"Do call me Sandra." Mrs Michael Howard stood surrounded by the therapeutic community en f?te champ?tre, demurely, iced bun in one hand, cup and saucer in the other. "It was a fantastic show I have to say, and as soon as I get back to London I am going to telephone my friend Dominic Lawson and ask him to commission a piece on what's going on down here. Perhaps you could write it?" she asked, quite the mistress of gentle flattery.
Sandra was trying her best to say the right thing. "You know it was all Michael's idea in the first place that I get myself involved in the rehabilitation of drug offenders. I mean, I'm absolutely hopeless at asking people for money, but I'll do what I can. I felt I had to do something positive with my time."
The whole community had been on best behaviour all afternoon while prison governors and their acolytes fussed around the party of VIPs. It was rumoured that our own Number One had even cancelled a lecture trip to Romania (subject-penal reform!) to ensure Sandra's visit went without a hitch. He beamed with pride as my well rehearsed company of entertainers trilled and thrilled.
Make no mistake about it, I had pulled out all the cultural stops. After being forced to replace the intended performance of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (two of my rats had been caught climbing the compound fence and were subsequently expelled), a programme had evolved which included readings from Thomas Hardy, Primo Levi, Oscar Wilde, DH Lawrence, Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, music by Orlando Gibbons, Jan Sibelius and Neil Young; and "A letter to lift the spirit" (an inspired choice I felt considering what had happened to Sandra's husband a fortnight earlier) from Sydney Smith to one Lady Georgiana Morpeth.
I had made it quite clear to the lads that it was our duty to cheer Sandra up. It cannot have been easy for her to have entered the lion's den as she did, knowing perfectly well that the scent of Michael's legacy still hung heavily in the air, tingeing the afternoon's celebration with "something of the night."
Sir Simon ambled over to me, a genial old soul, in loud dog-tooth tweed, brogues you could see your face in, check Viyella and canary yellow Paisley silk tie. Sir Simon, it turned out, was Sandra's friend from the shires, a rich, grassroot Tory who until recently had chaired, inter alia, the local police authority. He was interested in what school I had attended and how "after an education like yours" I had managed to end up in a drugs therapy unit coming to the end of a 13 year sentence for armed robbery...
"Tell me," he enquired rather more confidentially now-Sandra had been snatched from me and I still had not managed to grab an iced bun. "The fellow who played the guitar and sang?" This was Terry, confederate flag tattooed on his heavily veined neck-highly talented, highly strung, high most of the time. "Ah yes," I said, "I could make a million with him. Do you know he's been inside for 16 years?" Sir Simon seemed perplexed. "Mmm. Er... is he... suicidal?" he asked. "It's just that I couldn't help but notice... he was wearing a pair of boots without laces. I thought perhaps it might have been some cautionary measure taken by the authorities to pre-empt any foolish attempts at... er..."
"Oh no Sir Simon. It's nothing like that. These days, laceless boots are de rigueur." Sir Simon thought about this for a while. "Wouldn't be much use if he was trying to make a quick getaway though would they?" He laughed so much at his own joke that he had not noticed one of the starched white-coated waiter-cons glide to a halt behind him. I was just about to reach out for the one remaining iced bun on his tray when I heard Sandra's voice from across the room. She was talking to a pair of bikers we all call Samson and Delilah. "Simon, they're asking for a piano. Can we do anything?" Sir Simon spun quickly round, colliding with the waiter's tray, knocking it clean out of his hands, and dropping his half full cup of tea. I watched helplessly as my cherished iced bun rolled into the pool of spilt tea.
The following morning I was pleased to read in the Daily Telegraph's Peterborough column that Sandra had found some "light relief" from the attacks on her husband among the inmates of Channings Wood prison in Devon. I planted this story myself because nobody in the prison system has the faintest idea about positive PR, which is one of the reasons why they get such a consistently bad press. "One of the best acts," ran the story, "was an escapologist. Sandra helped tie his knots... and in a mass outbreak of tactfulness not one man mentioned Michael Howard all afternoon."
BA and Rushy, my two remaining rats who ably stepped in to perform Houdini's sack trick were far quicker to catch on to the potential advan-tages (and dangers) of the media machine. A couple of days ago, the pair were looking over my shoulder as I worked on a draft of this article. "Now den Pete," Rushy began in his nasal Mancunian twang. "I 'ope you'll be menshnin' me an' BA. After all, we were the stars of the show."
"An' ah've told me mam to order Prospeck," BA added. "But could ya do us a favour?" he asked, big brown eyes glinting with innate intelligence. "Mek sure we see a draft o't' piece before it goes to press."
