadet in an arm lock, someone was on his head, people were lying on his legs and he really had it going on. At one point he ripped the shirt off my back. I went to wash the claret off my arms and neck – could have been my claret, could have been his, could have been anyone’s – and when I returned they were still at it. I ended up back on top of the lad. Meanwhile the cons behind their doors still wanted feeding, so we bundled him off to healthcare. It was only a hundred metres away, but it took us another twenty minutes to get him less than halfway, and we had him in cuffs by then. With arms behind their back it’s usually game over: not this guy.

  Eventually we got him into a constant observation cell – no door, just a gate covered by Perspex so you can see through. The nurse manager told us not to leave him, though – he was too dangerous – so we had to lug him a bit further to the seg’. Six or seven of us were still sweating our backs out nearly half an hour after coming in, and off we went again with this lad whirling like a dervish. By then, the entire jail was in lockdown and prisoners in the seg’ were cheering him on – ‘Go on, lad, give it ’em!’

  To get him there took another twenty minutes. Normally their staff then took over, but they saw us covered in claret. The cuts weren’t deep, but mixed with sweat, blood is like oil: a little goes a long way. He went in the special cell, where the idea was to do a strip search, common procedure with noncompliant prisoners after relocation. You’d lay them down using a variation on the old wrestling ‘figure of four’. Now this can be very painful – I’ve had it done on me in training – and once again the Space Cadet was having none of it. His legs were like steel: he’d got them straight and they weren’t for bending. The seg’ staff were outside gazing in.

  ‘Are you giving us a hand or what?’ I asked the seg’ SO.

  In came the troops, eight or nine on him now, and in the end it was decided the best course of action was to get the cuffs off and then, one at a time, as best we could, get the hell out. How we did that wasn’t textbook, but somehow we managed it. It was three o’clock when I left the jail, so much for getting off early. Served me right, I suppose.

  A couple of days later, I answered the phone on K Wing. ‘We’ve a lad in segregation for you, been here two days . . .’ the officer said and I started laughing.

  ‘The Space Cadet,’ I said. ‘We brought him in . . .’

  ‘Yeah and
I heard it took forty of you a couple of hours,’ he said.

  Anyway, I went down as backup for the Tornado team, one of whom gave me a nudge when I arrived. ‘We’ve got the experts in now, Sammy,’ he said. ‘This is the A team, not K Wing’s shower of shit.’

  They opened the cell and out walked the Space Cadet, clearly still tuning into Mars. To their credit, they realized their predicament straight away and tried to guide him back. He’d only stepped out by a metre or so, if that. But guess what? He was having none of it.

  Forty minutes later, with a bit of help from yours truly, in he went. Our Tornado team ‘expert’ meanwhile was on his haunches, helmet off, sweating like a sumo’s backside.

  I’m not sure how the Space Cadet got back to K Wing. Maybe Scotty beamed him up.

  7. Lock All the Doors

  I never got calls from work at home, ever. But this Saturday night I’d just cracked open a can of Stones Bitter, my favourite as it’s brewed in Sheffield, and ‘Strangeways’ flashed up on my phone.

  ‘Officer Samworth – Tornado?’

  ‘Yeah. Is it Danny Gee?’

  I knew it. I’d had a couple of sips of bitter, and it would’ve been easy to have put my phone on silent and left them to it. The takeaway I’d ordered got put on hold. But by now I was on the Tornado team myself and this was what I’d done my training for. I put my ale down, went for a nervous shit and got in the car.

  Tornado training involves kitting up with protective gear, like shields and helmets, and learning to work in teams on everything from controlling troublesome prisoners like the Space Cadet to putting down a full-scale uprising. In my opinion every jail should have a greater percentage of staff Tornado trained. It’s a very good thing: it gives you confidence, especially in potential riot situations, and at Manchester there was no shortage of lads wanting a go.

  It had been a tough enough course in Doncaster, lining up with shields at forty-five degrees, three against one, while guys threw stuff at you, and as the week went on, it got tougher. One block of wood hit me in the guts, leaving a six-by-six bruise. Fucking painful, but you got on with it. Us Manchester lads were up for it and got stuck in, breaking down barricades, all the scenarios you’d expect in a prison riot. The guys from other prisons looked terrified – southern softies who don’t like chips and gravy, I bet, filing accident forms for stubbed toes. But riot training has to be realistic. People need to know what facing angry nutters who are out to knock your head off will be like, don’t they?