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Two young officers from Group 4 appear in the corridor. They are to accompany me and two other inmates from this hell-hole – not that the devils’ keepers have been unkind. In fact, with one loutish exception, they have been supportive and friendly.
The Group 4 officers help me with my endless plastic bags, before I am locked into a tiny cubicle in another sweat box. I sit cramped up in silence awaiting a ‘movement order’.
11.49 am
The electric gates swing slowly open, and the van eases out onto the main road. I stare from my darkened window to see several photographers snapping away. All they’ll get is a blacked-out window.
I remain hunched up in my little box, despite the fact that as a D-cat prisoner I am entitled to have my wife drive me to Hollesley Bay in the family car. But once again, the Home Office has put a stop to that.
For the next five hours, I am cooped up with two stale sandwiches and a bottle of water as we trundle through four counties on the endless journey to somewhere on the Suffolk coast.
3.19 pm
The van finally arrives at Hollesley Bay, and comes to a halt outside a squat brick building. The three of us step outside, to be escorted into reception. More form filling and more bag checking – decisions to be made about what we can and cannot possess.
While my plastic bags are being checked, the duty officer inadvertently gives it all away with an innocent remark. ‘It’s the first time I’ve checked anyone in from Lincoln.’ And worse, the other two prisoners who came with me have only two weeks and three weeks respectively to serve before they complete their sentences; this despite the fact that their homes are in north Yorkshire. They have been uprooted because the Home Office is prepared to mess around with their lives just to make sure I couldn’t travel by car.
When all the red tape is completed, I am accompanied to the north block by another officer, who dumps me in a single room.
Once again I begin to unpack. Once again, I will have to find my feet. Once again, I will be put through induction. Once again, I will have to suffer the endless jibes and sullen stares, never lowering my guard. Once again, I will have to find a job.
Once again …
EPILOGUE
For the past fourteen months, I have been writing two thousand words a day, nearly a million in all, which has resulted in three published diaries.
Although Hollesley Bay turned out to be quite different from North Sea Camp, it was not dissimilar enough to warrant a fourth diary. However, there is one significant difference worthy of mention. Hollesley Bay is an open prison, not a resettlement establishment. It was clearly selected to ensure that I couldn’t work outside. After I had completed my induction, the director of Genesis, a Mencap project in Ipswich, offered me a job. His request was rejected by Mr Jones, the prison governor, despite there being three other inmates working at Genesis at that time. I appealed to the Prison Ombudsman about this blatant discrimination, but he said he didn’t have the authority to reverse the governor’s decision.
I reluctantly settled for the position of library orderly, with a remit from Mr Jones to ‘get more prisoners reading’. Thirty-two books were taken out in my first week as library orderly, one hundred and ninety one in my last, eight months later.
However, as the library was only open to prisoners between 12.30 and 1.30, and 6 and 7 pm, I was left with countless hours to occupy myself. It doesn’t take that long to replace on the shelves the twenty or thirty books returned each day. I could have occupied those lifeless hours writing a fourth diary, but as I have explained, I felt it would have achieved little.
During those first few months of incarceration at Hollesley Bay, I edited A Prison Diary Volume Two – Wayland: Purgatory, and had it smuggled out on a weekly basis by a prisoner who was working in Ipswich. But even that demanding exercise did not fully occupy my time.
My next venture was to write nine short stories based on tales that I had picked up from all four prisons. This collection will be published in 2005 under the title Cat of Nine Tales. Unfortunately, even this endeavour, with its several rewrites, only occupied me through to Christmas, leaving me another six months to kill before I was due to be released.
It was the death
of an old friend that spurred me into action, and once again gave my life some purpose …
A few months before my trial began, I had lunch at Mosimann’s with Chris Brasher and a mutual friend, John Bryant. The purpose of the lunch, and Chris always had a purpose, was first to persuade me that I should run in the London marathon and attempt to break the world record for the amount raised for charity by an individual in this event (£1,166,212) and second, that I should write my first screenplay.
While the marathon was postponed by events, I suddenly found myself with time on my hands to write a screenplay. Chris Brasher also knew the subject he wanted me to tackle, and proceeded to tell me the story of George Mallory, an Englishman who in 1924, climbed to within 800 feet of the summit of Everest, dressed in a three-piece tweed suit, with a coiled rope over one shoulder, a fifty-five-pound pack on his back, and carrying an ice axe in one hand and a rolled umbrella in the other.
At 12.50 pm on 17 July 1924 (Ascension Day), he and his young companion Sandy Irvine were enveloped in clouds and never seen again.
Was Mallory the first man to conquer Everest?
It was the untimely death of Chris Brasher that bought the memory of that lunch flooding back.
I resolved to put into action his second suggestion.
By the same author
NOVELS
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
