His last words were: ‘And don’t go imagining that the law is going to be changed, or anything like that. Because it won’t.’
I learned later that, on that very day, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe had at last yielded to the demands of Sir Robert Boothby and the Church of England that an official inquiry into homosexuality should be set up.
The journey to London—we were all going to the Scrubs first, and the other two on to Wakefield and Maidstone— was made by motor-coach. We had changed back into our own clothes, which felt light and silky after the rough prison uniforms.
We each carried a bundle of belongings, consisting in my case of a few letters and a very small pot of Marmite which I had bought out of my wages—10d a week—at the canteen at Winchester. Edward had some magazines, which we shared between us. This time we were handcuffed; Edward and Michael together, leaving one hand of each free, I with my right hand chained to my left.
I thought of myself in a detached kind of way. Here I was, riding through Farnham in a bright orange coach, turning over the pages of the New Yorker with manacled hands. I should never feel quite the same again about the New Yorker, or Farnham, or the spring, which had hung its catkins along the road which I was travelling. I was becoming a different person. I had believed all my life that every experience, no matter how disagreeable, could be made to enrich and illuminate; this would be the test.
The purpose, or at least the effect, of sentencing a man to prison is to strip him of everything he has—of the possessions, the habits, the attitudes of mind that go to make up a distinguishable human personality. He is reduced to a common denominator of blank nakedness, as defenceless as the white caddis grubs that I used to watch in the stream of my childhood. But the grubs, I remembered, defended themselves by building a ramshackle armour out of whatever they found in the mud. Bits of decaying wood and broken shell, pieces of water-weed and grains of sand, were cemented together by the naked worm which, one day, would transform itself into a winged creature and climb up a reed-stalk into the sun. I would do the same.
The coach turned in at the gateway of Wormwood Scrubs. It was a huge, extravagantly architected place of dingy brick and grubby stone, with Romanesque colonnades running riot in all directions. The forecourt facing the Chapel looked like one of the unsuccessful designs for New Delhi.
We were given lunch in the Reception building, sitting on wooden benches and eating fried fish, cabbage, potato and pudding out of a single deep, circular tin, with a spoon.
Afterwards I said goodbye to Montagu and Pitt-Rivers, and they were taken away.
I stripped and had a bath before changing into the usual grey clothes. Then I went and collected my sheets, my pillow-slip, razor and book of rules for the guidance of Convicted Prisoners, Male. I was shown into a cell on the third floor of ‘D’ hall. It was exactly the same as the one at Winchester, except that the floor was of scrubbed wooden boards. I had become used to such surroundings by now. I merely noted that the windows were dirty, the chamber-pot reasonably clean, and the mattress, as usual, full of lumps. I asked the duty warder for a bucket of cold water and a brush, and began to scrub the floor.
Next morning I was visited in my cell by Mr. Cockayne, the principal officer in charge of ‘D’ Hall. He was rather a small man with ginger hair, blue eyes and a strong sense of drama. Without an audience, he was lost. Even when he was addressing one prisoner, he kept looking around as though he hoped that someone else was listening.
He flung open my door with a theatrical crash. I was on my knees, trying to sweep some breadcrumbs on to a jagged piece of tin which did duty as a dustpan.
‘Wildeblood, isn’t it?’ he boisterously inquired.
I said that it was.
‘Well, I’m glad to see you intend to keep your cell clean. Begin as you mean to go on, that’s what I say.’ He stepped back a pace, swept the landing with his eyes and raised his voice. ‘We keep up a pretty good standard here. Most of the floors are fairly decent. I do my best ... and then what happens? Lying swine’—his voice rising to a shriek—‘lying swine go and write books saying the place is filthy.’ He gave me a meaning look and marched away, jerking his head from side to side and tugging at the seat of his trousers.
I rather liked Mr. Cockayne. He reduced some of the prisoners to nervous wrecks with his continual nagging, but he very seldom punished anybody. He always treated me as though I were a time-bomb that might go off at any moment; partly, perhaps, because he suspected that I might have ‘influence’, partly because he knew I was a writer.
He used to draw me aside and say: ‘You know, Wildeblood, I honestly do my best to keep the place clean, but what can you do? The dirt isn’t in the cells, it’s here ... and here ... and here!’ and his arm swung round in a circle to indicate the leaking roof, the grimy walls, and the disgusting lavatories which were not his responsibility, but that of the Prison Commissioners. It must have been heartbreaking for a man so obsessed with cleanliness, as Cockayne was, to have to work in a prison which was being allowed, quite callously and deliberately, to fall to pieces.
For he really was obsessed. I have seen him go quite pale with rage at the sight of a speck of dirt invisible to the naked eye of anybody else, and when newly-sentenced prisoners arrived wearing ‘Teddy Boy’ haircuts he almost had a seizure. His whole life was spent in a battle against an encroaching tide of dirt, which he regarded as a personal enemy; when he addressed the assembled prisoners one got the impression of Queen Elizabeth—whom he rather resembled in looks—spurring on her troops at Tilbury to repel an Armada composed of soot, spent matches and bits of fluff. But it was just as well that somebody at Wormwood Scrubs should be fighting this battle, in which Mr.Cockayne’s superiors appeared to have lost all interest long ago.
I was allocated to the Tailors’ Shop, a large and sunny room in which about eighty men were working at electric sewing machines, machines for knitting socks and other mechanical devices. In contrast to the Mailbag Shop at Winchester, there was, here, a positive feeling of industriousness. This was due, I discovered later, to the fact that many of the men were paid at piece-work rates. A really good worker on the sock-machines could earn as much as 6/- a week.
I was placed in front of a treadle-operated sewing machine and given a piece of shirt-tail on which to practise. As usual, the air was buzzing withventriloquial conversations.
‘How you doing, Pete?’ asked my neighbour, a dwarfish, bald Cockney whom I had not met before. It took me a moment or two to find out who was speaking, since the words seemed to be issuing from his ears.
‘O.K., thanks. How long have you been in?’
‘Five weeks. Had me first visit Saturday. The mother-in-law.’ He rolled his eyes plaintively. ‘Cor, what a woman. The size of her! They could hardly get her through the gate. Screw on duty tried to turn her back, said they was only three allowed in at one time. Honest, I ain’t kidding. You should have seen her in the War, though. Jerries was always trying to shoot her up; thought she was a barridge balloon. Straight. We got her into the old Anderson shelter in 1939 and she had to stay put for six years. Knit, she used to. All day and all night. We got her a pair of crowbars and there she sat, making wire-netting. You had a visit yet?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘First one’ll shake you a bit, I expect. You get what they call a box visit, sitting there with a piece of glass between you. That’s just for the first time; the others you sits at a table and they lets you have a good kiss-up at the end. It’s all right. Cor, you should have seen the mother-in-law behind that glass! Laugh? She looked like a bloody porpoise in a ‘quarium.’
There was a sharp hiss from the man on my other side. The older prisoners, I had noticed, usually removed their false teeth while working. It was not only more comfortable, but made it easier for them to converse without attracting the notice of the warders.
‘Do you smoke?’
‘Well, yes, when I’ve got any.’
‘I’ll see you’re all right
.’ It was a Yorkshire accent this time. ‘I read all about your case, you see, and I’d like to do this if you don’t mind. I’ve nearly done my time, but I know what it’s like when you first come in. Do you like marmalade?’
‘Yes, very much.’
‘I’ll get you some. You don’t have to pay me back.’
‘But marmalade costs the earth—a shilling, at least.’
‘That’s my worry, not yours.’
‘Well, thanks, anyway.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Hey! Cut the cackle!’ A warder came loping towards us. We all began to pedal, furiously.
There were two sit-down lavatories in the shop and two stand-up ones, shared by eighty prisoners. If one allows a session of ten minutes per man per day, it will be seen that this does not work out. Fortunately, most of the prisoners were chronically constipated, because of the food. They used the lavatories for surreptitious smoking, but this did not take so long; a prison cigarette, known as a ‘roll-up’, is only slightly thicker than a matchstick. The prisoners carry their tobacco—strong black shag—in a tin in their pockets, and roll a cigarette between their fingers as often as the opportunity arises. The ensuing ‘dog-ends’ are unpicked, re-rolled and smoked again, becoming more nauseating with each resurrection. Occasionally a warder, smoking a Woodbine, lets fall a ‘tailor-made dog-end’ which is eagerly snapped up.
In order to go to the lavatory it was necessary to attract a warder’s attention, shout ‘Fall out, sir?’ and wait for the permissive nod. The warders, so wide awake when one was talking illicitly, always seemed to become deaf and blind when I wanted to go to the recess. In my agitation I sometimes forgot where I was, and on several occasions other prisoners had to restrain me from snapping my fingers at the ‘Screws’ as though they were inattentive waiters.
I soon discovered, however, which warders were ‘all right’ and which were not. They varied greatly. Some did not permit any talking at all, while others allowed the chatter to rise in an ear-splitting crescendo above the noise of the machines. One, known as ‘Boots’ because of the unusual size of his feet, boasted that his ambition was to become known as ‘the worst screw in the nick’. He was always shouting fiercely and putting people on Governor’s Report, the equivalent to a charge in the army. He was about 24 years old and had pleasant features which he was always pulling into strange shapes, like someone impersonating Humphrey Bogart. I was rather afraid of ‘Boots’ at first, but after a few weeks I discovered his horrible secret, which was that actually he had an extremely kind heart. One of the saddest things about Wormwood Scrubs was the number of old men, in their sixties and seventies, who had been sent to prison for a first offence. ‘Boots’, so harsh and scornful towards the younger prisoners, always took these old men under his wing, chatting to them when they looked depressed and occasionally slipping a ‘dog-end’ or a sweet into their pockets.
The newspapers, in their dear old-fashioned way, always consider it newsworthy when ‘Public School Man Goes to Gaol’. The truth, sad though it may be, is that quite large numbers of public school men find their way to gaol, usually for shady business deals of one kind or another. At Wormwood Scrubs I met two Old Etonians, two Salopians and a Wykehamist; there were doubtless many more. The result was that the snatches of conversation which one overheard on the exercise yard possessed a charming diversity.
I had, unconsciously, become so accustomed ‘outside’ to judging people by their clothes that I was slightly unnerved to discover, when everyone was wearing the same uniform, how wrong snap-judgments could be.
These two men, for example, beefy, red-faced and brutal; obviously planning together some act of violence. Dockers, perhaps, or professional chuckers-out. They come towards me:
‘Always stay at the Georges Cinq, myself. Used to keep a suite there, actually. Expense account, you know.’
‘I still say you can’t beat the dear old Crillon.’
And these two; a thin, wolfish-looking young man with receding hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and his companion, a fat waddling baby of about forty with round blue eyes:
‘It’s a doddle, I tell you. Two grand’s worth of torn, and the old brass what’s got it is stone potty. You could creep that drum six-handed, with jelly and all, and she’d think it was mice.’
It was an animated scene. The younger prisoners walked rapidly in twos or threes around the outside of the yard, watched by a warder at each corner. The older men, who could not walk so fast, ambled up and down in the centre. One of the old men kept darting into the outer circle, trying to beg a ‘dog-end’ from someone. I had noticed him before, in the Tailors’ Shop, where he sewed buttons on to trousers. He was sixty-five years old, and his name was Ted. He had a rebellious quiff of white hair and very watery blue eyes. He had received a sentence of two years, supposedly for stealing a perambulator. The burglars said there must have been a baby in it.
There were several different kinds of burglars. There were the rank amateurs or ‘slags’ who had stolen paltry sums and were contemptuously described by the rest as ‘gas-meter bandits’. Then there were those who had specialised in ‘torn’ (tom-foolery is rhyming slang for jewellery) and had done most of their work in hotels. These had a tendency towards Oxford accents and glib talk about Jaguars and the South of France; part of their stock-in-trade had, of course, been to look as little like burglars as possible. Finally, there were the professional housebreakers and safe-blowers, an exclusive—one might almost say snobbish—group whose members had usually known each other ‘outside’. They looked very much like plumbers or carpenters, and their attitude towards their craft was much the same.
Cosh-boys, or ‘blaggers’, were rather rare, presumably because most of them came into the category of Young Prisoners and were therefore housed in ‘C’ Hall. The men who had been convicted of robbery with violence were usually excitable amateurs, who were somewhat despised by the professional housebreakers. A few of them were obvious mental defectives. If there was one thing more distressing at Wormwood Scrubs than the number of prisoners who should have been in Old People’s Homes, it was the number who should have been in mental hospitals. They were always causing trouble, abusing privileges and causing fights. One or two of them were epileptics, as well.
The routine at Wormwood Scrubs varied in many details from that at Winchester, but once I had got used to it I found that the monotony of the days and nights, instead of making the time drag, made it go faster. Whole weeks went by almost unnoticed. I could tell which day of the week it was because each day had some small detail in which it differed from the rest. On Mondays there was fish for lunch, and the prisoners changed their handkerchiefs and plate-cloths. On Tuesday, instead of making their beds in the regulation manner, they hung their blankets and sheets over the landing railings to air. Wednesday was the day for changing library books. Thursday was bath-day. Friday was the day on which we were paid, and made our purchases from the canteen. On Saturday we did no work in the afternoon, but had a longer period of exercise. And we went to Church on Sundays.
After four weeks at Wormwood Scrubs—that is to say, after I had been in prison for nine weeks altogether—I was allowed to come out on Association. I sat at a table with nine other men on the ground floor of ‘D’ Hall, and after meals we moved our chairs to the wall, trying to keep as far away as possible from the lavatories, which were in constant use. Some men played darts, chess or draughts, but most of us just sat and talked and smoked our ‘roll-ups’.
I always sat with the same group. Some of its members were sent eventually to open camps, some were released and others took their place, but it remained basically the same. The chairman, so to speak, was John, a 36-year-old timber merchant from Sussex. He was serving a seven-year sentence for a homosexual offence with a boy of 16. The boy, after staying in his house for some weeks, had left with all the valuables that he could carry away. John went to the police, and was prosecuted on the basis of his own statement. He pleaded guilty
, having been told that it would be better for him if he did not oblige the boy to give evidence. The parents of the boy (who was not charged) were among a number of local residents who had petitioned for the sentence to be reduced, but nothing had been done. Leave to appeal had been refused. John had already done two years of his sentence when I met him, and his hair had gone quite grey. He looked about fifty. In spite of his own troubles, he always had time to listen to those of other people.
His particular friend was Jimmy, a young professional burglar who, like many of them, had been a Borstal boy. Jimmy was always talking about ‘going straight’, but it was hard to imagine that he ever would. He was too fond of American cars, flashy suits and the good things of life ever to settle down to a respectable, underpaid job. Sometimes, when he was depressed, he would make the resolution, knowing that he was due for a long spell of preventive detention next time: ‘I ain’t going to have no more of this.’ Five minutes later he would be talking excitedly of forty-guinea suits, Pontiacs and ‘22-carat doddles’, or crimes that couldn’t go wrong. Somewhere in Jimmy’s brain there was a large gap, where the sense of right and wrong should have been. His tragedy was that during all the time he had spent in Borstal and in prison, nobody had tried to supply this lack. He was extremely intelligent and quick, with a lively wit and a strong sense of honour towards his friends, but he was quite incapable of seeing that it was wrong to steal. At 22, there seemed to be nothing before him but a series of prison sentences, interrupted by bursts of wild spending.
Then there was Basil, the Wykehamist blackmailer. He was immensely tall, and spoke in a high-pitched scream. I had known him slightly at Oxford and he attached himself to me as soon as he arrived, to the discomfort of the burglars, who had never met anyone quite like him before. He used to make outrageous remarks about them in French, which they rightly resented. He was, however, such an amusing raconteur that they eventually accepted him, with reservations. He was undoubtedly one of the wickedest people I have ever met, but laughter is such a precious gift in prison that I was always glad when Basil came stalking towards me like a huge, bespectacled crane.
Against the Law Page 14