The Loose Screw (16 page)

Wilko was the real blue-eyed boy, a tall, muscular man from somewhere around the Portsmouth area. He was an ex-guardsman, but more to the point and why he got his blue-eyed boy status, especially with the gym staff, was that he was a member of the British Olympic bobsleigh team and had represented his country in at least one Olympic Games. This fact alone, coupled with his looks and physique, made him a hot favourite with the ladies, and he always had at least two female recruits by his side when we were out. This did not deter him from being one of the main faces in the section, and you could always rely on him to organize some great parties. One such event took place in his ground floor room and carried on until the peacock that roamed freely around the grounds gave his usual morning cry to wake us up from the beer-soaked carpet.

I remember one incident from that night, which again seemed hilarious at the time, once our initial feeling of panic was over. We were very wary of allowing gatecrashers in, as we did not want the details of this illegal party getting back to the staff. Well, at some stage during the night, a group of about five or six appeared at the door and tried to gain entry. Fitz and I, as chief door staff, dealt with them, but as we slammed the door shut we failed to notice that one of their number had collapsed in a drunken state on the floor. The trouble was that his head was blocking the doorway and we only realized this after a few attempts to shut the door had failed. We dragged him into the room and notified Wilko. Between the three of us in our drunken state we concluded that we had killed him, and our natural reaction was to get rid of the body. We nicked some blankets from the store cupboard in the hallway, wrapped him in them and, picking up our dead body, we made our way quietly out of the room to dispose of him.

I don't know how we thought we would get away with it, but in our drunken stupor we really believed we had done him in and thought our only option was to get rid of the evidence. We made our way to the wooded area that surrounded the lake. Our original plan was to use one of the small rowing boats to row out and throw the bundle in the middle of the lake, but this was thwarted by the fact that the boathouse was locked. Funny isn't it, we believed that we had just committed the ultimate crime, but we did not want to break into the boathouse. We decided just to place the body deep into the wood and hope he would not be discovered by anyone on our course. Our mission over, we returned to the party satisfied that we were in the clear. As always it was not until the morning after that the reality hit us and we all woke with that strange feeling that we had done something terrible the night before.

During breakfast we huddled together and decided we could say nothing, not even to our other trusted section members. It was not until the morning smoke-break that I saw Fitz go white, as if he had seen a ghost. Wilko and I turned to see what he was staring at and went equally as white when we saw the man we had 'killed' the night before walking towards us. He came up to us and said "Blimey, that was one hell of a party you threw last night. My head is killing me and I woke up this morning wrapped up in blankets in the middle of the woods. It took me ages to find my way out." We were dumbfounded, relieved but dumbfounded, and as soon as the shock had worn off we laughed about it for hours. It's amazing the effect that large quantities of lager can have on your ability to think rationally.

Most of the section, and especially those I have just described, were good lads with whom I really got on well. I cannot comment on how they turned out once they joined their respective prisons, as I never saw them again once the course was over, but they were good friends when I knew them, who provided me with plenty of good laughs. As the course went on, many of the recruits did start to show signs of changing attitudes towards the way inmates should be treated, but most of this was done in front of the handful of instructors who expressed the same type of attitude. It was clear that, as none of us had any experience of dealing with prisoners, those who showed this change of attitude only did so to try to impress the instructors.

An additional option to the college bar and Union Jack presented itself to us when it was announced that one of the accommodation blocks was to close and the people billeted in there were to be relocated to external bed and breakfast guest houses. As luck would have it, Fitz was one of those who fell into this category and he soon found himself located in a guest house just on the outskirts of Rugby. Until now Rugby had been dreamed of as a good location for a night out, but it was just too far away and too expensive in taxi fares to use. Now of course, we could get a lift with Fitz at the end of the working day, have a good night out, stay in his room and get a lift back in the morning in time for lectures.

Luckily, Fitz's new landlady was quite liberal and had no objections to his having one or two friends stay a couple of times a week. So from then on most nights there were about ten of us crammed into Fitz's room farting and burping after a night out in Rugby's nightspots. We did, of course, continue to use the college bar for its ease of access, but this alternative offered us a welcome break from the same old faces and routine.

We soon all settled into the routine of the course, and the weeks began to really fly past. Before we knew it, we had reached the halfway point and the time had come to put our newly acquired knowledge to the test with the first of our two exams. The word exams suggests to me long two-hour papers that you always struggle to finish, and ones I rarely passed with flying colours. What we sat was actually a thirty-question multiple-choice test. All the questions were relatively simple and there weren't any trick ones slipped in designed to throw us off track. Besides, as I mentioned earlier, the answers had already been given to us by the instructors. Most of us did not even bother revising and those that did got lower marks than the rest, probably because they panicked too much. I was still extremely hung-over from a karaoke night when we sat the test, and I could barely see the paper in front of me, let alone circle the right answer, and I expected to do really poorly.

In fact when the results came back I was amazed to find that I had attained the joint top score in the section and one of the highest scores in the college -maybe it was lager power, I don't know. Although it was only a minor test, the instructors had made a big deal out of it during the week building up to sitting it, and we all felt relieved that it was over. We sat one more test, which was identical to the first except the questions obviously covered the topics we had learnt in the second half of the course.

To my knowledge no one failed the tests. One or two had to retake them, but none was kicked off as a result of failing the first time. It seemed to be a very difficult course to get kicked off, luckily for some of us.

There is not much more I can say about the course, except that I did thoroughly enjoy it. For the first time since the army, I felt as though I were part of a team again and enjoyed the comradeship I found with some of the lads. Some of the content of the course was interesting, and some I felt was totally unnecessary, but on the whole it was true what they said at Wandsworth -it was certainly the best part of the job. As the end of the course began to draw nearer, we began to gain passes in the different aspects, such as C&R, first aid and basic fitness tests, then after we received our final reports came the passing-out parade.

Ours was to be the last passing-out parade of its kind, as all courses after ours were not going to be taught to march as we had been. This was an attempt by the Prison Service to demilitarize its staff. So far as I am concerned they should have tried to do this in its prisons, not just at the training school. It was a shame because, although the parade meant nothing to me, there were plenty of those who felt very proud and it gave them a chance to show their families what they had learnt.

I was only one of two recruits who did not have anyone that came to watch the parade. The other was a girl called Toni from D-Section, who had been back-squadded from a previous course because she had broken her wrist in training. I am not sure why she did not have anyone there, but I just did not want my family there and wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. Toni and I did have a good laugh though, watching all the boys and girls that had been having relationships throughout the course nervously steering their partners away from any possibly awkward confrontations. Everyone was especially wary of us when we approached their family group to play the poor little orphan routine with the threat that we would say nothing as long as the drinks were flowing.

It was, on the whole, a good day and a nice end to an enjoyable nine weeks of constant parties. However, all good things must come to an end, as they say, and the day soon drew to a close and it was time to bid farewell to the majority of the staff and our fellow students for the last time.

My original group of companions from Wandsworth were equally as pleased as me to have been given Belmarsh as their choice of posting, and once we had collected our joining details for our new prison we headed back down the M1 for the last time. We had been granted a few days leave and had to report to Belmarsh by nine o'clock on 17 October. Once back home, we made arrangements to meet at eight thirty by the canteen in Belmarsh's car park to have a cup of tea in much the same way as we had done at Wandsworth, and bade our farewells until then.

8

BELMARSH

Belmarsh Prison is situated in Thamesmead in southeast London and was built on old marshlands that were once owned by the Ministry of Defence and used to test fire various weapons produced in the neighbouring factories of Woolwich Arsenal. There were many stories surrounding its construction, ranging from the fact that it was sinking into the marsh at a rapid rate to the fact that some Irish builders involved in construction had hidden Semtex explosives in the walls of the high security unit designed to house terrorist prisoners. All these were unfounded rumours possibly spread by any number of people opposed to its construction. To the big chiefs in the Home Office, Belmarsh was the new flagship of the modern Prison Service, but in reality chaos reigned within its walls due to poor and incompetent management, a serious lack of experienced staff, and uncontrolled regimes that changed on a daily basis. In short, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

Ninety-nine per cent of basic grade officers had less than six months' experience of the Prison Service and almost all the senior officers and governors who ran the prison had only gained promotion due to the fact that they volunteered to be posted there. I later found out that had they stayed in their original prisons most would not have stood a chance of promotion as their record of service up to that point had not been good enough. In short, they did not have a clue about how to manage staff or inmates and could not organize a piss-up in a brewery let alone deal with a serious incident. They were the service's dead wood; people with no hope of furthering their career elsewhere or old dinosaurs sitting out their final days to retirement, who had no interest in the future of the Prison Service and were put out to graze in the most expensive prison built to date.

Belmarsh provided the Prison Service with a perfect opportunity to promote a new, modern Prison Service and lose some of the stigmas that have become attached to it over the years since its formation. In reality they just did not handle it correctly and it was destined to earn itself a reputation that was at one time far worse than the most notorious prisons in its history.

I was obviously unaware of all this as I pulled up in the car park for my first day of a one-week induction programme. To give you an idea of how desperate the prison's situation was, our induction was cut down from two weeks to one as there had been so many staff off sick following assaults that they needed us on the wings as soon as possible.

My first impression of this huge prison was how different it appeared from the outside in relation to Wandsworth. It looked more like a huge Barrett housing estate hemmed in by a huge grey wall, which had a strange rounded steel construction to finish it off at the top. From over the top of the wall I could make out the cell windows of the various accommodation blocks. All around the wall and car park it appeared as though every conceivable entrance and blind spot were covered by moving closed-circuit television cameras. The exterior did not make me shiver with fear as Wandsworth's had done, but its sheer size and the thought of some of the prisoners incarcerated behind its walls made the prospect of entering through its gates every bit as terrifying.

With that all too familiar feeling of nervous anticipation, I went into the staff canteen to meet up with the others and await the arrival of our welcoming committee. We had only to wait about fifteen minutes, and were studying the scaled-down model of the prison located in the main conference room of the officers' mess when PO Webster and PO Johnson arrived. We took our places in the semicircle of chairs arranged in the room and -yes, you guessed it -began with the ritual of the creeping death. Of course we all knew each other well enough by now, but this was for the benefit of our new training staff and it also gave them the opportunity to introduce themselves to us.

PO Webster was an older man with a mop of grey hair and a nicotine-stained moustache. PO Johnson, although roughly the same age as his colleague, looked younger in years and appeared to enjoy keeping himself fit. Both were fairly quiet men, but PO Webster seemed unable to resist drifting into the storytelling that we had become used to. We learned that both men had come from Brixton Prison to take up their posts here, and they began the morning with a verbal introduction to Belmarsh.

We discovered that the prison held both remand and convicted prisoners of all the different categories from the lowest risk, category D, to the highest, Category A. There were five main accommodation blocks as well as a separate hospital within its walls. The four main blocks were called house blocks and numbered accordingly from one to four. House block one held short-term convicted inmates as well as having a separated wing that housed sex offenders, or rule forty-three prisoners to use the politically correct term. House block two held mainly convicted working prisoners who had jobs in one of the prison workshops, kitchen, farms and gardens or as red band cleaners. House block three, which had the nickname Beirut due to its hectic regime, housed all the remand prisoners awaiting trial as well as being responsible for running the induction programme for newly convicted prisoners. Finally, house block four at that time housed the longer-term convicted prisoners but was later refurbished to house Category A inmates.