June ... July ... August ... September. I was halfway through my sentence. ‘It’ll go quicker now,’ said Dan. ‘You’re going down-hill.’ But the days seemed just as long. I could not read in the evenings any more, because in addition to our daily work we were now compelled to sew mailbags in our cells. It was a maddening, useless task, sitting there in the dull glow of a 40-watt bulb screwed up high in the ceiling, eternally stitching away at the tough canvas, eight stitches to the inch. The Chaplain said that the system had been introduced because some of the prisoners had complained that they had not enough to do in the evenings; it was purely voluntary, and no-one who had anything better to do would be punished if he failed to carry out the weekly task. Several prisoners took his advice and stopped sewing their bags. After they had been stripped and examined by the Medical Officer to see whether they were fit enough for bread-and-water, they were brought before the Governor. He let most of them off with a warning that they must stitch their quota of mailbags in future. We did not believe anything the Chaplain told us after that.
When I had been an undergraduate at Oxford I had spent much of my time in interminable conversations, discussing every conceivable problem of the world in a room thick with smoke and littered with empty glasses and unwashed cups, until the dawn came creeping over Magdalen Bridge. But I do not remember any conversations more intense and absorbing than those I had in prison, with Bob the scientist, John the businessman, Vic the river-pilot and Charlie, Dan and Jimmy, the burglars. We talked about politics and sex and religion and art and war and the best way to blow the back off a Chubb safe, but in the end we always returned to the subjects of punishment and reform. This hardly sounds credible, but it is true; I heard more sensible suggestions from those criminals than I have heard from any penologist or politician since my release.
Whether they intended to ‘go straight’ or not, none of them believed that they would be better men for their stay in prison. It had made them feel that they were outlaws, and would remain so. Those who had decided to abandon crime had not done so because of any moral awakening, but simply because they could not stand the thought of coming back to prison again. On the face of it, this sounds like powerful proof of the deterrent effect of imprisonment, but I am not so sure. It is one thing to make good resolutions when you are sitting in Wormwood Scrubs; it is quite another to come out into an unfriendly world with no job, no home, nothing in your pocket but fifteen shillings from the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society, and no friends except other criminals.
The main complaint which these men had against the prison was not the discipline or the filthy sanitary conditions, but the fact that no attempt was being made to fit them for life ‘outside’. The work which they did in the shops was monotonous and almost useless from the point of view of a future career; they were taught to do one thing and did it all the time, year in and year out. The Principal Officer in the Tailors’ Shop, Mr. Heath, and his two instructors did what they could to help Dan and others, who were genuinely interested, to gain a wider knowledge of the trade, but their efforts were unofficial and exceptional. I believe that they would have been only too pleased to organise evening classes for men who wished to take up tailoring on their release, but the higher authorities did not seem to be interested in the idea.
There were evening classes, of course, but they were perfunctory and uninspired. The instructors frequently failed to turn up, and from the fragments of lectures on ‘Civics’, ‘Science’ and ‘Current Affairs’ which I heard the standard was deplorably low. The handicraft classes were run according to the most extraordinary rule. If a man made, say, a leather handbag, and wished to send it home, he had to buy it from the prison authorities at a price assessed by them—not the cost of the materials, be it noted, but an artificial price determined by a committee of the Chaplain and various Governors. If he was willing to pay this price, the money had to be sent in by a friend or relative. The prisoner, of course, never saw this money, which was placed in his ‘property’, but there were endless difficulties. Vic, for example, made a handbag which was given a value of 35/- (the materials having cost approximately 4/6d.) ‘My Shirley Rose’ sent him the money, but it was sent back by one of the subsidiary Governors, who accused Vic of having acquired it by trafficking in tobacco with other prisoners. That was the end of evening classes, as far as Vic was concerned.
But the thing that really crippled the evening classes, together with reading, writing, painting or any other attempt by the prisoners to improve their education, was the weekly quota of mailbags. This unpaid labour occupied about an hour of our leisure time every night. It severely curtailed my own reading and writing, and Dan, Charlie and Jimmy, who were slow readers, stopped patronising the library altogether.
We often discussed what an ideal prison would be like, supposing that such a place could exist. The Chaplain to the Commissioners, an eloquent Welshman, was fond of pointing out in his sermons the horrors of prison life in other countries; but we knew better, because there were a good many prisoners who had ‘done time’ in various foreign gaols. My Canadian friend at Winchester had already told me that at Sing-Sing he had been allowed to have his own typewriter, on which he wrote short stories which he was permitted to sell to magazines; at Wormwood Scrubs one was not even allowed to have a fountain-pen sent in, and the rules about taking out written work on discharge were ludicrously obscure. Bill, my companion on the buttonhole machine, had spent a few weeks in the prison of La Santé in Paris, where, he told me, work was commissioned by outside firms who paid good wages, out of which the prisoners were able to buy a wide choice of food and drink. The Lithuanian tailor told us that in Communist gaols the prisoners were permitted a monthly parcel, containing food and cigarettes, and that it was possible to earn remission by extra work.
This was a system which had already been suggested, rather surprisingly, by Dan. His idea was that in certain cases a convicted man should be sentenced, not to so many years’ imprisonment, but to a stated amount of work: a thousand mailbags, or ten thousand pairs of socks, or preferably something which could be sold outside the prison. In this way, the men would be given a real incentive to hard work; the prisons would eventually become less crowded; and the money earned by the prisoners could be used for their rehabilitation, both directly and indirectly. Each man would have a small nest-egg to take out with him, and deductions could be made each week to help with the salaries of instructors and the provision of lecture-rooms and workshops. Furthermore, a man who had caused a financial loss to someone by his crime would have an opportunity of paying it off, at least in part, by his own efforts.
The wastage of earning-power in Wormwood Scrubs seemed to be almost deliberate. Men who already possessed some useful training were very seldom given a job in which they could practise it. There was no shortage of plumbers, builders and cooks, but they were not to be found in the Works party or in the cookhouse. Some of the allocations were so eccentric that they could only be ascribed to a macabre sense of humour on the part of someone in authority. A horrible creature who had pleaded insanity when charged with raping his own children was given the job of looking after prisoners who went to see the psychiatrist. A soldier, found guilty of mutilating an African suspect in Kenya, was put to work in the operating theatre. An ex-Guards officer, much publicised during his trial as a friend of the Royal Family, was put in charge of the sink where the sample bottles of urine were washed. A man who had killed two girls by administering an aphrodisiac to them was immediately given a ‘Red Band’ and seconded to the hospital.
An establishment run on such lines was obviously not going to fit anybody for a better life. We did what we could to help each other, but it was not much. Jerzy, the little Pole, used to give Dan tailoring lessons every evening, but after a few months he was sent away to another prison. Dan then applied for permission to take a correspondence course. Every conceivable obstacle was put in his way. One of the warders, nominally in charge of education, told him: ‘This i
s a very expensive course, too expensive to waste on anybody like you.’ Dan pointed out that if he was forced to go back to housebreaking and received a further sentence, he would cost the country a great deal more than the fees for the course. He took his request to a higher level, and after a long delay was told that the time he still had to do was too short to allow him to complete the course. He then began all over again, with a request for a shorter course. I never heard the end of the story, because I was released before he had had any reply.
Two things kept me going. One was the visit, every three weeks, of Lord Pakenham, who was preparing a report for the Nuffield Foundation on the Causes of Crime. He must have exhausted my views on this subject during the first few visits, but he kept on coming for as long as he was able. Sitting with him there in a room without a warder, in the dingy grey suit which I had worn for six months, with my hands scarred by the mailbag needle and my fingernails black with ingrained dirt, I could feel that I was still a person. I can never repay him for what he did for me during those months.
The other thing that armed me against the world of prison was the feeling which the warder at Winchester had expressed so long ago: ‘There’s always someone worse off than you.’ I found it impossible to pity myself when I was surrounded by so much tragedy and degradation. I looked at the old man who sat opposite me at meals; he was 72, and had been sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for his first offence. While he was on bail, he had had an accident and had been blinded in one eye. He was unable to read, so he just sat staring at the wall. He had a calm and beautiful face, deeply lined with age. He said to me: ‘I am quite content. When you are as old as I am, you might as well be here as anywhere else.’
He was not the oldest. There was a man of 82, who was so crippled with rheumatism that when he arrived the other prisoners had to undress him and put his uniform on him. I do not know what his crime had been, but he was, in effect, sentenced to death. He died after a few weeks, in the prison hospital. The man who had poisoned two girls helped to lay him out.
I talked to a boy of 22 who had been sentenced to death for murder, and had spent three months in the condemned cell while his case was considered by the Lords. He told me how they had taken away his shoelaces and the buttons off his coat, and watched him day and night in case he killed himself. There were three things he remembered about the cell: the crucifix over the bed, the door that led to the execution room, and the grating through which he was allowed to speak to his mother.
I met a man who had been flogged at Dartmoor: the worst thing, he said, was the way the ‘cat’ curled round you and bit into the right side of your chest. I met wicked men and foolish men, and cowards and men whose courage made me feel ashamed, and from each of them I gained a particle of strength, or tolerance, or compassion. I saw much to make me angry, but much, too, that made me glad to be a member of the human race. I felt, almost for the first time, that I was a part of these people, that we were all involved in each others’ happiness, and sorrows, and meannesses and sudden, unaccountable bursts of joy. When someone was released we all shared a little of his freedom; when somebody killed himself, we all shared a portion of his death. I learned for the first time the meaning of those great, ringing words which I had known since childhood: ‘No man is an island, entire of himself ... therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ I saw that my whole life had been a longing to be part of the world, with all its squalor and its laughter and its tears.
It was impossible for me to know what my future would be. The Daily Mail had dismissed me when I was convicted, and I did not know whether I would be able to get another job in Fleet Street. From the sparse quota of letters and visits which I was allowed to receive, I gathered that I still had many friends, and that many people whom I had not known before had expressed their willingness to help me. In November, when Edward Montagu was released from Wakefield, I heard that he had been welcomed back by almost everybody, but I could hardly believe that this would happen in my own case. I remembered that I had admitted, in the witness-box, that I was a homosexual. It had seemed to be the right thing to do at the time, but I began to wonder now what effect it would have upon my future. Although I had reacted strongly against it at the time, I was haunted by the suggestion of the Governor at Winchester that I would have to go abroad, change my name, and behave like a furtive outcast for the rest of my life.
Winter came, bringing with it leaking roofs and a flurry of snow on the exercise yard. We began to look forward to Christmas. There was a man in ‘D’ Hall who made paper flowers; he sat on the floor of his cell night after night, crimping and twisting crepe-paper carnations and roses and chrysanthemums. Others made garlands and chains from tissue paper and glue, and painted signs in fancy lettering wishing us a Merry Christmas. The food-ration became noticeably more meagre, and the men who had been in prison for more than a year explained that the cooks were beginning to save up for an outsize Christmas dinner.
On the pay-day before Christmas we were given a bonus, according to the length of time which we had done. I received an extra 1s. 6d. with which I bought a packet of Woodbines. We were all rich and reckless, and gave each other presents. The old man Ted, who had stolen the perambulator, redoubled his efforts at scrounging in the Tailors’ Shop. On Christmas Eve we concocted an enormous gift stocking inscribed with his name, containing a weird assortment of ‘roll-ups’, sweets, matches, a clean shirt and a pair of socks. There were ‘joke’ presents in it, too; some of the cigarettes contained horsehair or feathers, trouser-buttons were substituted for wine-gums, and a bottle labelled Vaseline Hair Tonic was filled with water. We prevailed upon the Principal Officer to present the stocking to Ted, who fell on it savagely, his eyes watering with anticipation. He smoked the horsehair cigarettes without any apparent discomfort, and sold the ‘hair tonic’ for a quarter of an ounce of tobacco to a friend, who, as he said later, ‘bloody near killed him’ when he discovered the deception. Ted, however, had the last laugh, because he had already smoked the tobacco by this time.
Bill and I festooned our button-hole machines with a strip of rag on which we had chalked: ‘A Merry Yuletide to all our Customers.’ We also put out a Christmas Box, hoping that someone would be hysterical enough to put something in it, but all we collected was a packet of cigarette-papers which turned out to have been cut out of a toilet-roll and five Woodbines. These were given to us by a young soldier who had gone berserk in the Canal Zone and received seven years for shooting his sergeant; we knew he could not really afford this rich gift, so we bought an equivalent quantity of Nut Milk chocolate and gave it to him.
I received twenty-five Christmas cards from a diverse assortment of friends, including a former charlady, two Peers, a correspondent on The Times, a farmer, a Harley Street surgeon and a barmaid. With these, I decorated my cell.
The ground floor of the Hall, where we ate our meals, was a fantastic sight. There were artificial flowers everywhere, and on Christmas Day the tables were covered with old sheets, which gave them a most luxurious air. Paper-chains were festooned from wall to wall, and those over our table had been augmented by Dan, who had contrived some striking garlands by an ingenious manipulation of torn-up toilet-rolls, glue and red ink. He had been very shocked on the previous Christmas, apparently, to discover that the decorations in ‘D’ Hall consisted mainly of pieces of the News of the World, stained green.
Christmas dinner was quite unlike any other meal of the year. The helpings were enormous, the food queasily rich in comparison with the normal diet, and, as a final gastronomic touch, we were each given a mug of sugared tea. Major Grew stood around beaming, and I felt that we were supposed to burst into ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. Resisting this temptation, we ate as much as we could and rolled the rest up in our handkerchiefs, so that we could eat it in peace in our cells during the next few days. We all felt rather ill next morning, and were not really surprised to hear that one prisoner, no doubt overcome by the
gruesome bonhomie of it all, had hanged himself during the night.
I had always told myself that Christmas was the last milestone on the road, and that once it was over I would begin, as the prisoners used to say, to pack. Actually, the last ten weeks of my sentence were by far the worst. The reason for this was purely physical. Although the workshop was steam-heated almost to the point of suffocation, the cells were devoid of any heating at all. There was a small grating in each cell which was supposed to be connected to a circulating system of warm air, but nothing whatever came out of it. It was freely admitted by all the prison officials that the heating arrangements had been out of action for years, but nobody did anything to put them right. The prison Commissioners, apparently, had adopted their usual attitude of pious hand-wringing and pleaded poverty. Neither Major Grew nor Dr Landers ever visited the cells, and the warders were muffled up in military greatcoats and gloves. The prisoners, still wearing the clothes in which they had sweltered during the summer, had to keep warm as best they could.
I used to sleep in my underwear, shirt and trousers, with the rest of my clothes piled on my bed in a heap which was loosely held together by tucked-in mailbags. In spite of this, I developed chilblains which made my fingers swell up and crack like beef sausages too rapidly fried. Several prisoners told me that they had been to see the Prison Doctor with this complaint, but had received no treatment. The best cure, I was told by one of the burglars, was to soak a piece of rag in urine and wrap it round the affected part. He added that I might not fancy the idea, but it worked. I tried it, and it did.
Against the Law Page 19