by Jake Arnott
And in the meantime Karen was more confident. More assertive. She’d been writing for Case Con, the radical social work journal. She talked of the need for consciousness raising and the important imput of new ideas from the Women’s Movement for social change. She wrote of the implications that a feminist understanding of aspects of the family and child rearing could have for political understanding of social work. Feminist ideas were now in the ascendant and could no longer be ignored as a critical framework.
I couldn’t help but feel somewhat undermined. I can’t say that I took too kindly to my newly supposed status as oppressor. It bothered me, this ‘all men are bastards’ analysis. It was too familiar. A doctrine of original sin, where all men are profoundly bad.
So our relationship became frosty, to say the least. We had separate rooms in the house now. We still had sex but it would always have to be Karen who instigated it. A ‘re-alignment of the economy of sexual relations’, she called it. The personal is political, she kept reminding me.
Though it struck me that rather, our politics had become personal. She always insisted she was involved in something positive, something that would ‘make a difference’, as she put it, whilst I was merely obsessed with the more exotic aspects of the male psyche. And it was at this time that she first started using the ‘zookeeping’ jibe against deviancy theory. She was particularly dismissive of my continued contact with Mr Starks. ‘So, how’s your pet experiment?’ she asked me once when I’d finished intently reading a letter from him. And another time she declared: ‘You wouldn’t want him to be released, would you? That would spoil everything. He’s like your little rat in a maze.’
And the awful thing was, she was right. I was fascinated by his predicament. It was hard to resist seeing him as a long-term project. As a subject. But what bothered me wasn’t any desire for him to be incarcerated but rather an odd little fear at the back of my mind at the thought of him being given his freedom. The notion of Harry Starks at large scared me a little.
Then one evening Janine came to the house. I hadn’t seen much of her since the affair. She was a second-year now so she wasn’t at any of my lectures. To be honest I’d been avoiding her.
She’d cut her hair short which accentuated her wide eyes and full mouth and made her look quite gamine. She blinked mischievously as she stood on the doorstep.
‘Janine,’ I announced as cheerily as possible, hoping that she detected no nervousness in my tone. ‘Good to see you.’
‘Hi, Lenny,’ she drawled as she walked past me into the hallway.
‘Come in,’ I said, stupidly, and closed the door.
She looked up at the walls and ceiling and gave a little sigh.
‘What a lovely house,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ I said, a little more frantically than I’d wanted. ‘Can I get you a drink? Go through into the living room.’
She turned to me suddenly. Her eyes and mouth formed Os on her face.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I haven’t come to see you, Lenny.’
I frowned, and at that moment Karen came thundering down the stairs.
‘Janine!’ she called out.
Janine looked up and smiled. Karen virtually landed on her, planting a big wet kiss on her mouth.
‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ said Karen breathily, not even acknowledging my presence. ‘Come on. Let’s go upstairs.’
Later that night as I lay in bed I could hear strange noises coming from Karen’s room above mine. Tremulous moans, urgent cooing and deep-throated laughter. Distant night sounds murmuring through floorboards and plaster. I tried to ignore it all and get some sleep but I couldn’t help myself straining to listen.
Harry had started a BSc in Sociology with the Open University in 1973. He wrote and told me he thought that the course ‘would be a piece of piss. The work you did with us back at Long Marsh has really come in handy.’ He seemed to have settled at Leicester, for the time being, so I could arrange visits with some sort of reliability.
‘You look a bit fraught, Lenny,’ he told me. ‘Still having trouble with your bird?’
I’d written to him about my problems with Karen. He was easy to confide in. He was so blunt and oblivious to the intricacies of sexual politics.
‘I think she might be becoming a lesbian.’
Harry gave me an open-mouthed stare, then burst into laughter.
‘Sorry, Len,’ he said, trying to straighten his face.
‘I don’t know what to do, Harry.’
He shrugged.
‘Search me. I never had much truck with dykes, to tell you the truth. The Twins used to run a lesbian bar. In the basement of Esmeralda’s. Right old dive, it was.’
‘Well, anyway, how are you?’
‘I dunno,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Doing my time, I suppose. Thing is, it’s not my time I’m doing. I’ve had my time taken away from me. I’m doing their time. It’s turning me into a zombie.’
‘I don’t know, Harry. You seem pretty sharp.’
‘Oh yeah. Abstract thinking. I can do that, no bother. But if I start to think about anything real in my life, I feel I could crack up. I’ve seen it happen enough times. Remember Jeff ? Little Jeff from the Submarine?’
I nodded. The mild-mannered murderer.
‘He’s flipped. He’s only gone and found God, hasn’t he? I suppose he thinks he’s found some sort of reality. He said to me, “I have decided to live inside my head.” I told him, “Well, I’m sure there’s enough room inside there, Jeff old son.”’
Harry laughed flatly.
‘Thing is,’ he went on, ‘Jeff reckons he can escape from it all by going inside. Well I couldn’t do that.’
‘Yeah, but in a way, you’re using the inside of your head as a refuge. By studying.’
‘Nah, Lenny. You’re missing the point. What’s inside is neither here nor there. It’s not what’s inside of me that’ll make a damn bit of difference. It’s what I’m inside. That’s the reality.’
Then, a few months later, when I turned up at Leicester with a Visiting Order to see Harry, I was told that the visit was cancelled. Harry had had all privileges suspended for twenty-eight days. For offences against ‘Good Order and Discipline’, was all I was told. I had no idea what had happened. I wrote to him but got no reply. At first I worried about losing contact with him. But as the weeks went by I found myself forgetting him.
Yet unexpectedly, like a particularly vivid dream, strange images of Harry would begin to haunt me. If I concentrated on him, I figured that maybe he had, as he’d always feared, gone mad. It was a disturbing thought but there was nothing I could do about it, I reasoned.
Then, about three months later, I received a letter from Durham. Harry had been moved back there on the Ghost Train. I got a Visiting Order and went to see him. I dreaded what state he might be in. But as he was led out to meet me, he seemed in good enough spirits. His hair had got longer and he didn’t seem to be making so much fuss about his appearance. But he looked almost relaxed with an indifferent air about him that I recognised from all my time at universities. He looked like an academic.
The suspension of privileges and a spell in solitary had come about, it turned out, from a fight with a fellow prisoner.
‘What the hell happened?’ I demanded, almost chidingly.
Harry shrugged.
‘This bloke on the wing at Leicester. Poisoner. He’s doing a post-grad Open University course and he reckons he knows it all. He was always winding me up. Kept going on that sociology was a soft option. How what I was studying wasn’t rigorous enough. That I was just doing a mickey-mouse degree. Got right on my wick. So I did him. Gave him rigorous. Right in the goolies.’
‘Harry . . .’
‘I know, I know,’ he protested. ‘It was stupid. But he was driving me crazy. Going on about how social sciences didn’t have the right to be called sciences. Acting all superior.’
‘So, what’s he studying?’
‘C
hemistry.’
I laughed.
‘I know. A fucking poisoner studying chemistry. Show’s you how stupid the Prison Service is. That cunt ought to be in Broadmoor. Still, it was a stupid thing to do. I’ve really got to stay out of trouble.’
‘That wouldn’t be a bad idea, Harry.’
‘I don’t mind punishment. I can take that. It’s losing remission that bothers me. I don’t want to add another second to my time in here. Thing is, Lenny, back in the fifties I’d probably have got the birch or the cat and that would have been that.’
I winced and Harry chuckled softly at my response. Of course, as a criminologist, I knew that corporal punishment hadn’t been abolished in British prisons until the early sixties, but the thought of it still shocked me.
‘Nah, it would have been better,’ Harry went on. ‘Because with corporal punishment you didn’t lose any remission or have to do any other punishment. It hurt like fuck at the time, and of course it was humiliating.’
‘It was barbaric.’
‘Yeah, yeah, but then it was over with. To be honest Lenny, a lot of these reforms, they don’t necessarily make it any easier for those condemned. It’s more for the benefit of liberal fuckers like you, so you can sleep easily thinking that you’re living in a civilised society. I mean, a few strokes over someone’s bare arse, that’s barbaric, but locking up some poor fucker for years, pretending that you’re rehabilitating him, that’s OK. It’s all nicely hidden away and forgotten about. I mean, look at what I did. If someone owed me money and couldn’t pay up in time, I’d smack them around a bit. Oh yeah, that’s terrible. But look at what happens in normal society when someone’s in debt. Their house gets repossessed or the bailiffs call around to take everything that’s not bolted down. Which would you rather have?’
I shrugged, preferring to leave it as a rhetorical question.
‘Yeah, anyway. I’ve lost a bit of remission which is a bit of a piss off. But I’m going to be a good boy from now on. Concentrate on my studies.’
He gave me a shark-like grin. I smiled back.
‘Well, it’s bound to go down well with the parole board, isn’t it? And when you come to think of it, it does kind of let me off the hook and all. I mean, this sociology of deviance. I could tell them that my actions were consistent with the value system of the subculture within which I was socialised. Couldn’t I?’
He looked at me intently. I didn’t know what to say. He suddenly burst out laughing.
‘Don’t worry, Lenny. I ain’t that stupid. Your face. No, I know that won’t wash with any kind of board. Harry Starks, they’ll think, still a criminal but now he knows why he does it. No, don’t you worry, I’ll be all remorseful and shit.’
‘You’ve got to play along with the system.’
‘Yeah, I know Lenny, I know. Thing is, I always have, in a way. But yeah, keep my head down. No more kicking the shit out of chemistry graduates. But to tell you the truth Lenny, it did get to me. What he said.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, maybe he’s right, in a way. Maybe sociology isn’t rigorous enough.’
‘Do you think that?’
‘Well, I don’t know. Some things. Like deviancy theory. I wasn’t doing all that to rebel, you know. I wanted to be legitimate. I was just a bit, you know, heavy handed.’
He looked down at his heavy hands.
‘I just think,’ he went on, ‘you know, there’s something missing in a lot of these theories.’
‘Well, that’s a good thing, surely,’ I replied. ‘It means you’re developing a critical approach.’
Harry certainly developed a keen intellectual insight into sociological theory as time went on. I found myself wanting to run things by him now, as a way of checking my ideas. His comments were always direct and often quite ruthless but he came to represent a test to sloppy thinking, particularly on criminology. And I felt I needed that now more than ever.
For my part, I could still guide him to key texts and references that might be relevant to the rough ideas he started to formulate. He exhibited a strong tendency towards structuralism. It seemed almost instinctive and maybe, after all, he scarcely had any choice in this way of thinking. He’d spent years of experiencing movement through rigid structures in both time and space. This, for him, was where meaning resided. So I pointed him towards Levi-Strauss and some other French thinkers I thought might be useful to him.
We developed a strange kind of discourse through letters and occasional visits. I never envied his predicament but I was sometimes jealous of his ability to concentrate, with few distractions, on study. This was, of course, all bound up with the act of will he was exerting in order to get through his sentence without going mad.
He was constantly surprising me. I was astonished that he was able to articulate political as well as intellectual criticisms on deviancy theory.
‘You’re a Marxist, ain’t you, Lenny?’ he asked on one of my visits.
‘Yeah,’ I replied, somewhat hesitantly. ‘Not an orthodox Marxist, but, yeah.’
‘Well, it strikes me that old Karl wouldn’t have much truck with the sociology of deviance. I mean, criminals, misfits, deviants. Now, my old man would have called them lumpenproletariat.’
‘Your father was a communist?’
‘Yeah. And an orthodox one at that. Party member. It was big in the East End back then.’
‘So he was at Cable Street?’
Harry laughed.
‘Christ yes. He was always bloody reliving it. “We turned them back.” Yeah, it was like Stalingrad to him. Thing is, a lot of people credit Jack Spot and his gang for beating the blackshirts, but my old man always maintains it was the Communist Youth League.’
‘Who was Jack Spot?’
‘Jewish gangster. He ran the spielers and protection in the East End before the war.’
‘So you were never tempted to join the Party?’
‘Nah. The old man wanted me to, of course. I could never see the point myself. I mean, communism, it’s a cheap racket. They’ve got nothing and they want to share it with you. Sorry to disappoint you, Len.’
‘So you joined Jack Spot’s gang instead.’
‘Nah, I never liked Spotty. The Twins worked for him for a while. That was before they got this idea that they were going to take over the world. Nah, I worked for Billy Hill at first. Before I got set up on my own. Billy and Jack didn’t exactly see eye to eye. Anyway, going back to my original point. How can you square Marxism with deviancy theory?’
‘That’s a good point.’
Harry cackled, knowing that he’d got me on this one.
‘Strikes me,’ he went on, ‘that it lets too many people off the hook. Now I know you’ve got some sort of romantic notion about crime. Yeah, you have Lenny, don’t try and deny it. I bet you wish that I was a bank robber, something glamorous like that. At the heavy like some sort of modern-day Robin Hood. But it wasn’t like that. You see, crime, well what I did, it was just business with the gloves off.’
‘Yes, but it’s still labelled deviant if it breaks social norms . . .’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Harry went on, impatiently. ‘But what’s important is what you can get away with.’
At the end of 1975 I started work on my book, Doing Time: Social Control and Subcultural Resistance. I used some of the observations I’d made of the men on Long Marsh’s E Wing and made comparisons with ethnographic studies of other deviant groups. The Subculture of the Submarine, I titled this section (rather snappily, I thought). But I began to feel that it was the system itself that needed analysing, not just those groups of people who found themselves in opposition to it. I found myself using Harry’s impromptu critique of Becker; our problem isn’t that we’re outsiders, Lenny, it’s that we’re insiders. I found that so many of Harry’s opinions were informing my approach to my subject. The rat in the maze had yielded results. But his thoughts always seemed to challenge rather than confirm my theories.
Ka
ren left and went to live in a women-only household. She now defined herself as a lesbian separatist. I felt quite empty about the whole thing. Inadequate. I tried therapy. Some Reichian nonsense which didn’t get me very far. I even went along to a men’s group meeting. Sat in a circle with a lot of other sad blokes. Talking about getting in touch with our feelings. It was embarrassing.
In 1976 Harry graduated from the Open University with a 2:1. No gown or graduation ceremony of course but Harry looked pleased with himself when I got a VO and went to congratulate him.
‘Letters after my name,’ Harry mused. ‘That ought to impress them.’
I guessed that he meant the parole board. I smiled weakly, trying to hide my discomfort. There was that spasm of anxiety again. The thought of Harry getting released.
‘So what will you do with your qualifications? Once you’re on the, er . . .’ I coughed, ‘outside.’
‘Dunno.’ Harry shrugged then grinned. ‘Maybe move in on your racket. You know, academia.’
‘Really?’
Harry burst out laughing.
‘Only joking, Len. Christ your face. Nah, don’t you worry, old son. I was thinking of something more practical, you know.’
‘What like?’
‘Well, I was thinking, with the combination of my experience and my studies I could work in an advisory capacity. Management consultancy, something like that. I don’t know what you think’s so funny, Lenny. A lot of people would give their right arm to know what I know about business.’
Doing Time got published in 1977 and I sent Harry a copy. It had had mixed reviews but it was Harry’s opinion that I was most interested in.
‘So?’ I asked him. ‘What do you think?’
‘Well,’ Harry shrugged. ‘It was interesting. Yeah, it was all right.’
