by Ann Walmsley
I pulled once more, and then my husband’s voice came through on the garden gate intercom saying, “Ann, is that you?” There was no way to answer. And then I was out of ideas, and surrender to death came floating in like a lazy impulse, as insignificant a decision as looking up from work for a moment. It was my last thought.
I told the story to Carol and she stopped walking, turned to face me and brought her hand up to her mouth. “Oh, Ann. But what happened? Were you just unconscious or did someone resuscitate you?” she asked, her brow furrowed.
I could still see it so clearly. I came to, lying on the road in the darkness, and heard the sound of feet running away. They must have dropped me hard because there was a sharp pain in one elbow. The garden gate was open, so my husband must have remotely released the gate lock and the sound must have scared them off. I stumbled along the pea-gravelled garden walk, hoarsely calling my husband’s name. “I’ve been mugged,” I croaked. He ran up the path to pursue them, but I stopped him. “They’re huge. They’ll kill you, they’ll kill you.”
He hesitated, then, thankfully, turned back.Within five minutes, my husband’s boss, who’d been on the conference call with him, and who also lived in Hampstead, arrived at the house. He must have called the police, because they arrived five minutes after that and interviewed me in our living room amid the many moving boxes that we hadn’t yet unpacked. I have no recollection of how my daughter got home from the party or how I got to the hospital but those things happened.
“I’m okay these days,” I said to Carol. “It’s just that going into Collins Bay might spark the fear again.”
“What was the fear like?”
I was embarrassed sometimes to relate how acute my response had been compared to that of some other women in the neighbourhood who’d been attacked in the same way after driving home alone in a Mercedes. I’d heard of an American woman who’d had her emerald ring stolen in a strangulation robbery in front of her house, just a few blocks away, with her children nearby. Like me, she’d been unconscious, but upon opening her eyes, she stood up, brushed herself off and said, “I’ve got to get these kids to soccer.”
In contrast, my reaction was intense. I cried unexpectedly and often and didn’t leave the house for a week, spending much of it in bed. My husband took that week off to comfort me. My voice was an unrecognizable rasp from the strangling. On the night of the attack, I’d sat in the emergency ward of Hampstead’s Royal Free Hospital sobbing, until I had to stop long enough for the specialist to peer down my throat. A detective had been in and taken a DNA swab from my mouth and collected my clothing as evidence. He hoped to match traces of my DNA to that on the clothing of the suspects. I kept thinking one thought: Why wasn’t someone good in the lane just then? If someone good had been in the lane, they would have intervened.
Finally, I decided it was time to get out of the house. I couldn’t walk up the lane, the natural route to Hampstead High Street. Even in daylight. So my husband walked with me down a busier set of streets. On the High Street I scanned the faces of the passing men for signs of kindness, needing reassurance that there was goodness in human beings, not evil. Most faces were emotionless, busy. Then I saw a man in his early sixties with wire-rimmed glasses, gentle eyes and greying hair, carrying a book. His gaze was intelligent and open. I pictured him in the lane outside my house, which comforted me. I clutched my purse less tightly then.
We walked home along Well Road, and I looked up the southern end of Cannon Lane. Then I stopped abruptly. I had forgotten that this stretch of our lane contained a tiny one-cell 1730s jail built into the side of a brick wall. Unused now, of course, but still with its original heavily barred lunette windows. It was constructed as a parish lock-up when the adjacent house, known as Cannon Hall, served as a courthouse. An ironic twist, to be accosted at the very doorstep of a jail. Almost as ironic as the security camera mounted on our house: it pointed directly at the crime scene, but was not operational.
I soon discovered that I couldn’t walk at night or park in underground parking garages, which made it hard to attend my evening writing classes. Walking home from book club at friends’ houses in the neighbourhood was terrifying. I couldn’t set foot on Hampstead Heath without a walking companion.
In the weeks that followed I saw an ear, nose and throat specialist in Harley Street, a psychologist in Welbeck Street in Marylebone and an art therapist in Hampstead.The ENT said that no permanent damage had been done to my throat. My voice was still hoarse, though, and I had lost the upper octave of my singing range. He assured me that at least my speaking voice would return to normal, unlike another recent strangulation robbery victim I’d read about who had been rendered permanently mute. The psychologist heard me out and said that I was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and would have a peripheral startle response for months to come. Anything approaching me from the left or right would trigger it. It was true. I once opened the garden door to step into the lane and the postman was approaching on my right, a few feet away. I screamed involuntarily and slammed the door. I can’t imagine what he must have thought. As for the art therapist, she brought oil pastels and paper to the house and encouraged me to deal with my feelings through drawing.
My husband’s employer, concerned about an attack on one of its new expats, sent its global head of security, a sympathetic fellow formerly with the London Metropolitan Police, to provide me with a security briefing. It felt like a scene from an early 007 movie. He arrived with a briefcase full of gadgets. First, he pulled out a heavy thirteen-inch aluminum flashlight that could be used as both a defence weapon and an alarm. There was a button for the barking-Doberman sound and another for a police siren. For weeks I was inseparable from that flashlight. For my purse and pockets, he handed me square pocket alarms triggered by grenade-like pull strings. They were eardrum-piercing. The strings tended to catch on things, so I was forever setting them off and frightening people. A spray canister was next. Not mace, but invisible marking spray that only became visible under ultraviolet light. If the police later picked up the marked assailant, he might not even know he’d been tagged.
The security expert also taught me to read and memorize the licence plates of any cars following mine and to take evasive routes home if the same vehicle remained in my rear-view mirror for too long. He coached me to avoid being boxed in by cars at stoplights and warned me never to occupy the middle lane of a three-lane thoroughfare—both standard anti-kidnapping operating procedures. A friend taught me self-defence techniques, including how to scrape the heel of my shoe down the shin of a chokehold robber.And I visited a rescue kennel in search of a Belgian shepherd dog because I had heard that Belgian shepherds would leap walls to come to their owner’s defence. I was well equipped for danger and remained on high alert through the remaining three years of our stay in London.
“And did they get the men who did it?”
“I can’t talk about that right now,” I said. I hated talking about it still: the fact that they found one man but not the other, that he was charged with numerous similar assaults and pleaded guilty to several, including mine, and that the judge at London’s Middlesex Guildhall court, in sentencing him to eight and a half years in prison, had characterized the assaults as having been carried out with “utterly callous and ruthless efficiency,” saying it was lucky that none of the women he attacked had died. I couldn’t tell her about the police lineup or the visit to victim services. It made me sick to remember it and for long stretches of time my memory of those experiences, and even of the name of the convicted man, lapsed.
“How dreadful,” she said with empathy in her voice, and we walked in silence for a while, pointing out blue jays and cardinals. “Given all of that, what do you think? Do you think you could come into Collins Bay and visit the men in the book club? Maybe it would even help you.”
“Let me think about it, Carol. In the meantime, I’ll get you some book suggestions.” We were back at the car near my father’s g
ravesite. I looked over at his spot. “Bye for now, Dad,” I said softly, and opened the car door for Carol.
2
PROMISES KEPT
ALTHOUGH CAROL AND I had been friends for more than a year, I still didn’t know a great deal about what motivated her. When she and Bryan invited my husband and me to visit them at their Amherst Island holiday property, a rural retreat of sheep pastures and hayfields near Kingston, one element of her story emerged. She was a serial entrepreneur. One of her former businesses involved buying and selling primitive Canadian antiques, and the couple’s 1830s limestone house was a Noah’s Ark of folk art animal sculptures. Rustic life-size representations of a Dalmatian and a plump white sheep stood in the south sunroom, along with a robin and a crow, all hewn from wood and painted. In the library, other birds filled a high shelf, and a tall carved figure of a Mi’kmaq man in full headdress guarded the entrance to the laundry. A stylized black cat with green eyes sat on a dining room windowsill and a small church occupied one alcove.
The church was a clue to her other previous start-up. After working as a high school English teacher, she had followed her mother into the Anglican priesthood in the 1990s and then founded an Anglican Church parish west of Toronto called Church of the Resurrection. “I’ve always loved to do stuff from scratch,” she told me.
Carol’s view was that she might have inherited her combination of entrepreneurial drive and the sense of a calling to help others from her great-great-grandfather Sir George Williams. Williams was a successful businessman in the drapers’ trade in Victorian England and was the man who founded the YMCA movement “to save young men from dissipation,” as Carol put it. Williams set an example that appears to have trickled down to generations of Williamses, expressed through a family culture that placed great value on service to others, and a genetic predisposition to starting businesses and being competitive. Carol mentioned that other Williams family descendants included London mayor Boris Johnson and Colin Williams, the highly successful London-based titanium trader. “The spectre of Sir George has always hung over some of us,” Carol said. “It’s this thing about carrying his genes. I seem to have it.”
Over dinner, it became apparent why Carol chose books as her vehicle for helping others. She was born in 1945 in Ashburton, England, just an afternoon’s hike across moorland from Dartmoor Prison. Ashburton is a town on the edge of Dartmoor, a wilderness of peat bogs and granite tors where ponies and sheep roam freely. Her mother, Patricia Williams, a young British war bride, had moved there with her two oldest children to escape the Blitz. Carol’s father, David Wilson Blyth, was an army spotter during the war whose job was to identify targets for bombing sorties. Her mother was passionate about reading. When the six Blyth children were underfoot, their mother would tell them not to go outside and play, but to “go away and read.”
Carol was six when the family finally settled in Canada. “There were long, long summer holidays at lakes where we would just sunbathe and read,” she recalled. Their mother was influential in her children’s lives, guiding four of her five daughters, including Carol, into the study of English literature at university, encouraging them to teach. Her brother, like her, became a serial entrepreneur. I sensed that Carol was partly motivated by a need to succeed in a high-performing family and to leave her mark. We talked and laughed long into the evening, with Carol telling stories about her mother and Bryan guffawing heartily. I knew then something about where her courage came from. Now I had to marshal my own.
In the end, the decision to go into the prison was made for me. While turning it over in my mind, I had filled out the Correctional Service Canada (CSC) volunteer application form, just in case, because there was a long lead time for approvals. When the prison system granted my clearance, I felt I had to follow through with it. I have difficulty walking away from sunk costs and I lack a reverse gear. Just go in once, I said to myself. You can handle this.
What I didn’t know until my first visit to the prison was that Carol and I would meet the eighteen or so heavily tattooed book club members in a remote building within the prison walls, with no guards present and no visible security cameras. Carol’s idea was to put the men at ease. Our only protection would be a chaplain wearing a personal security alarm that would alert guards in the main building on the grounds, some eighty metres away. Great.
Locals know Collins Bay as “the Red Roof Inn,” a play on the name of the discount North American hotel chain. The red metal roof and Gothic turrets are the prison’s most distinguishing features. Built of local limestone in the 1930s, it’s a grey castle fronting a vast square of limestone rampart, with red-capped guard towers at each corner. In my childhood, when my mother drove me past it for my annual eye exam in Kingston, from our home in Prince Edward County, I would ask her if that was Disneyland and whether it had a drawbridge and moat.
So it was strange to finally approach this building as an adult, in October 2010 for my first visit to Carol’s prison book club. A warm Indian summer breeze was blowing the tall grasses of the surrounding meadows, and red-winged blackbirds called out from the marshy lowlands that stretched down to the St. Lawrence River where it meets Lake Ontario. The prison farm was barely visible at the rear. Just two months earlier, cattle trucks had removed three hundred Holstein cows from the farm buildings, as the federal government ended the forty-eight-year-old dairy operation that had provided milk to local prisons and farm skills to inmates. I was surprised to see how the city had filled in across from the prison since my childhood. There were car dealerships with metallic pennant streamers and rundown malls with pawnshops selling paintball guns in the shape of AK-47s.
That day I had followed Carol’s instructions to downplay my curves and eliminate showy jewellery. I was wearing a breast-flattening sports bra, a turtleneck, a buttoned-up stiff tweed jacket and pants. I’d left my emerald engagement ring in the city, and wore only a gold wedding band and simple pearl stud earrings. I was also wearing my nerves. My hand shook as I signed the official guest logbook at reception. Through the one-way glass to my left I could see the outlines of heads, where guards operated the mechanized gates into the core of the prison.
From that moment on I remember only brief impressions. I was fearful to the point of shock. My peripheral vision closed down and I felt like I was looking through a zoom lens, catching only concentrated bursts of images. After the double set of metal doors at the entrance slammed in sequence behind me, I remember being hit by the smell—an unpleasant yeasty odour that I couldn’t quite identify, as though decades of hardship, hate and regret had condensed on the walls. I recall walking down the main hallway with Carol and her co-facilitator Edward, a retired English professor with an upper-class English accent. A prison chaplain, Blair, was escorting us because the book group met in the prison chapel. Blair was explaining something about the building. I remember passing the health clinic with its posters about HIV and hepatitis. Then we passed lots of men in white waffle-weave long-sleeve shirts or blue T-shirts and jeans, some pushing carts or carrying mops, and I recall thinking, gosh, they have a lot of staff here.
The chaplain was saying something about the “telephone pole” design of the prison—a main corridor known as “The Strip” with cell units branching off on both sides. He led us along a sidewalk to a secondary building inside the walls of the prison that looked like a parish hall. And then somehow I was sitting on a wooden chair, waiting for the inmates to arrive, wondering whether to peel off my name tag, which announced to them all that I was ANN.
The men who walked in the door were dressed in white and blue like the ones I had seen walking freely on The Strip—the guys I had thought were cleaning staff. I was confused. Those were the inmates? Why were they walking around freely like that? Where were the guards and why was the chaplain, the only one wearing a security alarm, leaving the room briefly? And why did Carol look so relaxed? Then one man came toward me with his arm extended and a large smile. “Hello, welcome,” he said. I stood up
and grasped his hand and thanked him. Then many of the others followed suit, gracious and non-threatening. For some reason, the black men gravitated toward one side of the circle and the white men sat in chairs closer to me.
Carol introduced me as the head of the prison book club’s Book Selection Committee, saying that I was an award-winning magazine journalist who had majored in English literature at university. I was just sitting in to get a better sense of which books might appeal to them. After that she led them in a discussion of Dave Eggers’s wonderful non-fiction book Zeitoun, about a Syrian-born landlord and house painter in post-Katrina New Orleans who is swept up by Homeland Security after disobeying orders to evacuate the flooded city. It’s a book I had read and loved, but I have no recollection of what the men said about the protagonist’s good and bad choices or anything else for that matter. Instead I was rehearsing in my mind the self-defence manoeuvres that I had learned in London. I was sure we were about to be taken hostage. It was the first time I had been so close to criminals since the police lineup in London.
The men seemed equally baffled by my choice to drive such a distance to risk sitting in a room with them, given that I wasn’t proselytizing religion and I wasn’t being paid. After the meeting, a man with dreads and reflector sunglasses, flanked by two other black inmates, approached me and asked, “Miss, why would a nice person like you want to spend time with bad guys like us?”
That’s a very good question, I thought. But I said, “I’d like to help find you some good books.”
Another inmate, who I learned later had killed a man and felt profound regret about it, also approached. “I was thinking you look like that movie star,” he said. “What’s her name? I know, Nicole Kidman. You must get that a lot.”
I felt a chill. “Actually, no one’s ever said that before,” I said, mentioning that she was much taller. Perhaps it was my curly hair that struck him as similar. It was exactly the kind of attention I did not want.