The Loose Screw (14 page)

Our journey up the M1 took us about two and a half hours, and as we turned into the fairly well-concealed entrance of the college I caught a glimpse of The Union Jack public house. It was not a very promising sight and I could only hope that the beer tasted better than the external appearance of the pub would lead you to think. We proceeded up the long driveway over a cattle grid and soon were halted by a security barrier. After identifying ourselves by remote intercom to the security office, the barrier was lifted and we drove round to the main car park. The scene was not dissimilar to the one I remember at Copthorne Barracks all those years ago. It was, perhaps, not quite so hectic, however there were large numbers of people running around in various stages of the reporting process. We parked the car and made our way to the main entrance of the old stately home to report in with security and be told what to do next.

Eventually we discovered what rooms we had been allocated and were advised that we had approximately one hour before we had to congregate in the main lecture hall for our welcome speech and introduction. We collected our luggage and made our way to our rooms. Presumably, as we had arrived together we had been allocated rooms next to one another. At first we all thought this was great, but as the course went on Geoff was to regret having me as a neighbour. I used to knock him up every morning at about three o'clock to borrow some of his coffee and his kettle in an attempt to try to sober myself up a little before going to bed.

The rooms, all singles, were actually of a very high standard and, although not en suite, they did have a sink, which provided an excellent substitute urinal when the walk down the corridor seemed a bit too long in the wee small hours. The only disadvantage was that the doors to the rooms were on springs, which shut rather rapidly. I think we were all guilty of locking ourselves out on the way to the showers on more than one occasion. We would then have to make the humiliating walk across the courtyard, in full view of the whole college and wrapped only in a towel, to borrow the master key from security.

We made our way into the main lecture hall and took our seats for the initial briefing. I was surprised to notice how many of us there were. I guessed that there were about two hundred men and women packed into the seats overlooking the stage awaiting the opening address by the college governor, Mr Berry. My first thoughts when he appeared on stage were that we had made a mistake and were in fact at a Sinn Fein rally, because Mr Berry could have been Gerry Adams' twin brother. Maybe this was why I did not take to him then or indeed for the duration of the course. Another reason I knew I wasn't going to like this man became apparent as soon as he began speaking. He had a very arrogant manner and from the start he spoke to us as if we were all primary school children and he was the headmaster. He did welcome us with his first sentence, but then proceeded to tell us how he would not tolerate this and would not tolerate that. He warned us of the consequences of breaking any of the long list of college rules and seemed to be basing all his threats on the conduct of the last course, which seemed unfair to me considering we had not even started yet. In truth, a good majority of us did break almost every rule he described to us, which all seemed to be linked to alcohol-related antics, but no one was ever dismissed as a result.

When he had said his piece he handed over to one of his staff, who began reading out the names of recruits to assign everyone to the sections that they were to be placed in for the duration of the course. I have never been very good at meeting people for the first time and so I listened carefully, hoping that I would be placed into the same section as one of my companions from Wandsworth. Unfortunately it appeared that the staff had carefully structured the sections so that no one who had carried out the two-week initial training at the same prison was placed in the same section.

I soon discovered that I was to join F-Section, which seemed to be even more carefully put together than the rest as we were the only all-male section and mainly comprised all the ex-servicemen on the course. Maybe Berry wanted to keep all his potential rule breakers together for ease of monitoring, but as the weeks went by I think he lived to regret this decision, as he had underestimated just how much we would all pull together. One thing we all knew from our past experiences was that there is little they can do if you all stick together, and there was no way that he could sack a complete section if we all took responsibility for one of our number breaking the rules. That way it was impossible to prove who was responsible and therefore who to punish.

Once we had taken our places with our new sections, we were introduced to our section training staff. Each section had a principal officer and two senior officers who were responsible for the day-to-day training. Our principal officer was a man called Dave Oram. He was immaculately dressed with razor creases in his shirt and trousers, and his prison-issue boots were highly polished to a standard I had not seen since my army training days. His impeccable appearance, however, did not mean that he was a bullshit merchant. He was actually a very nice man who had no ideas above his station and he was always very fair and honest when dealing with us on any matter. He was almost at retirement age and, although he had served a great many years in many different prisons, he was nothing like the 'storytellers' or bully boy element we had seen at Wandsworth. He just took great pride in his personal appearance, a quality that the next instructor we met did not seem to worry too much about.

Mr Ian English was slightly overweight and his ill-fitting uniform looked as though it had never seen the hot side of an iron in its entire career. However, hat he lacked in self-pride he certainly made up for with his sense of humour, and we grew to look forward to his lessons as his tales always had us rolling about the floor in fits of laughter. He had joined the college recently from Belmarsh, although most of his career had previously been at Pentonville. This meant that I was able to learn a lot from him about the place I hoped to be posted to and quash some of the bad rumours I had heard about the place from the dedicated Wandsworth officers.

Among the many funny stories Mr English had was one about two Jamaicans who he had had on his wing at Pentonville and who were awaiting deportation. They claimed to be heavily involved with black magic and were desperately fighting deportation as they believed a terrible fate awaited them at home. Ian decided to use this fact to play one of his practical jokes and, after some research into voodoo and black magic, he came up with his plan. Before the wing was unlocked he armed himself with some salt and red ink, and on the landing outside the two inmates' cell he proceeded to mark out some form of voodoo sign with the salt and ink, which doubled up as pig's blood. When the order to unlock the wing came, the two men were about to exit the cell as normal when they spotted this sign on the floor. Ian said their feet froze, suspended above the sign, and with a chilling shriek and a deafening cry of "Lordy, Lordy, goodness gracious me!" the pair leapt back into their cell and locked themselves up. Despite his attempts to explain the joke, the pair of them were convinced they had received some sort of threat in the form of this sign and it took Ian and colleagues some three days before they could persuade the pair to come out of the cell. Although Ian had researched that salt and pig's blood were some of the materials used in black magic ceremonies, he had made up the way he had laid these materials out on the floor. He was later to discover that his design actually bore a striking resemblance to that of a genuine voodoo death sign.

Another of his stories involved a dispute he had recently had with a neighbour concerning the siting of a compost heap. Ian had lost the legal battle, but, not content with the outcome, he had set to work on a plan to reap his own vengeance. A keen fisherman, he always had an abundant supply of bait breeding in his garage, so late one night after his neighbour's lights had gone out he armed himself with a bag of maggots and proceeded to empty them through next door's letter box. The outcome cost him dearly in the small claims court, which did not listen to his plea of insanity, but Ian remained firm in his opinion that it had been worth it just to hear the reaction the following morning.

The third and final instructor in F-Section was a man from Canterbury prison named John Kirtley. At first glance he looked as if he was going to be a nasty piece of work. Like Ian's, his uniform although always clean seemed also to be allergic to irons, and he had a hard-looking face framed with a mass of wiry black hair and an equally unkempt thick black moustache. At first I got the impression he was an ex-military man, but this was not the case as he informed us that he had joined the Prison Service at the age of eighteen. In fact John was a very quiet man who, like Dave Oram, had a wealth of experience to share with us. He was very highly trained in the control and restraint technique, a form of self-defence taught to all prison officers. John was not only a riot team commander but also a fully qualified instructor. Unlike some of the staff we had encountered at Wandsworth and a few of the training staff we would meet later in the course, John knew how effective this technique was. He could not impress on us enough the need to carry it out using only the approved methods we were taught and how potentially dangerous it could be if we abused our skills and went too far when carrying them out. He told us of many occasions when staff had caused serious damage to inmates or had caused their colleagues to be placed in dangerous positions due to their being too overzealous when performing C&R. It is something that was designed to prevent injury and damage occurring to both staff and inmates during incidents, but many staff do abuse this knowledge and adapt their skills to inflict as much pain as possible to inmates.

The most common types of injury sustained are damaged or broken wrists, due to the nature of the holds used, when too much pressure is applied. At the other end of the scale there have been allegations made that some inmates have died as a result of poorly executed C&R methods by staff that were not correctly supervised or had not been sent on the annual refresher courses. Once again, it is a valuable skill to have and it is necessary due to the occasional behaviour of some inmates not only to protect yourself as an officer but also to prevent one inmate causing harm to another or even himself. Unfortunately, some staff do abuse it and there is not enough done to monitor its use correctly.

It was during this initial meeting that I learnt some really 'good' news -I had been chosen to be F-Section's representative to form a fire picket that night. Not only, as you may recall from earlier, did I have no good memories of carrying out fire picket duties, but this would certainly put paid to my plans to check out the watering holes as previously planned. It almost felt as though they knew of my love of lager and were trying to make my life difficult from the first day. Nevertheless there was nothing I could do about it and I took some comfort in the fact that the duty was a sleeping one after midnight, which meant I could return to my own room at that time. I was also assured that each of us would have to carry out this duty at some stage during the course and it was better to get it out of the way now.

After lunch in the very nice mess hall with some charming waitresses on hand to serve us, something that most of us from our backgrounds had not experienced before, we were introduced to our classroom. F-Section was housed on the top floor in the last classroom in the building and the room was laid out with the instructors' table at the front and our chairs in a semicircle around the remaining three walls.

When we arrived, the first thing we did was rearrange the names that had been placed on each chair so we were sat in the small groups we had begun to form at lunch. The first thing the instructors did when they arrived was rearrange us back into the original seating plan for the customary creeping death. As we made our way around the classroom, I discovered that there were only about five of our number that were not ex-services and we all made up a group of men from all over the country.

Our age group ranged from twenty through to fifty-eight and it was interesting to notice what a mixture of personalities there was among us. One young man, with whom I was to become good friends during the course, was 'Fitz' Fitzgerald. He was about my own age and like me had come from an army background but originated from Manchester. Fitz had a great sense of humour and between us we would keep the rest of the section amused for hours, either in the classroom or during our drunken escapades in the evening.

I masked my uneasiness at meeting people for the first time by resorting to humour, and one of the first things I did was tell everyone that I was at the wrong college and thought that I had in fact joined the Fire Brigade. This storyline was kept up for the whole of the course and earned me the nickname of Fireman Jim. I think I became so involved in this role that I even had some of the instructors believing I was slightly mad. It was similar to the way that the old prisoners of war would take bricks for walks to feign madness in order to be repatriated. I would even wear a plastic fireman's hat, which Fitz brought me back from a weekend in Blackpool, instead of my Prison Service cap -that really had them talking about me at boardroom level!

Talking of fire, once our introductions were over and we had finished our evening meal, it was time for me to report for my fire picket duty. There were six of us in total and when we reported we were broken down into three groups of two. Our duties consisted of patrolling the grounds of the college between the hours of six and midnight, with at least one of our two-man teams out at any time. Actually, 'two-man teams' is politically incorrect because we did have two ladies amongst our numbers. It was with one of these -a young girl called Sam -that I was paired off. She seemed to be a very nice young lady who told me she was twenty and originated from somewhere in Yorkshire. She was quite an attractive girl and was more than keen to chat away all night. This suited me, as I had not had much experience of working with women up to this point and was feeling a bit uncomfortable if not a little shy.