by Rod Madocks
Doctor Kaiser: We are trying to help you…
—Don’t think I don’t appreciate all your time, doctor. Lord, you’re a far cry from old Doctor Hood.
Doctor Kaiser: One of my profession?
—You could call him a doctor but most knew him as a butcher. That hospital bay there was usually full of the worn-out prisoners, too weak to be moved. Some even died after their release date. Dr Hood ran the place when he wasn’t drunk, evil bugger that he was. I hope you don’t mind me saying that, doc, but it’s the truth. I saw men die from fevers, blood poisoning, runny guts and bad chests after being turned away by Hood for ‘malingering’. He was no different and maybe worse than the usual run of prison doctors. I had particular reason to remember Hood. I tried to avoid him but he latched on to me when I was punishment block orderly. He used to call after me asking if was the ‘Lee with the surprisingly intact neck?’ He didn’t actually say ‘neck’, it was some medical words that I didn’t understand.
He knew exactly who I was. He said he’d been studying my case. Went on about how surely the famous Babbacombe Lee would not be afraid to dispute a little with him. I can see him still with his big red Irish face, calling out, “Come on Lee, just for the hellery now. Let’s have no secrets.” That type of thing. I kept away from him as much as I could but you can’t hide for long in jug. Sooner or later he’d get me cornered in the blocks. He kept on asking me whether I did it and not. I’d argue with him as much as I dared but he’d tell me not to bandy with him. Said he’d worked with Chilcote as a relief doctor in Torquay ten years before, told me that Chilcote was dead, caught dysentery off what Hood said were those ‘filthy charity patients’ of his. Hood said that he often spoke of my case with Chilcote and followed the court reports in the papers. It seems Chilcote thought the evidence was wrong at the trial. He never would believe she was killed with a hatchet. Hood kept on nagging me, saying in a jeering way, “Innocent are you? Innocent as a sparrow?” If I tried to argue back he’d tell me not to kick unless I was truly spurred. He’d go on about the blood on my trousers, the only man in the house, the empty oil can in my room, the knife in my cupboard drawer—all the stuff I tried to push away. I knew not to fight back and I pretended to be an old broken-down thing but that only encouraged him. He said I might be all meek and mild now but I was a big lad in my time. He said her head was smashed and neck cut to the bone with a blunt knife. A strong man did that. Was it a strong man like me?
I’d have to stand there, cap in hand, and take it. He poured it all over me, going on about how Chilcote told him what a demanding old zaul Miss Keyse was. Complaining and full of opinions, she was. A creaking gate that had hung on too long. Annoying to a wild young man wanting to get on. Hood’s main thing was to talk about what he called his “little theories”. He’d prod at me to say yea or nay to them. He liked to guess at what he thought happened that night in Babbicam. His “speculations” was another name he called them. I wouldn’t look at his toad face while he went on. I stared at the floor and let it flow over me. Hood rattled on about how those Devon beaches were a whirl of smugglers despite the revenue men. What happened? Hood asked. Did she stumble on a smuggler’s meeting? Hood said he thought someone was startled when she came busy-bodying. Someone knocked her on the head with a truncheon or knob stick and then she was finished with a knife that was close to hand because she was threshing so much. He went on about how he wasn’t saying I did it but he thought I was there. It all had to be tidied up once the deed was done. In all the panic maybe it was I who thought to fire the place? I’d say nothing and he’d laugh, saying that many a man’s mouth broke his nose.
Hood seemed sure I’d tell him one day. After all, he kept reminding me I was stuck here in Portland for many a long year. Or he’d laugh and say that I had well and truly burnt my arse and now I must sit on the blister, whether I did the crime or not. Of course I’d not give him the chance of satisfaction. My silence gave him further ideas. He said he saw someone harder than me doing the deed with Miss Keyse. There was a little too much consideration in me to be a slasher or a basher.
Doctor Kaiser: Had he got close to the truth? Was that why you disliked his prying?
—Truth? Naw, not near it. He wasn’t bothered about the truth anyway he wanted to grip on me and bear down. That’s all. Even when I got returned to the main quarries he’d call after me in the block corridors, “Too proud to tell the truth, Lee?” Or if I was in a column of men he’d wave and tap his nose and shout, “I have you, sir. I have you!” Dealing with that Hood made me wonder if I actually got out what would be waiting for me out there if that was a taste of it? Do you think me a guilty sort of man?
Doctor Kaiser: I think you have been hard done by too but I have not enough facts to form a true opinion.
—Facts eh? I thought I’d been boring you with too many. The only facts worth considering is who’s to live and who’s to die. Just like that fly in my room, a little cripple fly. A flick of spring sun has stirred it up from its hidey hole. I used to stalk those bluebottles in my cell. They grew to be great big buzzing things there. It was not the sound that annoyed but the waiting in between the bursts of buzzing that were a torture for a locked man. I’d whack ’em, those blue-arse flies, with a slam from my folded-over prison cap. Finish. Scat for Mr Fly. Now, we’ve got that Flit stuff. Addie goes around the place spraying away with it. It smells of paraffin like them lamps in the Glen and my stinking pantry room. I think perhaps I’ll let this fly live a while longer. That’s a little bit of control that I have left. Who is to live and who dies? Now that’s a question. I can see now that all life is waiting for something to tread on you and squash you down. It’s what you do in the meantime that matters.
It didn’t look as if I had much of a future in those last prison days though maybe better than the poor look-out I have now. Now I just want to appreciate Addie and try and reach out. That’s why I’m talking like this. To straighten it all out. It all comes round don’t it, doc. All get caught in the end?
[No apparent reply from Doctor Kaiser]
Brother Where Art Thou?
Here’s a question for you: how could Lee be so dumb and still survive? Let’s see how he managed once he was let out.
Meanwhile, I’ve found a way of dealing with Georgia. She speaks to me during special sessions and the rest of the time I block her out. If I relax and let her in she comes to tell me things. Sometimes I play a relaxation download that Mulvina sent me: It’s called ‘Dolphin Chakra’. That was sweet of her. Georgia comes into my mind when I play the floaty music. She has a tinkling kid’s voice and keeps saying how there are three of them trying to get through to me, claiming it’s your Mom, your Pa and your brother trying to get through (Grandpa clearly doesn’t want any of it). I keep telling Georgia I’ve got no brother but she says in her tinkling voice, “You’ll see, you’ll see.” I still don’t believe it’s a dead person talking. No doubt it’s a bit of my unconscious that’s trying to heal me and guide me to better things.
Spool Seven
Release and new birth
Newton Abbot Devon, 1908
—What do you remember of someone? Not their promises and not even their face or voice or way of standing. No, it’s a general feeling about them, something about their character With Jessie, it was the way she tried to stick by me no matter what. All she wanted from me was a bit of something back, something to say she was loved—but I never really gave her that. It was all such a shame, a sickening shame that still hangs round me. There are some things I shut out my mind, ’n Jessie’s face is one and our son’s another. His fat tongue stuck out like a fig. Jessie now, she still pops out in my dreams whether I want her there or not. I’ve started to hate sleeping. I’m frit of those little slices of death. Those dreams of Jessie bring me back thirty years and more. I did not really know her when I was with her, not really noticing her smell, the feel of her skin, not knowing the ’zack color of her eyes. Maybe she is dead now, like her ma dying yo
ung perhaps and with this terrible war who knows what has happened to them all.
[The recording spool shuts on and off numerous times in this sequence as if Lee struggles to find words.]
Doctor Kaiser: Ready to go on?
—Ess, as ready as I’ll ever be. At Kingswear when I started on the rail works they told me to go and fetch a bucket of steam from the engine shed. Mumpsy lad that I was, I went puzzling, scratching my head and dragging an empty bucket around and asking the artificers for steam to fill it. How they laughed while I wandered around with that bucket. They did it to all the apprentices. A joke played on the new lads. A bucket of steam. That’s how the years seem. That’s what my life seems to amount to now. A bunch of auld crams.
Doctor Kaiser: You must have been pleased to leave the penitentiary?
—I crept out of prison on my day of release in December 1907. My hands flopped at my sides because I had become used to having no pockets. I barely looked at the flinty sea off Chesil on the way down to Weymouth. There was a small crowd at Newton Station ’n I skittered though them like a mouse and was grateful when the Lloyds Weekly man ordered up a fast cab. We rattled up through Wolborough and onto Sand Pit Lane. It was only when we were going down that deep lane back to the village that I really believed I was free.
Then there was the village. So strange to think of it carrying on its quiet life all that while. The first thing I did when I came back to Town Cottage was to run up the stairs to my and Millie’s old bedroom. I looked at myself in the mirror on the wall there. That skull face looking back at me was a shock. Outside, a pack of news hounds had gathered. Phillips from Lloyds Weekly arranged two photographs with me and Ma standing together outside and one with me with my arms round her. Ma wore her white apron and I still had my hat and coat on. The next day I was whisked to London.
Faster now, faster than I had ever been in life before, I shot back into the world. Newton Abbot, it seemed so much busier than I remembered. Everyone seemed to be hurrying at a hell of a rate. New buildings had gone up, the roads had widened and some of the old warrens had gone. The express to London thundered along at the devil’s speed. It only stopped once at Exeter where I glimpsed the Castle high up on its hill. During the journey I roamed the new-fangled corridors between the coaches and could not stop switching the electric compartment lights on and off. Phillips led me through the mass of folk at Paddington and I took my first ride in a motor car. I gripped the leather straps tightly in the red cab as we went through all the horse traffic and omnibuses. I’ve been sold on autos ever since. At The Strand we came up to a very grand-looking hotel. I said the likes of me could not go in there, but Phillips took my arm and pressed me on. There we met Robert Donald. “Big Chief,” Phillips called him. He ran the Daily Chronicle and Lloyds Weekly and much else besides. I sat in my old black coat, refusing a drink. The press king, with his big face whiskers and his face as red as a beet, raised a glass to me anyway. He kept talking of “mutual profit” and about making me the talk of the nation.
Doctor Kaiser: It must have been strange to see a big city like that after all you had been through?
—I was in a daze. They took me around the sights of the capital. I saw Parliament Square and Marble Arch, the new electric lights shone at the underground entrances above the pushing crowds. We went to the Bioscope to see newsreels of airyplanes, Peary in the Antarctic, Jack Johnson, a gert black boxer. He looked cocky and confident. A new world had grown while I had been inside. I wondered how a film of my own life would look. On we rattled to Fleet Street to see the Chronicle printed. I stood mazed watching the great thundering presses, a tangle of wheels and pulleys where men crawled like pigmies among the workings.
Doctor Kaiser: How did you set about telling your story?
—Phillips sat with me in my hotel room while he wrote out my life. It took all of four days. I’d speak for a bit and he would write away madly. Some of the words he used were not mine, but who was I to say different? He wanted to call the piece ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’. It was to be come out in two parts then to be in a book. It didn’t say much about the Babbicam tale but dwelt on my hanging and on an account of prison. They also got an artist to make drawings. I was glad to be rid of them in the evenings. I spent the spare time reading old Lloyds Weeklies. The city made this constant humming noise, I could hear it day and night. Once or twice of an evening I went out into the streets but soon regretted it. There was something that frit me about that great mass of strangers. All the pubs seemed loud with voices and music, and my ears had got used to the dropping of silent hours in my cell for too long. Women kept calling to me, “Buy me a drink, dearie. Buy a drink.” But I knew them not. The lights shone all night in the hotel and at times I wondered what sort of world I had been let out into.
I was glad to get back to Deb’m holding my fat check as the presses rolled and the whole country gobbled up my story. I found my feet a bit and started to lose the prison terrors—but it would be a long while before I laid them to rest. Those gaol lessons were long in the learning and long in the losing. Still, a sort of pride grew especially after the Lloyds articles came out and my book followed. Philips sent me a box of them and I laid them out on the floor of Town Cottages for Ma to look at. She said I was her bigabout lad, although that front cover, showing me all noosed up and hooded on the scaffold, troubled her. I’ve still got one somewhere if you want to look at it.
Cards, letters and gifts began to arrive, forwarded on by the Lloyds people. My story seemed to touch other people’s hearts. Women especially wrote to me. My book carried a picture of me that was taken a week after leaving gaol. To me, it showed a hairless old man with a monkey face but the ladies seemed to like it. One letter spoke of my “untamed blue eyes”. I liked that, “untamed”, that’s what I was. My fame grew and even the village noticed. Old Uncle George came hobbling down from Sunnybank with little cousin Fred in tow, holding a newspaper with my picture on the front page. They couldn’t believe it. Ma grew sick of press men always rapping at the door. One paper brought Reverend Hine to meet me and to have our photo taken shaking hands. I hadn’t seen the hooky-nosed priest since the night before my execution when he and Pitkin had tried to bully a confession out of me. Hine was still a gennleman in his top hat and gloves but time had rounded his shoulders and brought mild sorrow to his once high and mighty gaze. I asked him how he was going on and he said his wife had died five years before. That news cheered mezelf up a bit—how I had survived so many of them. Hine said to me that he hoped peace would stay with me and I was to fear not. I could tell he still thought I was guilty as sin. I told him I was not frit, not one little bit.
It got so I had to watch for who was about because of all those newspaper stories. Men hanging about outside the Seven Stars at Newton started to call out to me, “Go on, John Lee, you show ’em. Good on you, boy!”, all sorts of things like that. Women began to stop me in the street to ask me to sign my book. I liked to put, ‘Sincerely yours, John Lee’, in there.
Doctor Kaiser: So, you became a novelty? Someone famous. That is remarkable.
—Even stranger for me, I can tell you. I cashed my Lloyds cheque. There would be a year’s good living out of it. I got new vulcanite teeth to replace the prison rotted ones, a good suit and a day coat. I wore a flower in my button hole and bought a gold signet to wear on the left pinkie. I wore my hat at the old tilt and swung a cane with a barley twist and mother of pearl handle. The coppers at Newton police station began to joke with me when I came for my monthly sign-on as a ticket-of-leave man. I showed them a great bundle of letters I’d received with marriage proposals from women of all ages. They called me ‘Lady Killer’ for a joke. I suppose a kind of vulishness began to grow. I liked to be touched by women. It had been hard not being with a maid those twenty two years. The only ones that had touched me in all that time was the soft fingers of the queer prisoners, ‘the mandrakes’, they called them who shaved us prisoners every week. Prison neutered a man and even
the whipping frame had a leather pad that cupped the privates so that they would not bump when the lash was laid on. It had been a long time since I had even looked at a woman close to. All through prison I kept thinking of Katie’s words to me in that letter they read out in court, about how she would never get tired of waiting for me even if my lot was to crack stones in the street. Ah, poor Katie, I had cracked many a stone since then and she was long past taking me back. Instead of chasing old love I now became a new feature. My fame grew, fed by newspaper accounts that tracked my every move. Crowds followed me in the streets. Women came flocking, milliners assistants, dairy maids, the girls from bakeries and drapery shops.
“Wishee well, Jack!” They called out as I came strolling past in my new get-up. They often wanted just to touch me. Something drew them to me and sent them all of a diz, like the new Helter Skelter at Hancocks Fair.
“OO! Thikky eyes! They looked right through me!” They would squeak to each other after I had passed. I enjoyed that swelling fame and took advantage when I could but I did not lose my head altogether and seldom forgot that fame was a horse that would not run forever.
Sometimes I would hole up at Town Cottage for days while Ma went talking to her hives, telling them to rejoice because I was home again. I’d walk around the village. Sometimes I’d stop at St Mary’s where Pa and Millie were sleeping together in the church yard. I met an old man once on one of these walks. His shoulders covered in a sack, under the dripping fingers of a rick. He said I had a bad name and no chillern. I was riding high now but life would go scat for me soon enough and I’d be all forgot. Miserable old crabbit, he was—still he made me think.