Against the Law

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Against the Law Page 20

by Peter Wildeblood; Max Lerner


  In January I was transferred, for meals and Association, to a building known to the authorities as the Old Recreation Hut, and to us as the Old Rec. The wind whistled round and through this ancient hovel with a shrill persistence, reducing us all to a shivering huddle of creatures who would not have been out of place at Belsen. We hunched over the lukewarm waterpipes, blowing on our hands and trying to cover our knees with the thin grey capes provided for outdoor wear. There were no lavatories in the Old Rec, and anyone who wanted to relieve himself had to ask the warder on duty to let him out. When perhaps a dozen had applied, the warder would unlock the door and the men, watched by a ‘Leader’, would scuttle out into the exercise yard to squat on latrines whose plumbing-systems had long since frozen up, and whose seats were often an inch deep in snow.

  The Old Rec will always be, for me, a vision of Hell. The wireless loudspeakers, roaring out distorted dance music, made conversation impossible. The lights were dim and unshaded. The smell of sour food and sweaty feet hung over everything like a fog, and everywhere one looked one saw men sitting there, hunched in their capes, their eyes blank, waiting, waiting.

  In January, too, the New System began. As we understood it, the theory was that Wormwood Scrubs was gradually to be transformed into something on the lines of Wakefield: a place where men like Dan, who by this time had been in prison for 30 months, would at last have the opportunity of acquiring that ‘training for freedom’ so glibly advertised by the Prison Commissioners. Mr. Cockayne, asking us for our co-operation, told us that the scheme would prove entirely to our advantage in the end. We were all moved to different cells several times, so that ‘D’ Hall presented the appearance of a demented game of General Post. In the re-shuffle, I contrived to spend four nights in a cell in which the heating actually worked. It was rather like a Turkish bath, but dirtier, because all the hot air which should have been distributed between the 88 cells on the landing was diverted into this one, bringing with it large amounts of brick-dust and soot.

  When I left Wormwood Scrubs in March the other prisoners were still waiting to discover the advantages of the new system. The only results, up to then, were that we worked for an extra two hours a day at the same rate of pay, and that our exercise time was cut down from the statutory hour to a bare twenty minutes. There was no sign of any of the privileges to which the long-sentence men would have become entitled if there had been room for them at Wakefield: no vocational training, no freedom of Association, no home leave during the last months of their time.

  There were only 28 days in February, but they seemed like 28 years. Someone had sent me a calendar for Christmas, and every night I pencilled out the date.

  The Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society asked me whether I needed any assistance on my release.

  The Chaplain looked at my notebooks to see whether I had written in them anything obscene or prejudicial to prison discipline.

  Jimmy said: ‘Try to do something for us when you get out, Pete; we can’t do nothing for ourselves.’

  It was my last day.

  The exercise yard looked just the same. The two crooked businessmen were still walking around with rapid strides, booming at each other. ‘You see the one on the left?’ asked Basil. ‘Well, he’s selling a Rolls-Bentley he hasn’t got to the one on the right for £2,000 that he hasn’t got either.’

  ‘How many more hours?’ the burglars inquired.

  A warder to whom I had never spoken before shook my hand and said: ‘I hope very sincerely that all goes well with you from now on.’

  I said good-bye to Dan Starling.

  That night I lay on my hard mattress for the last time and tried to gather together all the jig-saw pieces of experience and understanding which I had collected, so that I could take them out with me in the morning. I marshalled, re-arranged and sorted them in turn, trying to fit them together in a way that had value and meaning for me, if for no-one else.

  In prison I had known hatred, laughter, pity and love. I had learned to know more about my fellow-men than I had ever done before, and I believed that this knowledge would help me to know myself.

  I considered the man whose name was written on the card outside the door: 2737, Wildeblood, due for release tomorrow morning, and wondered what kind of person he was. In my imagination, the cell became filled with shadowy figures in wigs and robes. I could hear a rich, sneering voice:

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, it is the submission of the prosecution—and a submission which, however, regrettable, you may feel obliged to accept—that the accused Peter Wildeblood is a man who, during the last twelve calendar months, has consistently shown by his actions and his demeanour that he is in no way capable of profiting by the lesson which Society, in its wisdom, has seen fit to visit upon him.

  ‘I will not take up your time, members of the Jury, by dwelling upon the sordid and deplorable catalogue of his activities. I will merely remind you that he has failed, totally failed, to take advantage of the unique opportunities for the reconstruction of his life and his outlook which exist, as we all know, in Her Majesty’s Prisons.

  ‘This man has shown no jot or tittle of remorse, members of the Jury. He has maintained an attitude throughout which you may think is less appropriate to a convicted criminal than to a prisoner of war. An even more revolting feature of his behaviour, in the submission of the Crown, is—and you must forgive me for speaking frankly, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, but we must not flinch from our duty in these matters—an even more revolting feature is the fact that, during his time in prison, he has persistently associated with persons who are infinitely his social inferiors. In the circumstances there is only one verdict which you can give, and I hope you will give it after long scrutiny and careful consideration. That verdict is: Guilty.’

  There was a rustle of silk. The jury, who were sitting uncomfortably crammed together on my wash-stand, rose to their feet like puppets on a string. ‘Don’t the jury wish to retire?’ asked the judge.

  ‘Good gracious, no!’

  ‘It’s disgusting!’

  ‘There’s no smoke without fire!’

  ‘I read it in the paper!’ A big blob of spit ran down the windscreen.

  ‘Order, order!’ screamed the judge, putting his ear trumpet to his lips and blowing a shrill blast. ‘Are you agreed upon your verdict?’

  ‘Of course we are. Guilty. With a strong recommendation to no mercy.’

  ‘Good. I mean yes. Prisoner at the bar, did you hear what they said? Have you anything to say before the sentence of the court is passed upon you?’

  But I was not listening. They were only voices, and they could never hurt me any more. I was as detached as a passenger in an aeroplane.

  ‘Wakey-wakey!’ shouted a warder through the spyhole. ‘It’s come at last!’

  It was Tuesday, March the eighth. In an hour I should be free. I washed, shaved, collected my belongings and tore up my calendar. The other prisoners’ cells had not yet been unlocked. I walked past the closed doors, thinking of the men who lay behind them. I handed in my blankets, my sheets, my pillow-slip, my brushes, my plate and my drinking-mug, and my book of rules for the guidance of Convicted Prisoners, Male. I took off the prison clothes and put on my own. I made up a bundle of letters and books to take with me. Two other men were being released that morning; a wizened, red-haired taxi-driver, and a young man in a handpainted tie and gumboots. We sat in the Reception block drinking tea and eating porridge. It was part of the prison lore that a man who left his plate of porridge would return some day to finish it.

  At ten minutes to eight the gate was opened. The early shift of warders were coming on duty. Many of them had been my friends, and I shook hands with half a dozen of them. Then I walked out through the gate. I had never really believed that this would be the end, or even the beginning of a new chapter. It was merely a part of the story which had been implicit in me from the day when I was born; as much a part as the knock on the door when I was arrested, or the
moment when, as a child, I realised that I was different from the rest. I could not stop the pages from turning, or close the book. I had chosen to be myself, and I must go on to the end; there must be no abdication, no regret. The world knew what I was, and would make its judgments accordingly, but I could make no concessions to its opinion. ‘Simply the thing I am,’ I told myself, ‘shall make me live.’ In a world of hypocrites, I would at least be honest.

  For the first few days, I thought that people were looking at me; then I realised that I was flattering myself. I had forgotten that free men and women looked at each other in this way, just as I had forgotten that trees had a clean, green smell and that Virginia cigarettes tasted of damp hay. I wondered what it would be like to come out of prison after a five-year sentence. Even to me, the world was strange and a little frightening; the traffic roared and pounced, the colours of women’s dresses, flowers and neon signs jabbed the nerves of my eyes, and music had a new, rich texture as tangible as fur or silk. I woke at dawn, and began to long for bed at dinner-time. When I saw my first egg, I was stricken with awe at the impregnable perfection of its shape, so that I hardly dared to crack it with my spoon. When I saw my first daffodil, I felt like weeping.

  My friends said: ‘In a few weeks you will have forgotten it all. It will fade from your mind like a bad dream. It’s over and done with now, and nobody wants to remember it.’ They meant to be kind, but I knew that they were wrong. I could never forget. I would always carry with me, like a hidden scar, the memory of what I had seen. From now on, perhaps, I could never be wholly happy; but at the same time I could never be wholly selfish or consumed with pity for myself, because wherever I went I should be haunted by the faces, savage or resigned or drained of hope, of those hundreds of men so much less fortunate than myself. Society might have succeeded in forgetting them, but I never could. I knew what it was like to be a criminal, to know that everything you did would be misunderstood or used as evidence against you, so that you just drifted, hopelessly, from one prison sentence to the next. I knew something of the bitter rage which wells up in a man’s mind during the long cold nights, when he thinks of the punishment which Society, with icy impartiality, is exacting from his wife and children. I knew the dreadful isolation of the prisoner, meticulously deprived of every contact with the world into which, one day, he will be released. I knew how it felt to be a member of a minority, under-privileged even in gaol because of the shape of one’s nose or the colour of one’s skin.

  But, for the time being, my main concern was with the problem of my own future. The classic pattern, which I was determined not to follow, was that of Oscar Wilde: the flight abroad, the assumption of a new name, the eventual death in sterile obscurity. Such a course may have been inevitable for Wilde, but it seemed to me a betrayal of everything in which I believed; it would, moreover, award the final victory to those who had tried so hard to destroy me.

  While I was in prison I had written to the Home Secretary, asking for permission to give evidence to the Committee on Homosexual Offences. This permission was granted, but the Committee decided to wait until my release before calling me as a witness, so that I might give my views more freely. I had volunteered to do this because I thought there were probably very few other men who were able or willing to put forward the viewpoint of an admitted homosexual. Most of the evidence, I imagined, would be of a theoretical nature, given by psychiatrists, clergymen and lawyers whose only experience of the problem was of the ‘exposed ninth’—the untypical percentage of cases in which mental illness or legal proceedings were involved.

  I discovered, however, that I was by no means alone. A number of men holding positions of trust and responsibility, against whose names there had never been a breath of scandal, had offered to give evidence—if necessary, in public. This seemed to me an act of high courage. It was easy for me to speak for the homosexuals, because my admission that I was one of them had received the most widespread publicity; I had nothing further to lose. These others were risking everything to do what they believed to be right. They knew that, once they had appeared before the Committee, their names would be known to the police; and, if no change was made in the law, that their lives would be made intolerable. They had no illusions on this point. They realised that a decision by the Committee to leave the law as it was would be followed, immediately, by a savage and merciless ‘purge’ of all known homosexuals, in which they would be the first to suffer.

  I am not suggesting that the police would be so childish as to indulge in an orgy of revenge. The explanation is much more straightforward than that. In Wormwood Scrubs I had had the opportunity of talking to a number of policemen who had been convicted of various offences, and they all told me the same story. Promotion in the Police Force, they said, depended very largely on the number of convictions secured. In each police station there is, apparently, a kind of scoreboard on which the convictions obtained by each officer are recorded. It is the number which counts, not the gravity of the offences concerned; and, as one of the ex-detectives at Wormwood Scrubs remarked to me, it is very much easier to arrest a homosexual than a burglar. A policeman whose score is lagging behind that of his colleagues can always catch up by going to the nearest public lavatory, or merely by smiling at someone in the street. By various promises, the arrested man can usually be persuaded to plead guilty; if he does not, his word is unlikely to be taken against that of a police officer. Mr. E.R. Guest, the magistrate at West London, was reported recently as saying that his court alone dealt with 600 such cases every year. This grotesque mis-statement was much quoted as a sign of the decadence of the age and the prevalence of homosexuality; Mr. Guest’s subsequent explanation that he had in fact said sixty cases a year went almost unnoticed. There is little doubt, however, that prosecutions for homosexual acts are on the increase, and for a very good reason. As one man said to me in prison: ‘Why should they climb a tree to catch a burglar, when they can pick up people of our sort like apples off the ground?’

  Whatever the decisions of the Committee may be, they will still have to be accepted or rejected, in the end, by the opinion of ordinary men and women. It is not a question which is usually discussed, and it may therefore be rather difficult to obtain a fair sample of public opinion. The question, in its simplest form, is: Should the law be amended so that the acts of consenting adults, in private, are no longer regarded as a crime?

  I believe that it should, but my opinion is naturally coloured by the fact that I am one of those whose lives would be made easier by such a change. This, however, is not the only consideration on which I base my view. I am thinking of the thousands of others who, even if they never come into direct conflict with the law, are condemned to a life of concealment and fear. Fear is a terrible emotion; it is like a black frost which blights and stunts all the other qualities of a man. If half a million men, who are good citizens in every other respect, are to remain under this perpetual shadow, I believe that Society itself will be the ultimate loser.

  The right which I claim for myself, and for all those like me, is the right to choose the person whom I love. I have my own standards of morality about this; and they are not so very different from those of normal men and women. I do not wish to hurt another person; and for that reason I would not willingly persuade anyone to join me in a way of life which, whatever happens to the law, will always present grave and painful difficulties. I have no wish to corrupt the young, nor to convert to homosexuality—even if this were possible, which I doubt—any man who was lucky enough to possess normal instincts. I seek only to apply to my own life the rules which govern the lives of all good men: freedom to choose a partner and, when that partner is found, to live with him discreetly and faithfully.

  Discretion and fidelity are, however, made almost impossible by the present state of the law. The promiscuous homosexual, who seeks his lover in the street, paradoxically runs less risk than the man who lives with another in affection and trust. In such a case, there will always be ‘c
orroborative evidence’ of some sort; letters, photographs, the sharing of a home, can always be relied upon to convince a jury when one of the men concerned has been persuaded, by spite, jealousy or fear, to turn Queen’s Evidence against the other. I know that this is true, because it is what happened to me. If my interest in McNally had been merely physical, I should never have gone to prison. It was the letters which I had written to him, expressing a deep emotional attachment, which turned the scales against me.

  I came out into the world again expecting a good deal of hostility. People said to me: ‘Now you will really know who your friends are.’ Whenever I walked into a room, I waited for the whisper, the snigger or the insult ... but they never came.

  The twenty or thirty people who had been my most intimate friends had never wavered in their loyalty, although until the trial most of them had never guessed the secret which I had so carefully kept from them. They gave me great strength and comfort during the first difficult days, but I realised that I could not live the rest of my life in the shelter of their sympathy and friendship. These men and women, much as I loved them, were not the whole world; and it was the world that I had to face.

  When I went to the country to stay with my mother and father, I thought that meeting their friends was going to be the worst ordeal of all. There is probably no group of people more conservative, or less likely to understand a predicament like mine, than the middle-aged inhabitants of a small country town. I knew that they had all been extremely kind to my parents during the time when I was in prison, but this was no indication of their attitude towards me; in fact, I thought it likely that the more they sympathised with my mother and father, the more likely they would be to blame me for their distress. I was surprised and moved to discover that I was quite wrong. Although most of them avoided any discussion of the case, they welcomed me back as though nothing had happened. Of all the people whom I have met since my release, I perhaps appreciate the attitude of these the most, because it meant that they had searched their hearts and discovered there a wealth of humanity and tolerance with which I would never have credited them, and with which they might never have credited themselves.

 

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