None Shall Divide Us

by Michael Stone

  I found irony on the boards. Touts were held in the PSU and I found that funny. I took my war to the back door of the Republican movement. It was ironic that I should be held in a cell that was once home to Loyalist supergrass Budgie Allen.

  In the early weeks I was treated to impromptu concerts. Small flute and drum bands would travel from West Belfast and play tunes outside the prison. I couldn’t see them but I could hear them. Their music kept me connected to reality. The bands would beat their drums very loudly and chant my name. Republican prisoners hated it. I could hear them shouting obscenities back.

  Even in this subterranean hellhole there were rules. Every twenty minutes I underwent a suicide watch. The screws had to be able to see you, so things like sleeping with the blanket over your head were seen as a breach of security. I was strip-searched twice a day, morning and evening, and was constantly guarded by two screws and a principal officer who stood outside my cell. The authorities were terrified some poor bastard would hurt himself even though there was nothing to hang yourself from and nothing in that dingy cell to use as a makeshift rope.

  The Crum was a Victorian prison and still had Victorian fittings. The light switch was outside the cell and was an old metal one that sounded like a firework going off in a tin can when it was flicked on and off. The crack was loud enough to wake the dead and it shot a fluorescent beam into my tiny space. The prison officers flicked it every twenty minutes for the first four weeks. One day I asked them to make a decision: either keep the light on or turn it off. They said it was a suicide watch and they had to flick it every twenty minutes. I told them I wasn’t going to kill myself and I would much rather kill someone else. They looked at me in astonishment. The light wasn’t switched off for a full year and I used two circles of paper, coloured in with a black ballpoint pen borrowed from a screw, as an eye mask to shield my eyes from the bright light at bedtime.

  I did get my own back on the screws by faking my suicide. One was an annoying little man with an English accent who worked the night shift. I rolled my grey blanket into a sausage shape and stuffed it into my jeans. I tied the jeans to a pipe that ran above the door and attached my trainers to weight it down. Through the tiny slit of the viewfinder all the screw would be able to see would be two denim legs hanging from the air. I waited. The screw came on duty. He peered through the viewfinder and hit the panic button. The ‘Ninjas’, the Crum’s Immediate Reaction Force, bounded into the unit. The screw was screaming at the top of his voice, ‘Stone’s hanging in his cell. I think he’s dead.’ In the meantime I had taken down the jeans and got back into bed, covering myself with the blanket. The Ninjas unlocked my cell door and I sat up innocently in bed and asked, ‘What’s going on, are you moving me?’ The screw protested that he saw me hanging in my cell, but he was disciplined and moved from the PSU. The principal officer, called ‘the Beet’ because of his red hair and ruddy complexion, said to me the next day, ‘You wound him up, didn’t you? We’re going to have to watch you, Mr Stone.’

  I nicknamed my little exercise yard the ‘dog-run’. It was exactly like a kennel, tiny and boxed-in with a metal grille for a roof. It measured just fifteen feet by six. My dogs at home had more room than me. All I could do was walk up, turn around and walk back. I wasn’t allowed out when it rained, which was most of the year. The dog-run was disgusting. Prisoners filled paper bags with their waste and slung them out of the windows. They were called ‘mystery parcels’. They burst on hitting the grille over the dog-run and the waste dissolved into a shower of excrement. The longest period I went without seeing daylight was seven weeks.

  As the weeks wore on routine became the single most important thing in my life. I never lost track of time. I set my body clock by the twice-daily strip-searches. I started to lose weight. I also started to think about my future. I knew I was facing a substantial stint on the boards, but there was still a chance I would go to the wings to do the rest of my remand. Then I was looking at the Maze for my sentence. I needed to get fit. I needed to get back into shape, mentally and physically.

  I began an exercise routine consisting of sit-ups, press-ups and shadow boxing. The prison officers would laugh at me, but I told them to fuck off and mind their own business. The exercise was my survival kit. I put my mattress against the wall, put socks over my fists and punched the mattress. I started to firm up. If anyone came near me, I would fight first and ask questions later. Bathrooms were called the ‘ablutions’. I would take a plastic chair and sit under the hot shower for hours. I made a point of asking for a shower regularly.

  The authorities hated granting my request for legal visits because that meant they had to ‘lock down’ the entire prison. This meant that all movement stopped, grilles were closed, doors were locked and the army was even put on alert.

  About six weeks into my remand a Republican prison called Terence Clarke arrived on the boards. ‘Cleeky’ was doing time for his part in the capture of two Royal Corps of Signals corporals, Derek Howes and David Wood, who were murdered after straying into the funeral of Kevin Brady, one of the men I killed at Milltown. He even did a stint as Gerry Adams’s bodyguard and was head of security at the funeral for the Gibraltar Three. But Cleeky fucked up that day. He didn’t see me coming. He had been adjudicated and sent to the PSU for breaking prison rules. He grew a moustache. Under the Crum’s tough internal regime changing your appearance wasn’t allowed.

  Cleeky had deliberately broken a prison rule in order to be sent to the punishment block because he knew I was housed there. He wanted to get a feel for the layout of the place. Cleeky was opportunistic. He was looking for a chance to take me out. He announced himself to the PSU by shouting, ‘Where are you, Stoner, what cell you in?’ Later, when I was unlocked, I went looking for him. I didn’t know what he looked like. I had only heard of him. Cleeky was legendary in the Republican movement. He was a bad boy. I found his cell card and lifted the viewfinder to take a look at him. He was sitting on his bed, and jumped when the metal flap screeched open. He thought I was a prison officer until I laughed into his cell and told him that I was watching him. Cleeky screamed back at me, ‘You are so lucky, Stone. I was that close to getting you. I wanted to chop you into little pieces that day. I wanted to scatter your body all over the six counties. I wanted your dick in South Armagh and your head on a spike on the Falls Road. I didn’t get my way that day. You’re dead.’ I could see him pretending to box me and he was shouting, ‘Get your screw friends to let you in’.

  I slammed down the flap and rattled the door in the pretence that a screw was opening it. I told Cleeky I wanted to ‘put one in his baldy head’. He hit the alarm button and screamed at the screws, ‘Officer, officer, Stone threatened to kill me.’ Within seconds the Ninjas were all over the unit. Within the hour the Governor was at my cell door.

  ‘Mr Clarke is back on the wings. He has made an official complaint and wants to press charges. Did you threaten to kill him?’

  ‘He threatened me, so I said I would put one in his baldy head.’

  ‘He’s as bad as you. You are as bad as him. I don’t want to hear any more about this incident. End of story.’ The door slammed shut.

  Cleeky’s pal, Harry Maguire, was sent to the boards three weeks later, also for breaking prison rules. He was on remand for his part in the murder of the two corporals. I could see a pattern emerging. The Republican hierarchy was casing the place in an attempt to create an opportunity to kill me.

  Maguire made his appearance when I was having a shave. Behind me, a door opened. I thought it was unusual because boards prisoners never overlap in their unlock time, but a mistake was made by a prison officer and our times overlapped. The screw who was guarding me looked uneasy. I turned around and Maguire was standing behind me. He had a mop of red hair. We eyeballed one another. I handed the ancient shaving contraption to the prison officer. There was a brush propped up against the wall. I lifted it and snapped it in two across my knee. The screw stepped back. I taunted Maguire, I gestur
ed with my hand and pointed to the broken brush handle and asked him if he wanted to have a go at me. He refused to bite and returned to his cell, his screw walking behind him. I was charged with breaking prison property and was fined one pound.

  It was impossible for me to go to the canteen to eat, so my meals were brought to my cell by the duty prison officers. The Governor wanted to avoid a fight breaking out at the food counter, or worse, a poisoning. Two screws and a principal officer were responsible for selecting and delivering my food. I told them I would only eat individual items like potatoes or meat. I refused to touch stews, casseroles and curries or any food that was cooked in the one pot. I was sixteen years old and doing time in Long Kesh when I discovered what happens in prison kitchens. Young lads would spit, piss and even put steel wool and shards of glass into the massive cauldrons of food. By the time my food got to me it was cold, but I ate it anyway. Cold food was better than no food.

  Some of the screws were decent men. Much later, after we had developed a working relationship, we had a quid pro quo system, favour for favour. I would paint for them and they would smuggle in treats such as barbecue chicken. The screws got it in by putting it in a freezer bag, sitting on it to flatten it and placing it down the front of their trousers. When they were signing in for duty, they had to book in their personal weapon, go through the X-ray machine and were body-searched, but generally security was lax for prison officers. The chickens were a six-weekly treat and, after I had eaten the meat, I would take the bones in my bucket and dump them down the slop-out. I learnt a lesson: the screws could be helpful and useful. If they were prepared to put a barbecue chicken down their trousers they could smuggle anything in and that included knives and guns.

  The screws helped me get messages in and out. One made the initial approach by passing cigarette papers, wrapped in cling film, containing coded messages.

  My lonely prison life dragged on, but out of the blue I got a visit from the Security Officer. Unknown to me, I had been getting a lot of mail and the SO wanted to know what to do with it. He said there were at least three black bin bags full of letters and cards. He then asked about the food parcels that had been arriving, sometimes up to three a week. I told him they weren’t from my family and he said he knew all about that. He said the parcels contained cooked meat and chicken, fruit and expensive biscuits. He said that, if it were any other prisoner, the screws would scoff it.

  He then added, ‘Off the record, we have an officer who has compromised himself by smuggling messages for Republicans. The Republicans have turned the tables and he is now being blackmailed. He saw the prison authorities. The authorities knew he was smuggling messages but wanted to see how far he would go unprompted. He said the IRA wanted to kill Michael Stone, by poisoning, before his trial and there was a hundred thousand in the kitty, all-comers welcome. You’re here under Rule 25 and likely to be here until your trial. I have also heard that there might be a chance you will do your time in England.’ And with that he left.

  I had too much time on my hands to think. I thought about my old friend Sammy Cinnamond. He always cautioned me to ‘step back’ if things got rough and ‘stand aside’ if things started to look jaded. So the process of reassessing my paramilitary life had begun. I started at Milltown and worked backwards. I began to replay the story of my life. It was like a video. I fast-forwarded and rewound and I played and replayed key scenes in my life. Could I have chosen a different path? Could I have played things differently? Could I have lived a different life? I had pulled over from the highway of life. I was assessing and taking stock. I had had several chances to follow different routes. I had actually physically extracted myself from Ulster in the early eighties and moved to the UK for six months, but like a nail to a magnet I was drawn back. It seemed inevitable that I would end up here in a tiny box, no bigger than a dog kennel, reassessing what I had been doing since I was sixteen years old.

  Disillusionment had set in. I was a counter-terrorist. I was a retaliatory soldier because Republicans had forced my hand. I am not excusing my actions, but no man in his right mind could sit back and ignore their sectarian crimes. Or was it the other way round? I couldn’t decide. I realised what Sammy Cinnamond said was true. We are all expendable. I realised Loyalist prisoners are just unwanted baggage. Except for our families and our friends, who cares about us? I didn’t want to be a social or political embarrassment to the UDA, but I feared that was all I was. I had heard nothing from the organisation I joined when I was just sixteen. A message on a cigarette paper was smuggled in to me. It was from the Berlin Arms, a UVF bar, and said that the papers were full of the UDA’s denial of me, that I was a true Loyalist and the UVF were prepared to claim me after my trial. Tucker Lyttle had thrown me to the wolves.

  Life went on. I continued to reassess my life and continued my fitness regime. The prison officers were the only human contact I had and different teams guarded me by day and by night. I didn’t like the night men. They had a different attitude to the day lads. Some were ex-forces. They could be sadistic and used to wind me up by calling me Paddy.

  My euphoria at surviving Milltown was fast disappearing. The PSU was getting to me and I was finding it tough to get through each day. Then a young trustee arrived. He was an ‘ODC’, an ordinary decent criminal, in for fraud. He was on the boards to work. Trustees have prison jobs. Then he started. ‘The Battle of Milltown, that was brilliant. You’ll do big time for that. I wouldn’t want to be you. You know what I would have done? I would have taken a big M60 and sat a quarter of a mile back and killed the lot. What about your mates in the van? Didn’t they fuck off on you? Everyone is saying your mates were the peelers.’ That was it, a red rag to a bull. I got him in a stranglehold, he struggled for a few seconds and it was only when he went limp and slumped to the floor that I stuck my boot into him. A screw eventually saw what was going on and hit the alarm. They lifted the ODC up, slapped his face and took him back to his cell. I wasn’t disciplined. The authorities couldn’t do anything with me. I was already on the punishment block.

  Then King of the Bull Roots arrived. ‘Bull Root’ is prison slang for a sex offender. In the prisoner hierarchy, sex offenders are the lowest form of life and are considered worse than a paramilitary tout. In Northern Ireland, if a sex offender is walking through the wing and another prisoner shouts ‘Bull Root’, the prisoner nearest the sex offender must attack him. It is an unwritten rule. This particular Bull Root’s real name was John Clifford and he was convicted of the rape and murder of his niece, Sue Ellen. She was just eight years old and her body was put in a bin bag and dumped. Clifford bragged about the death of the little girl and that pissed off the screws. He was due for a stint on the boards and the screws asked me to ‘sort him out, don’t kill him, just give him a good hammering’. Clifford never appeared. The authorities wanted to keep the PSU clear of other prisoners.

  I asked for a radio and was surprised, not when they gave me one but when they said I could have had the radio from day one. The authorities had kept that from me. It was small and battery-powered but even from the bowels of the Crum it managed to pick up my favourite station, BBC Radio Ulster. I discovered David Dunseith and he became my link to the outside world. I tuned in to his Talkback show every day. Many times I was the subject of his discussions. People are entitled to their opinions. I also listened to the news bulletins and was dismayed to discover that the Provos were still bombing indiscriminately. It depressed me to think that the war was still going on and I was locked up in the Crum. Ironically, I heard a phone-in where Cleeky Clarke’s family complained and blamed me for their son’s spell in jail.

  I started to think about escape, despite being underground and alone. I broke it down, cell to unit, unit to perimeter fence, perimeter fence to outside. I didn’t factor in the armed soldiers guarding the prison twenty-four hours a day. I would be shot on the spot. I knew there was a blind spot that the security cameras didn’t cover, the razor wire was sagging and it was possible to g
et under it and on to the roof. The Beet spied me eyeballing the prison perimeter and said to me, ‘You know, Stone, a few years ago a boy got on to the roof. He didn’t get very far because the authorities got a forklift truck, they put pallets on the bucket and dogs were in the pallets. The dogs were released and bit the prisoner. Forewarned is forearmed.’ Over the following days an extra line of barbed wire was erected.

  I realised I was politically isolated. There hadn’t been any contact from the UDA since my capture and arrest. Then I overheard a conversation between two Republican prisoners. Directly above the PSU was a workout unit, used by men who had done most of their sentence and were getting ready for release. I heard them talking about going home. I heard one say to the other, ‘Twelve years tomorrow, just eight weeks left’, and the other replying, ‘Me too. A few more months and it will be adiós to the Crum.’ They were leaving this stinking prison and going home to family and friends and I hadn’t even been given my trial date. I hadn’t even done twelve weeks. I was facing life behind bars. Was my cause less worthy than their cause? The two men had done time when their comrades were on the ‘dirty’ protest and dying on hunger strike. These men were no better men than me and I was no better than them. We were all part of the same problem. We were all part of the same war. Their conversation about going home and freedom pulled me to my senses. I knew I had to stay focused. I knew it was essential I stayed on top of things.