A Prison Diary Read online

  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 balls 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 duchesse 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 glass 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 attitude’ 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

  Association. 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 assume 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 assist 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 six-month-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 passed on to Billy; reading a paper a day late when you have an eighteen-year 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 middle-class family, had a good upbringing, and a happy childhood. His father was a senior manager with a top life-assurance 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 (