‘You make me sound like the Sally Army, Dan. I’m not trying to save your soul, you know; I’m just trying to keep you out of the Moor.’
‘Yes, but why should you bother? Nobody’s ever bothered with me, and if they have I’ve usually let them down, that’s the honest truth.’
‘If I was able to help you in any way, would you let me down too?’
‘No,’ he said, fiercely. ‘I wouldn’t. You’ve been let down quite enough already by people like me. Anyhow, I’m not going to give you a chance, Pete. I’ve decided to go straight by myself, and I’m going to do it by myself. I don’t want to be helped by no-one. I’m going to come along and see you one day and say: “Look, I made it.” Then we can be friends, with neither of us feeling that we owes anything to the other. That O.K. by you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Dan pulled a piece of bread out of his pocket and threw it to a pigeon, which sidled towards us with its head on one side. ‘Scruffy little bastard,’ said Dan. ‘Looks like it’s been crossed with a blackbird. Been too long in the nick.’
Bill had decided to re-christen his machine ‘Marilyn’. He was scratching the new name carefully on the paintwork with the point of a screwdriver. ‘I know it’s none of my business,’ he remarked, ‘but I really must congratulate you on the change you’ve wrought in that Starling.’
‘Do you mean the clean shirt?’
‘No, I don’t. I mean the whole outlook. It’s impressive.’
‘I don’t think I have much to do with it.’
‘Oh, yes. Since you arrived, he’s practically unrecognisable. He used to be a horror; never spoke to anyone, except occasionally when he felt like a fight. And so mean!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Bill. He’s the most generous person I’ve ever met. He’s always giving me things.’
Bill jabbed me lightly in the ribs with the screwdriver. ‘I bet,’ he observed, ‘you never thought you’d end up being richly kept by a burglar.’
‘Are you by any chance going to warn me against him?’
‘Certainly not. I think he’s a delightful chap, and I see no reason why you shouldn’t be very happy together. I don’t know what the judge would say; but then I’m not a judge. I’m just a very ordinary man whose views have been changed quite a lot by going to prison. It so happens that I like women—rather too much, as a matter of fact. I wouldn’t like it at all if the law applied the same rules to my sex-life as it does to yours. So, as I said before, I congratulate you.’
It was not I, however, who made the last and most important change in Dan. It was a little Polish tailor, who had been posted from Winchester. He had brown hair streaked with grey, lustrous brown eyes like those of a mouse, and the most ferocious Cockney accent I have ever heard. ‘Moy nyme,’ he explained when we first met, ‘is Jerzy Poniatowski, but moy mytes calls me Pony.’ He had got a short sentence for receiving stolen goods, which he swore he had not known to be ‘bent’, and when he appeared before the Appeal Court he came within an inch of having his sentence quashed on a technical misdirection. Before getting into trouble he had worked in a London clothing factory and made gentlemen’s suits and overcoats at home in the evenings. I introduced him to Dan, who was fascinated by him.
‘He’s such a funny little tyke, with that “gorblimey” accent and all,’ said Dan, ‘but he certainly knows his stuff about tailoring. It’s interesting, too, when you hear him talk. I never knew there was so much in it.’
Dan had been working in the Tailors’ Shop at the Scrubs for nearly two years; but, like all of us, he did his work mechanically and without interest. Fortunately, Jerzy was given the machine next to Dan’s. They discussed the finer points of tailoring in whispers all through the working hours, and in the evenings Jerzy would sit drawing endless diagrams on lavatory-paper or in a notebook. Dan’s enthusiasm was intense, and I wondered how long it would last.
I asked Jerzy whether he thought Dan would ever make a tailor. ‘Blimey, yes,’ he said. ‘He sews lovely on the machine; all he wants now is some practice in cutting and handsewing. I’ll give him a job anytime, anytime at all.’
‘I wish you would, Jerzy. You’d be doing more good than you know.’
‘Certainly, he’s a nice kid and he needs help, doesn’t he? I’ll teach him all I know, and perhaps he could take a correspondence course as well. Then by the time he gets out he’ll be really useful.’
I rather jibbed at suggesting the correspondence course to Dan, but he thought it a splendid idea when it was put to him by Jerzy. He made the necessary application to the Chaplain, and told the Principal Officer in charge of the Tailors’ Shop what he had done. The Principal Officer had been in the Prison Service for thirty-odd years; he had played dominoes with murderers in the condemned cell and watched thousands of prisoners come and go (and, quite often, come back again), but Dan’s sudden urge to be a tailor must have been unique in his experience. He was flattered when Dan approached him for professional advice, but I think he suspected that there was a catch in it somewhere.
After a few weeks, he was almost proved right. At this time, Dan was making prisoners’ jackets, and was earning quite good money on a piece-rate. He discovered, however, that one of the newly arrived prisoners was a Lithuanian tailor who was capable of working at great speed but was only being paid l0d a week, like all men starting a sentence. It seemed to Dan quite wrong that so much work should be done for so little money. An arrangement was made, by which the Lithuanian gave his made-up jackets to Dan in exchange for tobacco, and Dan traded them in to the stores as his own work. Everybody was thus kept happy except the Principal Officer, who found out, as he was bound to do, that Starling was ‘fiddling’ again.
I went to the Principal Officer and asked him not to punish Dan. I pointed out that his new-found interest in tailoring was the only thing that gave any hope for his future, and that it must at all costs be preserved. A man’s life, I said, was more important, even to the Prison Commissioners, than a few pennies. It occurred to me afterwards that I had overplayed this scene rather badly, considering that the Principal Officer knew quite well that Dan was one of his best machinists, and had no intention of losing him. At all events, Dan was let off with a caution.
When I told him what I had done, Dan appeared to be impressed, but rather amused at the idea of my battling with the authorities on his behalf. Like most of the prisoners he was, at heart, afraid of the more senior officials in the prison, whatever he might say about them behind their backs. It had probably never occurred to him that some of them, at least, were reasonable human beings. For the last nineteen years, I suppose, he had been accustomed to equate Authority with petty tyranny, and the habit was by now impossible to break. If I ever suggested to Dan that such-and-such a warder was not a bad sort, he would reply firmly that there was no such thing as a good ‘screw’, except possibly a dead one. This attitude also extended to the police, the judges, and everyone else in a position of authority: politicians were dishonest charlatans, priests were venial and insincere, doctors didn’t know what they were talking about and you couldn’t believe a word you read in the papers. He lived in a world of suspicion and fear.
If Dan, and all the men like him, were ever to be useful citizens, somebody should have been trying to break down this attitude and persuading them that authority was not synonymous with harsh injustice, in the same way that rebellious colonial tribesmen, we are told, must gradually be brought to realise that administrators and police are there for their protection, rather than their subjugation. The only way in which this lesson could be taught in prison was by the example of the men in authority, from the ordinary uniformed ‘screw’ up to the Principal Governor himself.
The staff of a prison falls into two main and distinct groups. First there are the warders, whose principal responsibility is the keeping of discipline. The pay is reasonably good, but it is not, by its very nature, the kind of occupation likely to attract the best type of man. Promotion is slow, and leads only to the positio
n of Chief Officer, which is subservient to that of Governor. If, as has so often been stated, the twin objects of imprisonment are deterrence and reform, the role of the warder is uniquely concerned with deterrence. The propaganda which is used to attract recruits to the Prison Service apparently gives a rather different impression. I have spoken to several young trainee-warders who had entered the Service hoping that it would give them scope for some form of welfare work or social first-aid, but when they discovered that their duties consisted mainly of marching the prisoners around and shouting at them, they resigned in disappointment. Far from being expected to take an intelligent interest in the problems of an individual prisoner, the warders are not supposed to know what any man is ‘in’ for and are not allowed to talk to him except in the strict line of duty.
Given these facts, it is astonishing that the Prison Service should contain so many decent, good-hearted men. In every prison there are, of course, a few cranks and bullies, who are quite obvious to everyone and should have been weeded out long ago. There are also a great many who merely do what they are paid to do, in a kind of bovine trance-state which is strikingly like that of some of the long-term prisoners. They become glassy-eyed automata, thinking only of overtime and the retirement pension. They are probably no better and no worse, as guards, than the electronic eyes and mechanical computers which could so easily replace them. Fortunately, in addition to the bullies and the robots, there exists a small body of warders—almost, one might say, an underground movement—which contrives to take a real interest in the prisoners, and which is perhaps the most potent force for the reform of criminals which exists today.
I wish I could say the same of the Principal Governors, Deputy and Assistant Governors, for it is in their hands that the real power lies. I have experience at first hand of only two prisons, and it is conceivable that they may not be typical in this respect; but I can only write of the Governors whom I know.
None of them, I think, had been ‘through the ranks’ of the Prison Service. They had entered it, in middle age, after a career in the Army or in the Colonial Service, and their whole attitude to the prisoners reflected these twin backgrounds. Wormwood Scrubs, for example, under the leadership of Major Ben Grew, was run as a kind of caricature of the military life. Three of his subordinates, to my knowledge, had brought with them to the Scrubs a typical ‘sahib’ attitude towards men of colour; and the colour discrimination in the prison was one of its most nauseating features. There did not seem to me to be the slightest attempt by the authorities to discover, understand or grapple with the problems presented by the 1,000 individuals in their charge; the men were simply herded together like sheep for whatever period the judges had been pleased to allot to them.
Officially, any prisoner had the right to see the Governor whenever he had a complaint or a request to make. In practice, this was made as difficult as possible. When a prisoner did succeed in obtaining an interview with the Governor, he found him hedged about with assistants and officers, so that it was impossible to speak freely. The interview was conducted in a court-martial atmosphere, in which it was made quite plain to the prisoner that his word would not be taken against that of an officer, and that any complaint considered frivolous would land him in serious trouble. Complaints about the food, for example, were therefore rather less frequent than one would have expected. We all knew that if we complained, not only would nothing be done, but that we should make ourselves unpopular with the authorities, who had a hundred petty ways of getting even with us. If this idea appears exaggerated, I can only say that on two occasions while I was at Wormwood Scrubs a prisoner who had made a complaint against an officer was later ‘discovered’ to be harbouring a hacksaw-blade in his cell. It was always the same hack-saw blade, and I have been told that it turns up remorselessly in the cell of any man who makes himself sufficiently unpopular. In each case the ‘discovery’ is followed by a sentence of bread-and-water and the loss of a few weeks’ remission.
I only had one serious encounter with Major Grew, which concerned the allowance of letters. In contrast with the regime of Major Paton-Walsh at Winchester, who prevented me from receiving my letters and hinted strongly that they were from men masquerading as women, the situation at Wormwood Scrubs was, to begin with, more easy. During the first few months of my sentence I received a large number of ‘unofficial’ letters—a relaxation of the rules which enabled me, to some extent at least, to judge how I stood with the friends whom I had left behind. This, however, was before the arrival of a new Assistant Governor, who seemed to me to be unduly keen to prevent prisoners from receiving letters in excess of their meagre ration of one every two weeks.
He was a huge, unhappy-looking man, dressed like all Prison Governors, in a dirty mackintosh and a hat with a brim turned up in front. He was always padding up and down the staircases and along the landings, so that the burglars, whenever they saw him, were apt to remark that the doss-house must have burned down. At night he used to visit various men in their cells and talk to them. I believe he meant this kindly, and he was at least the only official who attempted to make contact with the men in his charge. His manner, however, seems to have been so clumsy and tactless that he only succeeded in arousing the resentment of the prisoners.
On several occasions I was ‘called-up’ by this gentleman in order to be told that a letter had come for me from Miss So-and-so, ‘whoever she may be’, and that it would be sent back to her unread because it was surplus to my entitlement. Once or twice I managed to get the letter by pointing out, quite truthfully, that it was a reply to one which I had written.
All the letters written and received by us were, of course, read by one of the warders. Although this was nearly always done in a humane and liberal manner, the knowledge that someone else was reading our letters inevitably had a deadening effect on our correspondence. I was fortunate in having several friends who were capable of writing entertaining letters even when they were being most carefully impersonal, but the majority of prisoners received only brief reports on the health of their relations, written in stilted, formal terms as though the writers were uneasily aware that someone was looking over their shoulders. The result was that letters, so eagerly awaited, were nearly always a disappointment when they arrived, and what was not said in them became even more important than the sparse news which they contained.
It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the part which letters played in our lives. They were our only link with the future, and in most cases the link was sadly slender. One inarticulate letter every two weeks is not much of a help, for example, in keeping alive a marriage which is threatened by a separation lasting several years, and it was pitiful to watch the misunderstandings and suspicions growing up in the minds of men whose wives were either too busy or too ill-educated to write them the kind of letters which they needed to get. A delay of a few days in answering a letter was enough, in our surroundings, to start an avalanche of jealousy and mistrust.
The visits which we were allowed to receive once a month were necessarily brief, and hampered by the presence of a warder. In addition to these, a few prisoners were seen occasionally in their cells by voluntary Prison Visitors—an admirable form of service which could do much good if it were organised on better lines. Unfortunately a prisoner who applied for these visits was obliged to take pot-luck and was by no means sure of getting a congenial visitor. Most of the men hesitated to expose themselves to visits from a stranger who was more likely than not to be an elderly person bent on delivering moral lectures to what American advertisers call a ‘captive audience’. The visitors themselves were handicapped by the prison rules, which forbade them to discuss a man’s crime with him—a subject which would have to be tackled sooner or later if anything constructive was to come out of their meetings.
A constructive approach to the problems of crime was, however, the last thing that one expected to find at Wormwood Scrubs. For this, I do not think it unfair to give some of the blame to the Gove
rnor, Major Grew, who for some reason has always managed to escape criticism, although it is generally accepted that the Scrubs, of which he had been in charge for many years, is the worst prison to which first offenders can be sent.
Since my release, I have heard many glowing reports of Major Grew from penal-reformers and others who interest themselves in Her Majesty’s Prisons. It is generally accepted that Wormwood Scrubs is the worst place to which a first offender can be sent, and that its sanitary conditions would, to quote the Earl of Huntingdon, disgrace a Hottentot village. But this, apparently, is not to be laid at the door of Major Grew, who has been in charge of the place for many years. When the praises of Maidstone Prison are sung, as they are so often and so loudly, the credit for its splendour is heaped upon Mr. Vidler, the Governor; but when the stink of Wormwood Scrubs reaches the nostrils of the House of Lords, it seems to be generally assumed that no blame can be attached to Major Grew.
Visitors to the Scrubs were, of course, never allowed to wander into the more unsavoury parts, in which we spent most of our time. If anybody was coming to see the workshops, half a dozen men would be detailed to scrub out the lavatories (thus causing even further frustration to those who wished to use them) and, in the case of really ‘nosey’ visitors like the Howard League for Penal Reform, to paint the doors and polish the brasswork. There was one hilarious occasion when the Mayor and Mayoress of West Acton, with a posse of local notabilities, visited the prison. In case of unfortunate encounters, all the prisoners were locked in their cells with the exception of a score or two of ‘Leaders’, who were mostly policemen fallen from grace or similar types who had ingratiated themselves with the authorities. These men were all fitted out with specially-made new uniforms, clean shirts and fresh arm-bands emblazoned with the name of their particular responsibility, such as ‘LIBRARY’, ‘CHURCH OF ENGLAND’ or ‘DRAINS’. I do not know whether they were allowed to talk to the visitors, but they must have looked extremely decorative. The guests, apparently, had expressed a wish to see the various articles and works of art made by the happy and industrious prisoners in their spare time, and we all wondered where these were to come from. The instructors in the Tailors’ Shop, however, stepped into the breach by producing one or two highly professional examples of garment manufacture; the art-class did its garish best, and although we were never allowed to see the resultant exhibition we strongly suspected that most of the items arrived in a van labelled ‘LCC’ which we saw parked in the yard.
Against the Law Page 18