Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  It all kicked off at dinnertime, no more than a week and half into my time on A Wing. The servery was split, the two parts separated by a gate that was locked manually and electronically. I fed the prisoners on one half while Vera fed hers on the other.

  It was all going along efficiently when a con started shouting.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I called across to Vera, and she nodded, yeah.

  The yelling carried on, though, and I caught sight of this prisoner who was about to kick-off big style. While I got on the radio, a cleaner came up to talk to me – I remember that. I also recall the anxious look on Vera’s face and an SO coming down the landing. Much of what came next is blank.

  This prisoner knocked the SO clean off his feet. Lamped him one, full on. He then cracked Vera, but luckily didn’t catch her as hard as he’d hoped.

  ‘Open the gate!’ I roared at the OSG. I’m told that’s how it was; I honestly can’t bring the actual memory back. Even now, I never stop trying to conjure it up in the hope it might provide vindication for what I did next.

  I don’t know how I got to this lad, but I did. I had him on the other side of the landing, pinned in his cell doorway. I got him to the floor and cracked him in the face, maybe as much as four times, hard.

  Eventually I began to hear voices, ‘Sam! Sam! Sam!’ People were grabbing my arms.

  ‘You are out of order,’ said the PO who’d witnessed what happened. ‘I’m not happy with that.’

  Red mist, operational stress – whatever you want to call it, I could have killed him too. Jack led him away.

  Walking back to our wing, I realized my keys were gone. Bad news. In the past, that’s led to new locks for the entire jail at a cost of a quarter of a million quid. I had to buzz the gate to get back on the landing, where a governor was waiting with the missing bunch in his hand. By then I was beyond caring.

  The next day my right fist was in a mess – punch someone properly and you get a displaced knuckle – and my knees were bruised to fuck. The prisoner was in a right state. His eye was swollen and he had a broken nose, bumps and bruises all over his face. He was in a special cell for three days, so he must have carried on playing up, threatening staff there. That did me a favour. As he was such a cock, few people on seg’ were fussed about how he arrived. He got six added months on his sentence. Plenty would say that wasn’t enough – he’d hammered two officers, one of them a woman, our mates. If the prisoners had got hold of him they’d have filled him in for cracking a female officer: you can twat a man, but don’t hit a woman, that’s their code. In fact, he was under threat in that respect for a while.

  But what I’d done wasn’t professional. I’d smashed a prisoner, the first time in eighteen years’ service. Blood pressure pumping, my head had all but exploded. There are instances when you lose it, but being a prison officer is not a licence to punch fuck out of people, as I’ve said. That my emotions had got unmanageable, that I couldn’t keep out of conflict – it felt like a terrible defeat. This wasn’t the person I wanted to be. When I was young, scrapping just came to be how we ended the night. I know now it’s all about adrenaline dumps – fight or flight – and in the prison service I’d learned how to control those bursts of adrenaline and put them to good use. I’d lost my self-control, and with it my prison career.

  It was a while before I found out that none of this was on camera. If my mates hadn’t blocked the view – not deliberately, they were trying to pull me off him – the best defence lawyer in the world couldn’t have got me off.

  To add to my misery, a few weeks later I badly injured my shoulder in a restraint on D Wing. He was a stocky lad this con, around twenty-five, and he’d spent a lot of time in the gym. My mate was forty-something and overweight. We struggled to get him to the deck, but another officer, a former soldier, got involved, and the con had hit the concrete four or five times when I felt my shoulder go, with a sound like you get when you twist a drumstick off a chicken.

  By the time we handed this character over, my mate was sweating buckets, grey as a corpse and in danger of a heart attack. The ex-army officer had thrown a whitey, in agony with a bad back, and my shoulder felt like it was hanging out of its socket. The three of us stood there, injured and ignored. Nobody said fuck all. A few days before I’d had a word with my mate and he’d broken down in tears. That wasn’t unusual now. During my last six months in that job I saw four officers crying in frustration, all of them male.

  At home, Amy sent me to the doctor, who signed me off for a month. I needed it: my blood pressure was through the roof – 185 over 135. At my age, normal is 120–140 over 70–80. Even my resting pulse was 113, still sky-high, which put me at risk of a stroke. Within a few days I was on a high-dose blood pressure medication and high-dose statin for cholesterol.

  ‘What you’ve got to ask yourself,’ said the doctor, ‘is: in that job, can you adapt how you live?’ If I wouldn’t or couldn’t change my lifestyle, I was going to be on tablets for the rest of my life.

  There was no way. Long hours, terrible shifts . . . There were a few lads and lasses who went to the gym, but not many. On the whole, the prison officer population drinks too much, eats too much and is unfit.

  At the end of the month, with my blood pressure not improving, the doctor wrote me another sick note and gave me different medication. Meanwhile, the shoulder injury was agonizing. It was the opposite shoulder to the one I’d had rebuilt in 2012 after the rugby wear and tear. This side was diagnosed as bursitis – inflammation of the fluid sac, a sort of cushion between the tendon and bones, over the joint. When it presses on nerves you get pain. It wasn’t dislocated, but I couldn’t move it, which didn’t help my psychological state either. They gave me a cortisone injection that made me sick as a dog and put me in bed for two days.

  I wasn’t sleeping properly. In prison on a morning shift, my routine had always been the same – bed at twelve, up at five. Now I was all over the place. I tried every trick: lavender, cherry juice, herbal, counting sheep, everything apart from drugs. I just couldn’t switch off.

  I am walking through a wood without a care in the world. Sunshine is breaking through the trees and warming my face; it’s a beautiful day. With me is Steve, my black Labrador, and while I’m throwing him a stick we stumble across a little house in a clearing.

  In an instant, the sun goes in, the world is in shadow and I get a knot in my stomach. I recognize this house immediately. It is Mark Bridger’s cottage.

  Light glints on a top-window pane, where a figure catches my eye. It is Billie, my daughter. My sweet little thing is inside. Forget all the horrible things I’ve seen in my life: they don’t come close to this.

  I push aside the branches and step closer, desperate now to gain entry. But all the cottage doors and windows are barred. In a rising panic, I tear around the lower walls, but can’t get in. Upstairs, behind glass, Billie is crying, terrified. She wants me to get her out. I look up at her, heart racing, but can do nothing. Another face forms in a downstairs window, also familiar, staring out through dust. It is Bridger himself. I can’t tell you . . . I’d go through a wall to get at him but I can’t. I can’t.

  And then I’d wake up, shaking and sobbing, inconsolable.

  It was a regular occurrence, this dream, and it left me a wreck. I’d be distressed, spaced out for two, three days afterwards. It was so vivid I couldn’t eat or sleep. Gradually, it came to me less and less, although I still catch myself thinking about it now and then, when I’m half-awake maybe, in that semiconscious state when you don’t know if you’re asleep or not.

  But mainly the nightmares were things I’d actually seen in prison: horrible thoughts, gruesome images swam to the surface, stuff long since buried. Forgotten faces and voices crowded in on me. Miseries I’d endured and watched others endure flooded my mind as I tossed and turned. I’d lie there in the darkness, stuck in this mental House of Wax, head spinning. It had all happened, though, and now I had to live with it. I realized how thos
e old soldiers feel who don’t want to talk about what they did in the war. It hangs on your soul and won’t shift. You can’t scrub it clean.

  Awake wasn’t much better. I’d take Steve out for a walk at dawn, this torment festering in my brain. I began to picture myself hitting the con, but what I could never see was him twatting my mates. He’d laid one of them out and almost broken the other’s jaw – could have killed her. The rest of the scene was soon on a permanent loop – but those two assaults wouldn’t come. It was driving me insane.

  As if life wasn’t tough enough already, in the October my cousin died of alcoholism. That knocked my head around even more.

  I started losing it. I stormed out of a supermarket because a customer was holding me up by arsing about on her phone. When an ex-con I recognized carved me up in his Audi I exploded with road rage – nearly pulled the steering wheel off imagining jumping up and down on his head, even though I had the missus and little ’un in with me.

  I lost all interest in hygiene – so much so that I developed sores under my arms and in my groin. Amy would shove me in the shower, put my clothes out every day – she even had to squeeze the toothpaste on my toothbrush. At eight o’clock she’d kick me out of the house, and to try and work out my anger I went to the gym every day. I’d do far too much, two hours at a time on the weights until I made myself ill, throwing up outside in the bushes. I’d leave the gym at ten and then suffer a massive emotional release in the car – tears, thoughts swirling – a relentless wave of grief.

  Then I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what was happening. It was scary. My chest tightened and for ten minutes I thought I was off to the great segregation unit in the sky. The doctor offered me more drugs: didn’t want them. Nor was my shoulder getting better. And still everything kept coming in my head: ghosts like Pawel Nicpon and Alan Taylor.

  ‘You don’t sound right, you,’ said a friend, and suggested some counselling. I was in a very bad way.

  As Christmas drew closer, Amy was getting really concerned. My blood pressure was still going up. I kept losing my rag and had a terrible temper. My missus and daughter were on eggshells. I knew how badly I was behaving, yet couldn’t do anything about it. I was a ticking time bomb.

  22. Tragedy

  Christmas Day was one big panic attack.

  I did the dinner as always – Amy had offered but she’s an awful cook. She and Billie had been on edge for weeks, doing their best to ignore my outbursts, and now we were all in the kitchen, music on, trying for a nice chilled atmosphere. I must have drifted off peeling the potatoes and vegetables, though, because when Amy noticed what I’d been doing she began to laugh. I’d prepared a shit-houseful of parsnips, carrots and ’taties – we do it right, bubble and squeak next day, chips and pickles – and the result was in a huge pile in front of me. Peelings, that is: all the actual vegetables were in the bin at my feet. I just broke down in tears.

  That was soul-destroying; yet more tragedy was around the corner.

  New Year had hardly dawned when, on 6 January 2016, Raffles, the officer at Strangeways, phoned me with shocking news. My old mate Pete, one half of K Wing’s Tractor and Trailer double act, was dead. He’d only just retired. He was fifty-six.

  He’d left on the back of an incident in the jail, too, on the SIU, special interventions unit. He was among the first on the scene and saw it all, blood everywhere. Pete was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, from that one incident, and after a short while went off sick. The longer he was off the worse he got, replaying the event in his head. Disappointed by people he’d thought of as mates, who hadn’t contacted him, he also had a downer on himself for being unable to cope. He began to imagine himself as a forgotten man. The nightmares began and the stress got worse: I’d been there myself.

  He was off for a total of six months, and some of that absence ran parallel to my own, so we saw each other plenty. After I’d been on sick leave a while, I’d discovered I wasn’t bothered what people said about me. They could call me soft or a skiver, I no longer cared. But Pete had been in the job twenty-five years, and the reason he was so respected wasn’t because he was hard, it was because he was a decent person. The idea they might be judging him bit him deep.

  He’d eventually retired on Bonfire Night, 5 November 2015. The prison service had paid him compensation for the trauma, but then he got a letter saying they wanted some of it back. That was salt in the wound. He hadn’t been spraying it around on cars and champagne. He’d used it to pay off his mortgage.

  The top governor decides on compensatory amounts and there’d been a precedent. One lad, on the sick, had set up his own internet business and had to argue the toss, ending up with 50 per cent of what he could have had. Pete originally got 100 per cent because he had been a long-standing officer of good service. Once out, though, he refused to see anyone, doctor, psychiatrist, and someone told the prison. When they asked him about it, he said he didn’t feel comfortable speaking to a stranger. So on those grounds they decided that he hadn’t helped himself enough and took 25 per cent back.

  The last time we’d met was a week or so before Christmas, when he took Amy and me out for a meal after I’d helped him move stuff from his caravan in Wales to his daughter-in-law’s. All we talked about was how bad he felt. I tried to reassure him he’d done his bit and needed to let the job go, but he couldn’t. It had got to him.

  Like me, he wasn’t good over the so-called festive period, and when Helen found him, the day before Raffles called, poor old Pete had died of a massive stroke.

  The crematorium was rammed. Helen was overwhelmed by the turnout. Pete was a popular guy, though as usual not enough of us had thought to tell him so while he was here. I went in shorts and a rugby shirt, which Pete would have liked – my usual clobber when not in uniform. Henry, the Strangeways chaplain, delivered a beautiful service. Even the inmates had been shocked and upset, he said. As funerals go, it was a good one. Afterwards, we all went on to a working men’s club in St Helens, where we talked about how tortured our friend had been – how the way he’d been treated broke his heart. Quite definitely, the prison service finished him.

  On the back of everything else, Pete’s death had me in bits. The day I heard I had another panic attack. I went to the gym for four hours and afterwards was sick in the car park again. I had no phone on me; when I got home, Amy was frantic. That night I cried for an hour and a half.

  That, though, was the last panic attack I’d have. I knew I had to try something, and it felt like a wussy thing to do, but it was time for counselling.

  The counsellor was a lovely Eastern European woman. My appointment was for an hour, but I was only twenty minutes into my story when she said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’

  I started getting to my feet, embarrassed.

  ‘No, no, I need to refer you to a psychologist. The problems you’ve got are way above anything I can help with.’

  In March, a psychologist took things up a level. I stayed with her over sixteen sessions in four and a half months, which took us to the end of July. During that time, I got progressively worse, to the extent that, eight weeks in, I was a man possessed. But I stuck at it.

  Through it all, the psychologist was brilliant. Every session went over its allotted hour; it sometimes lasted two. Mainly she just sat and listened, chipped in now and then, as I talked about the things that tormented me.

  I told her about battering that con. I spoke about the death of Pawel Nicpon – his screaming face, and how his smell continued to haunt me. I opened those inner boxes and the full chamber of horrors emerged.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ she’d say.

  ‘I’m not making it up.’

  ‘I know you’re not. I’m telling you it’s terrible in itself.’

  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, there was all the other more mundane stuff, like how badly officers were treated by management, their colleagues and faceless bureaucrats. I was also very self-critical,
a habit she told me I had to get over. As with Pete, the psychologist’s diagnosis was PTSD. ‘Suffers recurrent nightmares,’ said her report.

  I remember chatting with an ex-squaddie not long before I finished, who insisted that PTSD only applies to the military. But PTSD is not just about war. A mate and his missus were in a car on the M1, their two kids in the back, five and six. A truck turned over, causing a pile-up. The car was mashed to fuck, his missus was decapitated, and it took over and hour to get him and the kids out. These children saw it all: you’re telling me they won’t be traumatized? First responders – police, nurses, firefighters – all see things that scar them. If someone says they have PTSD don’t knock them for it.

  One day a prison governor phoned me up to ask when I was coming back.

  ‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘Who says I am? I’m in a bad way, guv, and you might have seen the last of me.’

  He asked if I’d sorted any help out, and I told him about the psychologist. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’ve been having some therapy myself.’

  Talking stirred everything back up, but it became a crutch too. For three or four hours afterwards I’d be in a good mood – euphoric, even. But by evening, clouds descended. It was as if I’d been on some psychological bender – horrendous.

  I never contemplated suicide. The psychologist asked me that, early doors. Basically, I just needed someone to agree: ‘Yeah, that wasn’t good.’

  I’d thought I’d ask Amy to share a few thoughts on her experience of this time, which she agreed to do. Here they are:

  I remember you coming home smelling of shit that time. I had to undress you at the foot of the stairs, run you a bath. Carrying that uniform to the washer made me feel sick.