Harris, the man who sat beside me in the dismantling shop, liked to gossip. Who owed money or cigarettes. Who’d got a new radio or a rug in their cell. After the first few days I stopped listening, but the details of Harris’s life had got in by osmosis, the wife who was definitely waiting but hadn’t visited for the last three months, the mate who was going to give him a job when he got out. He kept offering me things — cigarettes, girlie mags, once a pair of shoes he said he didn’t want. I always refused, though I was tempted by the shoes. My prison-issue boots were molded to the shape of their previous owner’s feet, the heels worn down in a way that forced me to walk with a strange pigeon-toed roll.
After a couple of weeks I was transferred to cleaning duty, scrubbing floors, mopping spilled tea and soup off staircases and landings. After the dismantling shop it felt liberating, even luxurious. Pushing a mop my mind could leave my body. I barely heard the screws
shouting at me when I dawdled. Round and round. I rocked back and forth on my worn heels and dreamed of the island, of turning in the water, the horizon stretching away from me in an infinity of blue.
One night, in a room above a noisy taverna, I’d counted my money and realized I had barely enough to get back to England. I would have to leave the next day, or the day after. Three nights later I ate a dinner of dolmades and grilled fish and drank a bottle of red wine and three glasses of ouzo and decided to stay for good. What did I have in England? I’d get one of the crumbling little houses by the harbor and do it up. I’d learn to fish. I tried to talk to the taverna owner about it as he played dominoes with his friends at a back table. I was drunker than I thought. Angry with me for interrupting his game and unable to understand what I was saying, he waved me away. I insisted, grabbing his shoulder and babbling about fish and houses and a local girl I’d spotted outside the church. Eventually a couple of the players pushed me outside. Like a fool, I tried to fight them. Bruised and hung over, I left the island the next morning.
On the overnight train trip from Bari to Milan I was joined in my compartment by a man in a well-cut suit, who said he was from Rimini and worked in local government. We talked for a while, mostly about football. His English was stilted, but he knew the names of all the current Spurs squad, reciting them one by one, as if telling a rosary. He rummaged in his bag and pulled out a bottle of a nasty-looking orange drink. I sipped some, just to be polite. “Please, take more,” he said, smiling. “Please.” The next thing I knew, it was daylight, I was alone, and the train was pulling into a siding. The carriage was stiflingly hot. I stumbled out into the corridor and came face to face with a cleaner, who gesticulated and shouted at me in Italian. The train was completely empty. Sick and disoriented, I had to walk down the tracks back to the station. Only when I tried to buy a ticket for my next journey did I realize my camera had gone, along with the small amount of cash I had left in my money belt.
I ended up begging from a middle-aged English couple who were sitting at the station café. The wife believed my story. The husband patently thought I was a liar, but handed over enough money for a ticket to Calais, along with their address, “In case,” as he told me drily, “you intend to do the decent thing.” At Calais I had to beg again and this time wasn’t so lucky. I hung around in the ferry terminal for hours, approaching every likely-looking person. Are you English? Sorry to bother you. Eventually I was arrested. At the gendarmerie they checked my documents, searched me, and let me go again. By that time I hadn’t eaten for two days.
I was saved by a middle-aged homosexual who bought me a beer and a sandwich in the terminal café. Wretchedly I told him my story, and to my surprise he bought me a ferry ticket. On the crossing he fussed over me, treating me to more drinks and food. He had a racing green MG parked at Dover and I gratefully accepted a lift to London. Eventually we drew up outside a mews house in Chelsea and he said, enunciating pointedly, that he thought we should have a little cocktail together. I let him unload my pack from the boot, then staggered away down the street, while he tugged at my sleeve and swore at me in a sort of stage whisper so as not to wake the neighbors. I walked all the way to Muswell Hill and, after emptying my friend Alan’s fridge, lay down on his sofa and slept twenty straight hours, waking up with a start in the middle of the night in the deluded belief that I was still on a train.
Round and round. The rhythm of wheels on a track. With about twenty hours of solitude a day, I had plenty of time to think in prison. If Pentonville was a factory, what would it make? If it was a machine, what was it designed to do? I spent hours running through my memories. I thought about when I’d been happy and unhappy, the times when I’d been closest to feeling there was a future. The more I thought, the clearer the moral landscape appeared. There seemed to be two worlds. One was basic and sensual, a human-scale place of small tasks and pleasures, building things and eating good food, lying in the sun, making love. In this world, human relations were very simple. The desire to dominate,
to own and to control, just didn’t arise. The other world, the world of Law and War and Institutions, was a strange and abstract place. In this mirror-world I was a violent person and had to be punished because violence was a monopoly of the state. I’d somehow authorized the British government to distribute violence on my behalf, which it did through various branches of officialdom — the army, the police, the Pentonville screws. The problem was that I couldn’t remember giving my consent. What paper had I signed? Where had I said I wished to regulate my habits and govern my sexual behavior and strive for advancement in various abstract games whose terms had been set before I was born? The state claimed it was an expression of the democratic will of the people. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was just a parasite, a vampire sustaining itself on our collective life, on my life in particular?
* * *
I was released in the last week of April 1968. No one was there to meet me. I was relieved not to see Dad or Brian, whose single visit had been as bad as anything else that had happened to me in prison, but I’d hoped some of my Vietnam Action Group friends would be at the gate. So much, I thought, for solidarity. But I’d had a short letter from Alan in Muswell Hill, saying he was storing my stuff and I should go over there when I got out, so that was where I headed.
I bought a paper from a newsstand and read it as I waited for the bus. I found it hard to concentrate on the news. It felt too good to be wearing my own clothes, my own shoes, standing on the Caledonian Road looking at rows of houses blackened with grime from the railway yards. Beautiful pigeons, beautiful old man in his vest, smoking a cigarette and watching the beautiful street from an upstairs window.
Back at the Muswell Hill house Alan shook my hand and asked how I was. I didn’t know what to say, so I told him I was OK. We drank tea, standing in the overgrown garden, where one of his housemates was storing a partially dismantled scooter. I expected Alan to be curious about prison, but he didn’t ask any questions at all. He seemed fidgety and distracted. “They’ve suspended you,” he told me. If I wanted to continue at university I’d have to begin my second year again in the autumn. I asked him what was being done. Were any of the activist groups at the LSE going to support me? He looked uncomfortable and wouldn’t meet my eye. “The thing is, you were convicted of a crime. That doesn’t make it very easy, politically.”