A Prison Diary Read online

‘Have you any idea how much batteries cost?’

  ‘No,’ I tell him.

  ‘£6.40 a time, and then they’re only good for twelve hours, so I wouldn’t be able to afford any tobacco if I had to buy new batteries every week.’ I still haven’t worked out where all this is leading. ‘But I never have to buy any batteries, do I?’

  ‘Don’t you?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ he replies, and then goes to a shelf behind his bed, and extracts a biro. He flicks off the little cap on the bottom and pulls out the refill, which has a coil of thin wire wrapped around it. He continues. ‘First, I make an earth by scraping off a little paint from the water pipe behind my bed, then I take off the plastic cover from the strip light on the ceiling and attach the other end of the wire to the little box inside the light.’ Derek can tell that I’m just about following this cunning subterfuge, when he adds, ‘Don’t worry about the details, Jeff, I’ve drawn you a diagram. That way,’ he says, ‘I get an uninterrupted supply of electricity at Her Majesty’s expense.’

  My immediate reaction is, why isn’t he on the outside doing a proper job? I thank him and assure Derek the story will get a mention in my story.

  ‘What do I get out of it?’ he asks. ‘Because when I leave this place, all I have to my name other than that stereo is the ninety quid discharge money they give you.’*

  I assure Derek that my publishers will pay him a fee for the use of the diagram if it appears in the book. We shake on it.

  5.05 pm

  Mr Weedon returns to tell me that I am being moved to a single cell. Terry immediately becomes petulant and starts shouting that he’d been promised a single cell even before I’d arrived.

  ‘And you would have got one, Fossett,’ Mr Weedon replies, ‘if you hadn’t phoned the press and grassed on your cell-mate for a few quid.’

  Terry continues to harangue the officer and I can only wonder how long he will last with such a short fuse once he returns to the outside world.

  I gather up my possessions and move across from Cell 40 to 30 on the other side of the corridor. My fourth move in nine days. Taal, a six-foot four-inch Ghanaian who was convicted of murdering a man in Peckham despite claiming that he was in Brighton with his girlfriend at the time, returns to his old bunk in Cell 40. I feel bad about depriving Taal of his private cell, and it becomes yet another reason I want to move to a D-cat prison as soon as possible, so that he can have his single cell back.

  I spend an hour filling up my cellophane bag, carrying it across the corridor, emptying it, then rearranging my belongings in Cell 30. I have just completed this task when my new cell door is opened, and I’m ordered to go down to the hotplate for supper.

  6.00 pm

  I once again settle for the vegetarian option, although Paul (murder and stamps), who ticks off each name on a clipboard at the hotplate, tells me that the chicken is passable. I risk it. He’s wrong again. I won’t give him a third chance.

  During Association I spend half an hour with Billy Little (murder) in his cell, going over his work. He tells me he has at least another twenty years to serve as his tariff is open-ended, so I advise him to start writing a novel, even a trilogy. He looks doubtful. He’s not a man who’s ever put much faith in the word of a Conservative.

  There’s a knock on the cell door and a massive giant of a man ambles into the room looking like a second-row forward in search of a scrum. I noticed him on the first day as he stood alone in the far corner of the room, staring silently through me. He was hard to miss at over six foot, weighing around twenty-one stone. He’s never said a word to me since my arrival on the spur, and I confess to being a little apprehensive about him, even frightened. He’s known as Fletch.

  He’s come to ‘let me know’ that Terry is no longer complaining about my being moved into a single cell because he accepts that by phoning the Sun he was ‘out of order’, but he has since been warned that one of the Sunday papers is going to run a story about him hitting a woman over the head with a snooker ball wrapped in a sock. One of the many things prisoners will not tolerate is anyone attacking a woman. Terry has told Fletch that he’s terrified that some of the inmates will beat him up once the story is published.* Fletch is letting it be known that he doesn’t want any trouble, ‘even though he accepts that the lad was stupid to have talked to the press in the first place’. Fletch looks at me and says, ‘I must be the only person on the spur who hasn’t spoken to you, but then I hate everything you stand for. Don’t take it personally,’ he adds and then leaves without another word.

  Billy tells me that Fletch is one of the most respected prisoners on the spur and, to my surprise, a Listener. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ he adds, ‘because I can tell you that one of the reasons we have so little trouble on this wing is because he was a bouncer for a London nightclub before he ended up in here. Last year he single-handedly stopped a riot over the state of the food. The screws could never have contained the problem on their own, and they know it.’

  I leave Billy and return to Association to play a couple of hands of Kaluki with Del Boy (murder), Colin (GBH) and Paul (murder – seventy-five years between them). I win the first hand and lose the second by 124 points. It’s been that sort of a day.

  Just as I’m about to return to my cell for lock-up, Ms Roberts appears on the floor. Terry rushes across to her and begins an animated conversation. She does her best to calm him down. When he is placated enough to move on, I ask her if she’s had a call from my solicitor.

  ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘and I’ll have a word with you first thing in the morning. I hope you’ll feel it’s good news.’ I don’t press her for any details because several other prisoners have formed a queue as they also wish to speak to the Deputy Governor before lock-up.

  9.00 pm

  It has, as I have already stated, been an up and down sort of day, but I feel a little better after Ms Roberts’ comments. What will she have to tell me tomorrow?

  For the next couple of hours I go through another hundred letters that the censor has left on my bed. The pattern is now firmly set, but there is one letter in particular that amuses me – I am writing to give you my full support, as I suspect that no one else is bothering to do so at the present time. I smile because Ms Buxton of Northants reminds me just how fortunate I am to have so many people willing to fight my corner. I only have to think about Terry’s phantom visitor to realize just how lucky I am.

  Day 10

  Saturday 28 July 2001

  5.42 am

  I wake in a cold sweat, having had the strangest dream. I’m back at Oxford in the sixties, where I win the University cross-country trials, which would automatically ensure that I was awarded a Blue and a place in the team against Cambridge. As I ran the one hundred yards in my youth, this scenario seems somewhat unlikely. But it gets worse. I’m disqualified, and the race is awarded to the man who came second. When the cup is presented to him I lose my temper with the judges. The judges are David Coleman and the late Ron Pickering – two of the most decent men God ever put on Earth. They tell me they had to disqualify me because they just didn’t believe I could possibly have won. No doubt the prison psychiatrist will have a theory.

  6.11 am

  I don’t begin writing immediately as I consider the task I have set myself over the past few days: a close study of lifers.

  On spur one, there are fifty-two men serving life sentences.* I’ve now held long conversations with about twenty of them, and have come to the conclusion that they fall roughly into two categories. This is of course an over-simplification, as each individual is both complex and unique. The first group consist of those who insist, ‘It wasn’t me, guv, it was all a stitch up. They didn’t even find the murder weapon, but because of my previous record I fitted neatly into the required police profile.’

  The other group hold their hands in the air and admit to a moment of madness, which they will eternally regret, and accept they must pay the penalty the law demands. One or two even add, ‘It’s no more