Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘Hughes! Off Association two days.’

‘But, sir!’ said Barry.

‘Don’t whine, you miserable cunt. Three days.’

‘Sir, I feel I should confess that I am just as guilty,’ I said. ‘I was doing exactly the same thing before you came round the corner. In fact I made the worst marks.’

‘Is that right, lad? I didn’t see you, though did I? I didn’t see it, you didn’t do it. Extra hour’s Association for honesty.’

‘Lesson One, matey,’ I said to Barry as the screw passed by. ‘Baffle them.’

Every two or three days or so I would receive a visit from my court appointed probation officer. The great question facing me was the nature of the sentence likely to be passed down from the bench. Most of the experienced cons told me to expect DC, Detention Centre – the ‘short sharp shock’ that Home Secretary Roy Jenkins had proudly added to the judiciary’s roster of available sentences. DC came in three-month packages, from a three months’ minimum to a maximum, I think, of nine months or possibly a year. It sounded foul. Up at five, run everywhere, gym and physical jerks at all times, running to dining halls, ten minutes to eat while standing up, more physical jerks and weight training, and what would now be called zero tolerance of all offences. The DC inmate emerged physically powerful, immensely fit and utterly zomboid in manner. An ideal candidate in fact for a job on the outside such as the bouncer at a seedy night-club, which would usually get him back on the inside for aggravated assault within a matter of weeks. This time he would be in Big Nick and a full-blown member of the criminal classes.

Borstal was the other option, an indeterminate sentence, which was completed by the inmate rising up the ranks, winning a series of different coloured ties, until such time as the governor thought him fit to be freed. That sounded ghastly too.

‘Or of course, there’s just good old Nick. Six months, prolly,’ some of them reckoned.

Mr White the court-appointed probation officer, who generously left me a pack of B amp;H at the end of every visit, was less pessimistic. He believed that it was essentially down to his report and he saw no reason so far not to recommend two years’ probation. These were first offences, I had solid upright parents, I had learned my lesson.

I had learned my lesson, hadn’t I?

I nodded seriously. I had learned my lesson, all right.

I cannot claim that prison politicised me in any way. It was not until years later, starting with those inevitable late-night student conversations at university, that I began to look seriously at the world through political eyes, but I do remember shivering with embarrassment at something that was said to me. Embarrassment is not a political emotion, it may be the British national emotion, but it is not political: rage is political, hatred can be political and so too can love, but not, I think, embarrassment.

What was said to me and I can’t remember who said it (one of the Londoners I think, for Pucklechurch, in spite of that preponderance of West Country and Welsh inmates was also used as an overspill prison for Wormwood Scrubs, taking moderate and non-dangerous offenders, usually those who were serving sentences for the non-payment of fines) but it was said none the less, just as it had been said to Oscar Wilde.

‘Person like you shouldn’t be in a place like this,’ the con said to me.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you’ve got an education.’

‘Not really. I’ve got some 0 levels, but that’s it.’

‘You know what I mean. These places aren’t for the likes of you.’

I wish I could pretend he hadn’t used that phrase ‘for the likes of you’, but he really did. This is how Oscar Wilde relates a similar experience in De Profundis.

– the poor thief who, recognising me as we tramped round the yard at Wandsworth, whispered to me in the hoarse prison-voice men get from long and compulsory silence: "I feel sorry for you: it is harder for the likes of you than it is for the likes of us.”

A hundred years on and still Britain is Britain. I tried to reply with the obvious, but none the less deeply felt by me, reply that I thought I deserved prison if anything more than he did. I had had every opportunity, every love, every care lavished on me. He heard me out in that non-listening way that convicts have and said:

‘Yeah, but still, eh? I mean, it’s not right, is it? Not really.’

The day for my court appearance drew near. I had received advance notice by letter from my mother that their old friend Oliver Popplewell, at that time not yet a judge, but a Queen’s Counsel none the less, would be speaking for me in court.

It was immensely kind of him to do so, but how I wished he would not: the idea made me writhe with embarrassment. A West Country magistrate’s court was not his milieu. He was not even a criminal barrister, he specialised in commercial and insurance law. It must have been embarrassing for him too, knowing (for he was no fool) that the Swindon bench would go out of their way not to be impressed by this smart London silk, brought in by middle-class parents to keep their son out of the hands of the penal system. Maybe they might think that they had paid for him, paid the staggering sums that QCs cost. How alienating and infuriating that would be…

I arrived feeling very nervous and deeply pessimistic. Popplewell did a magnificent job however, no forensic rhetoric, no Latin, no appeals to law or precedent, merely straight, slightly nervous (real or cunningly assumed I cannot tell) representation. He had done this out of friendship for my parents and he performed the task with great humility: whether they asked him or he offered, to this day I do not know. He spoke to the bench as one who had known me from my birth and one who knew my parents as friends. He was aware that their worships would take the probation officer’s report into consideration and hoped that they would take into consideration too the remorse and foolishness felt by an intelligent child who had gone off the rails, more as an act of teenage rebellion than as a threat to society. That the stability and unreserved love of his parents would also be taken into account, he was sure, as would be the very real promise that a young man of such intelligence showed the very real good he might do, at this turning point in his life, to the society he had scorned in this temporary fit of adolescent mutiny.

Oliver sat down in a swirl of black gown. The three members of the bench nodded to each other and asked for the probation officer, Mr White, whose report they had now read, to ask what sentence he thought proper.

White came through like a good ‘un and said that he saw no reason, especially in view of the long custodial remand period I had served, for any sentence to be handed down other than an order for two years probation.

‘He has somewhere to live?’

Popplewell rose. ‘With his parents, your worships, who will undertake to see that he obeys any order the court sees fit to make.’

More head-knocking and babbling before the beak in the middle cleared his throat and glared at me.

‘Stand up, please. You have led a very privileged life, young man. You have been expensively educated and you have repaid the patience and devotion of all those around you with dishonesty and deceit. Let us be clear, the crimes you have committed have not been schoolboy japes. They have been very serious offences indeed. In the light of the probation officer’s report, however, and various other representations it is the sentence of this court that you be placed on probation for a period of two years, during which time you are to reside…’

I don’t remember the rest. It wasn’t Big Nick, Detention Centre or Borstal, that was all that mattered to me, I was to all intents and purposes, a free man.