Hell: A Prison Diary Part 15

'Why, what happened?'

'I was out drinking with the boys at my f.u.c.kin' local, and when we left the f.u.c.kin' pub we came face to face with a bunch of f.u.c.kin' Aussie backpackers who accused us of stealing their f.u.c.kin' wallets. I promise you, Jeff, I'd never seen the f.u.c.kin' b.a.s.t.a.r.ds before in my life.'

'So what happened next?'

'Well, one of 'em had a f.u.c.kin' knife, and when my mate punched him, he dropped the f.u.c.kin' thing on the pavement. I grabbed it and when another of them came for me, I f.u.c.kin' stabbed him. It was only f.u.c.kin' selfdefence.'

'And he died from one stab?'

'Not exactly.' He hesitates. 'The coroner said there were seven stab wounds, but I was so f.u.c.kin' tanked up that I can't remember a f.u.c.kin' thing about it.' He pauses. 'So make sure you tell your f.u.c.kin' readers that I'm not a vicious criminal.'*

Once Richard returns to his cell, I go back over William Keane's words, before turning to the latest round of letters, still running at over a hundred a day. When I've finished them, I start reading a new book, The Day after Tomorrow, recommended by Del Boy somewhat ironic. It's over seven hundred pages, a length that would normally put me off, but not in my present circ.u.mstances. I've only read a few pages, when there's a knock on the cell door. It's Paul (credit-card fraud).

They're transferring him tomorrow morning back to the drug-rehab centre in Norfolk, so we may never meet again. He shakes hands as if we were business a.s.sociates, and then leaves without another word.

I place my head on a pillow that no longer feels rock-hard, and reflect on the day. I can't help thinking that hurling red b.a.l.l.s at Australians is, on balance, preferable to sticking knives into them.

Day 16 - Friday 3 August 2001.

6.07 am.

Silent night. Woken by the Alsatians at 6 am.

Should have been up in any case. Write for two hours.

8.00 am.

Breakfast. Rice Krispies, long-life milk and an orange.

10.00 am.

Avoid the workshop. It's not compulsory to do more than three sessions a week. Continue writing.

12 noon Turn on cricket to hear CMJ telling me that Australia are all out for 190, giving them a lead of only five runs on the first innings.

England are still in with a fighting chance.

12.15 pm Lunch. The rule for lunch and supper called dinner and tea is that you fill in a meal slip the day before and drop it in a plastic box on the ground floor. The menus for the week are posted on a board so you can always select in advance. If you fail to fill in the slip as I regularly do you're automatically given 'A'. 'A' is always the vegetarian option, 'B' today is pan-fried fish that's spent more time swimming in oil than the sea, 'C' is steak and kidney pie you can't see inside it, so avoid at all costs. Puddings: semolina or an apple. Perhaps this is the time to remind you that each prisoner has 1.27 spent on them for three meals a day.

When I leave my cell, plastic tray and plastic plate in hand, I join a queue of six prisoners at the hotplate. The next six inmates are not allowed to join the queue until the previous six have been served. This is to avoid a long queue and fighting breaking out over the food. At the right-hand end of the hotplate sits Paul (murder) who checks your name and announces Fossett, C., Pugh, B., Clarke, B., etc. When he ticks my name off, the six men behind the counter, who are all dressed in long white coats, white headgear and wear thin rubber gloves for handling the potatoes or bread, go into a huddle because they know by now there's a fifty-fifty chance I won't want anything and will return to my cell empty-handed.

Tony (marijuana only, escaped to Paris) has recently got into the habit of selecting my meal for me. Today he suggests the steak and kidney pie, slightly underdone, the cauliflower au gratin with d.u.c.h.esse potatoes, or, 'My Lord, you could settle for the creamy vegetable pie.' The server's humour has reached the stage of cutting one potato in quarters and placing a diced carrot on top and then depositing it in the centre of my plastic plate. Mind you, if there's chocolate ice-cream or a lollipop, Del Boy always makes sure I end up with two. I never ate puddings before I went to prison.

But today, Tony tells me, there's a special on the menu: shepherd's pie. Now I am a world expert on shepherd's pie, as it has, for the past twenty years, been the main dish at my Christmas party. I've eaten shepherd's pie at the Ivy, the Savoy and even Club 21 in New York, but I have never seen anything like Belmarsh's version of that particular dish. The meat, if it is meat, is glued to the potato, and then deposited on your plastic plate in one large blob, resembling a Turner Prize entry. If submitted, I feel confident it would be shortlisted.

Tony adds, 'I do apologize, my Lord, but we're out of Krug. However, Belmarsh has a rare vintage tap water 2001, with added bromide.' I settle for creamy vegetable pie, an unripe apple and a gla.s.s of Highland Spring (49p).

3.18 pm An officer comes to pick me up and escort me to the Deputy Governor's office. Once again, I feel like an errant schoolboy who is off to visit the headmaster. Once again the headmaster is half my age.

Mr Leader introduces himself and tells me he has some good news and some bad news.

He begins by explaining that, because Emma Nicholson wrote to Scotland Yard demanding an inquiry into the collecting and distribution of funds raised for the Kurds, I will have to remain a C-cat prisoner, and will not be reinstated as a D-cat until the police have completed their investigation. On the word of one vengeful woman, I have to suffer further injustice.

The good news, he tells me, is that I will not be going to Camphill on the Isle of Wight, but will be sent to Elmer in Kent, and as soon as my D-cat has been reinstated, I will move on to Springhill. I complain bitterly about the first decision, but quickly come to realize that Mr Leader isn't going to budge. He even accuses me of 'having an att.i.tude' when I attempt to enter a debate on the subject. He wouldn't last very long in the House of Commons.

'It wasn't my fault,' he claims. 'It was the police's decision to instigate an inquiry.'

4.00 pm a.s.sociation. David (life imprisonment, possession of a gun) is the only person watching the cricket on television. I pull up a chair and join him. It's raining, so they're showing the highlights of the first two innings. I almost forget my worries, despite the fact that if I was 'on the out', I wouldn't be watching the replay, I would be at the ground, sitting under an umbrella.

6.00 pm I skip supper and continue writing, which causes a riot, or near riot. I didn't realize that Paul has to tick off every name from the four spurs, and if the ticks don't tally with the number of prisoners, the authorities a.s.sume someone has escaped. The truth is that I've only tried to escape supper.

Mr Weedon arrives outside my cell. I look up from my desk and put down my pen.

'You haven't had any supper, Archer,' he says.

'No, I just couldn't face it.'

'That's a reportable offence.'

'What, not eating?' I ask in disbelief.

'Yes, the Governor will want to know if you're on hunger strike.'

'I never thought of that,' I said. 'Will it get me out of here?'

'No, it will get you back on the hospital wing.'

'Anything but that. What do I have to do?'

'Eat something.'

I pick up my plastic plate and go downstairs. Paul and the whole hotplate team are waiting, and greet me with a round of applause with added cries of, 'Good evening, my Lord, your usual table.' I select one boiled potato, have my name ticked off, and return to my cell. The system feels safe again. The rebel has conformed.

7.00 pm I have a visit from Tony (marijuana only, escaped to France) and he asks if I'd like to join him in his cell on the second floor, as if he were inviting a colleague to pop into his office for a chat about the latest sales figures.

When you enter a prisoner's cell, you immediately gain an impression of the type of person they are. Fletch has books and pamphlets strewn all over the place that will a.s.sist new prisoners to get through their first few days. Del Boy has tobacco, phonecards and food, and only he knows what else under the bed, as he's the spur's 'insider dealer'.

Billy's shelves are packed with academic books and files relating to his degree course.

Paul has a wall covered in nude pictures, mostly Chinese, and Michael only has photos of his family, mainly of his wife and sixmonth-old child.

Tony is a mature man, fifty-four, and his shelves are littered with books on quantum mechanics, a lifelong hobby. On his bed is a copy of today's Times, which, when he has read it, will be pa.s.sed on to Billy; reading a paper a day late when you have an eighteenyear sentence is somehow not that important. In a corner of the room is a large stack of old copies of the Financial Times. I already have a feeling Tony's story is going to be a little different.

He tells me that he comes from a middlecla.s.s family, had a good upbringing, and a happy childhood. His father was a senior manager with a top life-a.s.surance fund, and his mother a housewife. He attended the local grammar school, where he obtained twelve O-levels, four A-levels and an S-level, and was offered a place at London University, but his father wanted him to be an actuary.

Within a year of qualifying he knew that wasn't how he wanted to spend his life, and decided to open a butcher's shop with an old school friend. He married his friend's sister, and they have two children (a daughter who recently took a first-cla.s.s honours degree at Bristol, and a son who is sixteen and, as I write, boarding at a well-known public school).

By the age of thirty, Tony had become fed up with the hours a butcher has to endure; at the slaughterhouse by three every morning, and then not closing the shop until six at night. He sold out at the age of thirty-five and, having more than enough money, decided to retire. Within weeks he was bored, so he invested in a Jaguar dealership, and proceeded to make a second fortune during the Thatcher years. Once again, he sold out, once again determined to retire, because he was seeing so little of his family, and his wife was threatening to leave him. But it wasn't too long before he needed to find something to occupy his time, so he bought a rundown pub in the East End. Tony thought this would be a distracting hobby until he ended up with fourteen pubs, and a wife whom he hardly saw.

He sold out once more. Having parted from his wife, he found himself a new partner, a woman of thirty-seven who ran her own family business. Tony was forty-five at the time. He moved in with her and quickly discovered that the family business was drugs. The family concentrated on marijuana and wouldn't touch anything hard. There's more than a large enough market out there not to bother with hard drugs, he a.s.sures me. Tony made it clear from the start that he had no interest in drugs, and was wealthy enough not to have anything to do with the family business.

The problem of living with this lady, he explained, was that he quickly discovered how incompetently the family firm was being run, so he began to pa.s.s on to his partner some simple business maxims. As the months went by he found that he was becoming more and more embroiled, until he ended up as t.i.tular MD. The following year they tripled their profits.

'Meat, cars, pubs, Jeffrey,' he said, 'marijuana is no different. For me it was just another business that needed to be run properly. I shouldn't have become involved,' he admits, 'but I was bored, and annoyed by how incompetent her and her family were and to be fair, she was good in bed.'

Now here is the real rub. Tony was sentenced to twelve years for a crime he didn't commit. But he does admit quite openly that they could have nailed him for a similar crime several times over. He was apparently visiting a house he owned to collect the rent from a tenant who had failed to pay a penny for the past six months when the police burst in. They found a fifty-kilo package of marijuana hidden in a cupboard under the stairs, and charged him with being a supplier. He actually knew nothing about that particular stash, and was innocent of the charges laid against him, but guilty of several other similar offences. So he doesn't complain, and accepts his punishment. Very British.

After Tony had served three and a half years, they moved him to Ford Open, a D-cat prison, from where he visited Paris, as already recorded in this diary. He then moved on to Mijas in Spain, and found a job as an engineer, but a friend shafted him a sort of Ted Francis, he says 'so I was arrested and spent sixteen months in a Spanish jail, while my extradition papers were being sorted out. They finally sent me back to Belmarsh, where I will remain until I've completed my sentence.' He reminds me that no one has ever escaped from Belmarsh.

'But what happened to the girl?' I ask.

'She got the house, all my money and has never been charged with any offence.' He smiles, and doesn't appear to be bitter about it. 'I can always make money again,' he says.

'That won't be a problem, and I feel sure there will be other women.'

Tony is being considered for parole at the present time, but doesn't get on well with his probation officer. He claims she doesn't appreciate his sense of humour. He warns me to make sure I treat whoever they allocate to my case with respect, because this single individual can be the deciding factor as to whether you should be released or remain locked up in prison.

'So what will you do once you are released?' I ask.

He smiles and extracts a file secreted at the back of his cupboard. 'I'm going to sell agricultural equipment to the Senegalese.'

He produces sheet after sheet of financial forecasts on Senegal's agricultural requirements, along with grants the British government will advance to help subsidize that particular industry.

'I wouldn't be surprised if you make a fourth fortune,' I tell him after studying the papers.

'Only women will stop me,' he says. 'I do love them so.'

'Lock-up,' is bellowed from the ground floor. I thank Tony for his company, leave his office, and return to my cell.

8.00 pm.

I check over my script for the day and then spend a couple of hours reading my mail. If people go on sending me Bibles and prayer books, I'll be able to open a religious bookshop.

I try to find out the close-of-play cricket score, but have to settle for Any Questions.

Ken Clarke is very forthright about the iniquity of my sentence, which is brave, remembering he's standing for the leadership of the Tory Party.

10.00 pm.

Still no rap music, so for two nights running I sleep soundly.

Day 17 - Sat.u.r.day 4 August 2001.

6.18 am.

Woke several times during the night, not caused by any noise, but simply because I drank too much water yesterday. Cup a Soup (chicken, 22p), Oxo (9p) and a bottle of Highland Spring (69p). Still, I don't have to go that far for the lavatory.

The Alsatians wake me again just after six.

Write for two hours.

8.30 am.

On a Sat.u.r.day morning, you are not only allowed to leave your cell, but you also get a cooked breakfast. Egg, beans and chips. I still avoid the chips. Tony selects two fried eggs and the most recently heated beans for me. They taste good.

9.00 am.

a.s.sociation. I seek out Fletch to check over the script I wrote yesterday on drugs. He verifies everything William Keane has told me, and then adds, 'Have you heard of China White?'

'No,' I reply, wondering if it's Wedgwood or Royal Doulton.

'China White was a shipment of pure heroin from the Golden Triangle that turned up in Glasgow a couple of years ago. It was so pure [97 per cent] that fifteen registered addicts died within days of injecting it, and then the stuff began to spread, south killing users right across the country. All prison governors sent out official warnings to inmates, telling them to weaken any dosage of heroin they had recently been supplied with. Come to my cell and I'll show you some literature on the subject.'

Back in his cell, Fletch checks through some papers in a file marked DRUGS. He then hands over several pamphlets and postcards that are given to all suspected drug takers the day they enter prison. It was the first time I'd seen any of this material. They include The Detox Handbook, A User's Guide to Getting off Opiates (second edition), The Methadone Handbook (fifth edition), Cannabis (ninth edition), a pamphlet on HIV, Hepat.i.tis B and C, along with six coloured cards: Injecting and Infections (ill.u.s.trated): 1) Cannabis marijuana, puff, blow, draw, weed, s.h.i.t, hash, spliff, tackle, wacky, ganja.

2) Acid and magic mushrooms mushies, shrooms (LSD).

3) Amphetamines speed, wizz, uppers, billy, amph, sulphate.

4) Ecstasy E. doves, dis...o...b..scuits, echoes, hug drug, burgers, fantasy.

5) Cocaine c.o.ke, charlie, snow, C.

6) Heroin smack, gear, brown, horse, junk, scag, jack.

There are several slang names for each drug according to which part of the country you live in. The Misuse of Drugs Act divides illegal drugs into three cla.s.ses, and provides for maximum penalties of between two and fourteen years.

Fletch tells me that we have our own heroin dealer on the spur, and he knows exactly who his customers are. There are fiftyeight prisoners on our spur and eleven of them are, or have been, on heroin and fortyone of them are currently taking drugs.

HMP BELMARSH.

GOVERNOR'S NOTICE TO INMATES NO: 64/2001.

POSSIBLE BATCH OF.

CONTAMINATED HEROIN.