The Loose Screw (15 page)

As we made our way through the wooded area of the college grounds Sam said something that would confirm to me that she did not share my shyness. She stopped by a bench, looked around her, turned to me and said in her strong Yorkshire accent, "This looks like a reet good place for a shag, don't yer think?" I could not quite believe what I had just heard and was unsure whether she was making a general comment or inviting me to help her find out if her opinion was correct. It was the sort of spontaneous invitation you would normally only read about in the pages of a dirty magazine's readers' letters section, so I have been told. I decided not to tempt fate so early on in the course and just agreed with her and then commented on the time and how we must get going.

Sam and I remained friends for the duration of the course, although despite this initial encounter we never did get intimate. She eventually got together with another member of F-Section, although some years later when our paths met again whilst out enjoying a drink she confessed to me that I had been the one she fancied and she had been disappointed that I had never returned her advances. Not wishing to make her feel unwanted again, I did make up for it later that evening and regretted not taking her up on her offer sooner. This took place during the time I was having serious doubts about my relationship with Lauren's mum. I was, however, still living there and, due to Sam's enthusiasm, I had to ensure I kept a shirt on permanently for almost two weeks until the scars had healed on my back. I later heard reports that Sam had been sacked for allegedly having an affair with an inmate at Feltham, although this was later overturned when the inmate confessed he had made it up due to a crush he'd had on her. Although offered, Sam did not resume her job after that as she probably felt she could not trust the system again. I have never heard or seen anything of her since.

Another duty we had to carry out that evening was to accompany the orderly officer when he went to ensure the peaceful closure of the college bar. This really got to me, seeing my fellow students falling about drunk and telling me what a good night I had missed. A good night it may have been, but the following morning was to be the one and only morning that I would wake up bright and early without any sign of a hangover, unlike the remainder of the section who had even at that early stage broken open the bottles of little yellow caffeine pills to help them stay awake.

During the course we must have spent a fortune on these small yellow wonder pills and probably all left there as caffeine addicts, but one thing was clear -we could not finish the course without them. The first day and in fact the first week were taken up with the issue of uniform, discussions about the contents of the course and familiarizing ourselves with the college and its facilities and other members of staff.

We discovered that we would learn things such as how to be assertive, how to communicate, how to recognize and deal with potential incidents, as well as learning the basic rules and methods we would need to apply when we took up our posts as prison officers. Our instructors explained that we had such a massive amount of information to learn in a very short period that we would not remember it all and would still need to learn much of the required skills once we were actually deployed at our respective prisons.

We were also told that, although we were required to sit two exams during the course, it would be extremely difficult to fail, as after each lecture the instructors would give us preprepared handouts, which would contain the necessary answers relating to that topic in the exams. This practice, we were to find out at the end of the course, went on without the knowledge of the senior college staff and presumably the Home Office and was something the instructors had devised in order to ensure that the vast majority of their students passed. It would also, therefore, reflect on their skills as tutors and would obviously look good on their own staff reports.

During that first week I not only took the opportunity to sample the two watering holes at our disposal, but also found that the college was equipped with a good gymnasium. I decided that I would use this chance to build up my fitness again after not doing any physical training for a year or so since leaving the army. From the second or third day I set a routine for myself that included a three-mile run followed by an hour's session in the gym. Alternatively I would take part in one of the aerobic classes that had been organized by two of the students who were formerly gym instructors. Of course, all this training was being matched by the amount of alcohol I consumed every night. However, the workouts did at least allow my body to sweat out some of the lager every evening before being replaced, and it did help my performance slightly in that it gave me a little more resistance to the overwhelming urge to fall asleep during lectures that we were all experiencing.

It was in the gym that we took part in the daily C&R lessons as well as carrying out the basic fitness tests required to pass the course. The physical training instructors really loved themselves, and were always looking for a way to impress the ladies on the course. One way they tried to achieve this, as an alternative to forcing themselves into the tightest vests and shorts and parading around like it was the mating season at London Zoo, was to tell the most impressing tale of how they battled this prisoner or single-handedly stopped that riot. Once again, the name Charles Bronson seemed to be the favourite prisoner to claim you had conquered. Nearly every PTI on the course, together with some of the other instructors, laid claim to the fact that they had at one time beaten up this man who was reputed to be the worst prisoner in the system. Every tale consisted of a big build-up story in which Charlie had disabled countless other members of staff and riot teams until being overpowered by whichever hero was relating the story to us at the time.

Even though I was used to hearing such ego-boosting tales from many people, I could not help thinking to myself again that I would hope never to come into contact with this man. Although I did not believe the way that each man told us how they had defeated him, I had little choice but to believe the mental picture I drew of this man according to the increasingly alarming descriptions I was hearing about him. My view would of course change later on when in fact I did have the responsibility of looking after this mythical prison legend, an experience that I will describe later.

The first week quickly came to an end and we all climbed into Geoff's trusty Cortina for the journey home and a weekend break to give us an ideal opportunity to sober up, ready for week two.

The start of week two was when we really began to get into the course, and lessons began in earnest at nine o'clock on Monday morning. By nine thirty we were all outside taking the first of our half-hour smoke breaks, which would become as regular as our mealtimes. Although they seemed a little too regular, they were always a welcome opportunity to get some fresh air, stretch your legs and nurse the hangover with some coffee. I did calculate, however, that if you took the smoke breaks out of the course curriculum you could turn out prison officers in about three and a half days as opposed to nine weeks.

I had in fact stopped smoking almost a year prior to going on this course, but started again as I found I had nothing else to do during these frequent breaks. So that was how the course seemed to continue, with smoke breaks being interrupted by the occasional requirement to attend half an hour's worth of lecture. All the stories we heard about the course prior to arriving seemed to be true. It was actually quite a relaxed course and we were well looked after in terms of food, accommodation and the facilities that were at our disposal.

I quickly discovered that the college bar offered no less than The Union Jack and was a lot more accessible, especially on the homeward journey. To that end, although we did venture to the pub on one or two occasions, most nights were spent in our own bar. F-Section, presumably because we were the only all-male section, quickly adopted the role of the loudest and most dominant of the course. We wasted no time in declaring the college bar our main territory and each night we would assume our positions around the 'Old Joanna' (piano) and from here we would mastermind and execute our various antics.

We soon found that we had generated our own cult following of refugees from other sections to whom, providing we thought they were worthy, we would grant honorary evening membership to the F-Section drinking display team. These members made up for the half a dozen genuine F-Section members who chose not to drink as much as the majority of us. The main core of hardened drinkers and partygoers consisted of Jason, Wilko, Scouse, Fitz and myself.

I have already introduced you to Fitz and you all obviously know me by now, so I will give you a brief description of the other three. Jason was, along with Scouse, not ex-forces like the rest of us, but he did possess the same type of humour and thirst. He was from the Maidstone area of Kent and was, he thought, a bit of a lad. At over six foot he was the tallest in the section, and his main passions were surfing and cars. He was a bit of a boy racer and on the fourth week of the course his passion almost got us kicked out. He returned one Monday morning with a jazzed-up turbocharged XR2, fully equipped with spoilers, a big exhaust and an enormous speaker which took up the entire rear parcel shelf.

The following Thursday night Jason decided to offer Scouse, Fitz and myself a lift to the local chip shop down the road. The trip went well despite his driving at about one hundred miles an hour down the narrow country lane, and deafening everyone in a five-mile radius with his stereo. When we returned to the college car park, however, Jason obviously did not think he had impressed us enough and proceeded to practise his wheel spins and handbrake turns. Unfortunately, during one high-speed pass of the car park we nearly took out a pedestrian, who narrowly dived for cover to avoid contact with our car. We panicked, and without waiting to identify the man we leapt out of the car and made a run for it. We were halted in our tracks by a bark that we in F-Section particularly had come to know well -Mr Berry the college governor. It appeared that it was he that we had narrowly missed and he hissed out of his bright red face that he wanted to see all three of us outside his office at eight o'clock the following morning. We disappeared to the sanctuary of the 'Old Joanna' and spent the whole night worrying how we would manage to get up and be at his office by eight after drinking all night.

Somehow we did manage it and were soon all stood in front of Gerry Adams' desk awaiting our fate. He screamed and shouted and banged his table, giving us the old speech about being irresponsible and reckless. Then he gave us the ultimatum -he wanted one of us to own up and take responsibility for our actions the night before, otherwise he would sack the lot of us on the spot. Fitz and I were used to these bollockings from our army days and knew he was bluffing, as if he had had the authority to sack us he would have done it straight away. He was just using scare tactics. He gave us five minutes outside to discuss it among ourselves, so Fitz and I used this opportunity to persuade the terrified Scouse and Jason that we had to stick together and all claim responsibility. Reluctantly they agreed; they had no real choice, as the obvious candidate for the chop would have been Jason as the car's owner.

We went back into the breach and stood our ground. Berry was fuming at our show of solidarity and screamed that he would make his decision as to whether to sack us all over the weekend, telling us to report back to him on Monday morning. We knew then that he was bluffing, as he would not bring us all the way back on Monday to sack us -wanker. He was just trying to make us sweat a bit over the weekend. Needless to say, he did not sack any of us and we all completed the course.

The only one of us that returned shaking like a leaf on Monday was Scouse, not because he feared facing Berry, but he had been issued a far more serious and painful threat from his 'tart', as he affectionately called his girlfriend, should he lose his job. Scouse was a natural comedian who was blessed with the trademark Liverpool sense of humour. He was a small, wiry man who when not in uniform was always dressed in his native costume -a shell suit -and he must have weighed all of six stone when wet.

Scouse's story, not surprisingly, was hilariously funny to us. He claimed to have been trapped in a disastrous marriage for years to a rather large lady who he referred to as 'the fat tart'. Apparently he suffered years of abuse at the hands of this woman, who would come in from the pub every night and beat him up for no apparent reason. He told us that she terrified him and for years he felt trapped, until one day he reached his breaking point and decided he could take no more. No, he did not put his foot down and tell her who wore the trousers as she was obviously the one who did, he did the next best thing any man would do when trapped and terrified by an opponent who can't be beaten -he ran away. He bought her a bottle of gin, her favourite tipple, waited until she had consumed the lot and was sleeping peacefully on the sofa, gathered his belongings, crept out of the house and disappeared in his Escort. He feared reprisals so much that he, with the help of some friends, entered a life not dissimilar to that which is offered to supergrasses on the witness protection scheme. He had to change his name, constantly move between different friends' houses and was always looking over his shoulder.

This was the main reason Scouse decided to seek refuge within the Prison Service, as he said with her record even 'the fat tart' would not dare look for him in a prison. He had, at the time I knew him, found another partner and was hoping to get a posting as far away from Liverpool as possible; somewhere like Dartmoor or the Isle of Wight would have suited him perfectly. His new partner still seemed to be the dominant one in the relationship, but she never beat him up and he seemed happy enough.

Scouse was always in the centre of all our practical jokes and was involved in another incident that almost saw us dismissed from the service. He was an expert in winding people up, especially in the bar in the evening, and on one occasion was directing his skills to Fitz, Wilko and myself. We decided there was only one way to deal with him on this occasion and that was to use our newly taught but very basic knowledge of C&R and remove him from the bar. This we did but, as we escorted him down the corridor towards the outside fountain in the garden, we ran straight into two of the senior PTIs in the corridor. We released Scouse, but not before they had seen what was going on. It was strictly taboo to practise C&R outside the confines of the training dojo and they told us to report to the gym first thing in the morning. We all thought that that was it. We had got away with the car incident, but this was far worse and we could not see how we would get out of this mess. Luckily for us, the man in overall charge of the gym was our own instructor and he seemed to like our spirit. Consequently, he just shouted and screamed a lot and gave us some menial tasks to carry out in the gym, and he promised to take it no further, so we were spared to fight another day. My only explanation for these narrow escapes was that the Prison Service must have been extremely desperate for staff at that time, and of course we had Wilko with us who was a favourite of all the PTIs, and the third member of our group.