My friend, Pinnington, and I found ourselves in a police car heading South to Portsmouth. We had been sentenced to 3 months in a detention centre.
In the car, I played with the ratchets of my hand cuffs, not appreciating that each click was none negotiable! and within 30 minutes, I had, inadvertently, tightened them fiercely around my wrists.
Fortunately, an understanding policeman relieved me of the discomfort I had caused myself.
We arrived at Haslar Detention Centre late on the evening of the 12th August 1976, driving in through 2 huge steel gates that flanked the facility.
Reception
Within an hour, I had been stripped, showered, provided with regulation kit and been given a short, cropped haircut.
Every item of my personal belongings, (apart from my cigarettes), was itemised, documented and wrapped in a polythene bag and then I was marched down a long series of corridors to a small cell.
My cigarettes found a new home in a prison officer’s pocket.
Incubation
I was alone now but aware that this place was home to 200 other inmates.
In a state of shock, I lay on a hard bed while a hundred memories haunted my thoughts while the muffled sound of men shouting outside the door distilled into a reality that magnified the predicament and slammed slammed me with home truths.
Here, I would be without friendly faces, without a caring girlfriend, without family or home comforts. Those things were outside and outside was now another place – a place I could no longer go.
I was locked up, disenfranchised, trapped.
I was incarcerated.
In an instant, without notice, a prison guard was back in my cell. He deposited a stainless steel tray onto a wooden bedside cabinet then left.
I stared at the tray. Incredulous. I had gone all day without anything to eat yet what was in front of me? A steel cup containing just water. A stainless steel bowl with 4 crackers, a thin layer of margarine and a dusting of grated cheese completed the offering.
That image sent me into a blind panic and I reached the swift conclusion that this place was going to be pure hell.
Again looked at the fare on the cabinet, I found myself thinking, “Christ! It was not even porridge!”
I fell asleep in that place, exhausted, tucking itchy blankets around me, fetal position, weeping.
And what would I wake up to?
From 7:00 – 8:30 pm, most inmates enjoyed ‘association’. Being one of three new inmates that week, I was allowed to stay in my cell and learn how to pack my bed-box and belongings. There was a regular inspection routine each Sunday morning before parade and the inspection routines dictated or rewarded how inmates would fare in the overall regime.
After the default 48 – 72 hours acclimatisation period all new inmates experience, I was left staring at a stainless steel door, bracing to face a noumenon.
Although the world beyond was a potentially terrifying reality where I would sometimes hear a muffled shout or feel the floor vibrate, I could never truly know what existed beyond until that door was opened.
And soon it was! By the most charismatic and likeable human being I has been introduced to in several months, maybe years.
Already into his late 50’s, a prison officer suddenly appeared at my now opened cell door and introduced himself. Probably due more to a sense of temporary disassociation rather than anything else, I can’t remember the wording or the instruction(s) if there had even been any but I do remember looking into a pair of deep blue smiling eyes and wondering how, all of a sudden, I’m staring at a John Wayne doppelganger calling me “Goodland” and inviting me to call him ‘Sir’.
From 7:00 – 8:30 pm, most inmates enjoyed ‘association’. Being one of three new inmates that week, I was allowed to stay in my cell and learn how to pack my bed-box and belongings. There was a regular inspection routine each Sunday morning before parade and the inspection routines dictated (or rewarded) how inmates would fare in the overall regime.
Presenting myself as an enthusiastic inmate to officers, only revealing my true inner self to a couple of inmates while, all the while, projecting my ever vigilant, always on adrenalin based fight or flight demeanour dialled in as the outer shell and signal I was radiating outwardly.
Day two brought a surprise and a potentially devastating setback. The very good news was that I was to become an “orderly”. An inmate with special responsibility. The official job was Gym / Yard orderly and meant that in the morning, I would assist Mr Berry in the Gym and in the afternoon, unsupervised, I would maintain the acres of land (and tarmac) around the parade ground.
There were only a couple of orderly posts in the whole place. This was immediate promotion, almost as valuable as earning a green tie!
The bad news was less palatable. I would be joining Churchill dorm with my bed adjacent to “Puppet”, the volatile inmate who thought he ran the place!
And there was something else.
According to tradition, ALL new inmates had to perform a humiliating initiation ceremony in front of every inmate in the dormitory they were joining.
Naked, after lights out but bathed in the blue night light of the room, new inmates were expected to knot their ties on their privates and run the gauntlet past all the inmates in their dorm.
I had a real big problem with that.
All day, I carried out my duties with a sickening sense of foreboding. I was already trying to imagine what would happen to me that evening. I was trying to comprehend how I would defend myself against a room full of 70 men expecting me to “perform”.
I had no intention of humiliating myself but was imagining being picked up physically, against my will, possibly by a dozen men?
Would I find myself at the centre of some barbaric act – like the scene from some second rate B movie jungle kidnapping?
Would they simply attack me? Beat me up? How could I know?
All I knew was that I was not going to volunteer for the humiliating spectacle demanded of me.
The Puppet encounter, verbatim
Mid afternoon, I was relieved of my duties to move my bed-box into Churchill dorm. Digger joined me, gave me a sweet and sat on the edge of my bed.
I can’t remember asking him about any initiation ceremony but he did offer some simple advice. Perhaps sensing my anxiety for the first time, he told me to just try to keep myself to myself.
At 7:00 pm, just after dinner, everyone goes to association. Everyone except me. I am lying on my bed, arms folded behind my neck, ankles crossed, staring – simmering.
I have dropped my black and yellow wasp stripes. I am not giving off signals that invite respect. Instead, I am recalling my days back in Yeovil. I am summoning my most intimidating thoughts and converting them into an aura of contained rage.
“Dare anyone catch my gaze”, I repeat in my mind. My teeth are clenched, my mouth open just a fraction, my eyes wide, fixed on some imaginary point above the opposite bed.. Neck stiff, the cheeks of my face taught – staring, staring straight ahead.
An occasional visitor returns to the dorm, maybe to collect a mars bar or packet of sweets. I stare ahead. Half an hour later, another inmate enters, walks past the foot of my bed offering a cheery “Alright mush?”
I ignore him. Stare through him.
I am alone again. I am also aware that the image I have been generating is no longer a mask. My mental self preservation has summoned up some other version of me – but this version is a volatile, unexploded bomb.
I rise from the bed, gather my kit and walk down to the toilet and shower area. There I wash, clean my teeth and pee. Walking back up to my bed, I ignore someone crossing my line of vision.
It’s early but I undress, putting on regulation pyjama bottoms but changing into a turquoise work T-Shirt – then I slip into bed, folding the sheets and blanket neatly to a point level with my navel.
Arms go back behind my head and I stare straight ahead.
I was fit, had developed a broad chest and had wide shoulders. In my “condition”, I was lying chest puffed out, anxious but feeling as dangerous and as strong as I could ever feel.
Teeth grinding, gritted, grimacing, “Anyone DARE…”
I heard Puppet enter the dorm and heard laughing and barracking. Someone in the far corner of the room pulled someone else to the ground. I just kept staring.
Over the next 5 – 10 minutes, just about everyone in the dorm had passed my bed to shave and wash at the bottom. I just kept staring – not at anyone – just staring ahead.
Puppet was in the corner of my vision now, sitting on the end of his bed. Boasting about something, swearing about something else – but not directing anything at me.
He looked though. For a second, Puppet did look across at the psycho in the work T. shirt – and the psycho moved his gaze for the first time and stared back at Puppet.
He had a 5-o clock shadow, permed black hair and the gaze of someone who could play the same deadly game I was playing. The difference was, his gaze was less intense, his look was less threatening, and his teeth were less gritted. If Puppet had been anticipating trouble, it looked like he was “off duty” or was happy to indicate to me that he was off duty!
I stared at Puppet and he saw a loaded gun. I had hours or was it years of intensely focussed menace in that stare and Puppet read it right – and looked away.
And the consequence:
The rest of the dorm had been a buzz of voices as everyone performed the ritual of preparing for bed.
A few minutes later, Benny Hill, a Hitler look alike in prison uniform (and a temperament to match), marched into the dorm and warned us all that we had five more minutes till lights out.
Then, suddenly, the room lost its colour and the dorm was bathed in an eerie blue light – like moonlight.
Immediately all hell let loose…but it was not directed at me.
At the bottom of the dorm, a lad called Galpin had had the bottom end of his bed picked up by Puppet and half a dozen others. With the lad still inside it, they had slammed the bed and Galpin into the wall.
Then, before Benny Hill had rushed back to investigate the commotion, everyone had run back to their beds and tucked up innocently. By the time the lights came on, Galpin was the only one standing in the dorm.
Benny Hill slapped the lad and then marched him off to run a mile around the parade ground. Benny Hill did not like people getting out of bed after lights out – unless he had given them permission!
I lay flat, staring up at the ceiling.
Nobody bothered me and I had not had to perform the ritual. The “sugar plum fairy”.
Puppet never acknowledged, spoke to or hassled me in the final days before he left Haslar but my show of colours, my show of self preservation acted as a great insurance policy.
And my new role as Gym orderly would soon serve to enhance that policy over the following weeks and months.
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