I wasn't sorry to wave goodbye to Wandsworth, even if it was from the cramped compartment in the back of a Securicor meatwagon. Two months there had been more than enough time to reflect on and recover from my recent delinquency. Ahead of me lay a four-and a-half-hour journey to the south-west of England. The allocations department told me I was fortunate to have been tagged for drop off at the Weare, which for the last four years has formed the third part of a triumvirate of prisons on the rock solid isle of Portland. Also known as "The Boat," "The Hulk" and, intriguingly, "The Love Tug," HMP Weare is Britain's only floating nick.
As our meatwagon eventually crossed the causeway onto the island proper, a flotilla of small yachts bobbed about carelessly in the bay, their flags and pennants fluttering gaily in the February sun. And there stood Portland. At the beginning of the last century, the best military engineers of their day had been dispatched here to work their wonders on the maritime defences. Above and around me now rose the not inconsiderable fruits of their labour. Crowning a high and jagged outcrop of rock was what looked like the palisade of a stone citadel, as imperious as the Bernini colonnades in Rome.
We tumbled out onto the quay aching and exhausted-myself, Tonks and Boyes (a pair of swarthy Romany gypsies), Baz (a loquacious scouse with the only box of matches in our contingent), Sal (a Dutchman with more English than the vindictive guard in the van), and a north London hard man called Gooner, muscles bulging out of his vest.
Moored beside us was one of the most unlikely and bizarre vessels I have ever set eyes on. It might have been designed by Rogers or Grimshaw, such was its austere high-tech functionalism. Service pipes and conduits wrapped themselves around the infrastructure, creating a sort of hybrid Lego/Meccano set criss-crossed with coils of deadly razor wire. Incongruous. Immense. Immobile. The only feature which even vaguely suggested a life on the ocean wave was a slim aftward funnel upon which had been riveted the logo "HM Prison Service: Investor in People."
Two screws eventually arrived and escorted us, two by two, up the ship's gangplank. Safely inside our new home, handcuffs now removed, we were led into a spartan room plastered with "No Smoking" signs and told to wait.
At the back of my mind since our departure from London had been the knowledge that Zed, an enterprising drug dealer who used to sell me heroin on the streets of Soho, was already serving time there. Anticipating a sneaky "boot" that evening, I had been looking forward to rekindling our friendship as soon as I'd managed to unpack my bags. So imagine my surprise when on gazing across the room I saw Zed himself sitting behind impenetrable glass with all his kit around him, in the outgoing zone of reception. "My appeal came through yesterday," he mouthed through the screen. And there was no way anything was about to be passed between each hermetically sealed container. Talk about passing ships in the night. My self-destructive urges had been foiled by the Court of Appeal. Perhaps it was God, determined to save, in that infuriatingly mysterious way of His "those in peril on the sea." At any rate, it looked as though it was going to be a straight first night aboard the hulk. "I'll write to you," Zed promised as if in consolation.
I was allocated an outward facing cabin (not a cell) with a television set and en suite shower. The panorama through the porthole was spectacular-better even than the view of the cathedral from the exercise yard in Durham Prison. I was dazzled by the frenetic activity of it all: buoys and barrels, storage tanks and Nissen huts, coils of rope, cranes and containers, piles of palettes scattered haphazardly across the piers and jetties. On the water itself, were four Royal Naval Reserve safety launches, a tug called Grasmere, a pair of BT cable-laying ships, a firefighting barge and most unexpectedly a pristine cruise liner decked out in twinkling fairy lights strung from mast to mast...
On the cabin door (which, alas, does remain locked from time to time) was pinned an "Information to Prisoners" notice. "Contrary to popular belief," it informs the new arrival, "just because the officers wear a uniform they are not your worst enemy. Your personal officer, Mr Nabalm, is here to help you, advise you, deal with any problems which may arise during your stay on the ship..." Well bring on the quoits and shuffleboard. Mix the cocktails in the Crow's Nest Bar. Whatever else they may say about our beleaguered prison service, first-class passengers aboard the QE2 never had it so good.
That night I slept intermittently, drugless, dreaming that our seaboard home had been toppled over by a relentless storm. After a thorough medical examination the following morning (I've put on over two stones since my arrest in early December) I was offered condoms (that's why they call it "The Love Tug") and acupuncture for my rapidly deteriorating lower back. I then sat in my cabin lunching on a "healthy eating option" of seaburger, chips and mushy peas. Suddenly, Scouse burst into the room, red-faced with indignation. "Fuckin' hell Pete... There's bin an outbreak of scurvy on the landin' above us!" On further investigation, Scouse's scurvy outbreak turned out to be no more than an isolated case of impetigo. But perhaps we weren't that far away from the hulks of Woolwich after all.
