by Lee, Jane
John was staying at home this time, rather than with Dad. He had got plenty of money from me and he had his mates there for him. I knew it wasn’t good but there was nothing else I could do. He was so grown up then. He had to grow up fast, just like I did. Anyway, my family was a phone call away if he needed anything and Shell and Matt were looking out for him.
It wasn’t all bad. I couldn’t believe my luck landing in East Sutton Park. This was an open prison and what a touch it was. It was like a big mansion house and it didn’t even look like a prison. My best mate Den from Holloway had turned up as well, finishing off her five stretch. She had one month left. Her boy and mine were good mates and I was over the moon to see her. I even had the bed next to hers in the dorm and I soon settled in.
East Sutton Park was a lot more comfortable than Holloway but, if you did anything wrong, you could be sure the other inmates would grass you to the screws. Den told me the score. She warned me to keep myself to myself and not to trust anyone if I wanted to stay out of trouble and keep my place in the open prison. I didn’t like those rules and yet I tried to keep them. But it didn’t take long before I started getting the hump with the other inmates. ‘Stool pigeons,’ I called them. I swear to God, if you did something wrong, there wouldn’t just be one but a queue of inmates at the office grassing you up. I couldn’t handle it. I told Den I was going to explode.
‘Please don’t, Jane,’ pleaded Den. ‘I’ve only got three weeks left. Just keep your head down and keep yourself to yourself and you’ll be OK. Please try and stay here until I go home.’ I said I would do my best because I loved Den. She was on my level and it was good having her with me. I told her that, if anybody fucked with me, I’d do them after she left.
I got a job in the prison gardens trimming hedges. I was the strimmer girl and it was good. I could go anywhere in the grounds on my own with my strimmer. I could even go outside the prison and cut the hedges. What a difference it was to Holloway and a world away from Cat A. The only letdown was the other prisoners. Most of them seemed to think they were officers without keys. They weren’t the hardened villains you got in Holloway and they would do anything to please the screws. And that was where we were different. When I went into the mansion house with my work boots on, another inmate once told me to take them off.
‘You’re not allowed to wear your work boots in the house,’ she shouted and she was with a screw at the time.
I couldn’t believe it and just lost it. ‘Shut your fucking mouth. If you want my boots off that badly, you’ll be taking ’em off with your fucking teeth.’
She was scared stiff and ran off and I got pulled into the office. I got a warning for that and a telling-off. Well, I could handle the officers pulling me up but not the inmates. No way. I told Den that I didn’t think I’d last another three weeks. I had the bar of puff on me and I couldn’t even have a joint with anyone in case they grassed me up. I’d go on the hill inside the grounds, outside the main building, and make myself a small joint, hoping no one would see me or report me to the officers.
When Den at last left, I was so happy for her, yet so sad that my friend had gone. I was sure I wasn’t going to find any other friends like her. Then I met Sharon, a gypsy girl like me, and we were immediately friends. Sharon was inside for GBH on another bird but she was pukka and we got on like a house on fire. But, sadly for me, she was shipped straight out to another prison when her mum was caught chucking bottles of vodka over the fence to her. When I say caught, I mean another inmate grassed on her. But Sharon and I were kindred spirits and our paths would cross again.
Three days after Den left, a new shipment of prisoners arrived, including a French bird. She asked me what I was in for and how long I’d got. I told her I’d got two years and nine months for driving on a ban and having a bit of puff and she just laughed. I asked her what she was in for and she said she’d had a right touch. ‘I’m in for importing a kilo of crack cocaine and a kilo of heroin and I only got eighteen months in an open prison.’ Well, I lost it. She was laughing at me but I didn’t find it funny. She was bringing heroin and crack into our country to kill our kids and only got 18 fucking months. I battered her. The screws came in force and dragged me off her, and that was the end of my time in East Sutton Park. I had told Den I’d only last three weeks after she went but I didn’t last three days. But by that point I was past caring.
The next day I was moved out to Cookham Wood prison, near Rochester in Kent. There were loads of people I knew at Cookham Wood. I was well happy, daft as that sounds, because it was more like Holloway and not full of grasses. I phoned home and let Dad and John know I’d been moved but that everything was OK. Dad told me he was visiting John regularly, as he was the priority now, and that my boy was keeping my house spotless. I was really proud of him. Matt was looking out for John as well. In fact, everyone was but from a distance. He was 15 and was running our home like a proper man. With the money I’d left he was paying the rent to the council, as well as the bills, and Matt was going over every week to help out. The dogs were both fine and John was happy. I phoned him every day and he made me the proudest mum in this world. That boy deserved a knighthood the way behaved while I was away. He was on his own, with no brothers or sisters, and he was living in Essex and my family was in the East End. Matt was Kent, yet John was surviving in this mad world and doing it as best he could.
At Cookham Wood I told my mates I’d got a bar of puff when I was put on a wing with them. I was in a cell with one other inmate in what was called a two-up. But another mate assured me that the bird was safe so I was happy to go in with her. On the first night I asked the bird if she fancied a bit of puff.
‘What? Drugs?’ she replied. ‘Oh no, I’ll have none of that.’
So that night I laid on the top bunk and after lights out I rolled myself a big joint and got stoned. I was so stoned I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The room was just one big bubble of smoke and I was smiling from ear to ear when I heard the bird ask, ‘Is that puff I can smell?’
‘No,’ I told her.
But she jumped out of bed and I thought she was going for the buzzer to call the screws. Even though I was out of it and could hardly move, I was thinking I was going to have to do her. So I looked at her through the cloud of puff smoke and said, ‘Listen, love, you can’t smell anything, do you fucking understand me?’
She was looking at me and she realised that, if she touched that buzzer, she was in big trouble so she just said, ‘OK. It’s my mistake,’ and got back into bed, much to my relief, as I didn’t want to hurt this woman.
In the morning my mates were hysterical with laughter when I told them about it. They said they knew she didn’t like puff but, as it was the only cell available in their wing, they told me she was safe. ‘We knew you would sort her out anyway,’ one of them said.
I wasn’t amused. ‘If I’d had to do her, I would have done you as well for putting me in that position.’ We all burst into laughter.
I needed a single cell but you had to have ‘enhanced’ status to qualify and that meant you needed to be a goody two-shoes. Well, I am no goody and I can tell you now I was never in enhanced in the year I served in Cookham Wood. But I did need a single so I could puff in peace. I was selling some of my puff too but my roommate wasn’t in on it and she didn’t like the smoke after lights out so it was a problem. But then I was called to the office along with my mates. I was thinking I was in trouble when I was called in but my mates were told to wait outside. There was a screw who had noticed I’d been having all my gym clothes sent in by the Peacock Gym in the East End. She asked me how I knew the Peacock. I told her the owners were lifelong friends of mine. It turned out that she also knew the Peacock. In fact, he was another lifelong friend. What a touch. I thought I was going to be in trouble and this was the best result ever.
I opened the office door, called in my mates and told them that I knew the screw’s family on the outside and that she was one of us. And she did become a loyal
and good friend to me and my mates. She got us out of all sorts of trouble and told us which screws were safe. We had it good, thanks to her. I asked her if she could get me a single cell and she told me to go and see the doctor as he was the only one who could swing it. She said, ‘You’ve only been in a couple of weeks and you’ve got to be in here at least six months to get enhanced status. If you get enhanced so soon, it’s going to look dodgy.’ Each of my mates who had been there over six months all got enhanced that week and our wing became the bollocks
I went to see the doctor about getting a single. I told him they had put me in a double with another inmate and it wasn’t fair on her because I had nightmares. I told him I would jump around the room because I had bad dreams about being shot and at night I would think she was the policeman who shot me. I said, ‘I really like her, doc, but she’s terrified of me.’ I was moved to a single cell that day for the other girl’s safety. Another inmate who had been properly enhanced was moved back into a double because of me and that didn’t go down too well with her. I told her you can be just a bit too good sometimes and laughed.
So I had the bar of puff, a room of my own and I was in business. I was giving it to my mates to sell and we were shovelling in the profits. Puff was worth more than gold in prison. But I got them to charge the same price as you would pay on the outside – £10 for an eighth of an ounce. I was trading it for phone cards, tobacco, clothes and jewellery. I soon had a drawer full of goods, a Chanel suit (handy for court appearances) and the latest trainers too. The inmates I traded the puff with would pay by getting their relatives to send me gear through the post. It was a nice little arrangement. All because of the big lump of puff I got inside by thinking ahead before I walked into court that day.
Well, I was doing pukka. When the doors were opened each day, my cell was packed with inmates and I wasn’t even the one who was selling it. My mates were. There was a group of us hanging around together by now. They even included Sharon – my gypsy pal from East Sutton Park, who had turned up at Cookham Wood – and we all had a right laugh. The whole wing was happy. Puff didn’t hurt you and, believe me, everybody’s world in prison looked a bit dark. Who could blame us for turning the lights up?
The authorities allocated me a job in what we called the sweat house. You had to machine-stitch 150 pairs of prison jogging bottoms a day for £7 a week and, for every 10 pairs you completed above that, you earned an extra penny. Well, I told my mates that the prison wasn’t getting one pair of from me and I just broke the machine when nobody was looking, by breaking the sewing-machine needle. They moved me to another machine and I broke that as well. At last, the woman who was running the shop – a civilian – told me I wasn’t very good at machining and put me on a third machine.
‘This is my baby,’ she said, stroking the machine.
‘I won’t be able to work it,’ I said but she insisted and put me on it. You know what? I broke that one too. I swear, I thought she was going to cry but I had warned her. I told myself I was a prisoner and not a slave and I didn’t feel too bad about it. I swore they wouldn’t get one pair of jogging bottoms out of me and they didn’t. She wouldn’t have me back in the sweat shop after that, thank God, so my mates got me a job with them earning £10 a week working for the prison electrician. We sat in a hut all day listening to music, reading the papers, drinking tea and coffee and all we had to do was change the odd light bulb. In prison, it wasn’t what you knew, it was who you knew – believe me. But it was all too good to be true and eventually me and my mates were called to the office one day and the senior officer said he knew what we were up to.
‘You two are selling marijuana for her,’ he said, pointing at us in turn. Well, we had been grassed. We denied it all the way. My two mates were pukka. I must say, nearly everyone in that prison was. Some weren’t but you’ll hear about them later and, at this moment, everyone was proper and the two I was with were the best.
‘Look, sir, just because were being good girls, you have to blame it on drugs, don’t you?’ one of them said to the officer. ‘It’s us, sir, not drugs, that is keeping us mellow and happy. We are good girls now. We don’t want riots or fighting. We just want to be good girls and I swear we don’t know anything about drugs. It’s just us being good.’
I was trying so hard not to laugh and it was killing me. I mean, we didn’t want to upset this officer and piss him off but he just burst into laughter and threw us out of his office. I was screaming with laughter at what happened. Then my mate said, ‘Jane, puff makes us mellow and they know it. While we’re all puffing, we’re all happy and I just told him, if he wants to nick us and start fucking with us and making us take piss tests to check for drugs, we’re going to start rioting – but in a girly, respectable way. There hasn’t been any trouble on this wing since you arrived and they know it. They aren’t stupid. Puff’s not legal but it’s not bad. We’re not rubbing their noses in it. On the other wings it’s full with heroin and, believe me, Jane, they are having wars to deal with over there.’
It made sense and I understood. It was sweet in Cookham Wood. Don’t get me wrong, there was no place like home and nobody wanted to be in prison but we had no choice and you had to make do. It was one good prison. Even the screws were fair and treated us like humans, rather than as if we were their enemy. There was the odd wrong ’un but that was rare in this prison.
Even when I had to go on an anger management course as part of my rehabilitation, that was a laugh too. I loved it. I had to take it because I’d beaten the bird up in East Sutton Park. There were about 20 of us in the group and we had to do role-playing to help us control our anger. I loved these classes. We were in the group one day and I saw that the worst of the worst in the prison were present. The officer running the class asked me what I would do if I was at the prison medical hatch with a headache and someone pushed in. Well, I jumped up and warned the inmates that, if anyone tried to bunk in front of me, they would have more than a fucking headache. ‘I’ll give yous a headache, neck-ache and back-ache because I’ll beat the living daylights out of the lot of you,’ I said, playing up to my audience
‘No, no, no,’ said the course manager. ‘Sit down, Jane. We’re here to help you and teach you how to let people push in front of you without you losing your temper. You need to control your rage and just let them go in front of you and keep calm.’
I wasn’t having that. ‘Are you sick or something?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t a queue at Tesco with a load of housewives and little old grannies. We all know that, when the old granny bunks the queue in Tesco, you just laugh and tell her it’s OK. But we’re talking about the prison medical queue, where there are drug dealers, murderers, armed robbers and all the criminals in this country, and you want me to stand here and lie to them and say, “I’ll let them push in and take it on the chin?” I don’t think so, somehow. Do you? And as for you lot, you have been warned. If you try and bunk in front of me, you know what will happen.’ I was play-acting. My eyes were blazing and I was shouting but I knew what I was doing. I was winding her up.
So then she said, ‘Well, let’s try something else. You go in to a pub and, when you’re at the bar, you see your boyfriend in there with another woman. What do you do?’
I jumped up again. ‘What, my Matt in the boozer with another bird?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
Well, I was on my feet now. ‘I’d pull out my 9mm Browning,’ I screamed, ‘and I’d point it straight at him and tell him he’s got one minute to convince me that she isn’t with him or his brains are going to be splattered all over the wall. Then I’d get my other gun from my other pocket and make sure everyone shuts the fuck up and lets the man I worship start to talk because what he says next, his life depends on.’
‘No, no, no, Jane,’ the officer said.
By this time me and the whole class were screaming with laughter. Even the screws were holding their heads and laughing. ‘Jane, you can’t do that,’ she said, getting a bit exasperated but
smiling like she knew it was a big joke.
‘If my Matt wants to play with fire, he knows he will get burned,’ I added for good measure. ‘There are no ifs or buts in this conversation, in my book. It’s written in stone.’ We were all laughing but I asked the teacher what she would say to her husband. ‘That’s OK, love, I don’t mind? I’ll go home and wait for you in bed. You carry on betraying me and you can even bring me home some AIDS and syphilis. I don’t mind. I love it.’
But by now everyone was just rolling about. It wasn’t all laughs though, I must be honest. It got sad at times in that class. We had to write a problem down with a partner and then try to solve each other’s problem. I wanted to sneak Matt in for a night of passion while the girl partnered with me said she had five children and had got eight years in prison and had nobody to look after her kids. So they had all been put up for adoption. At the bottom of her note she added, ‘Please help me get them back.’ Tears filled up my eyes. I couldn’t even swallow. I just looked at her, grabbed hold of her and we cried. In fact, the whole class ended up crying when the teacher read out her problem. I couldn’t believe that, through going to prison, she had lost her kids. But when a prisoner got more than a five stretch and there was nobody on the outside to look after the children, they lost them. It was that simple. I must say, it woke me up that day. I wouldn’t play that game again. Getting shot hadn’t hurt me half as much as her problem did.
But, in general, everything was going OK and my 31st birthday was coming round. Matt and John were going to come to see me but there was a petrol strike on and I was getting worried because nobody was getting visits because of the strike. Even the screws weren’t turning up for work. As it turned out, I never had so many cards and presents in my life as I did on that birthday. I got done up, as my Matt and my son were coming. I prayed they would make it. I would understand, I thought, if they couldn’t because of the strike but, please God, make this day my day. And God answered my prayers and in they walked.
