Over the last three weeks you will have felt the resentment of other prisoners who feel strongly that equality should be practised even in prisons. You no doubt recall the Gilbert and Sullivan quote from The Gondoliers – when everybody is somebody, then nobody is anybody.
I think what I’m trying to say is that your status, friendliness and willingness to help and advise others has not gone unnoticed by those who are destined to spend a great deal longer incarcerated.
For this I thank you, and for your inspiration to press me to think more seriously about my writing. I would like to take you up on your offer to keep in touch, and in particular to check over my first novel.
I’ll be resident here for another month or two, or three, before they move me onto a first stage lifer main centre [Billy has been at Belmarsh for two years and seven months] I’ll let you know my address once I’ve settled. My number is at the bottom of this letter.
You are Primus Inter Pares
Yours,
Billy (BX7974)
I sit down at my table and reply immediately.
12 noon
When Fletch arrives back from the workshops, he finds me waiting by his cell door. He steps inside and invites me to join him. [36] I ask if I might be allowed to borrow his notebook so that I can consider more carefully the piece he read to me the previous evening. He hesitates for a moment, then goes to a shelf above his bed, burrows around and extracts the little green notebook. He hands it over without comment.
I grab an apple for lunch and return to my cell. Reading Fletch’s story is no less painful. I go over it three times before pacing up and down. My problem will be getting him to agree to publish his words in this diary.
3.37 pm
Mr Bentley opens my cell door to let me know that the Deputy Governor wishes to see me. As I am escorted to Mr Leader’s office, I can only wonder what bad news he will have to impart this time. Am I to be sent to Parkhurst or Brixton, or have they settled on Dartmoor? When the Deputy Governor’s door is opened, I am greeted with a warm smile. Mr Leader’s demeanour and manner are completely different from our last meeting. He is welcoming and friendly, which leads me to hope that he is the bearer of better news.
He tells me that he has just heard from the Home Office that I will not be going to Camphill on the Isle of Wight or Elmer in Kent, but Wayland. I frown. I’ve never heard of Wayland.
‘It’s in Norfolk,’ he tells me. ‘C-cat and very relaxed. I’ve already spoken to the Governor,’ he adds, ‘and only one other member of my staff is aware of your destination.’ I take this as a broad hint that it might be wise not to tell anyone else on the spur of my destination, unless I want to be accompanied throughout the entire journey by the national press. I nod and realize why he has taken the unusual step of seeing me alone. I’m about to ask him a question, when he answers it.
‘We plan to move you on Thursday.’
Only three more days at Hellmarsh, is my first reaction, and, after asking him several more questions, I thank him and return to my cell unescorted. I spend the next hour considering every word Mr Leader has said. I recall asking him which he would rather be going to, Wayland or the Isle of Wight. ‘Wayland,’ he’d replied without hesitation.
In prison it’s necessary to fight each battle day by day if you’re eventually going to win the war. First it was getting off the medical centre and onto Block Three. Then was escaping Block Three (Beirut) and being moved to Block One to live among a more mature group of prisoners. Next was being transferred from Belmarsh to a C-cat prison. Now I shall be pressing to regain my D-cat status, so that I can leave Wayland as quickly as possible for an open prison. But that’s tomorrow’s battle. Several prisoners have ‘Take each day as it comes’ scrawled on their walls.
4.00 pm
I try to write, but so much has already happened today that I find it hard to concentrate. I munch a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut (32p), and drink a mug of Evian (49p) topped up with Robinson’s blackcurrant juice (97p).
6.00 pm
Supper. I catch Fletch in the queue for the hotplate, and he agrees to join me in my cell at seven. ‘Miah [murder] is cutting my hair at seven,’ I tell him, ‘so could we make it seven fifteen? I can’t afford to miss the appointment, as I’m still hoping for a visit from my wife on Thursday.’
7.00 pm
Association. I sit patiently in a chair on number 2 landing waiting for Miah. He doesn’t turn up on time to cut my hair, so I return to my cell and wait for Fletch. He does arrive on time and takes a seat on the end of the bed. He doesn’t bother with any preamble.
‘You can include my piece in your book if you want to,’ he says, ‘and if you do, let’s hope it does some good.’
I tell him that if a national newspaper serializes the diary, then his words will be read by millions of people, and the politicians will have to finally stop pretending that it isn’t happening or they will simply be guilty by association.
We begin to go through the script line by line, filling in details such as names, times and places so that the casual reader can properly follow the sequence of events. Tony (marijuana only) joins us a few minutes later. It turns out that he’s the only other person to have read the piece, and it also becomes clear that it was on his advice that Fletch decided not only to write about his experiences, but to allow a wider audience to read them.
There’s a knock on the door. It’s Miah (murder). He apologizes about missing his appointment to cut my hair, but he’s only just finished his spell on the hotplate. He explains that he can’t fit me in tomorrow, because of his work schedule, but he could cut my hair during Association on Wednesday. I warn him that if he fails to keep the appointment on Wednesday, I’ll kill him, as my wife is coming to visit me on Thursday and I must look my best. Miah laughs, bows and leaves us. I’ll kill him. I said it without thinking, and to a convicted murderer. Miah is 5ft 4in, and I doubt if he weighs ten stone; the man he murdered was 6ft 2in and weighed 220 pounds. Strange world I’m living in.
Fletch, Tony and I continue to go over the script, and when we’ve completed the task, Fletch stands up and shakes me by the hand to show the deal has been agreed.
8.00 pm
For the next two hours, I transcribe out Fletch’s words, adding to the script only when he has given me specific details, background or names. By the time I’ve completed the last sentence, I’m even more angry than I was when he read the piece to me last night.
10.00 pm
I lie awake in my thin, hard prison bed, my head resting on my thinner, harder prison pillow, and wonder how decent normal people will react to Fletch’s story. For here is a man of whom any one of us might say, there but for the grace of God go I.
These are the words of the prisoner known as Fletch (murder, life imprisonment, minimum sentence twenty-two years).
My name is… [37] I am thirty-eight years old and serving a life sentence for a murder I did not commit, but I only wish I had.
My whole life has been a fuck-up from the start I was born in Morriston in Wales and although I loved my family, I have only had six real relationships in my life, or as real as I felt they could be. The sort of relationship you want to rush home to, and regret leaving in the morning when you return to work.
I met my wife when I was seventeen, and even today would happily die for her. We had a twenty-year relationship, though both of us had other lovers during that time. Of the six relationships I’ve had, two have been with men, which is where the complication begins. Because of years of sexual abuse I suffered during my childhood, I have never really enjoyed sex, whether it be with a man or a woman.