Prisonomics

by Pryce, Vicky

  I told Kirsty and the others at the table how odd it was that a number of women I came across in Holloway and even in ESP seemed to think I was an MP before I went to prison and always ask me what it had been like. I am just an ex-MP’s ex-wife! ‘What’s an MP?’ asks Kirsty.

  5 APRIL

  How do you have a shower without scalding yourself? You would think the answer is simple. Make sure the tap is not too hot. Not so simple if you have no control. The shower room in East Sutton Park was a revelation. It was a big white, light room overlooking the back courtyard down the stairs past reception and near the back door, where the girls often congregated just outside to have their first cigarette of the day. It was clean and airy, with six shower cubicles on each side shielded by curtains that were changed each Sunday during those famous 2p job sessions. These apparently were put in relatively recently after persistent complaints that there was no privacy for the women who were obliged to expose themselves in unprotected cubicles. And in you went, all precious toiletries at the ready and hoping that there would be plenty of others there running showers. This wasn’t so much for the companionship but mainly to ensure that the temperature of the water was manageable if lots of you were running it. The problem was that you had no control. You pushed a button and the water came out for about 30 seconds, coldish for the first few seconds then piping hot if there was just you or even just a couple of you. So a ritual had to be had. If no one else was there, which was usual, or just a couple of you, one had to do two things. First, turn the hot tap on full in the one wash basin that existed so that some of the hot water was diverted there. Then you had to use a cubicle as close as possible to that tap so that you got the maximum effect of the hot water diversion. Then you went on this funny run. You had to start pushing buttons for the water to run in one shower, run out, then dash into the one next to it, run out again then go into yours and enjoy a few seconds of relatively tepid water while the other showers were on full blast. As soon as the water in your cubicle stopped running, as it was timed to do after a very short burst of water, you had to repeat the process, often five times, rushing from cubicle to cubicle like a madwoman pressing buttons if you wanted to complete the shower thoroughly washed but with your skin intact. Otherwise having a shower was impossible. Baths did not exist. One finished the washing process cleaner but absolutely exhausted, as if one had also completed a marathon run at the same time.

  6 APRIL

  I have clearly settled into my weekend routine. Am I becoming institutionalised? Tomorrow, Sunday, is visitors’ day and I am expecting Sir Brian Bender, a previous permanent secretary at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and my boss while I was there. Wonderfully, he’s also going to bring some of my children with him.

  Saturday, therefore, was relatively relaxed and I enjoyed the much-cherished long walk around the grounds. In the evening, while queuing for our ‘grab bags’, Liz was picked on (again) for coming down to supper with open-toed shoes and was sent back up to her room to change. Odd bureaucratic rule, I thought, why does it matter what shoes you are wearing? And what was the point of having a woman in her fifties with grown-up children, formerly in a position of power, sent up to her room for wearing the wrong shoes? I was later told that it was meant to avoid anything hot scalding your feet while you were being served dinner and then it being recorded as an injury inflicted upon you by the prison. I suspect though that the original rationale had long been forgotten and officers liked to apply rules wherever they could. Fortunately it never happened to me (I was too cold not to be wearing socks and proper shoes all the time I was in ESP).

  8 April

  The day I had been looking forward to: ICT day. I enlisted to do Microsoft NVQ 1, also PowerPoint and Excel. The IT course went well – a week later I managed to pass my NVQ for the basic Microsoft and discovered all these things I used to ask my PA to do for me. I am determined to manage better in the future. I was really excited about learning to touch-type. Having been married to a journalist who had been taught to touch-type I had always marvelled at the ability to type almost as fast as you speak. The prison had available a program called ‘Maeve’s Friend’ which taught you how to do it online (on the prison intranet) and once logged on allowed you to practise as much as you wanted at all times of the day and get better each time through repetition. Or so it proves with most people. I was useless at it. Every now and then the program would say: ‘You are doing well. Let’s repeat the exercise.’ It used to bring my blood pressure up as it was clear my brain and fingers were simply not coordinating the way they should. So I conceded defeat. As I am typing this I use the same old techniques as always – bad typing and then long sessions with the spell check function.

  I returned to the dorm to discover that the fourth bed in our little room, which was usually given over to just three of us because of its size, had a new person on it with bags of belongings strewn all round. Just arrived from a closed prison, Alison was in her early sixties, tall and thin and with a hairdo that reminded me a bit of Rod Stewart in terms of style, though she was much better looking. She had tight jeans, longish hair, a husky voice from smoking, and was really cool in a million ways. I had no idea what she was in for. I, having been there all of three weeks, was now an ‘old hand’ and started telling her about the place. I told her a bit about the IT course in ESP and how I was due to do Excel next week, which I hadn’t done for decades. She paused to think for a few seconds and then said: ‘Yes, Excel, good thing really, but when you are running a dope factory you try not to put things in Excel but do all the figure work in your head.’ It left me speechless.

  Sadly she eventually decided that our room was too claustrophobic with four of us in it and moved out some time later but her story fascinated me throughout my stay. I now look at police helicopters flying at night over the houses near Brixton in south London where I live and realise that they are not trying to track down people running away from robberies as I had always fondly thought but instead are using thermal imaging cameras to capture any glowing houses among the dark ones, which is a way of detecting those that hide cannabis factories in their lofts.

  9 APRIL

  And then it was family day. There had been such interest in this extra day of fun from women who had not reached their FLED yet and had to rely on their family coming to visit. There had been a rumour circulating the previous week that those going to the family day would be having it instead of a weekend visit and there were many worried faces around but the rumour proved, like many other things, to be unfounded. The girls who had been in before me talked of a brilliant Christmas family day arranged by Mrs Beck, a wonderful and very energetic senior officer who was also organising such days – in fact, because of popular demand they arranged two of them, on Monday the 8th and Tuesday the 9th. I went on day two so as not to miss the beginning of the IT course; given I only had a few weeks remaining until my HDC date I wouldn’t have had time to complete the course if I started a week later.

  I finished breakfast dining room duties that morning in a hurry, arranged for my fellow workers to cover for me at lunchtime and got ready for a day starting at 11.30 and finishing at 3.30 – the longest I would have been with the children and grandchildren for a while. The excitement from all sides was palpable as the cars started arriving. On those occasions family can come and spend most of the day with the residents, kids play pass the parcel, draw pictures, and visit the farm and play with the piglets and lambs, see the horses and also the gardens and the flowers that the residents were growing and selling. My grandchildren loved it. We all felt like we were not in a prison at all but were able to wander around the entire estate like a normal family. One of my roommates, who was serving two years of a four-year sentence, helped the little ones feed the horses. And we all went to the shop. My other roommate, the lifer, served us. I wasn’t allowed to have any cash while in ESP but my daughter paid and took a joint of roast pork and some sausages home for me. And as it happens the pork
loin and brilliant sausages that my fellow residents at ESP helped make spent a couple of months in my freezer and were eaten with my friends as celebration on the day my tag came off on 11 July. Incidentally, that was the same day that the main tag providers, Serco and G4S, were castigated in the press for overcharging the MoJ some £50m over a number of years, apparently still billing the taxpayer for tagging people who had already been released and even ex-offenders who had long since died!99 My friends admitted they had never eaten nicer pork in their entire lives and they were not exaggerating.

  The family day had another perk attached to it. It the only day that relatives could bring in a picnic for us, which was not allowed on any other normal visit. I had made my request in advance – prawns, smoked salmon, Parma ham, Gruyère cheese, all of which I ate with abandon. And then the pièce de résistance – strawberries and cream. Strawberries were not in season at the time and the imported fruit in the plastic container my children brought was a bit hard but no matter, I scoffed them down and then annoyed everyone back at ESP by frequent mentions of how delicious they were. And for me, not having tasted them for about a month, they were. The simple fact that I had had what I had wished for was enough and stopped me missing them at all for the rest of my stay. To this day I do not understand the policy that does not allow visitors to bring in treats. And I also do not understand why a commercial outfit like the farm shop does not capitalise on the influx of people coming to see their loved ones on Saturdays and Sundays by keeping the shop open. I know for a fact the residents would love to staff the shop themselves and would sell more produce this way. Oh well. At times I felt inclined to offer to write them a proper business plan but I knew my place.

  10 APRIL

  I received an envelope containing the menu of an event I should have been at organised by my ex-KPMG colleagues. They all used to work for me but were now dispersed in all sorts of organisations. More than a decade ago we had formed something called the Bath Club, which got its name because the first event was, for some reason we have now all forgotten, held in the city of Bath; the club has since met annually for supper at the Farmers Club in Whitehall Court, in Westminster.

  The dinner was held on 13 March, just after I had entered Holloway. They all apparently drank my health and sent me the menu signed by all with individual messages, some absolutely hilarious, all very moving. If I believe the menu, which I read out loud to my roommates Sarah and Amy, they ate celeriac and tarragon soup followed by seared bass fillet with roast fennel, smoked tomato sauce and fresh seasonal vegetables and then almond and pear tart with clotted cream for pudding. The meal, accompanied by the club’s own wine, was finished with coffee and chocolate mints. Honestly, what did they think they were doing sending me this? We were salivating even though I know from experience that the menus in ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ often read better than they actually taste. My friends at KPMG determined that we would have a welcoming drink and indeed when I got out I sat with them on a hot balmy July evening on the terrace of the Farmers Club, and a lot of champagne was drunk – not by me who hates bubbles, but by my colleagues, pleased to have the group intact and together again. I will be forever grateful to them all.

  CHAPTER 4

  HALFWAY THERE

  There is a ghost in East Sutton Park. She is called Arabella, a little girl long dead but who keeps making appearances, apparently. According to a booklet in the visitors’ centre, Arabella lives – and has lived for a good few hundred years – under the stairs leading to a loft. Rumour has it that Arabella walks up and down the stairs on her way to and from the room in the loft which as far as I understand it, not being a believer in ghosts, is blocked off until the money is found to refurbish it as a room for the governor, as that side of the house has great views over the valley. But the women in ESP believe it is sealed off because no one wants to go into it, it being haunted. There are numerous tales of people having seen the little girl, dressed in white, walking up and down, and of hearing her making noises in the night but while I was there I never met anyone who had actually seen the ghost though many were prepared to swear that they knew of someone who had – but they had all left ESP already. New girls who heard about the little ghost as they arrived fully believed in its existence and it always caused a lot of hilarity for the non-believers among us. But then again, who knows?

  12 APRIL

  A Tannoy ‘residents’ announcement just before lunch warned us all that our rooms would be inspected to see if there was any food left on the windowsills, which was not allowed, and that if found it would be confiscated. Panic stations. Everyone, including me, kept fruit, butter, milk, cheese and anything perishable as near the window as possible as contrary to what the newspapers may think there were no fridges in the rooms – the one communal fridge in the Butler’s Room had not worked properly for ages and was a health hazard. I was on dining room duty in and out of Butler’s when the workmen came and finally took that smelly fridge away – and didn’t replace it with another. As I was rushing to clear my belongings from the windowsill after the announcement I was told that in a previous inspection everything went, including the biscuits, which apparently you were not allowed to hoard. The logic of that defeated me: how was keeping biscuits for a rainy day a problem? And how could I continue swapping my custard creams for the digestives I preferred? I had stacks of them there including a few bars of chocolate which would melt if I put them anywhere else but I went to try and hide it all for a while.

  Well, no one came to look at our room; it seems there was a culprit somewhere else. It turned out to be my friend Liz, whose window had no window sill on the inside, only on the outside. She, like many others with a similar window configuration, would regularly put everything outside overnight and at times not just on the sill but also in a hanging makeshift contraption they had devised. As her room was at the front of the house, the whole thing was visible to any casual observer – and to make matters worse her large carton of milk bought on canteen had been toppled over by strong winds and had just missed, on its downward journey, the head of an officer walking past. It was all a warning to her and the occupants of her room. We were much more careful from then on to ensure that our curtains, even when opened, were strategically positioned in such a way that they hid the bananas, milk and chocolates that absolutely needed to stay by the window to remain fresh and edible. It became a bit more difficult to balance it all hiding against one corner of the windowsill when I started buying bulky grapefruit and lemons from canteen but they somehow managed to survive my stay there and the regular residents of my room didn’t have anything forcibly taken away.

  13 APRIL

  Visitors’ day again – hurray! When I was arranging for this week’s visit, I rang one of the friends who was coming to see me to make sure I had all the right details for him in my ‘app’, such as his address. I caught him just as he was in a coffee shop in Kensington High Street and as we were talking he interrupted me to say that someone I knew well had just walked in – and he passed the phone to her. It was Patricia Hewitt, who, when a Cabinet minister in the early to mid-2000s, was the reason I entered the civil service. She had wanted someone completely different to the traditional civil servant to replace her departing chief economists in what was then the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Although I had seen her since she left the government and since I rejoined the private sector, it was so great to reconnect, me on the prison payphone and her in a sandwich bar. How weird life is. We made arrangements to meet as soon as I got out.

  My colleagues duly came to visit, two of my directors in the company I used to work for, Alison Sprague and Mark Conaty, and my ex-PA, Ava Alleyne, all of them great friends. I cannot describe how happy I felt seeing them. They were like a breath of fresh air, breezing in and bringing me their stories from the outside, their optimism about my future, and pen and paper on which we proceeded over the next couple of hours to draw up my ‘recovery plan’. I don’t know what I would have done without their
support and guidance. And funnily, our plan has worked according to the letter ever since, even down to expecting and preparing for the occasional knocks to come (though they have come from unexpected corners) and how to survive them and bounce back. Alison sent me both at ESP and at home PowerPoint-type slides, like a strategic review one might put together for a client – we weren’t management consultants for nothing. Every conversation we have had since includes a brief rundown on where exactly we are on the plan and a reminder of the next steps. There’s just one thing I haven’t done yet but am working on – hiring a proper PA again so that there is at least someone who can say no to the things I am asked to do.

  14 APRIL

  Since my visitors came unusually on Saturday this week I had the whole of Sunday to myself, which gave me plenty of time to agonise and worry about the Chelsea 4 p.m. semi-final kick-off against Man City at Wembley, which was shown on ITV. As I was watching it in the dining room, I became the target for friendly abuse mocking the image of Chelsea as the millionaire players’ club. Luckily there were two staff members who were keen Chelsea supporters including Nigel, whose daughter attends games regularly. At least I had someone to commiserate with after we lost 2–1 – undeservedly in my view.

  15 APRIL

  We were all horrified to see on the news that a bomb had exploded during the Boston marathon, killing three people. Footage was shown again and again, and it looked horrific, the bomb exploding just in the coffee shops behind the runners and onlookers. I panicked as my niece, Melina Georgantas, lives and works in Boston and has run the marathon a number of times. It was difficult to find out whether she was hurt but frantic calls to my daughters finally elicited that she was fine. She had been sitting in a bar away from the main impact and when the incendiary devices blew up so powerful was the blast that her drink flew out of her hand and the glass was smashed. She was OK though it all left her rather shaken. I saw her later after my release and she described how she was just 100 yards from the finishing line and if the glass doors of the café had not been wide open to ensure a good view, the glass would have been blown into her face and body. She had had the presence of mind to march her fellow drinkers in the café down into the basement and through the back door to the street behind from where they quickly left for home.