by Ted Lewis
I couldn’t believe my luck. Moffatt had shot himself in front of the Home Secretary.
I said: “I don’t suppose the Home Secretary wants to hear about my shoes, Governor.”
“What’s this about, then?” said the Home Secretary.
Moffatt was committed now.
“Cracken was issued with a new pair of shoes. He threw them out of the window, refusing to wear them. That’s why he’s not allowed out on exercise.”
The Home Secretary looked at Moffatt and then at me, taking in the Governor’s venom and my own contempt.
“Well, come on, Cracken,” he said. “Tell me about the shoes.”
There was the trace of an amused smile on his face.
Well, he had asked, and you don’t look it in the mouth when it comes.
“He’s just trying to make me look bad, Mr. Home Secretary,” I said. “I came over here from E wing wearing a pair of plimsolls which I’d worn for weeks without anybody objecting. Then a week ago a warder pinched them off my chair when I’d put it outside my door. The shoes were put there instead. I admit I stuffed them out the window, but, Jesus, these kind of tactics, well, hardly the kind of games so-called responsible people are supposed to play. I mean, are they?”
The Home Secretary found this all highly amusing.
“Is that right?” he asked Moffatt. “Were they pinched off his chair?”
Moffat passed it on to the Chief.
“I merely gave the order for him to be issued with a new pair of shoes,” Moffatt said.
“What happened, Chief?”
The Chief was having a bit of a smile-up, too.
“Well, yes, quite frankly, they were taken off his chair in the manner described, yes,” he said. “Because, to be honest, I knew he wouldn’t give them up if he was just asked.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “There are ways of doing these things and there are ways of not doing them. I mean, that’s the kind of trick we’re supposed to get up to.”
“If you can’t . . .” Moffatt began, but the Home Secretary cut through him.
“Cracken,” he said, “I’m not in the habit of asking prisoners favours. But will you do something for me?”
“Yes sir, of course.”
“Will you wear your shoes if they’re given back to you?”
“Yes sir, of course I will.”
I knew he’d meant my plimsolls. So did Bastin. But Moffatt missed the point completely. Pedantic as ever, he snapped out: “Yes, of course. If he wears his shoes he can go out on exercise.”
“Good,” said the Home Secretary, looking down at the table top.
There was a short silence while the Home Secretary, Bastin and myself thought one thing and Moffatt thought another.
Moffatt was finished now. That was obvious. He didn’t know it. He probably never would. But it was clear that the Home Secretary was going to implement a few subtle changes, via Creasey probably, that would only filter through to Moffatt if it was absolutely necessary that he should be made aware of the changes. I got the feeling that it would never be absolutely necessary. Moffatt would just be kept happy until such time had elapsed that he could be respectably moved on.
That afternoon I got my plimsolls back and went out on exercise. The day was bright and sunny and by the hospital the flowers rocked from side to side in the slow warm wind. I stood in the shadow of the wall and looked up at its edge and beyond and watched the fluff-ball clouds drift across the kodak-blue sky and I thought about the park near where Sheila and Timmy and me had lived before this last lot. It’s funny how good weather works your memory. I thought of the swings and Timmy’s laugh as I pushed him higher and higher, right up into the sky, the chains clanking, Sheila calling “Be careful,” Tony laughing louder and louder, the goodness of the feeling of my own strong arms thrusting against the swing with the warm sun glinting on the warm iron and the squeaking of the joints and Timmy’s little hands gripping tight as life itself.
I lay down on the grass by the hospital. So I’d screwed Moffatt up. Fine. For a moment there it had been great, a triumph, virtue rewarded. A victory to be savoured and passed on and absorbed into the false brightness of prison mythology. And the very fact that for a while I’d counted the victory as amounting to some kind of importance now described to me only the slackening of my own grip on my scale of values. I was like one of the cons Walter’s cousin had described on the demo as suffering from too much bird. The victory was purely relative. Six months ago it wouldn’t have been worth piss in the wind to me. Now I was stoking up on small glory.
I lay on my back and lit a fag. That way I couldn’t see the wall or the hospital or any of the other hospital buildings. There was just the sky and the drifting clouds and the weight of the warm earth falling away beneath me.
I’d spent seven of the last ten years inside. The longest time all at once had been eleven months, the time before this last lot. I’d missed the first year of Timmy’s life.
Only twenty-two years and seven months of this one to go.
I stood up and looked at the wall.
The wall is dark against the night sky. Now and then clouds slide slowly over the face of the moon. Beyond the wall is the building, its rooftops just visible over the wall’s lip.
“Are we going over, then?” says Jackie Robinson.
“That’s why we came, isn’t it?” says Tony Cook. “No point in coming, otherwise.”
We are standing outside the approved school they’ve left recently. Earlier, in the cellar club, after the Bennies had been taken, they’d started talking about the school, about the lads they’d left behind, how great they were, how I should meet them.
We all shin up the wall and drop down the other side. Silence. The huge building is lit only at two windows. It is still and solid and its outline makes me shudder. All those kids in there, enclosed, regimented.
“That’s Derwent’s window,” says Jackie, nodding at one of the lights.
“The bastard,” says Tony.
We are about to move towards the building when a downstairs light is switched on. We freeze. A door opens and light pours out into the night. Someone comes out and walks round the corner of the building, out of sight. We turn and run and make it back over the wall.
“Bloody bastards,” says Tony. “I bet it was Derwent.”
“Bound to be,” says Jackie. “The sod never sleeps.”
We walk the streets until it is time for Jackie and Tony to turn off. We arrange to meet in the club up West again tomorrow. I look at my watch. I reckon that it will take me at least two hours to walk home. By that time it will be five-thirty in the morning. But I never make it. On my way home the Filth stops me, inspired by my Teddy Boy clothes. I am searched, and they find my file, my offensive weapon. Later I am conditionally discharged, but that doesn’t matter to me, one way or the other. The important thing is that now I’m one of the boys, and that now I can start to rise above them. I have the first of my credentials.
When I got back to E wing things had changed. Everything was different.
The wing was definitely under new management. Gordon was still there. Naturally. But it was Creasey who was running things. Everything was sweetness and light. The whole thing was a different place.
It almost made you think twice about making it over the wall.
For a start, the wing had been almost cleared. We were left six-handed. The only three left from the original lot apart from me were Ray, Tommy and Terry. And of course, Walter. Seventy-seven years to go between us. It’s that kind of incidental arithmetic that makes it ridiculous not to think of going over.
Strachey was still there but he didn’t count. We just let him get on with it. The rest of the monsters had been locked off upstairs which in some ways was a pity.
The other
new members were a real couple of cases: one was Albert Atkin, a double lifer. He’d killed one boy when he was seventeen and another one in the nick inside of his first year. He’d been a lucky bastard because topping was still in style when he’d done his thing but he’d got himself a reprieve because of his age. Even at this time he was just knocking twenty-one. He was a good-looking boy without his glasses, a bit fey, over six foot. He’d drift around the place looking like the Bad Lord Byron. In fact he was very intelligent. His favourite reading was the Greek tragedies. He was a bit like me, a self-educator. The two of us would have marathon discussions on literature that would irritate the others no end because there was no point of reference for them to jump in. The other thing about him was his conviction that to be any worth he had to be tough and courageous. This was alien to his basic nature, but he believed the view of the world he’d absorbed to be true and so he was always in conflict with himself. Apparently it had led him to his second killing: he’d been insulted by his prospective victim and he couldn’t stand the idea of himself not being up to the rules and so rather than cop out he’d gone down for another dose of life.
The other newcomer was Jimmy Gearing. We called him Karate, because that’s how he’d killed his one. Or so he said in court. Personally I had my doubts. He was an exaggerator. He was one of those guys who are so unsure of themselves, of their acceptability, they just run off at the mouth with stuff about how they’ve done this and how they’ve done that and what they’re going to do next and the irony is that they become a pain in about one minute flat whereas if they kept their mouths shut for maybe half an hour then at least they wouldn’t be left sitting all on their own. Karate would also get extremely excited at any mention of sex or any number of subjects he was allergic to. After a week or so of his presence I began to think the proper nickname for him should have been Lonely.
So being so short-handed, we virtually had the run of the entire wing. We were unlocked at seven in the morning and we didn’t have to go away to our cells again till nine in the evening. All our meals were in association. Within the prescribed limits, we virtually ordered our own lives. There was strictly no ordering about for the sake of it. For instance, Ray and I did the cleaning. Originally this had been done by short-timers. Though there was less work, there only being two of us, Ray and I used to tear into it for about two hours every morning, sweat flowing off us. This way we got more leisure. The screws hated to see it but we now worked unsupervised so they had to lump it.
The rest of them worked in the new wrought iron shop. That wasn’t the only new innovation. There was a new exercise pen, big enough to play football in, and we also got Creasey to organise some tennis gear.
Sometimes in the evenings we’d have lecturers from the local university to give us talks and twice a week the cook gave us cooking classes which was really just an excuse to have a decent meal. The other evening activity was weightlifting, along with telly-watching, and as we’d got the run of the two TV rooms there was no arguing as to what went on.
Life droned on like this for a little while until I’d decided who to pull as far as making one was concerned. Karate and Atkin were right out. Ray had once been on Walter’s firm. At Ray’s trial the Filth had offered Ray a trade: although Walter was already inside, they’d told Ray that if he’d give them some more stuff on Walter’s operations they’d leave out the bird. Ray had turned it down and he’d got a ten. I’m not saying you deserve anything for not being a grass but even Walter had been moved to offer him a business when he got out. Although at this time Ray wasn’t very pally with Walter, I wasn’t going to risk pulling in someone who had a present coming from Walter, and apart from Terry whom I couldn’t quite suss, that left Tommy. So one day I dropped by his cell.
He was lying on his pit staring up at the ceiling. I sat down on his chair. Neither of us said anything for a while. I took out a couple of snouts and gave one to Tommy and lit us both up and he grunted but that was all. We just stayed as we were, smoking.
“I don’t know about you, Tommy,” I said eventually, “one big happy family it may be at the moment, but I’ve a feeling the novelty might wear off during the next twenty odd years or so.”
Tommy didn’t say anything. The thought flashed across my mind that Walter might have put him in it about the possibility of me approaching him and offered Tommy a little present as well.
“Or is it the time off for good behaviour you’re thinking of?” I said.
Tommy smiled.
“Sure, Billy,” he said. “I don’t mind sitting here for fifteen years instead of twenty. There’s a big difference, isn’t there?”
I smiled and said nothing. After a time Tommy said:
“I’ll tell you, Billy. There’s only one thing I think about while I’m awake and that’s the top of that wall. And when I’m not awake I dream about it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m thirty-one, Billy,” Tommy said. “As far as I’m concerned there’s no alternative.”
I didn’t want to break the unwritten law by asking him point blank if he’d got any plans; there’d been times when a con had told another con an idea and he’d been beaten to the line. So instead I said: “Walter’s of that frame of mind, too.”
“I thought he might be,” Tommy said. “Mind you, with him you’ve got to be a fucking mind-reader.”
“Right,” I said. “He doesn’t put much about.”
Tommy’s hamster took a few more turns on its wheel.
So we were both agreed about Walter.
“All I was thinking,” I said, “was that if either of us were in the running for making one, and it coincided with somebody else, or something like that . . .”
“I know,” said Tommy. “You’ve got to know the form, but there aren’t all that many people you can bank on to give you fair odds. So you tend to try and make it sans assistance.”
“That’s right,” I said.
There was a silence.
“Course,” he said, “there are times when you can’t do it all on your own.”
I nodded.
“Tell me, Billy,” he said. “You’re a deep thinker. Where would you say you got the most privacy in this wing? Apart from after nine o’clock in the evening, I mean.”
There was only one place in the wing where you could work at making one and that was in the shower room.
The shower room was down on the Ones on the inside corner of the L. There were four stalls on the right hand side as you went in, a tin locker, and a long wooden gymnasium bench and a couple of standard cell issue tables. There was a big window to the left of the door about three foot wide, six foot high and six foot off the ground that faced out into the exercise yard. The window was barred and meshed and wired up to the control room. Apart from this window there was no other ventilation in the shower room and the window would steam up solid and even if the door was open, looking into the shower room from the doorway all you could see were fleshy muzzy blobs walking about. So as far as privacy was concerned the shower room was wide open. But the floor was concrete and the walls were built of three inch stone blocks so they were out too.
But for the sake of the discussion I said: “Well, obviously, the shower room. But beyond that feature, there’s nothing else going for it.”
Tommy sat up and swung his legs over the side of his pit and stood up.
“I want to show you something,” he said, and walked out of the cell.
I hurried after him. We walked down to the shower room in silence.
The shower room was empty except for Strachey. He was sitting on the gymnasium bench reading Playhour.
“It’s time for ‘Jackanory,’ Strachey,” Tommy said.
Strachey wobbled his monstrous head in our direction.
“Out,” said Tommy.
Strachey got to his feet like a
n over-seventy and dragged himself out of the shower room. When he’d gone Tommy pointed to the corner nearest to the door on the left hand side as you came in. The window to the left of the door was three foot away from the corner. But instead of the wall following on to make a natural corner with the side wall, it cut across the corner forming a diagonal.
“Billy,” Tommy said, “have a look at this bit of wall here and tell me if you think there’s anything unusual about it?”
Tommy liked the dialectical approach to things.
I shrugged.
“Not really,” I said. “Just a bit of brickwork.”
“Billy,” he said, “they never do anything in the nick without a reason, no matter how fucking stupid. That corner’s been cut off for a reason.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Bet your fucking life, man. It’s either an old chimney or a ventilation shaft that’s been bricked off,”
“Could be.”
“It’s the same all the way up the Twos and Threes. Must be on the Fours as well. It’s got to be. We ought to probe it and see what we get.”
“But Tommy,” I said, “right here in the middle of the wing it won’t get us anywhere.”
“I know, but it might take us somewhere. Supposing we could get down into the cellars. Maybe we could find a weakness there. Or maybe we could crawl right up it and come out on the roof. You never know, Billy.”
Tommy looked at me and I looked at the corner.
“What else have we got?” Tommy said.
I nodded.
“Sweet fuck all,” Tommy said.
“If we have a crack,” I said, “just you and me, right? Nobody else.”
“Right.”
“Especially no Wally.”
“Right.”
We both looked at the corner again.
I lie on my bed, staring at the blackness above me. I can’t sleep. I am sick of the remand home. I am sick of being treated like a kid. The whole place is full of kids. My shop breaking offences are rather heady stuff to them. I am the man. Small boys vie with each other to eat my cabbage, which it is forbidden not to finish up. They are just kids and the place is a bore. I must get away. When I’m sentenced I want to go to prison with my mates. I don’t want to be the odd one out because of my age. Escaping from the remand home will put me in line for a sentence. I want to take what they take.
