Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  STRANGEWAYS

  A PRISON OFFICER’S STORY

  NEIL SAMWORTH

  SIDGWICK & JACKSON

  For Yvonne Francis Samworth,

  my mum

  ‘The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.’

  FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The House of the Dead, 1862

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1 Good Morning, Judge

  2 Lippy Kids

  3 Bitter Sweet Symphony

  4 Strangeways, Here We Come

  5 Prison Song

  6 Once Around the Block

  7 Lock All the Doors

  8 Blue Christmas

  9 Black and White Town

  10 Born of Frustration

  11 Every Day Hurts

  12 I Wanna Be Adored

  13 Drug Soup

  14 Could It Be Magic

  15 The Air That I Breathe

  16 Isolation

  17 This Charming Man

  18 Damaged Goods

  19 Out of Control

  20 Step On

  21 Hollow Inside

  22 Tragedy

  23 Don’t Look Back in Anger

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Where necessary, names have been changed to protect the innocent – and on occasion the guilty.

  Prologue

  He was twisted, I’ll give him that: quite definitely a firestarter too. And like me, he was the type who’d made a career out of prison – only in his case on the wrong side of the bars.

  Riley was his name, self-harming his game, which brought him more grief than anyone else. He’d had a hard life and it showed. A serial arsonist who would never be free, he was destined for a high-security hospital, this creature and a half. Think Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, only not as good looking.

  He was the kind of prisoner it is easy to hate, the sort who mean constant mither. Thomas Riley had a history with cell fires and back in the day he had done himself serious harm. He’d tied his trackie bottoms at the ankles, filled the legs with sugar and set them alight. Now sugar melts, of course, and so did his calf muscles, pretty much. He couldn’t walk for ages and it all added to his horrific appearance. He didn’t so much talk as squawk. At one time he must have been somebody’s son, someone’s child, been taken to the park and that. Yet here he was now, a stunted fucking thing.

  Cell fires are a hazard in every prison, Strangeways included. The likeliest places are segregation units, where the most disruptive inmates are housed, although the forensic or hospital wings have their share. I’d worked on healthcare a while by now and developed an intuition around the mentally ill prisoners that mainly – with us officers and nursing staff – made up the place. The majority of cell-burners didn’t intend to go up in smoke; it was about manipulation. They wanted to cause us as much trouble as they possibly could.

  I was on nights and sensed something was up with Riley. He seemed weirder than usual, strangely possessed, so I laid a hosepipe along the floor to his cell, just in case. As usual on healthcare at night, the lights were out and he had his music on. He’d often stay up all hours. After a while, I got to thinking it were a bit loud and didn’t care for his song choice either. ‘Firestarter’ by The Prodigy was blaring out and I’m more of a Def Leppard man, me. I looked through the little glass hatch in his door. Sure enough there he was, facing the window, off on one, dancing away like Keith Flint.

  ‘Boom! I’m the trouble starter, punkin’ instigator . . .’

  Now he’s really into it, this lad. He’s got a lighter in one hand and, while I’m watching, bends down and gives it a flick – the signal I need. I drop the hatch – which is maybe a foot and a half wide – and insert the end of the hosepipe.

  ‘Tommy,’ I say, but he’s ignoring me. ‘Tommy!’

  The hems on his trackie bottoms are aglow and spark into flame just as he starts on his T-shirt. ‘Tommy!’ At last he reckons to twig and turns around just as a jet of water hits him in the face.

  Keith is still giving it some – for the minute anyway – but this lad is speechless. He’s not dancing any more either. He’s stood facing me, lighter in hand, saturated top to bottom.

  Up and down goes the spray while he glares back, fuming. I move on to the bedding and bunk until everything else is just as wet as he is. I even turn the hose on that fucking ghetto blaster and give that a soaking. Which finally shuts The Prodigy up as well.

  Good job well done, I closed the hatch and went into the office, where a nurse sat doing paperwork. ‘Cell fire,’ I said and she leapt to her feet. ‘Don’t worry. Dealt with.’ Old Gollum still had his lighter, but there was nothing left to set fire to. After that, he went on intermittent watch – five times an hour we’d have to look in on him.

  In winter, them cells got cold and at around three or four o’clock in the morning Riley rang his bell. So off I strolled.

  ‘All right, Tommy?’

  ‘Fucking ’ell, Mr Samworth. I’m freezing in here.’

  ‘Well, kid, if you’re going to set yourself on fire . . . Would you like fresh bedding?’ Yeah, he would. ‘What about that lighter then?’ He handed it over. ‘Cup of tea, Tommy?’ I offered, ever the professional.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, adding a nice sarcastic, ‘please.’

  No one can fully prepare you for cell fires. There are big scary people in jail, but when a blaze gets going it’s something else again.

  Another lad came to us from HMP Wakefield, or ‘Monster Mansion’ as it’s known, due to all the perverts. Wakey holds prisoners long-term and is more laid-back than Strangeways, which is high security and remand. It must be like coming from a monastery to the Haçienda – a massive change. He wasn’t happy, this kid. He’d only been there half a day when he torched his TV and, after covering himself in wet towels, hid under the bed. The wing was full of smoke. I’d just gone off shift so heard about it the next day.

  Once they’d dragged him out, his punishment was interesting. He was placed on report and the adjudication was sent to the police, as happens in serious cases. Very unusually, in my experience, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) took it on – cell fires are a grey area, and every other case I saw was handled in-house – and he became the first prisoner ever to get lifed-off via video link. Before lighting that blaze, he’d been on a life sentence that isn’t life at all. The shortest I’ve seen is eighteen months; more often they are anything up to thirty-five years. He now got whole of life.

  Currently, there are about 400 prisoners in the estate that will never go free. The urban myth that there are only five is fake news. Some want locking up forever. The murderers of Lee Rigby will always be a threat, our arsonists too. Reckless endangerment doesn’t cover it. There were over 200 people on that wing – staff and prisoners – whose lives he could have ended.

  Reports of serious assaults in prison, knife attacks, cell fires, the throwing of urine, spitting even, regularly go to the CPS. Yet they still don’t take enough cases up. What happens in prison stays in prison. My jaw was cracked once, but nothing ever came of it. You get the impression you’re expected to be there to be punched – well, bullshit. I may be six foot tall and weigh seventeen stone, but not everyone has such physical presence. When it comes down to it, a prison officer is just a civil servant.

  Every day in prison is a story of endurance and aggression in a culture where few dare ask for help. Our jails are creaking catastrophically due to shortages of cash and a genuine will for change, unless by that you mean interference by pen-pushers, box-tickers and politicians, who have never faced the reality of working on a prison landing in their life and would shit blue lights if they were ever asked to do so.

  R
age: I know all about rage. I saw plenty of it when I joined the prison service, and it’s what was in me when Strangeways chewed me up and spat me out. The job will do that to you. In Britain, it’s not just cells that are going up in smoke. It’s the prison service itself. And until we get serious about extinguishing the flames, there is a danger they will burn out of control.

  1. Good Morning, Judge

  Growing up where I did there was always a chance you’d be a criminal, just by virtue of who you knew. Environment is a big part of it. I’ve had friends go to prison – not all of them bad people. Okay, they did bad things, but it’s often where circumstance led them.

  As a teenager in Sheffield, on the other side of the Pennines, I’d had one or two run-ins with the law myself. It was only for fighting on nights out, nothing serious – fists not knives or booting people on the deck. For a while in my youth I liked nothing better than an all-in brawl and wound up in court four times in twelve months. You’d go before a judge, apologize and get slapped with a caution and £80 fine.

  A few years back I went out with a gang of old mates. They knew I was a screw and ripped me all night. Towards closing time, they gave me warning that they were going to get stuck into these other lads who’d been following us, suggesting I got out of there. That scrap made the front page of the Sheffield Star.

  One pal used to deal drugs. If I was skint he’d say, ‘Deliver for me.’ I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t really morality. I put another mate on the bones of his arse in touch.

  One night just after I’d been kicked out of the sixth form, a mate and I were off out when a Rover 2000 pulled up. We knew the lad in it from school.

  ‘Do you want a lift?’

  As we pulled away, this cop car came the other way, and suddenly we were off; he was hammering it. Only then did it dawn on me that the car wasn’t his. Fortunately, he got some distance and dropped us off before the police caught him up. He got jail time for that. Mates go on to be crooks, thugs and drug dealers – that’s just how life is.

  The last time I got in trouble, I was picked up for fighting and then also got accused of vagrancy: I’d given my last £20 to my mates so they could go for a curry. I’d been in front of this judge before and he called me a problem child, although I’d just had my twenty-first birthday. He sent me to see a doctor, who told me I was ‘absolutely barking’ – there is a fag paper’s width between insanity and genius, he said, and he wasn’t sure which side I was on.

  Anyway, I never went to court again, mainly because I never got caught, and by twenty-five I had calmed down. By then I was channelling my aggression into rugby union.

  I’d been all right at school, though detested the place. It was only due to rugby that I hung around until sixth form, before they ‘asked me to leave’. That was fair enough: my head wasn’t in it. I lived for rugby: prop or blind-side flanker. At seventeen I started playing for Sheffield Tigers Colts and, after getting the shit knocked out of me to begin with, developed a reputation. In my early twenties, though, I’d started really piling the weight on and got up to twenty-two stone. Too heavy. A mate said, ‘Enough of this,’ and we did a Rocky IV, running uphill with bricks on my back, shit like that. I’d no time for getting into bother.

  When I applied for the prison service, I did worry that those teenage indiscretions might be on my file, but nothing was said about them. I reckon it all stood me in good stead anyway, because I can see where some cons are coming from, how they got where they did. But by the time I joined the prison service I’d grown up quite a lot. The horrors I’d seen long before I got to Strangeways would mature anyone fast.

  My road into HMP Manchester was winding. It began, as I’ve said, in South Yorkshire, in 1962. My first forty years were spent in Sheffield, around half of it living with my mam and sister. Our dad left us to it when I was two. I’m not keen on calling him my dad, as that conjures an image of someone always there, looking after you. He never was. When I was about fourteen, there was a knock on the door. I’d just come in from school. A bloke stood on the step.

  ‘It’s Neil, isn’t it? Do you know who I am?’

  ‘Yeah, my dad,’ I said, and shut the door right in his face. We did carry on seeing his parents a couple of times a year: they were always good to us.

  To begin with we lived in Walkley, quite a poor area south of Hillsborough. Mainly, however, I remember us living with our nan in Vernon Terrace, Crosspool, which was more affluent. It was a crowded three-bedroomed house. There were us three, Mam’s sister Auntie Pat, her four kids – she was getting divorced – my nan and granddad, who had Parkinson’s, and Uncle Don, Mam’s twin brother, who kipped in the attic. At one point we had his fiancée squeezed in as well. Next door were Auntie Freda, Nan’s sister, who baked more than Mary Berry – we had a strong sense of family.

  Mam worked three menial jobs, cleaning or whatever, trying to provide for us. Her maiden name was Pilling; Samworth was my dad’s name. He chose Neil too, but no one other than my nan ever used it. My mam always called me Sam, and even my nan towards the end of her life switched to Sam too. One or two dicks in the prison service tried it on by shouting ‘Neil’ at first, but not for long.

  Aside from having no dad, we were your typical working-class Yorkshire brood, loads of us about, plenty of funerals and weddings. My sister and me had politeness instilled in us. Treat your elders with respect; say please and thank you. If someone offers you a sandwich, take it – which was never a problem for me because I like my grub; always have done. We had nothing: a new pair of school shoes meant hard times.

  Until I was fifteen, I can only remember Mam going on one date. That changed when she met my stepdad, the first guy to show her respect, although I didn’t get on with him at first – teenage angst, most likely. I came to see how he was good for her and good to us. Before he came along we had jack shit. Holidays had been camping in Wales with Uncle Don and Auntie Pat, same place every year: nothing materialistic, just loads of love, so we were lucky. A lot of kids don’t get that.

  The night before we were to play Old Brodleians, near Halifax, my mam told me she and Terry were getting married the next day. I was as surprised as you’d expect.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’ve been together a while, and I know you love your rugby.’

  It was her way of saying that I didn’t need to come. That’s how we were: no fuss! I was happy for them – Terry looked after her, and she started enjoying life. I was happy for me and all, because the players always got hot pie and peas at Old Brods.

  My mother was thirty-eight years old when she left us, and to say her death was a shock doesn’t come close. She fell down and banged her knee, that’s all, a part of her she’d had bother with in her youth, requiring a couple of operations. To begin with she was confined to bed, but gradually felt worse – couldn’t get downstairs on her own – and eventually had to go to hospital. At first I didn’t think it was serious: you wouldn’t, would you? I was still living at home at the time, but Terry had to ask me to go visit.

  Four or five days later I went to see her again and, although there was no indication of anything fatal, something in my gut said otherwise. On my way home from that second visit I had to pull my motorbike over by the side of the road. I took my helmet off and found myself sobbing my heart out. She was dying. I knew it.

  Within days they’d got her on life support: her immune system had just shut down, and twenty-four hours later that was that. She’d only been in there a fortnight. It was devastating, not only for me but also for my sister, Auntie Pat and the rest of the family. One day right as rain, the next gone. I still can’t get my head around it.

  Some people light candles to mark the day a parent dies. I don’t know the exact date, other than it was in 1983 and around my twenty-first birthday. I know my mam’s birthday, 17 May, when I shed a tear thinking about her. But not the day she died. Blanked it out, I suppose.

  Terry and Mam had met when I was fifteen, so they were together around
six years in total. He didn’t want me to go to the chapel of rest, but I did: the first time I’d been on my own with Mam since she passed away. It was horrible. She looked nice and peaceful, but they hadn’t done a very good job of disguising the post-mortem scars on her head. I had a cry and gave her a kiss, knowing nothing I would ever do in life could be worse than seeing my mother like this.

  After the funeral, Terry and I took her ashes to Lodge Moor, a lovely part of the world with its crags looking out towards Derbyshire, where we’d decided Mam would like to be. I’d spent a lot of my childhood there. It was a beautiful day and we went for a walk on the golf course towards a large rock we used to run around as kids. When Terry launched the ashes, though, there was a sudden gust of wind. Blowback. We were covered: eyes, ears, up the nose, the lot, as though we’d fallen down a chimney. We had a good laugh and could then get on with life.

  In the garden of rest on City Road in Sheffield there’s actually a plaque Terry placed there in her memory, though I’ve never seen it. That’s me: it’s how I deal with things – I’m not one for stuff like that, posting soppy messages on social media and the like. She’s in my heart, and that will do.

  I suppose it’s losing my mam so young that has helped shape me as an adult. You’ve got to crack on, haven’t you? Get things done, because everything can change in a second.

  Mam’s death was one of three events that knocked me sideways in quick succession. I also got married, stupidly – it lasted six months, if that – and fractured my skull playing rugby, although it wasn’t operated on.

  Thing is, I hadn’t realized what I’d done at first and went out as usual after the game on the Saturday night. Same thing Sunday night, few beers and what have you, still feeling a bit woozy. Monday morning, I looked in the bathroom mirror and my eye wasn’t moving – not up and down, not side to side, nothing. I went straight to A & E and ended up at the Royal Hallamshire, where a scan revealed a clot the size of my fist on my brain. If I’d gone in on Saturday, the consultant said, they’d have kept me in and I’d have been on a drip. The fact that I’d been out all weekend drinking and was still alive meant they would just give it time. I was told to take it easy for a couple of weeks; get any more headaches come straight back. I spent the next eighteen months going back and forth to that clinic. It took twelve months for my eye to start moving again. I’d double vision for a while and went deaf in my left ear, which I still am. Most of the patients were little kids with jam-jar-bottom glasses, so I was sat on little stools while nurses waggled Mr Men pens in front of my face. I survived.