Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

It was magic.

I lasted about eighteen months at the slaughterhouse. Having been a puke remover and a cow killer and a tripe hanger and a hoof puller and pig stunner, my final job was fat collector.

An animal has what’s known as caul fat around its stomach—kind of like a beer belly—and my job was to cut it out, stretch it and hang it up on these poles overnight to dry it out, so you could bag it when you came in the next morning. Most of it was used in girls’ make-up. But before you hung it up to dry, you had to clean it. They had this big tank of boiling-hot water, and the trick was to clean the fat using the steam, then wash it off, put it on a rack, and hang it over the poles.

But the guys in the slaughterhouse would fuck around with each other, like they always did. They’d cut the strings on your butcher’s apron as you were leaning over the tank, so you’d get this spray of blood and shit and fuck-knows-what-else all down your clothes. I got sick of them doing that to me, and I got a bee up my arse about one guy in particular. So, I’m leaning over the tank and this guy sneaks up behind me and cuts my apron strings. Without thinking, I just turn around and whack him over the head with one of the fat poles. I just lost my cool, man. It was quite a heavy scene. I whacked him a few times, and there was blood spurting out of his face. They had to send him to hospital in the end.

That was the end of the slaughterhouse for me.

‘Fuck off and don’t come back,’ said the boss.

That’s why I became John the Burglar. I just couldn’t face another factory job. The thought of Harry and his gold watch and the two-quid-a-week wage was too much to handle.

But I soon learned my lesson when they sent me to Winson Green. An hour is a long time in that fucking place, never mind three months. The first thing I did was ask someone what the guards had meant about my long flowing hair and the showers. Then I spent the rest of the week begging for a pair of scissors so I could look less like a girl. Every morning during wash-time I’d have my hand over my balls and my back pressed to the wall, I was so fucking scared. If I dropped the soap, it stayed on the fucking floor.

I wasn’t going to be doing any bending over.

But I was worried about more than a rogering. People got killed in that place if they pissed off the wrong guy. There were fights every day, and I was shit at fighting. So I did exactly what I’d done at Birchfield Road with the bullies: I found the biggest, baddest fuckers in the exercise yard and I made ’em laugh by doing crazy things.

That was my protection.

The inside of the prison was just how I’d imagined it would be, with clanging doors and rattling keys, and different levels for different categories of prisoners, each with its own balcony overlooking the central area. I was locked up in the ‘YP Wing’, which stood for Young Offenders, and on the level above us were adult prisoners who were on remand waiting for trial or sentencing. Murderers, rapists, bank robbers—every kind of undesirable you could imagine was up there. The stuff they could smuggle in was amazing. They had beer, cigarettes, all kinds of shit—although any type of tobacco was very highly prized. Smoking helped kill the boredom, which was your worst enemy on the inside. Even soggy old cigarette butts were worth a fucking fortune in there.

Getting tattoos done was another way to make the time pass more quickly. One of the guys showed me how to do it without a proper needle or any Indian ink. He drew a picture of The Saint on my arm with a ballpoint pen—I’d been a fan of the show since it started in 1962—and then he used a sewing pin he’d nicked from the workroom and some melted grate polish to poke in the tattoo over the top.

I started tattooing myself all over the place after I came out of Winson Green. I even put a smiley face on each of my knees to cheer myself up when I was sitting on the bog in the morning. Another thing I learned inside was how to split matches. They were a scarce commodity, so the guys had worked out a way to make four out of one by splitting them with a pin.

I remember thinking, If they’re clever enough to do that, how come these people aren’t all fucking millionaires?

My most vivid memory of Winson Green is the time when Bradley came in. He was a notorious child molester, and he’d been given a cell on the level above the YP Wing. They put this big sign outside his door which said, ‘RULE 43’. That meant he had to have a twenty-four-hour-a-day guard, to protect him from the other inmates. They’d have strung him up from a light fixture, given half the chance. But the guards hated Bradley as much as the cons did—he was on remand for seventeen offences of sexually abusing kids, including his own—and they did their best to make sure his life was hell on earth. One time I saw this fucking huge guy with a tattoo of a snake on his face beat the shit of Bradley, and the guards just looked the other way, didn’t even say anything. The first punch alone must have broken Bradley’s nose. There was all this blood and snot and cartilage running down into his mouth and he was fucking howling with pain.

My job in prison was to dole out the food. The inmates would come in with these trays that had little compartments moulded into them, and I’d spoon out the sloppy tripe and peas or whatever disgusting fucking shit they were cooking that day. Whenever Bradley came in, the guard on duty would go to me, ‘Osbourne, don’t give ’im anything worth a shit.’ So I’d give him almost nothing. Bradley would have to be escorted into the canteen by himself to make sure nothing happened to him, but it didn’t always work. I remember one time, when he’d been given hardly any food for weeks, he said to the guy who was serving the porridge, ‘Can I have some more, please?’ The guy with the porridge just looked at him. Then he dipped the big, heavy prison ladle back in the pot, took it out, swung it back, and smashed it into Bradley’s face. I’ll never forget the sound of that fucking porridge ladle burying itself into his head.

Thwack! His nose hadn’t even healed up from the previous attack, and it just exploded again.

Bradley was crying and screaming and staggering around, but the guard just whacked him on the arse with his stick and told him to move along the fucking line. It was heavy-duty.

Bradley refused to come out of his cell again after that.

This became a problem for the guards, because prison regulations meant you had to have a cell search every night and empty your bucket of shit and polish the floor every morning. So when the prison chief noticed that Bradley wasn’t coming out to eat, all these fucking whistles and bells started going off. I was in the kitchen at the time. This guard comes up to me and one of the other guys and goes, ‘You and you, I want you to get that disgusting piece of shit out of his cell and into the bath. Then I want you to scrub him.’

I don’t know how long they’d let Bradley fester in his cell before sounding the alarm, but it must have been a few days, judging by the state of it. The slop bucket he was supposed to use as a bog was knocked over and there was piss and shit everywhere. Bradley himself was covered in it, too. So we dragged him out and into this bath of cold water. Then we used the brooms for the yard to scrub him down. His whole face was swollen and black, his nose was a fucking mess, and he was shivering and crying. I felt sorry for the guy at the end of the day.

People say child molesters get a soft time inside. Believe me, they don’t. I’m surprised Bradley didn’t just top himself. Maybe he was too chicken. Maybe he just didn’t have any spare razor blades.

On one of my last days in Winson Green I was walking around the exercise yard and I saw a guy I recognised.