6.00 pm
Supper. Provisions have arrived from the canteen and been left in a plastic bag on the end of my bed. I settle down to a plate of tinned Spam, a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, two McVitie’s digestive biscuits and finally a mug of blackcurrant juice, topped up with Evian water. What more could a man ask for.
8.00 pm
Association. I am asked to join a group of ‘more mature’ prisoners – at sixty-one I am by far the oldest, if not the most mature – for their weekly committee meeting in Fletch’s cell. Other attendees include Tony (marijuana only), Billy (murder), Colin (GBH) and Paul (murder).
Like any well-run board meeting, we have a chairman, Fletch, and an agenda. First we discuss the hours we are permitted to be out of our cells, and how Mr Marsland has made conditions more bearable since he became the senior officer. Fletch considers that relations between the two parties who live on different sides of ‘the iron barrier’ are far more tenable – even amicable – than at any time in the past. Colin is still complaining about a particular warder, who I haven’t yet come across. According to Colin, he treats the prisoners like scum, and will put you on report if you as much as blink in front of him. He’s evidently proud of the fact that he’s put more people on report than any other officer, and that tells you all you need to know about him, Colin suggests.
I decide to observe this man from a distance and see if Colin’s complaint is justified. Most of the officers make an effort ‘to keep a lid on things’, preferring a calm atmosphere, only too aware that lifers’ moods swing from despair to hope and back to despair again in moments. This can, in the hands of an unthinking officer, lead to violence. Colin, I fear, is quick to wrath, and doesn’t need to take another step backwards, just as things are going a little better for him.
The next subject the committee discuss is prison finance. Tony reports that the Governor, Hazel Banks, has been given a bonus of £24,000 for bringing Belmarsh Prison costs down by four hundred thousand. Hardly something a free enterprise merchant like myself could grumble about. However, Paul feels the money would have been better spent on inmates’ education and putting electricity into the cells. I have no idea if these figures are accurate, but Tony confirms that he checked them in Sir David Ramsbotham’s (head of the prison service) annual review.
When the meeting breaks up, Derek Del Boy Bicknell (murder) – interesting that he has not been invited to join the committee meeting – asks if he could have a private word with me. ‘I’ve got something for you to read,’ he says. I walk across the ground floor from Cell 9 to Cell 6. After he’s offered me a selection of paperbacks, I discover the real reason he wishes to see me.
He wants to discuss his appeal, and produces a letter from his solicitor. The main grounds for his appeal appear to be that his former solicitor advised him not to go into the witness box when he wanted to. He subsequently sacked the solicitor and his QC. He has since appointed a new legal team to advise him, but he’s not yet chosen a QC. Imagine my surprise when I discover one of his grounds for appeal is that he is unable to read or write, and therefore never properly understood what his rights were. I look up at a shelf full of books above his bed.
‘You can’t read?’
‘No, but don’t tell anyone. You see, I’ve never really needed to as a car salesman.’
This is a prisoner who carries a great deal of responsibility on the spur. He’s a Listener and number one on the hotplate. I earlier described him as a man who could run a private company and I have not changed my mind. Del Boy brings to mind Somerset Maugham’s moving short story, ‘The Bell Ringer’. However, it’s still going to be a disadvantage for him not to be able to study his legal papers. I begin to wonder how many other prisoners fall into the same category, and worse, just won’t admit it. I go over the grounds of appeal with Del Boy line by line. He listens intently, but can’t make any notes.
8.45 pm
Lock-up is called so I return to my cell to face – delighted to face – another pile of letters left on my bed by Ray the censor. I realize the stack will be even greater tomorrow when the papers inform their readers that I will not be going to an open prison, after Emma Nicholson has dropped her ‘I was only doing my duty’ barb into an already boiling cauldron.
I’ve now fallen into a routine, much as I had in the outside world. The big difference is that I have little or no control over when I can and cannot write, so I fit my hours round the prison timetable. Immediately after evening lock-up is designated for reading letters, break, followed by going over my manuscript, break, reading the book of the week, break, undress, go to bed, break, try to ignore the inevitable rap music. Impossible.
Every time I finish the day’s script, I wonder if there will be anything new to say tomorrow. However, I’m still on such a steep learning curve, I’ve nowhere near reached that dizzy height. But I confess I now want to leave Belmarsh for pastures new, and pastures is the key word. I long to walk in green fields and taste fresh air.
Billy (lifer, writer, scholar) tells me it will be better once I’ve settled somewhere, and don’t have to spend my energy wondering when and where I will be for the rest of my sentence. He’s been at Belmarsh for two years and seven months, and still doesn’t know where he’s destined for. Tony (marijuana only, escaped from open prison) warns me that, wherever I go, I’ll be quickly bored if I don’t have a project to work on. Thankfully, writing these diaries has solved that problem. But for how long?
Day 14 Wednesday 1 August 2001
6.21 am
A long, hot, sleepless night. The rap music went on until about four in the morning, so I was only able to doze off for the odd few minutes. When it finally ceased, a row broke out between someone called Mitchell, who I think was in the cell above the music, and another prisoner called Vaz, who owned the stereo below. It didn’t take long to learn what Mitchell planned to do to Vaz just as soon as his cell door was opened. Their language bore a faint resemblance to the dialogue in a Martin Amis novel, but without any of his style or panache.
8.37 am
Breakfast. Among my canteen selections is a packet of cereal called Variety, eight different cereals in little boxes. I start off with something called Coco Pops. Not bad, but it’s still almost impossible to beat good old Kellogg’s Cornflakes.
9.31 am
The morning papers are delivered to the duty officer. They’re full of stories confirming that my status has been changed from D-cat to C-cat because of Emma Nicholson’s accusations.
9.50 am
Ms Labersham arrives and actually knocks politely on my cell door, as if I were capable of opening it. She unlocks ‘the iron barrier’ and tells me that she has come to escort me to my creative-writing class.
I’m taken to a smoke-filled waiting room with no chairs, just a table. Well, that’s one way of guaranteeing a standing ovation. Moments later a trickle of prisoners appear, each carrying his own plastic chair. Once the nine of them are settled, Ms Labersham reminds everyone that it’s a two-hour session. She suggests that I should speak for about an hour and then open it up for a general discussion.
I’ve never spoken for an hour in my life; it’s usually thirty minutes, forty at the most before I take questions. On this occasion I speak for just over forty minutes, explaining how I took up writing at the age of thirty-four after leaving Parliament, with debts of £427,000 and facing bankruptcy. The last time I gave this speech was at a conference in Las Vegas as the principal guest of a US hotel group. They flew me over first class, gave me a suite of rooms and sent me home with a cheque for $50,000.