Veronica's Bird

by Veronica Bird

  To cement our relationship, I felt it would be a good experience with a visit to an Italian restaurant, a traditional trattoria in Harrogate. The Italian owner had found out who our guests were, and asked me if I spoke any Russian myself.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Except thank you.’

  His face beamed. ‘What is that please?’

  ‘Spasibo.’ I was quite proud of my pronunciation. As we left after a delightful meal where everyone could relax away from the tasks set us for the prison visits, Luigi came up to us and shook hands, one by one, saying ‘Spasibo’ as if he was fluent in their home tongue. They became wistful for their own country as they realised how far away their home town was from Harrogate perhaps metaphorically even further, as much as physical.

  Dr Edward Tierney was one of the good men of this world. He gave me enough money to take the group to London for the last day of their stay. It was extraordinarily kind and a very generous gesture, typical of the man and I made sure the party was aware of the private gift. They had heard so much about London and the Queen, causing them to lean forward urgently at the slightest comment I made, in case they missed anything of value. We drove down the M1 in two cars and went to see all the sights. Big Ben, of course, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square and when we arrived on Westminster Bridge to gaze down the Thames their eyes glittered with tears in their happiness. My piece de resistance was a visit to Fortnum and Mason. I had explained that this was where the Queen would do some of her shopping after the proletariat had left for the day. They stood in the entrance at attention, expecting a glimpse, perhaps, of a diamond tiara, taking in the rows and rows of quality goods and the well-heeled customers. They simply could not absorb into their Russian minds, the variety of foods, the way the chocolates were packed, the soft lighting and the luxury floorings. They did not spend a penny, of course, keeping to their wish to take as much money home as possible, but one of our party went up to the Cashier desk and through the interpreter, asked for ‘…. two F. and M. carrier bags, the ones with your name printed on their side.’ These were duly handed over and they became the most precious souvenirs of the trip. We ended the day going to a London pub where the party chose steak and ale pies, mash and a pint of beer, allowing themselves to be driven back to Wakefield in the late night.

  I had one more surprise in store. I had packed up large carrier bags for each of them. They had been filled with all the sort of goodies they could not get, such as soap, toiletries, and biscuits. There was much hugging, tears and three sets of kisses for each of us.

  Their plane took off on time and we went back to our work. We had achieved two things, amongst others. The first was, they, and we, had come to a better understanding of how to improve the lives of prisoners, especially those waiting on their non-existent remand. We had given them fresh air and light, a tiny step perhaps, but to a prisoner shut up all day it was a giant leap forward. The other was we had come to understand that people are the same all over the world. They have fears as well as aspirations, they all want a better life for their families and they could see no reason to need politicians arguing in the U.N. about this transgression or that contravention.

  We all want to live in peace. It was, if nothing else, a good re-affirmation of a basic tenet in life.

  PART THREE

  WHY DO WE LOCK PEOPLE UP?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT’S AN IRONY

  It is an irony, is it not, that Veronica’s family is called Bird. It is almost as if she latched on to the secondary sense of her name in its penal implication, that is, ‘doing bird’ (to endure a prison sentence) at an early age in her life, which caused her, unconsciously perhaps, to steer a course towards the Prison Service. She certainly did her bird, thirty-five years of it, some of it in the harshest prisons in the country.

  On the very day Veronica finally broke free of the family bonds which had held her tightly, Myra Hindley entered the Prison Service on the wrong side of the door. She died, almost as Veronica hung up her keys once and for all. Her future life would be predicated on the need for two simple, and free fundamentals which in anybody else’s circumstances might never have been considered as essentials in any retirement plan. They were, fresh air and sunlight.

  After I met Veronica and agreed for me to write her story, I logged seventy-three years of her life onto my dictaphone, over two hundred thousand words in total, which needed distilling down to about half that figure. Having no knowledge of, nor any preconceived ideas about the Prison Service (I was still describing staff a few months ago, as ‘Warders’ and prisoners as ‘convicts’ which goes well against the grain of today’s position of labelling prisoners as ‘men’). To understand what they did and how they carried out their daily jobs, I could only sit back and listen to the recordings…and learn. It was a steep mountain path to walk, and I made numerous mistakes in my interpretations but, gradually, a story of ultimate triumph began to emerge from my fog of ignorance. Through excellent arrangements with Bob Duncan who wrote the Foreword to this book, he managed to take me into Pentonville prison, a 175-year-old Victorian institution where I received a full-on experience. I was able to touch, feel and smell – tangible senses which brought wisdom and a better understanding to my thought processes and underwrote my belief that prison could never be for me and, I believe, it is not for you either.

  Using a much over-used but appropriate word in this case, I feel privileged to be able to say I know Veronica Bird, who, in the end, through her utter determination, built a happy story around her.

  *

  About one hundred years ago, give or take thirty-five, I was living with my mother and sister in a small house almost, if not quite on the roof of Dartmoor. The prime position was already occupied, a wild swathe of bracken and gorse with the occasional pony displaying a long fringe covering its eyes, to bring scale to the desolate scene. Bent and coiled, like one of Dartmoor’s adders and forming part of the A386 leading to Princetown and thus, the prison, is the aptly named Devil’s Elbow which was always impassable in winter after an icy night.

  We were closer to this forlorn spot than to Plymouth, which drew us daily to its Dockyard, and close enough to hear the Dartmoor Prison siren’s fearful moan, intruding its way onto the moor, often when the mist hung just above the gorse. It was, of course, the best time to escape. We knew only too well another prison break was on the way and we lay somewhere in an escapee’s path.

  In the swirling fog, a prisoner, lost, soaked through to the skin and demoralised, terrified of the stories of quaking bogs, might well imagine Baskerville’s hound howling at his heels, as he sought shelter in the first available house which hove into view.

  We had a reasonably sized dog of our own, not a Baskerville breed perhaps, but a red setter, which slept alongside our coke-fuelled Rayburn every night. (That is the old type of coke, not the modern expression). There seemed no point in locking doors up there. No-one would call after dark where we lived. So, we never worried about a convict calling for cocoa at midnight. Us?

  It was the night after the siren had sounded its warning. We were asleep and did not hear the back door being tried cautiously, before being opened wide enough to allow a shivering body to enter. The convict, hungry after a day on the run, made for the pantry, almost tripping over the dog which, woken, was now keen to share the biscuits which had been purloined by his new mate. This they did together with considerable pleasure. Bread, more biscuits and bananas disappeared into a bag and, I am sure, with a pat on the head for the dog, ‘Copper,’ (good name for a guard dog) he was off. He had not disturbed us by demanding money with menaces and left the kitchen in such a tidy state, other than some muddy footprints (which gave the game away) it took us quite a while to realise we had been visited in the night by the escapee.

  I relate this incident in my life to make a point. Dartmoor held at that time (1951) the hardest criminals in the country. Like Colditz Castle, one prison was designed to hold the whole rotten bag of potential esc
apees and most of the men had nothing to lose. Forget Human Rights, it hadn’t been invented. In those days, you were on your own, struggling just to survive.

  ‘You will never escape from here,’ was the oft-repeated phrase in the Second World War Stalag, but, also in the middle of Dartmoor. That must have been the thought of every woman detainee as the heavy steel door sealed behind her on her first day in Holloway.

  But that cold, wet convict could have benefitted from demanding whatever cash we had, ‘money and car keys,’ let alone ‘warm, dry clothes and maps of Devon.’ Why didn’t he do so? Was it just his utter resolve to get away unchallenged that prevented him from disturbing our slumbers on that night or was it the thought of being caught and returned to an extended sentence in hell, which made him have his supper with our dog, before merging into the blackness and the fog at the very earliest opportunity? Or, was there a thread of decency retained within his hardened heart?

  Things have changed radically since those days. The brutalised men had held their captors in some respect. The hierarchy of class remained, affecting to some degree one’s thinking processes. If you conformed, you might have your sentence reduced. If you killed someone, the State would kill the murderer – an eye for an eye, if you like, straight out of the bible. (Exodus 21:24).

  Today, we have lost the class system effect, and the scaffold, replaced by a professional army of Prison Officers, well-trained, though sometimes struggling to find those extra funds to allow them to go the extra mile. They now have to deal with better educated prisoners, many of them aware of their ‘rights’ and willing to use them where ever they can. There is the rise in the use of drugs, and ingenuity shown from those outside the fence smuggling in all sorts of contraband. As technology advances, the Prison Service has to continue to be ahead of the game and have, I learn, achieved considerable success in reducing, if not stamping out the flow of illegal goods.

  On this basis, the Government has to plan to continue to improve standards generally in our prisons, to prevent the system falling back to those dark and now, forgotten, Dartmoor days. The plan is continually under pressure, for the peoples’ aspirations rise pro rata, so what was judged acceptable yesterday will not be so in the near future.

  Let’s use Brockhill as a real example. It had previously been described by others as a ‘basket case,’ – in other words, to our sophisticated standards in twenty-first century Britain, this was as bad as Dartmoor was fifty years ago. On such a foundation, it will always prove difficult to outrun our desire to improve conditions in our own prisons as we judge them, for they are constantly being pushed ahead of the reality.

  So, should we be locking men and women up in prison at all?

  What if we don’t want to follow this tried and tested method of crime prevention? What if we were to take away the system altogether? What then? One only has to reel back to nineteen sixty-nine in North America to remember the Murray-Hill riots (Montreal’s night of Terror) ending in the murder of a policeman, with one hundred and eight normally law-abiding Canadians, arrested (and they are not the most volatile nation on earth) when the Montreal police withheld their right to protect the public – and that strike was only for sixteen hours. Imagine what a week could do?

  We lock up because we still adopt in our hearts, the biblical proverb, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. We have all used the phrase, but it is a strange, awkward set of words when examined more closely. The principle is that someone who is injured by another person should be penalised to a similar degree. Hence murder begets hanging. When you take away hanging, this must beget long-term imprisonment as there is nothing else we can replace it with, at the moment. If we have nothing else, how can a victim receive an estimated value in compensation? This is not a simple swop; there is an insistence here you will swop, to the same value, otherwise someone is going to get very upset.

  Mohandas Gandhi once said: ‘An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.’ ‘We should not seek retribution’, says someone else, ‘ for personal slight. Enforcing an eye for an eye is the magistrate’s job; forgiving our enemies, is ours’. But, on the other foot, Mohammad Ali was quoted as saying: ‘I’m a fighter. I believe in the eye for an eye business. I’m no cheek turner. I got no respect for a man who won’t hit back. You kill my dog; you better hide your cat.’ There are, as we all know, always two points of view, both earnestly given, both believed in – you take your pick, but, remember, both could be wrong.

  When I worked in the Middle East, forty years ago, the principle of retribution was still very much part of life, an accepted norm. The amount of money could be calculated down to the last riyal and everyone was happy or, if not happy, was able to save face, which could be as important as the cash. But in England, how often does an angry victim’s family, cry out, when a convicted criminal receives a lesser sentence than the public deems fit, (in other words, lesser than an eye, in their perceived wisdom) despite a judiciary responding to laws set by the same public?

  A second reason is, we lock people up because we have lost most of our mental institutions. These far-away people have nowhere else to go. It’s good isn’t it, that these awful, often Victorian, monoliths have been closed, the screaming which had run bouncing along the tiled walls, stilled now, as stinging nettles grow in the once tended gardens? It’s good that we know the Government have dealt with the issue once and for all, so the politically incorrect term ‘madhouse’ can no longer be applied in our effete society. Isn’t it?

  If we were to stop for a moment, gazing with unfocussed eyes, might we not ponder on where these sad, desperate people have gone? Surely there are just as many cases as there were fifty years ago, maybe more, with the pressures of life heavier on their shoulders, stresses greater, the probability of a breakdown more likely?

  Released back into an uncaring world they seek only the sanctuary they knew and, not finding it, take it out on the ‘heartless’ public and end up in prison where they cannot understand the callous attitudes of the new neighbours around them.

  So, where else do they go? Unless they are known to be dangerous to the public there is nowhere else. That is where we lock people up so we can be safe. But to be mentally unbalanced does not mean you have committed a crime; some do of course, but others are as innocent as you or me. Those in prison, confused and restless, mix with rogues and ruffians, many who have no moral compass at all; the virus takes hold in new stock. But that is what we do. We lock people up yet we don’t stop the killing. On average eighty-seven people are killed every year in Britain by unstable minds. Are you certain we are still safe?

  We lock people up through our belief, dangerous men and women should be prevented from continuing their careers in crime. A wall, a fence or both, high enough, (and ladder proof), between them and us has been the way to deal with criminals since before we became a nation. The first people we locked up in Dartmoor Prison were French prisoners-of-war. The initial group of captured soldiers arrived in eighteen hundred and nine. These were, on the whole, good, loyal men, fighting for their country; it had been their misfortune to get caught up on the losing side of an argument. They weren’t criminals. Quickly the cells filled up, in fact Dartmoor became packed to the bulwarks, leaving the Frenchies twiddling their fingers during the day. They turned their attention to making the most exquisite models of men-o’-war fabricated by carving their bacon bones into miniature ribs, gun ports and deck planks. This is not the picture we usually imagine of Dartmoor’s past, a place of Dickensian grimness.

  The government, naturally, did not want to allow fighting men to return to the war as soon as they reached France. A sensible idea. But, the war over, our Government realised they had a solidly built and available prison, and moved quickly in deciding they could lock up their own people here instead. Out on the moor, in the mist and fog where they had no hope of escaping….and, hopefully, out of sight, out of mind, the flotsam of Britain could be conveniently forgotten.

  There i
s yet another, a fourth group of convicted offenders to consider. (Felon is too harsh a word to use for this selection of sinners). What about those sent down for manslaughter where, perhaps, a teenage son borrows his father’s car, drives it into a mother pushing a pram across a road and kills both the woman and her child. He or she pleads ‘not guilty’ naturally. ‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ and ‘the sun was in my eyes,’ are probably the tearful truth, but it doesn’t give the bereaved husband release from his fearful tragedy. So, lock the lad up. The widower demands an eye for an eye. He wants, as the press love to term it, closure.

  Is therefore, the real idea of prison to bring solace to the grieving, haunted by death or serious injury? Is it to allow the sufferer a feeling of justice having been served which has, in the end, been decided often by the votes of just twelve men and women? Are we not simply pushing the problems further down the river, hoping they will eventually float out to sea?

  Veronica described how the removal of prisoners’ uniforms could improve the self-esteem of her charges. In nineteen fifty- one it was unthinkable such an idea would one day come into being. Dartmoor convicts (they were always convicts in those days, a mid-fourteenth century word, stemming from the Latin, and a much loved and well understood term) wore jacket and trousers with black arrows stamped over the material just as we see in cartoons today. Did you know their boots also had an arrow made of studs on the sole? It allowed warders to see if their escapee had passed by in a particular direction even when amongst other footprints. Insisting on keeping this Victorian status quo, would not go down well with the Prison Reform Trust or the Howard League of Prison Reform in today’s politically correct society. But, as so often in life, the cry is raised: ‘…he hasn’t apologised.’ So, a prison sentence carries with it – to the victim – a catharsis of a kind. ‘I knew I was right,’ he says, as he folds his arms in satisfaction.