by Linda Calvey
“Who told you, darlin’?”
“My voices.”
“Which voices?”
“The ones in my head.”
The girl, who had long lanky brown hair, started muttering to herself. She was young and tomboyish, and her grey jogging top and bottoms were soaked in her blood.
“You mustn’t listen to them when they tell you to do terrible things like this,” I said, looking around for something to quench the blood, and to hold the jagged flap of skin back onto her face. There was nothing suitable, no towels or clean sheets, just an old T-shirt on the floor.
“I’m goin’ to have to hold your face back together with this, sorry, darlin’.”
I reached for the T-shirt slowly, as I didn’t want to frighten her. She was shaking now, and had started to stammer words I didn’t understand.
I picked up the shirt and packed it against her face. She didn’t wince, didn’t respond at all when I pushed her flesh back against the bones it had been roughly separated from.
“What did you do it with?” I asked, wondering if she had smuggled in some kind of weapon. I was starting to feel nervous. The screw seemed to be taking forever to get help, and I’d been left with this highly volatile and extremely vulnerable prisoner.
“What did you do it with?” Was there a weapon to hand?
“This,” the girl said simply.
She pulled her bedcover away to reveal a china dinner plate smashed in half. One part was covered in black blood.
That’s when I realised how afraid I was. The broken plate was on the other side of the girl. I couldn’t stop her if she grabbed it and used it on me. I had to think.
“Darlin’, why don’t we put the pieces of plate by the door.” I smiled as soothingly as I could.
“It’s alright, they like you,” she replied, looking into my eyes for the first time. Her ripped face was grotesque, with severed skin and jutting bones, but I could see she must’ve been a nice-looking girl once. She was new to the wing and I hadn’t had a chance to meet her, but it was obvious she had some kind of psychosis and should never have been put in a cell all alone.
“Who likes me?” I replied, momentarily puzzled. I could feel my arm starting to ache as I held the blood-soaked T-shirt up to her damaged face.
“The voices. They’ve told me not to hurt you.”
“Ok darlin’, tell them I don’t want them to hurt you again, so I’m goin’ to put the dinner plate by the door.”
I put her hand where the soaked rag was, and told her to keep it there. She was muttering to herself again, and I knew she wasn’t really here, with me, in this cell. She seemed to come and go out of her own troubled mind. It was very strange. I took the plate, easing it away from her side, and put it carefully by the door, pressing the red buzzer as I did so.
Oh my God, they’ve left me here on my own. Where’s that ambulance? Where’s the screw?
I looked round, half expecting the girl to have followed me. She was still sitting on the bed, staring at the ground.
“Is it hurtin’ you?” I asked. I felt desperately sorry for her, and also very scared for myself. I wouldn’t have left her, though, however frightened I was. She was clearly in need of care and help.
“No, no it doesn’t, you’re very kind.” She had a northern accent, and I guessed she was from Newcastle way.
Then, just as I had given up on anyone coming to help, I heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. They were slow, casual, and I felt anger flare up inside me. As the door was unlocked, a woman’s voice said, “This is really inconvenient. I’m trying to do all the men’s medication.”
Thoughts were buzzing through my brain. Why the delay? Why so slow? Did no-one realise how serious this was? I moved away from the girl and as I did so, the top of her cheek flapped back down again. At that moment, the prison nurse walked in.
“Oh, for God’s sake! This is an emergency! Why didn’t you tell me? When you’d said she’d cut her face I had no idea…”
The nurse’s voice was urgent now. I held the girl’s face back up. The nurse left to call 999, and the screw stayed with the girl. Within minutes, an ambulance had arrived and the girl was taken away. It turned out she was only meant to be in Durham for a few days until they found her a bed in a psychiatric ward. A few days too many for her.
I spoke to Reggie soon afterwards, and I told him about the girl. In his usual kindly manner, he took pity on the girl and sent a pair of trainers to her in hospital.
When the governor called me to his office to thank me for helping her, I let rip. “I could’ve been attacked. I was left there alone with a very disturbed girl. I should never have been put in that situation.” Mr Smith offered me a phone card as a reward.
“I don’t want a phone card. I want to know that girls like her aren’t put in here. She should’ve been in a hospital all along.”
I was really angry. I felt that justice had let me down, but I was an unusual case, whereas girls like the self-harmer were everywhere in the broken prison system.
My time at Durham was coming to a close. I’d been there for four years, and was due to be moved to an institution in Wakefield – but before I went, an old friend of mine made a bizarre gesture of love.
One day I was told I had an incoming call. When I picked up, a voice said, “Hello, Black Rose.”
“Hello Charlie. How are you?”
“I’ve come in to take a hostage for you.”
I heard a door slam, then Charlie shouted, “You’re all my hostages!”
“Charlie, what’s goin’ on? What are you doin’?” I couldn’t work out if this was some kind of elaborate joke.
“I’ve took them hostage.” Charlie sounded elated. He began to shout down the phone, high as a kite.
“What do you mean?” I said, puzzled, hoping he hadn’t really done what he’d said he had.
“They let me in the guv’nor’s office to call you, and now I’ve taken everyone in here hostage.” He had done exactly what he’d said. “They’ve got to set you free, and I’m going to keep them until you are released.”
“Oh my God, Charlie, you can’t do that. I’m alright. I don’t want to go home today,” I flustered. “Please let them go, I really don’t need it.”
I was pleading with the man considered Britain’s most dangerous criminal. There was a pause from his end.
“Ok, Black Rose doesn’t want me to take hostages today. To say thank you to her, we’re all going to sing.” Charlie was obviously speaking to the people he had captured.
“We’re going to sing ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’, but we’re going to change it to ‘He’s got the whole world in his sawn-off shotgun’. Ready?” He laughed. “When we get to the end of the song, you can take me back down and you won’t be hostages any more.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh with him or to be scared for those poor people in the office.
He made them sing, then finished with, “Black Rose is so classy. She’s got red varnish on her fingernails and gold varnish on her toenails.”
I didn’t want to contradict him. It was a truly bizarre way to end my time in that prison.
I was moved to Holloway, where the excitements included a visit from Elton John.
“Yeah, a couple of the girls on the wing have Aids,” a screw explained to me, “and so he’s comin’ in to see them. Somethin’ to do with a charity called Aids in Prison. Make sure you’re about.”
Well, I had nowhere else to go.
Elton did indeed come in. He was dressed in jeans and normal clothes and glasses, and I asked him why he wasn’t dressed up as I’d always seen him.
“Do you think I walk around all day wearing a glittery shirt and glasses?” he replied. I giggled. He was a sweetie and we had a nice chat in the TV room. I wrote to him afterwards, and he generously sent a
cheque for £5,000 to the person in charge of Aids in Prison.
Shortly afterwards, I was moved on to Newall, which was primarily a young offenders’ institution in Wakefield. I was the only Cockney in there – the rest of the girls were from that area and spoke in northern accents. The screws paid them in Crunchie bars for blow jobs.
I couldn’t believe some of the things I heard in Newall. One girl I knew had been done for prostitution. I was chatting to her one day when a male prison guard we hadn’t seen before walked past.
She looked mildly surprised. “Hello again.”
The guard ignored her as he went past. She raised her eyebrows and turned to me.
“He used to be one of my clients. Seems he’s not so interested any more.”
The double standards in our world never ceased to amaze me.
The young offenders in Newall called me “Ma”, and came to me with their problems. One young woman had been sold by her father to a much older man for sex, just to pay off a gambling debt. She’d been 14 at the time. It was horrendous. Every girl seemed to have a tragic story to tell: mothers who were junkies, being pushed into prostitution to earn money, neglect and violence leading to drugs, abusive relationships and, finally, prison. In those days, I saw how lucky I’d been to have a lovely family, to have known the love I have.
Acceptance came easily to me then, and I felt something else: gratitude. Yes, I’d been imprisoned unfairly, but I also knew that I was one of the lucky ones. I had never experienced the degradation suffered by those poor girls, and I never would.
Chapter 28
Freedom
1999-2008
Myra let out a loud scream.
“Aaarghhhhh, a spider!”
The vilified murderess was sitting on a chair as I was dying her hair the dark shade of red she liked, when she suddenly jumped up and started shouting.
“Aaarghhhhh it’s huge!” I shrieked, catching sight of the spider as it went hell for leather across the cell floor.
It wasn’t like me to lose my head, but this one was as big as it gets. It had long thick legs and had scuttled out from under Myra’s bed.
We both legged it to the corner of her cell, which was situated in a kind of no-man’s land between the punishment block and the main wing of HMP Highpoint in Suffolk.
Myra had arrived a year after I had, and while I was kept in the regular cells, she had to be kept away from the other inmates, as she was still the most hated woman in Britain – or so the papers said. I don’t think anyone could’ve disputed it. She had two rooms to herself, one for sleeping in and one for repairing library books. By contrast, my wing was only locked at the end of the corridor. The individual cells were open.
Highpoint was a Category C prison, meaning it was closed, but with fewer security measures. Myra would’ve been in danger from the other inmates if they had access to her. She lived right in the bowels of the building, which seemed fitting. I’d been told about Myra’s arrival a few weeks ago by a gleeful screw who seemed to think she and I were pals.
“Did ya hear, Linda, Myra Hindley’s comin’ here. What d’you think of that?”
I looked over at the screw. She was leaning against the kitchen doorway as I helped prepare breakfast for the girls. It was hot and steamy in that room of stainless steel cupboards and surfaces. I was ladling out porridge.
“I don’t mind where she goes. It’s nothin’ to do with me,” I shrugged. “Who’d like some porridge? Don’t touch the stuff myself.” That made a girl in the queue for food laugh.
“You and Myra, eh,” the girl joked. She can’t have been more than 25 years old. She was doing time for arson and theft.
“But you know her from Durham, don’t ya?” the screw went on. “That’s what the guv’nor told us. Anyway, it’ll have to be you who keeps her company.”
“Oh, why’s that then?” I asked. “There you go, darlin’, there’s sugar and milk over there.” I winked at the young woman as she carried away her plastic bowl of porridge on a plastic tray and went to find somewhere to sit.
This wasn’t really the time to be trying to engage me in conversation. Was the screw trying to make trouble?
“The guv’nor says you and Myra were friendly, like, so when she comes, you’ll have to look after her.”
I snorted at that. Putting down my ladle, I turned to the prison guard. She was tall and stockily built, with short brown hair. “I can tell you now that Myra and I were never friends. I worked in the library and she spent a lot of time there. That was that. Didn’t you know I slapped her in the face once?”
“Good for you, Linda,” hollered one of the girls who was still waiting to be served.
“You could always tell the guv’nor you won’t do it,” said the guard slyly, knowing full well I wouldn’t dare. It didn’t go well for you if you refused to do what you were asked, and I wanted to leave this place eventually and go home. I didn’t want any black marks on my prison records.
So, here I was, coming to see the woman I loathed, whose crimes were so abhorrent to me that I found it difficult to be in her company, and having to wash her hair twice a week. Once a month I’d have to go back to dye her roots and give her a trim, though I was no hairdresser. She’d smoke constantly while I was there, one cigarette after another in a constant chain, which I hated, as I always left her reeking of tobacco.
“You kill it! You’re the Black Widow!” Myra shouted, hiding behind me.
“I can’t kill it, I’m frightened as well.”
I was amazed that this woman who had killed children could be scared about ending a spider’s life.
At that point, the spider ran back into the darkness under her bed.
“Check it’s gone, Linda, go on.” Myra drew heavily on her ciggie as she spoke.
I sighed. Crouching on the grey linoleum floor, peering under her single bed, I couldn’t see anything, except for a battered-looking briefcase. That immediately struck me as odd, as we weren’t usually allowed anything we could hide things in.
“What’s that case?” I said, feeling emboldened by tackling the wayward spider.
“Oh that, that’s mine.” Myra seemed to hesitate. “That’s got my papers in.”
“Your papers?”
As far as I knew, we weren’t allowed to keep private documents on the wing.
Myra pursed her lips and it was obvious she wouldn’t say any more. I have often wondered what was inside that forbidden briefcase.
By then, Myra looked like any other middle-aged woman. She had brown hair, which was short on top and long at the back, pink nail varnish, and at the age of 57, apart from her flowing kaftan, she could’ve been mistaken for a suburban housewife anywhere in the land.
“My mum wants to speak to you,” she said, sitting back down on the chair.
I picked up the bowl of dye and the small brush I’d been applying it with and got back to work.
“Your mum? Nellie?” I said. “Why does she want to speak with me?”
“Because you’re my only friend.”
I almost dropped the bowl. I think I even choked. I really didn’t know whether to feel chilled by that, or pity for her. She was no friend of mine. I was there under duress, chatting, doing her hair, wafting away her endless cigarette smoke. She obviously thought I was there by choice, but how could she? Didn’t she know how hated, how despised she was by everyone, including me?
“Oh, alright then,” was all I could say, weakly. “I’ll chat to your mum. How is she?”
Myra coughed, her lungs sounded terrible. “She thinks I’ll get out soon. It was Brady. I was forced, you know.”
Suddenly the air seemed cold. Her voice sounded like ice.
I didn’t know what to say. Her words were so unexpected. It was the first time she’d ever alluded to the horrors she and Brady had inflicted on little Lesley Ann Downey and
four other youngsters. I hadn’t a clue what to say. My mouth felt dry and I stood, waiting to see what would come next. Her words hung in the air. Myra obviously realised what she’d said.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
She stopped abruptly, then continued as if nothing had happened. “I want to go home, Linda, that’s all I want now.”
When I’d finished her hair, she fished about in her cupboard and handed me a heart-shaped box of chocolates. “It’s for you,” she said, lighting another cigarette.
“Thank you, Myra,” I said, opening the lid to find nothing inside. “Oh, well it’s a pretty box.”
Did Myra think she was buying my friendship with odd presents? Was she trying to appease me in some way for her awkward confession? She had always talked a lot about going home. She had a small band of supporters who were lobbying the Home Office to release her. Perhaps she counted me as one of her admirers? I don’t think she had any idea that many of those closest to her would gladly have left her to die, rotting in prison until the end of her days for the heinous crimes she’d committed.
That evening, when Myra’s mum Nellie Moulton rang, I was there to answer.
“Hello, dear.” Nellie was an old lady, living in a care home near Manchester, but she sounded compos mentis.
“Hello, this is Linda Calvey. How are you?” I said, at a loss to know what to say to this woman. I felt instantly sorry for her. How agonising to have given birth to a monster, to know that your child killed all those children, and possibly more. I had no idea how that would feel.
“I’m so pleased Myra has a nice friend,” she said, though in my mind I couldn’t shut out the voice shouting I’m not her friend, I never will be. “Myra says you colour her hair, that’s nice.”
And so the conversation went on. I started speaking to that woman every Sunday, because I felt so sorry for her. She must’ve gone through hell, and the least I could do was play along with this bizarre friendship.
Another odd friendship that I struck during the next few years in prison was with a charismatic lawyer called Giovanni Di Stefano. His nickname was the Devil’s Advocate, and he claimed he specialised in “defending the indefensible”. It was rumoured he’d acted for serial killer Harold Shipman, Saddam Hussein and, later, Osama Bin Laden. One of the girls was seeing him in her bid for freedom, and she asked if I’d be interested in meeting him too. I’d heard he had managed to overturn Hoogstraten’s manslaughter conviction, so I admitted I was intrigued.
