The Due Process of Bullshit!

I passed through the reception area relatively quickly. I was photographed, fingerprinted, stripped searched, and a final humiliation was performed, consisting of squatting on the floor to force out any objects, drugs, or whatever else I might have put up my 'jacksy.' This was conducted in front of two officers who also pulled my arse cheeks apart, just in case of what I thought? That I might have stuffed a cake with a file up my arsehole?

After my own clothes were put in a small sack, I was then given some prison garb to wear. This consisted of dark blue trousers, blue pin-stripped shirt, leather shoes, underwear, socks. I was then taken through a succession of heavy metal doors deeper into the prison. Bedding was then issued along with a towel, soap, plastic razor, comb, toothpaste and brush. I was allocated a single cell on the third landing in C wing, and told to smarten myself up ready to meet the Governor.

It was an old Victorian prison. The floor was made of black slate and was highly polished. The bed was a thick wooden board attached to the floor by metal legs, upon which was thrown a horsehair mattress, the joke being of course the horse was still in it. There was a table and chair in the other corner, under which there was a white enamel chamber pot. By the window there were two shelves upon which there was a toilet roll and a bible. Secured to the wall was a shiny steel plate in which it was possible to see the outline of your face. I looked, and in the pale light coming through the window I could see the bags under my eyes, and the lacklustre dark hair that fell to my shoulders.

There was also a terrible smell about the place. Carbolic soap and excrement hung in the air on all landings. An invisible gas exploded between the buttocks of a thousand arseholes each morning. Now it invaded my nostrils, turning my stomach. I prayed for the moment when I would get used to it, like the screws.

I moved the Formica chair beneath the window and climbed on it to peer out. On both sides were rows of barred cell windows, seemingly chiseled out of the thick, grey stone. I could see across the courtyard to the perimeter wall where lights shone unsteadily beneath several rows of razor wire.

I was brought down from the landing, to the end of the wing, to see the Governor. He had an office in each wing. This saved constantly moving a prisoner around, which was quite a rigmarole anyway, what with the shouting and carrying on between the prison officers as they passed you from one to the other. It was a tragic performance to see them behaving the way they did. It was, I’m sure, designed to make you feel like some commodity, a kind of dehumanising process to reduce your ego or to reinforce their omnipotence over your crummy life.

They shouted “Mister!” and “Sir!” to each other all day. When a prisoner left their party or when they were telling another screw at the far end of the wing that prisoners were being sent down to them, they shouted “One to you!” and “One off mister!”

When a Principal officer passed they came to attention, so rigid with respect that you could almost hear the cheeks of their arse grinding together. When the Chief passed they shouted even louder, and got even tighter, and when the Governor came through the wing, they shouted so loud, “I’ll Kirrect sir!” tightening up so much I wondered what they had got left for a Prison Commissioner, the subservient bastards.

The office was a kind of regal apartment. All the main visitors, and senior officers, were met and introduced in another part of the prison away from the prying eyes, and ears, behind the cell doors. On the wall above his desk there was a painting of the Fens with a row of what looked like geese flying in perfect formation, beneath which red-coated huntsmen were chasing a fox. “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”

I was made to stand to attention in front of him whilst he drummed his fingers on the desk. I looked at him. He was wearing a flat cap and tweed jacket, with white shirt and regimental tie that befitted his rank of upper class Englishman; I’m sure he would have ridden a horse if he had one. I had seen people like him before in the officers mess, usually retired Majors or Colonels who were invited occasionally to have dinner with old chums, and talk bollocks for hours on end whilst they driveled over old campaigns and brandy. 'The enemy were hear, here and here…the thin red line was…'

He spoke with some effort, and if you could not hear what he was saying, you’d have thought from his tone and the sympathetic, loving and adoring looks of the screws, that he was stating some new philosophical truth to save the suffering world.

“You’re here remanded here – until your – trial…See here that you – behave yourself and…give no trouble to – my officers here. Umm – If I see that you play the game…then your stay will be bearable…but if not…well…remember the ball is in your court.” The screws looked at me with eyes that had an added meaning. I was then escorted back to my cell and banged up.

Somewhere on the landing a prisoner was shouting. I could not hear the words nor did I want to. I posted my mind out of the window, it made good its escape; and fear that I had been staving off all day, at that moment, entered my body.

I sat on my bed and held my head between my hands.

I was thinking of mum and the impoverishment of her life, and how she had suffered that we all might find contentment in our worlds. She had created a mythical world of laughter and sunshine, in the hope of giving us all gladness. Maybe her untimely death was really the only antidote she ever found to her suffering – if indeed she had.

It seemed a peculiar triumph of the world in which I lived – and maybe its loss – that I felt convinced at times that I was inferior. That being subjected to such a harsh upbringing by my father had not led to confidence and enlightenment, but had left me seeking repentance at every threshold I crossed. No matter how hard I struggled to escape the feelings of remorse and guilt, it was as if by my very struggle, I was being compelled by a greater force, to lie still.

I thought of my dad, a dad that did not love me. It was strange how we can be loved my so many, and yet crave the love of those that will not give us their love. We cannot conquer all, if indeed this is the correct term. I wanted to be an equal, and for him to hold me to his chest and tell me how much he loved me. It was simple.

Once when he was in hospital I went with my sisters to see him, and for long spells when I was watching him from the back of the ward, I kept wishing he would die. He was coughing his lungs into a basin, and was delightedly stirring his fingers in the blood and licking them. Mum and Stella held his arms, and begged him to stop. But I wanted him to continue really. I wanted a man with a hood and a scythe to knock on the door of the private ward, and summon him to go with him into the shadows. I did not care that he was crazy. To me he had always seemed unbalanced so what was the difference now – that he may be dying?

I stood there pissing into the chamber pot, and the grey loneliness of the evening came in to the cell as the sun went down. Somewhere far off down the landing, I heard for the first time the opening and closing of heavy steel doors. Keys turning in locks, hurried conversations, doors banging closed, cutlery scraping, and all the while getting nearer until my door opened. It was teatime and I’d spent my first afternoon in nick.

I sat at the table and ate my four ounces of cold bully beef, along with a spoonful of boiled potatoes, and lukewarm peas. I also had six ounces of white bread and two pats of margarine. They had been given to me on a plastic plate. I chomped and shoveled the food into my mouth with a plastic fork. I had no knife with which to cut the food. I squashed the margarine with my fingers and spread it on the bread. I stabbed the bully and the spuds with my fork, and in my hunger crammed the food into my mouth like a ravenous child. I also had an enamel mug of warm brown tea with which to swill every thing down. I finished my meal and felt a little stronger.

Then silence. The world became a wet emptiness that occupied my very soul. I sat at the back of the cell and looked up to the small square window, straining my neck. Already the evening was drawing in.

I thought of God for some reason… the greater being. It was much better to do so than to think of Toni and the kids. I’d not told the screws I was married considering it less complicated if they did not know where they lived, because no doubt they would raid the place, looking for fuck knows what, and the last thing I wanted was for them to be terrified by a load of brass necks thundering through the door at dawn.

So now I was a lone wolf, who occasionally howled, and thought of God and how He always sided with the rich. It seemed strange that the richest woman in England was the head of the Church. Why not some sniveling, little, back street woman, who fed pigeons. She loved all God’s creatures, which is probably more than the Queen does!

Isn’t that fucking great! Hard labour and exploitation all of your life and at the end the promise of Heaven. And all this from the mouth of a Saviour who came to save the world thousands of years ago but wasn’t capable of doing it then, and is extremely unlikely to succeed now or in the future! I mean I could see Him at some dinner party getting the piss taken out of him. “What was that again? Saving the world? – Leave it out John – yer ‘aving a Giraffe!”

If there was a God I can only assume that being born poor, calls for some automatic punishment for sins I knew nothing about. I sat there and cursed God from the bottom of my heart for being a coward, and not coming out to fight me like a man! Is this His way of punishment that I should now languish in a prison for years, for doing what exactly?

Dark, steel blue clouds drifted across the pale sky. Rain sheeted down with little respite. Nothing was moving apart from over-coated figures that patrolled the base of the high wall with black dogs. It was a silent kingdom, through which an icy wind was whispering. I was trapped.