Come Easy, Go Easy (3 page)

Then there was Franklin, my boss at the Lawrence Safes Corporation, and sitting by his side was Roy.

Roy and I looked at each other for a brief moment. Roy looked pale and thin. I imagined he had been sweating it out during those three months, wondering if I were going to give him away.

The judge was a little guy with a thin, mean face and stony eyes.

I didn't stand a chance of beating the rap.

Cooper, much thinner, with his head in bandages, told how I had come to open the safe and how he had asked me for a duplicate key.

The long-legged blonde got onto the witness stand. She had on a sky blue dress that showed off her curves in a way that had every man in the court room, including the judge, staring at her.

She explained that she sang at one of Cooper's clubs and from rime to time she visited his apartment to discuss with him the songs she wanted to sing. Everyone in court knew why she visited Cooper's apartment at one o'clock in the morning, and you could see by the way they looked at Cooper how much they envied him. She said Cooper had been out of the room when I had opened the safe. She said she saw me look inside the safe, then shut the door and pretend I hadn't opened it.

Cooper told the judge how he had found me in front of the open safe. He said when he had closed with me, I had hit him on the head with an iron bar.

Franklin surprised me by coming forward and speaking for me. He said I was the best workman they had, and up to now they had always found me completely trustworthy. But he was wasting his breath. I could see he made as much impression on the judge as a handful of grit thrown at an armoured truck.

My attorney, a well-fed, middle-aged chisler, seemed to have trouble in keeping awake. After he had heard the evidence for the prosecution, he looked over at me, grimaced, got slowly to his feet and announced that his client—that was me—now pleaded guilty and threw himself on the mercy of the court. Maybe there wasn't anything else he could do, but I felt at least he might have made it sound as if he were sorry. The way he said it, I and everyone in the court got the impression he was already concentrating on his next case.

The judge stared at me for several sadistic moments. Finally he said I had committed a breach of trust. In my particular job a man had to be trustworthy. I had endangered the reputation of an old-established firm where my grandfather and my father had served as faithful servants. He said that as this was my first offence he had been tempted to treat me leniently. He didn't kid me for one moment. I could tell by his hard little eyes that he was talking for the sake of hearing his own voice. He said my brutal, savage attack on Cooper—an attack that might have ended in a murder charge—had placed me beyond the mercy of the court. He then sentenced me to ten years' penal servitude. I would be sent to the Farnworth Prison Camp where they would know how to deal with a man of my viciousness.

That was the moment when I was tempted to betray Roy, and he knew it. I turned to look at him and our eyes met. He was tense and sitting bolt upright. He knew what was going on in my mind. He knew I had only to point to him and tell the judge he was the man who had hit Cooper for me to get off the hook for at least a couple of months for a new trial, and maybe, if it could be proved that Roy had hit Cooper, for me not to go to Farnworth.

Farnworth was a notorious chain gang prison farm, some two hundred miles in the interior, and had been the subject of a number of newspaper articles over the past three years when public spirited journalists had called on the authorities to close the camp, which they described as the nearest thing to a Nazi concentration camp as made no difference.

I had read the articles, and like a lot of people, I had been shocked by what I had read. If the newspaper men were telling the truth, the conditions at Farnworth were as horrible as they were disgraceful.

The thought of serving ten years in that hell-hole made my blood run cold.

Roy and I looked at each other. As we stared at each other, I remembered a lot of small, unimportant things he had done for me when we had been at school together and when we had worked together. I remembered his jeering, friendly sympathy when my girl friends had let me down. I remembered the long talks we had had together and the plans we had made if we ever got hold of some money. It was those things that made it impossible for me to betray him. I gave him a grin: it wasn't much of a grin, but at least it told him he was safe.

I felt a heavy hand of one of the cops who had stood by my side during the trial drop on my arm.

"Get moving," the cop said under his breath.

I looked at Janey, who was sobbing into her handkerchief. I looked at Roy again, then I went down the steps out of sight of the court, out of the world of freedom into a future that held no hope for me. The only thought that kept me going while I waited to be taken to Farnworth was that I hadn't betrayed Roy.

That thought helped me to keep my self-respect: and because of where I was going, that was something I just had to hang onto.

Farnworth wasn't a prison of high walls and cells. It was a prison of chains, sharp-shooting guards and savage dogs.

If the days were terrible, the nights were worse. At the end of each day, seventy-seven stinking, unwashed men were herded like cattle into a bunk-house fifty feet long and ten feet wide with one small barred window and an iron-studded door. Each man was shackled to a chain that circled the bunkhouse. He was shackled in such a way that whenever he moved the other men were jerked awake by the communal chain tightening.

After a day in the burning sun, working until every bone in your body ached, the slightest irritation became intolerable. Often when a man was restless in his sleep and jerked the chain, his neighbour struck at him, and vicious fights were continually breaking out in the stifling darkness.

Once we were locked in the bunk-house, the guards left us alone until the morning. They didn't care how many fights broke out, and if anyone got murdered, it meant just one less for them to bother about.

There were only twelve guards to look after the prisoners. At night they went off duty with the exception of one man. This man, Byefleet by name, was in charge of the dogs. There was something so savage and primitive about him that even the dogs were scared of him.

The dogs were kept in a big steel pen during the day and they were kept short of food. They were as dangerous as tigers.

At seven o'clock each night, the prisoners were chained to their bunks and the guards went off duty. It was then Byefleet, a giant of a man, fat, with the face of a pig, came into his kingdom. Carrying a baseball club, he would go to the steel pen and let the dogs out.

No one except this pig of a man dared to move into the open before half-past four in the morning when the dogs were herded back into their pen and the guards came on duty.

Night after night I lay sleepless in my bunk while I listened to the snarling of the dogs as they walked around the buildings that made up the prison farm.

Before I could escape from this hell-hole I knew I would have to find some way of fixing those dogs.

From the moment I stepped inside Farnworth prison I had made up my mind to escape. I had been in this prison now for ten days, and already they were ten days too many. If it hadn't been for the dogs, I would have crashed out after the first night and taken my chance of being shot down. Neither the lock on my ankle chain nor the lock on the bunk-house door presented any difficulties.

During my first terrible night in the bunk-house, I had managed to loosen a piece of wire from the grill that served as my mattress, and after a struggle that left my fingers bleeding, I had succeeded in breaking off a strand some three inches long. With that and a little patience I could fix any Farnworth lock.

It drove me half crazy to know I could escape from this stinking bunk-house if it hadn't been for those snarling dogs out there in the darkness. Somehow I had to dream up an idea to fool them.

During the days that followed, I came to the conclusion that an escape attempt in daylight was out of the question.

Every morning we were marched to the fields, guarded by sot guards armed with automatic rifles and on horseback.

The road to the fields was as bare of cover as the back of my hand. Long before I could reach the distant highway or the river, I would have been shot down by one of the guards who would come after me on his horse.

If I were to escape, the attempt would have to be made at night, but first I would have to think of a way to fool those dogs.

So during the day, while I toiled in the fields and most of the night as I lay in my stinking bunk, I wracked my brains as to how I could lick those dogs, but nothing came up that was of any use.

Each morning as we paraded for the roll call, I passed the dog pen. There were ten dogs in the steel cage: massive brutes, some Alsatians, some wolf hounds. A man on his own attempting to escape wouldn't stand a chance against those ten dogs. They would concentrate on him and tear him to pieces before he got twenty yards from the bunk-house.

The problem baffled me.

It wasn't until I had been at Farnworth for close on a month that I solved the problem.

I was put on kitchen fatigue: a job every prisoner dreaded.

The food dished up for the prisoners was practically uneatable. The invariable diet was potato soup in which floated lumps of half rotten meat. Working in the kitchen in the heat and the ghastly stink of rottening meat was an experience to turn the strongest stomach.

To disguise the taste of the meat, the cook used a lot of pepper, and it was this pepper that gave me the idea of fixing the dogs.

For the next three days when I returned to the bunk-house I brought back with me a pocketful of pepper which I hid in a flour sack in my bunk.

I was now two steps forward in my escape plan. I had the means of opening the door of the bunk-house and I had a quantity of pepper to throw the dogs off my scent once I reached the river.

But if the dogs spotted me, no amount of pepper would save me. The pepper would only serve a purpose if I could get out of sight of the dogs, and they then came after me, trying to follow my scent.

But how was I to reach the cover of the river before the dogs spotted me?

If I could solve this problem, I was ready to go.

For the next four days I concentrated on the sounds going on outside the bunk-house. These sounds gave me a picture of Byefleet's routine, and I needed that.

At seven o'clock in the evening, when it was still light, Byefleet took over from the guards. The prisoners were checked and driven into the bunk-house where one of the trusties fastened on the chains while Byefleet watched. Then the bunkhouse was locked up and Byefleet went over to the dog pen and let the dogs out. Then he went to a hut where there was a bed and lay down: maybe he even slept. With ten dogs doing his work there was no reason why he shouldn't sleep.

At a quarter to four in the morning, he left the hut and went over to the kitchen to collect a couple of buckets of meat scraps for the dogs. He carried these buckets into the steel pen and the dogs followed him in. From the noise and the sudden yelps of pain, I guessed he stood over the dogs, supervising them, this took a little time. Then at twenty minutes past four, he locked up the pen and walked over to the steam whistle. He gave it a couple of long, ear-splitting blasts. This was to wake the prisoners and tell the guards the dogs were back their pens.

This routine never varied. I decided my only chance of escape was to crash out as soon as the dogs began to feed.

I would only have a small margin of time to get to the river: a distance of a mile across completely flat ground. I was in good physical shape and I was fast on my feet. I could reach the river in under six minutes, but they could be hectic minutes. Only there I would begin to use my store of pepper to blot out my trail. I would keep going until they came after me, then I would hide somewhere until they got tired of looking for me. From then on I would move only at night. I would head for the railway which was about twenty miles from Farnworth. I then planned to jump a train that would take me to Oakland, tthe biggest town in the district, where I could get lost.

There was one more thing to worry me. It wouldn't take a second or so to unlock my ankle chain, but it would take me longer to open the bunk-house door. While I was doing this, would one of the trusties raise the alarm?

If one of the trusties started yelling, Byefleet might hear him, then I would be sunk.

Having got so far with what looked like a nearly foolproof escape plan, I decided I wasn't going to leave anything to chance if I could help it.

There is always one man in a prison camp more feared than the rest. At Farnworth this man was Joe Boyd.

He was not more than five foot three in height, but in breadth he was twice the size of a normal man. His brutal face was a mass of scars from past ferocious fights. His smashed nose spread across his face and his tiny, gleaming eyes peered out from under bushy eyebrows. He looked like an orang outang, and acted like one.

He slept in a bunk below mine. If I could persuade him to come with me, I was sure no one in the bunk-house would dare raise the alarm while I worked on the door.

But could I trust him not to give me away?

I knew nothing about him. He never spoke to anyone. He kept to himself, but if anyone came too close to him, his enormous fist would crash into their faces, stunning them.

It would be easy enough to tell him my plan without anyone else overhearing me. All I had to do was to pull aside the filthy blanket covering the wire grill on which I lay, and I would be looking right down on him.

I spent half the night listening to his violent snoring, and wondering about him. He was hated not only by the prisoners but also by the guards. I couldn't imagine him giving me away, and finally around two o'clock in the morning I decided to take a chance and include him in my escape plan.