Detained at her majesty’s pleasure (Part One)

Ramblings from a prison cell 

With the drop of the judges gavel my life changed forever. A police officer grabbed my arm and I was led downstairs to a cold and stark jail cell. I was in total shock and didn’t understand what had just happened but I remembered the officer quietly saying “you’ll be out in three months if you play your cards right.” He locked me in a room and so began the first of many sessions of waiting and waiting and waiting without knowing what or when something was going to happen. It was my first test in patience, a talent I was going to have to develop doing the next ninety days.  After an unnerving and prolonged period sitting alone in silence I was handcuffed, put in a caged van and driven off on a mystery tour. It terminated at Armley Prison,  just outside Leeds. 

From that time on I was prisoner – Ellis DC2294.

Thirteen years prior I’d worked in Latchmere House Remand Centre teaching English to boys under eighteen. The law stated that they had to  be provided with at least ten hours of education weekly. As I went back and forth through the numerous gates and security checks I never thought I’d be one of those who don’t get to go home at night. It was 1988 and I was now being subjected to a powerful kick up the arse. 

1. HER MAJESTY’S PRISON LEEDS 

Built in 1847 from locally quarried stone Armley Prison was a foreboding castle-like jail perched conspicuously above the city of Leeds as a warning to criminals. It originally had four wings radiating from a central point in a Victorian architectural style typical of the time. Each of these four wings had three landings of cells. By the late nineteenth century it became the only site for carrying out death sentences in Yorkshire. The last hanging at Armley took place in 1961 just four years before capital punishment in the UK was abolished. 

ARMLEY PRISON   

Bang up, echoes, trays clang

Exercise over, doors slam 

Chatter subsides, stillness grows 

Thru cold steel nothing shows 

Calendars crossed, letters written 

Boredom broods, lips get bitten 

The cord is cut, our lasses wait 

Years away from the grey stone gate

The Victorians built Armley for 600 men with individual cells. In 1964 the toilets and wash basins were removed from each cell and replaced with one or two extra beds and a slop bucket. A report by HM Inspectorate of Prisons later found “91% of cells at the prison in Armley are used to hold more inmates than they were designed to and it is unacceptable that the consumption of food occurs in the same space as toilet facilities.”

BIRD

Flying through the prism,

Relentlessly on my way, 

Ever conscious of the schism, 

Awaiting for my day.

Prism is the name that I adopted for prison, it softened the feel of the word and reflected my decision to use my sentence to look at the many facets of the experience. I also learned a whole new meaning for words I thought I knew including bird, bender, burn, screw, nonce, block, numbers, draw, runner, gear, bang-up, slop, knock back, cocky, rajie, snout, jam roll, spin, divi. Adding to these linguistic complexities was the dialect of my fellow inmates, mostly from the north of England, who spoke in strange tongues alien to my ear. My own accent was interpreted as foreign and so I was labelled “the American.”      

FLY

Fly bird, go fast, be gone, 

Beat those wings and fly, 

Fly time, fast, go, go, go on, 

Go bird, go, soar up high, 

Catch that cloud floating by, 

Ride that breeze towards sun and sand, 

And carry me home to my chosen land.