The banter continued until we landed in Heathrow, where I was made to wait until everybody else had left the plane before being cuffed up and walked across to an unmarked police car.
'Right get in, you're off to Holloway,' the female officer told me. 'They're going to wonder where you got your tan from when you get there.'
I had heard that Holloway was a rough old nick but felt confident that I would fit in OK. After surviving the likes of Maghaberry and Topas, I was no longer fazed by the prospect of entering a jail with a bit of a reputation to it. It was a case of been there, done that, got the mental scars to prove it.
The police spent the short trip from the airport to the jail winding me up and trying to convince me that I was going to be sharing a cell with a big, butch lesbian called Betty. We had a right laugh together and I almost forgot that I was heading to a place that housed some of the most dangerous women in the country. Holloway might not have been as bad as the Spanish prisons that I had been in when it came to the treatment of the prisoners, but the residents there were just as violent and deranged. The difference was that I was now accustomed to life behind bars and had got used to mixing with shady characters.
As we pulled up to the jail, the gates opened up to let us through and I thanked the coppers for the lift. They wished me luck and handed me over to a big, fat, jolly-looking female screw, who walked me into the reception area. Entering a prison for the first time is always a bit intimidating no matter how many jails you've been in and Holloway was certainly no exception. Weaselly, beady-eyed, smack-rats milled around the place and Yardies gibbered away to one another in incomprehensible patois. Worse still, the hardest, butchest girl I've ever seen in my life was checking in at the same time as me. She looked like a big, burly, shaven-headed bloke.
A closer inspection revealed that this manly-looking creature was not only unrecognisable as female, but was also covered in vomit. Congealed lumps of sick plastered her clothing and a thick crust of mucus and stomach acid had formed around her mouth. She was obviously on the bad end of some heavy-duty drugs.
After waiting patiently for a good ten minutes whilst the man-woman drooled puke everywhere and repeatedly fell asleep on the desk, it was finally my turn to be processed. The receptionist must have had the patience of a saint. If the he-she had come into a Spanish prison in the state that it came into Holloway, it would have been beaten over and over again until it sobered up and then probably beaten some more for good measure. I gave the desk staff all the information that they asked for and then followed another female screw down a corridor onto the induction wing.
There were nine other girls on induction with me, most of whom were drug addicts and low-level criminals. It was supposed to be four to a cell but there was only one other girl in the room that I was allocated to, which was a turn up for the books. My new cellmate seemed to be taking very badly to life behind bars and lay sobbing on her bed all day. I figured she might not want to talk to anyone so I left her to get on with it. It was sad to see her so distraught but when you're sharing a cell with someone, you have to give them space when they feel down. If I had been upset about something, the last thing that I would have wanted was for someone to pry into my business by asking why I was crying.
The following morning, I was woken up early and told to pack my things because I was moving onto the main wing. Prison life is full of uncertainty; you're never in the same place long enough to settle and soon get used to upping and leaving your digs all the time. It's still always nerve-wracking moving in with a new set of people, like starting a new school as a kid.
The minute I set foot on the wing, a load of druggies and fruit loops were all up in my face, asking me where I was from and what I was in for. As with Soto and Topas, the inmates didn't come across as particularly aggressive or hostile, just very curious. They seemed to have no concept of personal space though. Two of them followed me all the way to my cell, gibbering away incessantly about nothing in particular until a guard shooed them away.
The guard unlocked the door for me and motioned me inside, which was a bit of a relief because I didn't think I had the energy to deal with any more over-zealous junkies. My cell had four other cons in it, none of whom were English. There were two Bulgarian pickpockets, a Jamaican drug dealer and a short, fat Pakistani girl, who was in for fraud. This was just my luck; I had spent ages sorting out a transfer to England so that I would be around other English-speakers and here I was, stuck in a room with every nationality under the sun.
None of my cellmates were people that I would have mixed with in the outside world. The Bulgarians couldn't understand a word of English and kept calling me Diana for some unknown reason, which soon became incredibly wearing. The Pakistani and the Jamaican were both crackheads so all they really cared about was drugs. Most of the prisoners in Holloway are transferred to another jail shortly after arriving though, so I knew I wouldn't be in with them for very long.
Holloway was a lot less multicultural than Soto and Topas, but still contained a lot of foreign nationals. Most of them were from Jamaica but there were also quite a few Bulgarians, Polish and Vietnamese. The Vietnamese were all in for growing marijuana. They looked very weak and frail but I knew better than to do anything that could possibly provoke them after seeing their martial arts display in Soto. I didn't fancy being kung fu-kicked across the wing so I tried my best to stay on their good sides.
Literally all of the English prisoners were on either crack or heroin. They were always cutting themselves as well, which was something that I had never seen in any of the other jails that I had been in. Most of the girls had scars all over their arms where they had slashed them over and over again with homemade prison shanks. It's strange because no one in Spain had any noticeable blade marks on them. I don't know if this is because British prisons have more of a culture of self-harm or what, but it was horrible to witness and hammered home what difficult lives these girls had.
Fortunately I was able to arrange a visit soon after I arrived at the prison, which provided me with a momentary respite from seeing people getting rushed to the hospital wing after slicing themselves up. My visits in the Spanish jails had taken place in a private room but this one was in a large hall full of tables and chairs. I had been dying to share my excitement at being back in UK with my sister and my mum and spent the whole time telling them how great it was to be on English soil. Seeing them reminded me how much I longed to be back home, where I would be free to chat to my family whenever I wanted.
Two weeks after touching down in Holloway, I got word that I was transferring to HMP Cookham Wood in Kent, which I saw as another step towards freedom. The other girls on the wing told me that you got longer visits and more time out of your cell, which sounded good to me. I hoped that it was the last time I got moved before I was released though because I was sick of being shipped out the minute I got used to a jail. The constant change was like a form of torture. It meant that I was never fully able to relax.
The transfer bus that took me to Cookham was like a limousine compared to the buses that they had in Spain. The seats were comfy, we didn't have to sit cuffed up and we were even given a packed lunch to eat. It would have been a pleasant journey if the screws hadn't stuck a paedophile in with us. The minute the other girls got onto it, they started shouting and screaming their heads off, calling her every name under the sun.
'You're dead when you get off this bus,' bellowed an angry Cockney bird. 'You're not even going to make it to the wing.'
Luckily for the paedo, we were all in separate compartments so none of the other prisoners were able to get at her. I wondered why they had decided to put a sex offender on a bus with regular criminals. The nonces had their own separate unit in Holloway and were usually kept well away from the general population. I hoped the same was true of Cookham.
Upon arrival at the prison, our compartments were unlocked and we were escorted one by one into the building, the nonce being saved until last to prevent her f
rom being attacked. I was taken straight to the main wing and shown to my cell, which was even smaller than the ones in Holloway had been. My new cellmate was a crazy Jamaican woman with no teeth and a swollen stomach. She was as skinny as a rake and had a hairdo that could have passed for a particularly poorly-made bird's nest.
'Hi I'm Terry,' I told her. 'It looks like we're going to be sharing.'
'Yeah you got lucky,' my new roomie told me. 'This place is full of 'nough monsters. You did well to avoid being in with a wrong 'un. Kiddie fiddlers, child killers… they've got 'em all in here.'
This didn't sound too good. Was that why they had stuck the nonce on the bus with us? Was Cookham Wood reserved for sickos and sex offenders? I wasn't sure if Bird's Nest Head was telling the truth at first so I quizzed some of the other inmates when I got out on the wing.
'There's your answer for you,' a grizzled old heroin addict from London told me, pointing over to a mousy-looking, brown-haired girl, who was surrounded by an army of screws. 'That's Sarah Whittaker.'
'Not the Sarah Whittaker?' I asked her.
I had read about this evil woman in the papers. She had left her little children wallowing in their own faeces and dying of starvation whilst she went out boozing and living the life of Riley. One of her kids was found with maggots crawling about in his nappy and was under half the weight of the average child his age when the police found him.
'Yeah,' the smackhead told me. 'It's full of celebrities in here. See that woman over there?'
She was pointing towards a big, black woman with horrible, cold, evil-looking eyes.
'That's Marie Kouao.'
Although not quite as notorious as Sarah Whittaker, this was another name that had been plastered all over the news. The sick monster had beaten her niece with bicycle chains and hammers and forced her to sleep in a rubbish bag in an unlit, unheated bathroom. The little girl eventually died of hypothermia.
It made my mind boggle that such intensely evil people were allowed to walk around the jail unhindered. Sarah was escorted everywhere by a group of guards but the other nonces were left to their own devices. Over the course of the next few weeks, I was forced to mix with all manner of freaks and perverts. People who had killed and molested their own children were in with the general population and would often lie and claim that they were serving time for fraud. Occasionally one of them would appear on the news and get stick from the other prisoners but they were usually left alone.
Sometimes the most innocuous-looking inmates turned out to have committed the most disturbing crimes. I remember seeing two quaint, little old ladies walking around the wing together and thinking, 'I wonder what they're in for'. I later learnt that one of them had burnt her grandchildren to death so that she could get out of looking after them to go to the bingo, and the other was a paedophile. Cookham was like some weird twilight zone where demons walked around the place in the guise of regular human beings.
The girls who weren't nonces all seemed to be plastic gangster types. They acted like rebellious teenagers who thought that they were cool because they were always in trouble. There was even more self-harm than there had been in Holloway. Some girls barely had an unmarked patch of skin. They were scarred all over their bodies, with huge slashes down their arms and legs. I didn't know how they could do it to themselves. I'm far too vain to cut myself. If I fall over and graze my knee, I worry that it will mess up my legs, so the chances of me mutilating myself because I'm having a bad day are slim.
The one redeeming feature to the prison was the fact that we were allowed to make phone calls to inmates in other jails. This was brilliant because I hadn't spoken to Aidan for ages and missed him almost as much as I missed my family. We had been writing to one another but it wasn't the same. When I rang him up, I was surprised at how much stronger his accent had got since he had been back in Ireland. It was so thick that I could barely work out what he was saying. He kept going on about all the things that he had planned for us when we got out of jail but to be honest, I wasn't sure if I wanted to carry on seeing him after I was released. I liked him a lot but was he really someone that I had a future with? We were two very different people with conflicting views on life.
The more I thought about it, the more I made up my mind that I was going to have to say goodbye to Aidan at some point. He had the same anger in him that I had seen in Jamie and I didn't want to make the same mistake twice. He had treated me well whilst I was in Topas but seemed far too mixed up for me to have a relationship with him in the outside world. When I got out, I wanted to start afresh and put behind me everything that had happened in Spain. Aidan would be a constant reminder of my time inside, which wasn't what I needed. Staying away from him was going to be difficult but I knew that it was for the best.
Thinking about the changes that I needed to make when I was released made me wonder what was going on with my pardon. I hadn't heard anything from Fair Trials for a while and the tension was killing me. The longer I went without any word from them, the more anxious I got.
Just as I was beginning to think that everybody had forgotten me, I got a note to say that I needed to attend a meeting that would determine whether or not I was eligible for transfer to an open jail. Prisoners aren't usually considered for open conditions until they've served the majority of their sentences so I had a feeling that John Bercow had pulled a couple of strings to fast track things for me. If I was successful then I would be able to put in for a home visit. The thought of spending a day outside the confines of the prison made the hairs on my arms stand up. It would be my first taste of freedom.
On the morning of my meeting, a million different thoughts were flying round in my head. What if I got turned down and told that I was going to have to stay in Cookham until the day of my release? I wasn't sure how much longer I could put up with being surrounded by wannabe bad girls and creepy sex offenders. The month that I had already spent in there was bad enough as it was.
The assessment only lasted a couple of minutes. I was asked some questions about what I planned to do when I got out of jail and was then told straightaway that I was getting my transfer. I couldn't believe that it had been so easy. I was off to a place called HMP East Sutton Park in Sutton Valance near Maidstone. It would only be a matter of time before I got to tuck into one of Mum's gorgeous roast dinners and sleep in my own bed. My stint in hell was finally coming to an end.
Chapter 21
MURDER AT HOGWARTS
We were having our tea when it all went downhill. We noticed a paramedic car and a cop car in the little car park by the gate and they then started to cover it all with tape. After about half an hour, one of the governors came in to tell us that one of the prison teachers had had her throat cut. We are all very traumatised.
Diary entry from 12 September 2007
'Pack your bag,' the screw told me. 'You're off to your cushy open nick. Don't overdo it on the caviar and make sure that your shoes are clean so you don't dirty the red carpet on your way in.'
Funny guy. By this stage I had come to realise that a jail is a jail and that there is no such thing as an easy prison. I had expected British nicks to be a walk in the park but although they were a damn sight better than the ones in Spain, they were still quite gruelling so I knew not to expect anything too great from East Sutton. It was also the fifth time I had been shipped from one jail to another within a two-month period so changing prisons had now become extremely repetitive.
It was lovely looking out of the bus window as we were driven to the prison. East Sutton Park overlooks the Weald of Kent, which is an area of fields and woodland that stretches out for as far as the eye can see. Gazing out at such a vast expanse of countryside was like a breath of fresh air after being cooped up in a tiny little cell for so long. It made me feel alive again.
The prison itself was equally impressive. It was the spit of Hogwarts from the Harry Potter films. Big, archaic-looking stone chimneys stuck up from the roof, making it look more like a National Tr
ust property than a prison, and there were no fences or walls. There weren't even any bars on the windows.
'I could get used to this,' I thought to myself as we drove up to the entrance, past the well-kept lawn and rows of pretty flowerbeds.
The inside of the jail was equally impressive. There were proper carpets on the floor and luxurious leather sofas dotted around the place. The prisoners were just as scruffy and drug-addled as ever but I suppose you can't have everything.
Instead of cells, the accommodation in the jail consisted of large dormitories with seven beds in each. My dorm was huge, with a fireplace and posh bay windows in it. Holloway had prepared me for sharing with a lot of people so I wasn't bothered about rooming with six other girls. So long as none of them snored too loudly, I would no doubt settle in just fine.
My other roomies were all fairly chilled out. They were a range of different races and ages, which was to be expected because prison is a real melting pot. Crime crosses all boundaries and villains come in every shape and size there is.
The other girls were intrigued by my story and seemed to think that I was some kind of big time gangster because my sentence was so long. They were all coming to the end of theirs and couldn't get their heads around the fact that I had been moved to an open jail with so long left to go.
Passport To Hell: How I Survived Sadistic Prison Guards and Hardened Criminals in Spain's Toughest Prisons Page 26
