Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed

by Stuart Howarth

  There was one screw in particular, I’ll call him Smith, who seemed to have it in for me. He would do the strip-searching a different way each time, which was frightening and disorientating. If I had to take all my clothes off in front of another man I wanted it done impersonally, by the book.

  ‘Don’t you realize how threatening this is for me?’ I asked, when I was being taken through for a visit with a friend.

  ‘Just get your clothes off,’ he snapped. ‘We decide how things are done around here, not you.’

  ‘But I was abused as a kid. Can’t you imagine what it feels like to be abused by a fully grown man?’

  ‘Why, did you enjoy it?’

  ‘You what?’ I couldn’t believe I’d heard him right.

  ‘You fucking heard. Did you like it?’

  ‘Did I like it?’ I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. ‘Did I fucking like it? Fuck off!’

  ‘Come on,’ he snapped, impatient with me now. ‘Do you want your visit?’

  ‘No, I don’t want my fucking visit. Just get me out of here. Take me back on the wing.’

  My overwhelming instinct was to attack him, to beat him, to bite his smug face. I managed to hold it in, but I couldn’t hold in the tears. I ran to the dividing gate and demanded that it be opened by the screw on the other side. I burst through it, screaming and shouting.

  ‘I can’t believe what he has just said to me!’

  A senior officer appeared from nowhere with four screws, obviously nervous that I was about to kick off. The senior officer listened to my ranting for a moment and agreed that Smith was out of order. Another screw, who had witnessed the exchange, backed me up.

  ‘He doesn’t usually work on this wing,’ the senior officer said, as if that excused him. ‘But that was out of order. Do you want to make a complaint?’

  ‘Yes, I want to make a complaint.’

  ‘OK, come down to the office tomorrow and collect a form.’

  This was my first experience of the endless business of trying to make complaints against prison officers: the forms that had to be filled in, the forms they would consequently lose, and the glowering hostility that I would be faced with. In the hope of channelling my fury, I decided to start keeping a diary from that date of all the things that happened to me inside Strangeways.

  Someone must have believed I was in the right because I was given my job back the next day. But it didn’t last long. Once you have made enemies in a place like Strangeways they can always find a way of getting to you. I was sweeping up on the wing when Smith came past. ‘Howarth,’ he said, ‘you’re nicked. Get behind doors.’

  I threw my broom down in a fury. ‘Why are you picking on me?’

  They were putting me on ‘basic’ for some trumped-up charge of using foul language towards one of the female screws he was with as he walked past. Later we found out the two of them were having an affair.

  ‘Basic’ meant I would be locked behind my cell door all day, with no right to a TV and reduced visits. But the promised charge sheet never transpired, so I guess there were some officers there who knew that I hadn’t done anything wrong and weren’t going to allow my enemies a completely free rein to persecute me.

  Neil gave me a lot of good advice, but the trouble with that was that a lot of the time that should have been spent talking about what had happened to me in my childhood was taken up with talking about the treatment I was now getting in jail.

  Sometimes my mail would go missing. Or I would queue for an hour to get on the phone, and the moment I got through on my call they would cut the lines off.

  ‘The phone’s gone off, boss,’ I’d complain.

  ‘Nothing wrong with the phone, Howarth.’

  I would then have to go to the back of the queue again and the phone times would be over by the time I got back to the front.

  I was moved to a cell where the windows wouldn’t shut at all and there was no mattress on the bed. The frequency of the strip-searches became ludicrous, sometimes as often as eight times in a day, sometimes four for just one visit. It seemed as if I was being punished for deciding to make a complaint, for challenging their complete power.

  ‘You think you’re clever, do you, complaining?’ a couple of them asked me one day. ‘You think you can beat the system? No one gives a fuck about you in here. You’re going down for life, Howarth, because you’re guilty. So you just carry on complaining.’

  Even some of the other inmates warned me off. ‘Stuart, don’t complain,’ they said. ‘No one likes a complainer.’ One evening a couple of the screws came to my cell for a chat, pretending to be friendly, although I could see they had an ulterior motive. ‘Why didn’t you know what your dad was doing to you was wrong?’ one of them asked, as if making casual conversation.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, why did you leave it till now to say something? Surely you must have known.’

  ‘Why are we having this conversation?’

  ‘Just intrigued by your case. You tell us you don’t like strip-searches, why didn’t you know that what your dad was doing was wrong?’

  I could sense the antagonism in their voices. I could imagine the sort of things they’d been saying about me to one another, especially since I’d started making complaints about Smith. Some of the decent screws had told me they agreed with me and that he was a tosser, but there were a lot of them who didn’t think any prisoner should ever have the right to complain about anything in their treatment. There were some very good and fair officers in there, but they were the minority. The rest could never resist the temptation to have a dig.

  ‘Oh, Howarth, got anything you want to complain about today, have yer?’ was a greeting I got most days.

  Mum had got in contact with a charity called One in Four, which helped people who had been abused as kids. The charity got its name from their belief that one in four people have suffered some sort of abuse in their childhood, which is a mind-blowing figure when you stop to think about it. A guy called Colm O’Gorman came from the charity to talk to me. He told me he would try to get me moved; he could see I was losing my marbles in Strangeways.

  Sue and Geoff Hadfield, who had written to say how sorry they were to hear about my troubles, came in to see me, and asked if there was anything they could do to help. They offered to put up bail, going to court twice to try to push it through, even offering to have me live in their own home with them, but both times they were refused.

  ‘On the evidence I have seen,’ the judge at one of the applications said, ‘Stuart Howarth is a cold-blooded killer. There is no way I will grant him bail.’

  Christina was there, listening, and she started to cry. ‘Get that woman out of my court,’ the judge bawled and a policeman went to grab her.

  I hated him for talking to my sister like that and started crying and shouting at him, accusing him of being a paedophile, before stamping off, handcuffed, downstairs from the dock, with my guards following.

  ‘Why in God’s name did you call the judge a paedophile?’ my barrister wanted to know

  ‘Why not?’ I snapped, like a sulky child. ‘He called me a cold-blooded killer. I’m not a danger to society.’

  ‘If he ends up trying your case and you’re found guilty you’re going to be looking at a very long sentence.’

  When things had calmed down a bit I was taken back upstairs. Christina was allowed to remain in court and the judge took his wig off, making himself seem a little more friendly. But I was bitterly disappointed that the hand of friendship that had been stretched out to me by the Hadfields had been torn away by a system that couldn’t seem to understand what was happening to me and my family.

  I felt an enormous love for Sue and Geoff, and in Geoff I was increasingly seeing a man whom I would love to have had as a father. He was willing to trust me and stand up for me, just as a father should for a child, regardless of what other people said I had done.

  I was starting to bleed heavily from my rectum again, jus
t as I had as a child. They took me to the hospital without any warning, double cuffed to a screw and driven in a minibus to have a camera inserted into my anus.

  ‘You’ll enjoy today, won’t you,’ one of the screws said, ‘having things shoved up your arse?’

  ‘Why do you have to keep making fucking remarks?’ I wanted to know. I couldn’t understand why men who were supposed to be in charge of my health and my rehabilitation would want to abuse me in almost the same way my dad had, exercising their power over me at every opportunity, taunting me, baiting me. I was an adult, not a kid; did I really have to accept it?

  Before they could put the camera in the nurse told me they had to give me an enema to clear everything out of the bowel.

  ‘Go ahead,’ the screw who was attached to me said.

  ‘There’s no way you’re staying here while that happens,’ I said.

  They handcuffed me to the bed while they inserted the tube. Once the enema took effect they unlocked the handcuffs and the screws went to the toilet with me. ‘Go on, lad, push it all out,’ they cheered as I emptied my bowels. For someone who had never been able to use a public toilet or do anything if there were other people close by it was a horrible ordeal and by the time we got to the room for the procedure I was crying.

  Privacy while going to the toilet was always a problem for me in prison. There were some screws who seemed to linger excessively at the peephole in my cell door whenever I was trying to go. As a result I would try to get it over as quickly as possible, pushing and straining and causing damage, which would lead to bleeding and more anxiety. I’m sure it was part of the reason why I had ended up in hospital that day.

  I was going to be sedated for the insertion of the camera and the screws wanted to be in there with me. The doctor could see how panic-stricken that was making me and seemed unhappy himself with their attitude.

  ‘You don’t have to be in here,’ he insisted. ‘There’s only one door in and out of the room. I insist that you wait outside.’

  It seemed that in life’s great game doctors outranked prison guards when they were in their own hospitals and the screws grudgingly gave in and left. The doctors were very kind. They could see from my records that I had been through a lot. Once the procedure was over they told me that I had colitis, but that they could give me medication for it. Whenever people talked to me kindly, in gentle voices, I was unable to stop myself from crying. It reminded me of how I used to try to cuddle close to Mum for comfort after Dad had hurt me, when we went in the van to pick her up from work, or how I tried to create reasons for my teachers to take me on their laps.

  All the way back to the prison the screws were making the same jokes and comments as I sat miserably in my cuffs. As soon as we got back I was strip-searched, even though they hadn’t taken their eyes off me all day. I was then left sitting in the sweat room for three or four hours until they were ready to take me back to the wing, which meant I was too late to have any tea, even though I’d had nothing to eat all day because of the sedative I was given. I was also too late to be allowed to make a phone call to Tracey. There was no comfort for me from anywhere as I curled up on my bed and tried to find some escape from the pangs of misery and hunger in sleep.

  The next day they told me they’d lost yet another form that I’d used to make a complaint about the way they were treating me. Everything seemed to be conspiring against me. I felt helpless and suicidal.

  During a phone call with Christina, she told me that someone had rung her house and threatened to do something to her kids unless she dropped her charges against the babysitter. I immediately started panicking and told the security officer I needed to talk to the police, to get her help.

  ‘Howarth,’ he sighed, ‘go away. We’re fed up with your fucking moaning.’

  ‘Please,’ I pleaded, ‘I need to speak to the police.’

  ‘I’ve told you, fucking go away. Go and sweep the stairs or something.’

  ‘Fuck off!’ I shouted, hurling my brush down like an angry kid.

  ‘I’ll fucking nick you for that!’

  ‘Nick me. Fucking nick me. Go on, nick me.’

  ‘I’ll press the button.’

  ‘Press the fucking button.’

  He pressed the button, the alarm ripped through the wing, and the screws all started running about with their bunches of keys jangling and their boots cracking down on the walkways and stairs as everyone was put behind their doors like they were preparing for some sort of major riot. I found myself encircled with screws, all waiting for orders to restrain me.

  ‘If you fucking touch me,’ I warned, ‘I’ll hurt one of you. But if you leave me I’ll walk.’

  I started crying and one of them tried to take my arm.

  ‘Fucking get off me!’

  I was frogmarched off to a dark floor with cells all along one side. They put me into one, and one of the screws came up close to me. I could tell he was looking for trouble — he had the same air about him that Dad used to have when he was just looking for an excuse to batter me. The screw leaned forward until his forehead was against mine.

  ‘You think you’re fucking hard?’ he shouted. ‘You wanna kick off? Get on with it then.’

  ‘If you’re going to do me,’ I said, looking round at them all, ‘then do me. There’s not a lot I can do about it, is there?’

  ‘Get your fucking clothes off,’ he ordered.

  They strip-searched me then left me. I was now on the block, and I stayed there for four weeks in solitary confinement.

  In solitary there was nothing to do all day but sit and think, remembering and reliving my past, over and over again. I was allowed to see my solicitors as normal, but if I got a visit from Tracey we had to talk through glass and we weren’t allowed to touch. One time they wouldn’t let her in because they said the dogs had sniffed her out as having drugs on her, which was ridiculous.

  I kept trying to make complaints about victimization, because if I stopped trying I felt they would have won. I believed that everyone in the prison hated me, particularly the screws. There was one officer who had seen a picture of me in a local paper wearing a hard hat, who started calling me ‘Bob the Builder’. I didn’t mind the joke at first, but he started to sing whenever he was locking me into the cell: ‘Bob the builder, Bob the builder’, then he’d slam the door, flick up the flap and finish with, ‘... stick it up your arse!’ Another officer would regularly call me a ‘cocksucker’, knowing full well about my past.

  Chapter Eighteen

  GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY

  I went to court on 26 March 2001, charged with murder. The police resolutely refused to reduce it to manslaughter. I had no idea how things would go for me, but I was very unsure how I would be able to cope if I was given a life sentence in Strangeways. If I was found guilty of murder, I had decided I would hang myself with a sheet. And I dreaded walking into court and finding myself looking at the judge I had accused of being a paedophile, the same man who had said with such certainty that I was a ‘cold-blooded killer’.

  A doctor had given me a letter confirming I suffered from claustrophobia, so they took me to court in a car instead of a sweatbox. The screws wouldn’t allow me to wear a suit and try to make myself look and feel more respectable; they said I had to wear a scruffy pair of jeans I’d been wearing for months because there are only certain times of year when you are allowed to send clothes in to Strangeways. They wouldn’t even allow me to take a shower before I left.

  When we got to the court my lawyers met me with the good news that we had a different judge, Mr Justice Elias, a man who was an expert in child abuse cases. They assumed he had been selected specially for the case. The prosecution then made me an offer. If I would plead guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility, they would accept a ten-year sentence. There was no way I was going to admit guilt under any circumstances. If the whole story came out in court, I was sure they would see the truth. I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel like it was my fault.


  They then came back and offered me eight years in exchange for a plea of guilty to manslaughter. I wasn’t willing to go for that either. I wanted a chance to speak up and be listened to, something that had never happened to me in the past. They came with another offer of five years.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’d rather go to trial.’

  ‘But you’ll go to trial on murder,’ my solicitor Padhee said. ‘You’ll get a lot more than five years if they find you guilty. You’ve already served nine months, you could be out in two or three years.’

  ‘I want the judge and jury to decide. I’m not guilty of what they’re saying.’ I was adamant.

  There was so much toing and froing that the case didn’t even get heard that day and I had to go back to Strangeways and return in the morning.

  ‘We all talked about it last night and the prosecution is willing to leave it up to the judge to decide,’ Padhee told me. It was a risk, but it seemed like one worth taking.

  As we went up to the courtroom I was unsure quite what was going on. I wished I were dressed better. It seemed disrespectful to be standing in front of the judge in such a state. I was shaking uncontrollably.

  ‘How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?’

  ‘Not guilty to murder. Guilty of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility, in provocation and self-defence.’

  The judge gave a short nod. ‘I accept that this case be accepted as manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. But I don’t accept provocation or self-defence. Sit down, Mr Howarth.’

  I did so, listening while the prosecution read their case summary out. Then the defence read theirs. For the first time in my life I was hearing my story being spoken by other people. The pictures all came into my head and I couldn’t contain my emotions. I knew my family were all in the room, although I couldn’t see them because they were seated above me.