For many months now, I have impatiently anticipated writing this: the last thousand words of my sentence. The time has finally come to reflect on the past 3,172 days, served under five home secretaries, in 12 different prisons. It seems an eternity since it first began, back in 1988, when the prison population stood at a mere 48,000 (it's now more than 62,000) and Margaret Thatcher still lived in Downing Street.
The Flying Squad arrested me at gunpoint for a series of robberies on a string of bank and building societies. I had committed these during a summer of madness, foolishly imagining I would never be caught. The sentencing judge gave me a meagre seven years in the first instance, prompting the police to comment that I had had "a right result" when they came to see me deep in the bowels of the Old Bailey after my case had been heard. I disagreed; and seven months later escaped from my "medium security" prison, dressed in a home-made clergyman's outfit.
I managed two months at large before I felt the long arm of the law on my shoulder once again. I was given another three years before being dispatched-in luminous yellow stripes-to top security Long Lartin prison where I stayed for the next three years.
In those halcyon days, (pre- Whitemoor and Parkhurst escapes), Long Lartin was as relaxed as an incontinent nonagenarian's sphincter. Some cons chose to drink themselves into oblivion. Others preferred the mind-numbing comforts of hard drugs. Many men simply vegetated. But I chose to work, and set about turning myself into an "expert" (so the papers said) on English baroque architecture of the early 18th century.
My efforts reaped dividends. After being awarded a Wingate scholarship to the Courtauld Institute of Art, I was released on parole to the house (Prospect Place, significantly enough) of a blue-rinsed dowager as mad as she was seriously rich. For six months I was Alice in Wonderland, but the honeymoon did not last. Before the end of the first term I was expelled from the Courtauld (for non-attendance at lectures) and the mannered townhouse (for flooding the bathroom). Shortly afterwards the probation service revoked my licence. It was straight back to gaol for me. I did not pass go. I did not collect ?200.
With another couple of years to serve, I found myself in Oxford prison (founded in 1071) and, with almost a millennium of history to play with, persuaded a liberal governor to allow me to take parties of visitors from the university around the castle. "Break Into Our Prison" was the banner headline across the front page of the Oxford Mail. But once again I grew restless. One fine day, on an escorted visit to the county archive vaults, I slipped through an open toilet window and scuttled off down the High Street.
The Sweeney were soon hot on my trail after I robbed another building society, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice. That little escapade added another three years to my tally. Back in Brixton prison, I was deputy stage manager of the National Theatre's all-convict production of Hamlet, dropped acid tabs and partook of my first bag of heroin. O me miserum. The seeds of disaster were well and truly sown.
Blundeston prison in Suffolk came next. Following an argument with a crazed Jamaican crackhead, I lay bleeding with a shard of glass buried deep in my neck. I nearly died. Luckily for me (and Prospect readers), a team of surgeons rescued me from the brink. I returned to mainstream life disturbed and disfigured. The white horse of heroin galloped to my side.
In Stocken prison in Leicestershire (where I first began to write "The Prisoner") the glistening black "cockroaches" ran along foil with increasing frequency. As I grew more dependent on the drug, my bank balance plummeted, my girlfriend abandoned me and my long-suffering parents grieved. Readers may remember how I transferred to Lindholme prison near Doncaster to undergo a detoxification programme; and moved on to Channings Wood in Devon for therapeutic full-time "rehabilitation."
Vicissitudes notwithstanding, as I write I have reason to be cheerful. As the date for release draws ever closer, each day is a month, each week is a year. But the lure of heroin has receded. I have been to hell and back and the gates are creaking open. Offers of (legal) work are flowing in and I have a wide and supportive network of friends.
I have just finished reading Karlo Stajner's little known account of his imprisonment in Stalin's gulags, 7,000 Days in Siberia. His excruciating pains of confinement make mine pale into humbling insignificance. He writes about how, towards the end of the second world war, a mood of optimism arose among the starving and beaten prisoners. "They all said the same thing, 'the war will be over soon and we're going to be released.'" Stajner was less sanguine than the rest about their future prospects. Yet he wrote that night in his secret journal, drawing on an inner strength that I have drawn upon myself when the days seemed darkest and the light at the end of the tunnel barely flickered: "How good it is that, no matter what befalls them, people never lose hope."
