by Rod Madocks
—If you say so. Maybe I’m trying to avoid talking about prison. After the hanging business, it was hard to straighten it all out in my head. It was all too mazing. I had been half-way across the dark but I’d been called back, but to what purpose? I had been given something that all men wanted—the putting off of death—yet I was soon to find myself thrown into a deeper Hell. Believe me, I soon wished I had been hanged prapperly.
It was alright at first. They treated me to a port and steak on the night after the attempted execution. The guards made a fuss of me and I kept on wearing my street clothes for a while. I stayed on in the condemned cell that the prisoners used to call the salt box. Pitkin visited me every day. He took down all the details of the dream I had the night before the execution, the one about not being hanged and he told me about how Lazarus had been raised from the dead to bring change to the world. I received a letter from Ma saying that she too had a dream that I would not be hung on the night before. She said that all that night before the planned execution there was a rapping and a creaking going on all over Town Farm cottage and the bedroom ornyments danced around.
Everything still seemed like a dream to me. I passed the time lying on my bunk and going through it all in my mind. Warders Barrett and Milord read to me from Bible stuff left by the Reverend Pitkin. Once, I was taken out for exercise in the yards and noticed a pile of fresh dug earth. I wandered closer and discovered a pit there next to the mound. A warder said, “Yes, Lee. It is your grave all open and waiting for you.”
Doctor Kaiser: How long was it before you heard that the death sentence was set aside?
—I waited a month to hear I was respited. I did not really know what it would mean for me. The warders told me I would probably do twenty years but none were very clear. One day I was called to see Cowtan. He told me I was being transferred. He wouldn’t say where. I was given duck canvas clothes marked with the government arrow which the prisoners called ‘the devil’s claw mark’, or ‘crow’s feet’. That prison cloth were stiff and sharp and rubbed you sore. I was chained at the ankles and wrists, and Cowtan and two warders took me to the London train at St David’s. They rushed me from the cab at the station. I could hardly walk because of the chains. A few folk saw me and called out,
“It’s Lee!”
We took a closed carriage on the gert, green, steamer. I’d seen its name as we waited on the platform. It was the Amazon, an Alma class express; I’d watched it pile past on the Plymouth line many a time in the past. Now it took me east. I was still treated a bit special. At Salisbury they brought me a glass of milk and cakes. Those were the last bits of the outside world for a long, long while. At Waterloo I was pushed through the crowds who moved quick out the way of my brown heavy clothes and chains. A fast cab took us over the river through the city. I could see nothing as the blinds were pulled down. They stopped speaking to me. Once, Cowtan shouted out to the cabbie to ask where we were. He said it was the Caledonian Road. Shortly after the sound of the hooves changed to an echoey beat as we came through a gate into a walled yard.
“The Model,” called out the cabbie.
Doctor Kaiser: What did he mean by “The Model”?
—That what they called Pentonville, the Model Prison, built thirty years afore. Us prisoners called it ‘The Pent’. We came in under a spiked gate like into a castle. Cowtan told me to not let myself and him down. Then, with the forms signed, all connection was gone. I found myself being pushed along by new fierce warders under yellow gas jets. Everything was smooth, clean and shiny. The gaol corridors stretched out on each side like the spokes of a great wheel. They told me to give them any money, gold or silver, or they would take it. They also wanted letters or locks of hair otherwise they would find them and destroy them. I handed over the last of my things, letters from Katie and those from Millie and Ma, also the hair bracelet that Katie gave me on the night of the Babbicam Regatta. Then I was stripped and they peered up my arse for contraband. Disinfection bath came next then I was pushed into a narrow cell. It had a hammock slung from rings, a copper wash basin and a work bench all lit by a gas burner high on the wall. That night and all the other nights were spent there in hard silence. It was a place built to muffle up sound. The night warders shuffled past in soft overshoes. Couldn’t hear nothing, only the hiss of the gas jet. Days were little better, the pile of old ropes to be picked to oakum fluff were throwed through the door hatch by a silent trusty and the half hour exercise time was spent alone, pacing in a walled yard.
About a week in, I started banging and screaming until the guards came. I wanted to see someone and speak so they gave me a kicking in reply and told me I would miss the meat ration that day for wasting their time. I heard one warder saying to another that he hated us boys the most. He said we were sad troublesome fellows until our spirits were broke.
Doctor Kaiser: How long were you kept on your own in a cell?
—I did nine months solitary. All long sentence men had to go through it. It pounded me to an inch of my life. The weight of those long silent hours and days pressed out all my spirit, forced me to live inside myself. After the first weeks when I would flail about and jabber and moan I slowly began to learn to be more still, to sink down into the oakum picking and let the time pass. I also learned to make out the faintest sounds and mark them. A special point came when I learned that towards evening if I stood on the work bench closer to the high window I could hear a faint whistle that rose to a point then faded. I reckoned it was the scream of an express pounding out of the city on the Northern Line and that sound gave me some hope of another life going on out there. The long nights were the worst. The deadly quiet ate you up. Sometimes I burned a home-made candle made of meat fat and twists of oakum. Gar, I loved the smell of that secret flame and sometimes I burned my fingers with it deliberate-like to remind me that I was still alive. I still kept on thinking about that hanging business and what it all meant. I tried to draw pictures of what went on. I used the paper I was given for monthly letter writing. Those pictures were all taken away by the staff and in time I just kept everything in my head.
Doctor Kaiser: What kept you going?
—In solitary you needed to shift from living to being. You became like a craitur, a granfergrig, just scuttling along the stone floor and barely feeling the world. There were some who could not manage it, they were overmatched by it all. Sometimes on morning cell clear-out I’d see grey-faced felons along from me. Sometimes one of them would be missing, taken to the punishment cells for chucking their food or going for the crows—that’s what we called the staff. Sometimes the poor lads went mad and stripped off and pounded at the walls. I held on. I saw it through. Nothing lasts. I knew that and know it now. It all comes to an ending some time. It could be very hard though. Bitter sad times, like those early summer evenings when you’d hear the whistling and chat of the crows going off work. They’d be going to lives waiting for them on the outside and all I could think of was all the maids I’d never have, those roads I would not cross again. I also used to think somewhere out there Lizzie would be having her babby and I wondered how they were faring.
Doctor Kaiser: You never left your cell?
—Nay, apart from half hour a day exercise in the yard, going round in a circle and chapel once a week. I looked forward to chapel. Can’t say I have since. They used to sit us in wooden boxes screened from each other. I liked the hymns, specially “Stars In My crown” and “Nearer My God To Thee”. It was the only time I really heard the sound of my own voice. Sometimes I’d hear a strange tapping on the wood next to me. I wasn’t sure what to make of it until a new trusty taught me about it, bit by bit, when he gave me my daily rope for picking. He whispered that you knocked out one tap for an ‘a’ and two taps for a ‘b’ and so on. Three fast taps signified the end of a word. It was a painful slow way to communicate not like the naval morse and heliograph that I had learned in the navy but still it made all the difference. I tried it first in chapel and the unseen fellow in the next box tapped ba
ck “Lee, we know you. Keep well.” I became faster at it, and could rattle off the code. Knock knockety knock knock for, “Are you there?” And the rattling seven taps and two taps for “GB” meaning, ‘God Bless’ as a sign off. All would stop when you heard a thump rather than a knock, that meant, ‘beware a crow’. I realized that some of the old prisoners went on like this all day between themselves by means of little coughs or clicking sounds or through noises made by brushes or tools.
Doctor Kaiser: And in time you joined the regular prison population?
—I was in the Pent for four months then in high summer I was moved to the half-built Wormwood Scrubs. It was noisy in the new gaol and there was less of the killing quiet that you had in the Pent. I got to talk to other prisoners more easily there though at night you had to tap along the pipes. I was given work sewing duck cloth uniforms to start with. I complained to one of the old tailor prisoners who brought me the cloth that I needed to find a way to kill time. He used to laugh at that and tell me to have a care because time would kill me in the end.
It was still a hard, horrible time. The days were spent picking at oakum from rope ends. It was as tough as catgut. Or sewing the ugly stiff prison jackets. When you didn’t do that you had to turn a crank handle in your cell for hours while the guards screwed it tighter and tighter to make it hard to move. On account of that some of the prisoners called them ‘screws’. Bad thoughts walked the night. For a while I made a four-ply rope from oakum thinking to fashion it into a noose and do it “good ’n prapper” this time. I carried that rope for six weeks until I eventually burnt it in my gas jet and crumbled it to bits. I remembered how Ma picked up bits of broken saucer and smashed them up as grit to feed the chickens. She said they had no teeth and needed help. I prayed to the Lord to give me teeth to eat the years. Then, ess, the full term nine months crawled round and I was spat out in October with fifty other men. We grinned secret-like to each other, we were survivors of the silent hours and we were going to the Portsmouth works prison.
I learned the real business of being a prisoner at Portsmouth; at least the hard work there pushed away my thoughts about the trial and the execution nightmare. First I joined the army of mud-brown convicts agnawing at the sea bed in the new dock basin for the navy. We toiled in the stink of harbor sludge and rotting sea weed all mixed up with filth from the town sewer pipes. I was more of a public figure there and the warders often pointing me out to visitors as ‘Babbicam Lee’. That dreadful name had settled on me like a clammy shroud.
Doctor Kaiser: You managed more contact with family later in your sentence?
—News got through to me from letters, yearly visits from Ma, from other prisoners or the odd friendly warder. Poor Millie died. Dear, dear Millie, eaten up by the coughing sickness. Then I heard that Pa was killed by a conniption fit after a drinking do. He was gone and no regret. Ma buried him with all the family photographs as if wanting to sink a whole life with him.
Doctor Kaiser: You mentioned earlier about your campaign to prove your innocence. How did that work?
—I wrote letters to the Home Office about my case and to strangers who wanted to help. There were no end of petitions about my case and that made the prison authorities angry. My hopes were kept alive in many ways. Ma came about two years into my sentence and showed me a letter written in a poor hand. The envelope carried an American stamp. It was signed from ‘a well wisher’ and said that it was known that I was innocent and proof would come to light one day. There were the initials, very faint, ‘CH’ on the bottom of it. Some five years into my sentence a trusty showed me a piece from the Gloucester Journal. It said that I had been set free and pensioned for life at 30 shillings a week because Lizzie Harris had confessed all to the authorities on her deathbed. Well, I knew some of it weren’t true for when I read it I was still working at the wringer in the Portsmouth prison washhouse for nine hours a day and sleeping in a dog kennel cell alongside forty men. And still and still, it made me wonder if something had really happened to Lizzie. I began to think that Lizzie really was dead, her merry mocking laugh, and her wild blue eyes no more. That woman who had held my heart in her hand. I thought perhaps Lizzie had gone and maybe her secrets gone with her too unless she’d told someone.
Doctor Kaiser: You must have felt you were a special person to have survived all this?
—I thought then that I lived on because the Lord had saved me, I knew not how or why. I still struggled with the meaning of that reprieve from death during the early time in prison. It was all mixed up with the dream I had on the night before the hanging and of Ma’s account of her dream and the dancing and rattling of things in Town Cottage on that night. I thought maybe I could not be hung because I was special. I was a scryer like Ma. I could not be hung because the Ladywell had mapped out a different future for me despite all that was ranked up against me. That’s what I thought then anyhow. Now, I’m not so sure, the track of life has got so knotted up. It’s hard to make sense of it all. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do by talking to you like this. It seems now I’m getting closer to crossing the bar and finding out the secret that I nearly learned forty years ago in that shed at Exeter only the difference now is the sort of man I’ve become over those years in between.
Doctor Kaiser: Was it ever explained what happened on the day set for your execution?
—A long way into my sentence I was told that there had been a check on the scaffold by an engineer set on it by Governor Cowtan. When they took the scaffold apart they found signs of rubbing on a draw bolt on the crank. The scaffold had been taken apart then put together again after the hanging of Annie Tooke. One of the draw bolts had been wrongly set back. It was out by an eighth of an inch and this tended to catch on the ironwork of the drop doors when weight was pressed on it. The report said maybe I had not been hung because my weight pressed on that eighth of an inch of steel bolt. Whether it was a bent bolt or the dove of the Lord it meant the same to me though. The fact was I had been saved and I still drew breath despite all that had been thrown at me but to what purpose?
Explanation
I keep going back to Mulvina’s message like a dog to where it’s just barfed. Leave it, dude! I am still trying to read her words as sludge from my brain that she has managed somehow to harvest. But there is stuff there I cannot account for.
I have a confession—I used to send out emails in my parents’ name long after they had died, to pastors, neighbors, doctors, friends, anyone who knew them really. Even though they didn’t live long enough to see the Net really get going. I created an account for them and used to say things like, “We have been here a while, we are so happy, love to all.” I used to get some sort of comfort from it. Someone must have spoken to Grandpa after I’d sent out dozens of those e mails. He told me straight I was to quit doing it.
I tend to see Mulvina’s communications as being like those phony emails of mine, they are made to make people feel better. Still, the one I got from her wasn’t that comforting, it sounded more like a warning. They’d sent Banjo to help me. I needed leading though a wood, a crowded wood—I don’t know what that’s about. In Mulvina’s scribbled message “there are three of them. Is that my parents and Grandpa also? Crap knows, this phony medium stuff makes me sick. The truth is brutal, ain’t it? No crystals, no reiki will really help you. There are no Greek porticoes in the sky just dead meat down here. Plenty of memories though. Curse and bless me dear Mom and Pop, you are ash now, food for muskies and big mouth bass. What would you make of me striving and word-smithing like this? Will I ever get to be your proud heir? It is ten years since I slammed the door on you both.
I’m in the mood for answers. I’m going to unleash enigmatic Doctor Kaiser to burrow out of Lee exactly what happened that year before the murder. I want to hear about that Brownlow business he keeps hinting at. Let’s squeeze the truth out of the sick old bastard. Old Kaiser is beginning to show his sneaky methods. He can bore into Lee. You guys are all owed explanations even though I
don’t know you.
Broken Spool 5 fragments
What Really Happened at
Colonel Brownlow’s
Torquay, 1882
—When did my feet take the wrong path? When was it exactly, that bad turning I made? I had plenty of time to think of it through those twenty-two years of gaol time. It all led back to the Brownlow thing, all that crazy crinkum path. I had been trying to get back on my feet after the sorry mess in the navy but I was stuck in the dead end of the railway job at Torre Station.
Doctor Kaiser: Will you explain to me exactly what went wrong then, Mister Lee?
—Brownlow. What could I have been if not for that Brownlow business? The deadly hands of those twisters Harrington and Kisler had set me to it. What a stupid young tacker I had been to get onto a shameful path, a scoundrel’s way.
Doctor Kaiser: How did it start?
—I had been barely a week into working at Torre—that’s the rail station at Torquay. I was bored sick already, every day spent wheeling the tourists’ bags and humping hampers and boxes of hotel goods. I was squeezed in with Aunt Millie and her noisy little nappers at Clifton Place at Tormohan. There was barely hammock space there and I was pleased when Miss Keyse’s letter came, forwarded by Ma. Miss Keyse said in the letter that I was to go to Colonel Brownlow to take up a footman’s post at the house called Ridgehill on Middle Warberries. It was only ten minutes from Aunt Millie’s. It seemed a godsend at the time but one should beware such a gift lest it turns to a curse.
I found the great villa where the road winds up the hill from Wellswood among all the rich folks’ grounds. Kisler met me at the servants’ entrance. He was a big Frenchman in full butler’s rig. I straightway thought I didn’t like him at all. Kisler made it plain I’d been lumped on him and he was down on me from the start. He showed me my little room next to the plate room. He told me that Colonel Brownlow was an important man and I was never to speak to him or his wife unless spoken to first. I could hardly understand Kisler because he spoke with such an accent; I’d met Frenchies before, sailors and smugglers mainly; didn’t like them neither. There was Susannah the cook and Clara the housemaid, she was from Plympton and had buck teeth, Eugenie, the Swiss maid, sniffy and thought herself too good for me. Kisler ran a strict house and kept going on about the cleaning or “netto yage” as he called it. I couldn’t get away with sloping off all day like I did at Miss Keyse’s.