Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

I watched them go and lurched dumbly towards the prison officer who turned me round and led me back to my cell.

Prison officers, known of course as screws, found themselves at this point at an embarrassing sartorial mid-point. The older guard still wore the black of Mr McKay in Porridge, their proud chests glistening with a whistle chain that led from a silver tunic button into a pleated breast pocket, while the newer officers had to bear the indignity of a sort of light blue suiting that made them look something between Postman Pat and a mimsy Lufthansa steward. They felt it keenly, you could tell.

The prison currency then was tobacco, called ‘burn’. I dare say drugs are now the gold standard, but in my day I never heard of any drugs proliferating at Pucklechurch. My parents had given me enough money to buy cigarettes, so all was fine for that first two weeks, which passed in a blur of letter-writing and crossword solving. I was left very much to myself, as were all non cons.

The day came however, when I had to ride back in a police van to Swindon to make my plea. The police solicitor had decided, in the light of the dozens and dozens of uses I had made of the credit cards, that four specimen charges would be presented. You can see a photocopy of the Memorandum of the Court Order in the picture section of this book.

I pleaded guilty to all four charges, one of the straight theft of a watch, contrary to Section of the Theft Act of 1968 (which raises the question, what on earth could be the offences covered by sections 1-6?), the other three charges being that I did, by deception, obtain a pecuniary advantage for myself contrary to that same Theft Act, Section 15. The Clerk of the Court in Swindon, you will notice, has rather sweetly typed ‘pecunairy’ in each instance.

The moment the fourth ‘guilty’ had mumbled from my lips I was instantly a con, convicted not by the court, but out of my own mouth and my status at Pucklechurch was to change.

For this second appearance in Swindon was by no means my trial. A probation officer was appointed by the court to look into my case, my history and my future. The trial was set for November the first, a whole month and a half away. I still stoutly refused bail and, returning in the van, resigned myself to the prospect of seven weeks of ‘real bird’.

The first thing to change was the colour of my uniform. Next, my accommodation. I was marched to A wing, shouted at nose to nose every time I slowed down or looked from left to right, and told that I had better get used, pretty fucking quick, to being treated like the shitty little villain that I was.

The only burn to be got now was from work. If you worked every day you might get just enough to buy a half ounce of Old Holborn tobacco to last you the week and two packs of cigarette papers, these were standard Rizla+ rolling-papers, but presented in buff coloured packaging with HM PRISONS ONLY printed at an angle across the flap.

Work was assigned: you either mopped and polished the floor (a great treat because you got to use the electric floor polisher) or you worked in the ‘shop’, painting toy soldiers. I sometimes tried to imagine the children who received for Christmas a set of Napoleonic plastic soldiers, hand-painted by prisoners and how they would react if they knew the provenance. Now, of course, one knows that most children’s toys, from Barbie dolls to the latest Disney fashion imperatives have been constructed under conditions often a great deal worse than those of Pucklechurch, in which young men sat, tongues out, happily plying the Humbrol in a well-heated room, like enthusiastic members of the Stouts Hill Model Club, with Simon Bates and Radio 1 blaring out good fun pop. After four weeks spent in this dozily lulling routine work, I was promoted to floor mopping, what we used to call at Uppingham ‘lay fag’.

That’s the key to my contentment at Pucklechurch. I’ve said it before in interviews and it’s been taken as a witty joke, but life in prison was a breeze for me, because at that point I had spent most of life at boarding school. I didn’t mean to suggest by that, as was supposed, that boarding schools are like prisons, I meant that prisons are like boarding schools. I knew how to tease authority enough to be popular with the inmates and tolerated by the screws; I knew how to stay cheerful and think up diversions, scams and pranks. I knew, ironically, given my inability to do so in real boarding schools, how to survive. Some of the sixteen-year-olds at Pucklechurch had never left home before. Nearly all of them were inside for TDA or TOC-ing, which is to say ‘Taking and Driving Away’ or ‘Taking w/out Owner’s Consent’ – there must be some difference between the two offences, but I’m dashed if I know what it is. Also, the vast majority of them were from South Wales and the West Country. I found something immensely endearing about that. I had been trained by television to believe that all lags are either Scottish, Liverpudlian, or, most especially, Londoners. I had expected Sweeney accents and Glaswegian brogues, not Devonian burrs and Chepstow hilts.

There was little free time. Up at six, fold up all the bedding material, pick up one’s potty and slop out in the lavatories.

‘It is not a potty! It is a slop-pail!’

‘Well, I prefer to think of it as a potty, sir.’

‘You can fucking think of it what you fucking like. You will not call that cunt a fucking potty, you will call that cunt a fucking slop-pail, got it?’

‘Very good, sir. It shall be as you wish.’

After slopping out (a practice that Oscar Wilde, a hundred years ago had written to the newspapers to protest about and which the Howard League for Penal Reform has finally, I believe, managed to push into desuetude) one would be handed a safety razor (in my case a fruitless offering, since I was still so testosterone light that I had not even the faintest traces of down on my cheeks or upper-lip) and the ablution ceremonies would be performed, just as at school only conducted in complete silence, save for the rhythmical brushing of teeth and scraping of stubble. Next, we were marched down to breakfast for a completely familiar (to me) prep-school tea of tinned tomatoes and grey scrambled egg on fried bread. Then we were led to work.

In the evenings there came Association. Association was the prison’s major carrot and stick.

‘Right! You, off Association for a week.’

‘First one to clear up this fucking mess gets an extra ten minutes’ Association.’

Association took place in a large room, where there was a television, a dartboard and a ping-pong table. To me it resembled exactly the games room of a French youth hostel, only without the appalling smell. It was on my second night’s Association that a large con put his hand on my knee and told me that I was cute.

‘Ere, why don’t you fuck off and leave ‘im alone,’ a Bristolian car-thief next to me said.

There was no fight. That was it. No terrible moment later in the showers when I was told to bend down and pick up the soap. Just a hand on the thigh, a squeeze and a shy withdrawal.

Later that evening someone came up to me and said, ‘Two’s up then!’

‘Sorry?’ I said.

‘Two’s up with you!’

I agreed with him pleasantly and wandered off. As I was finishing my cigarette another con approached and said, ‘I’ll take that off you, mate.’

‘Fine, help yourself,’ I said, handing him the weedy little butt of my roll-up.

He gave me a thump on my back. ‘You said you’d go two’s up with me!’

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘But I had absolutely no idea what “two’s up” meant.’

Those who had run out of their supplies of burn lived on the fag-ends of others, going two’s up with the smallest, thinnest butts, collecting dozens together to make new roll-ups or burning their fingers and lips by smoking each one down to a millimetric strip.