Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (23 page)

‘I hope to write about prison life one day, sir, and try to change it for others, but it is too terrible and ugly to make a work of art of. And I have suffered too much to write plays about it.’

‘A poem perhaps?’ suggested the governor, moving behind his desk once more and resuming his seat.

‘I have an idea for a poem,’ I said.

‘“The Ballad of Reading Gaol”?’

I looked at the prison governor. In that moment he seemed to me to be the most Christ-like man I had ever met. ‘Or “The Nelson Touch”?’ I suggested.

He gave a short, barking laugh. ‘I am not sure the Prison Commission would approve of that.’ He looked up at me ruefully. ‘And do not be deceived by my surname. I come from different stock. There will be no blind eye turned on my watch. You are to be allowed some books, subject to my approval, to keep your mind active – and free from vicious thoughts. If we let you have pen and ink, it will be to a purpose. Your outdoor work is to continue. You have been sentenced to hard labour and there is to be no reprieve. You understand that?’

‘I understand, sir.’

‘Very good. You may go. And watch how you go. No malingering now – and stay away from the boy.’

‘The boy?’

He glanced down at a paper on his desk. ‘There is a boy in E Ward who works in the gardens and as a cleaner on your ward.’

‘Tom?’ I said. ‘E.1.1.?’

‘You know his name and number? How do you know his name?’

‘Everyone knows his name.’

‘You should not use his Christian name. Wipe it from your mind. Keep clear of him.’

‘He is an innocent child.’

Major Nelson looked down again at the paper on his desk. ‘He is fifteen years of age and far from innocent.’ The governor looked up at me. ‘You would do well to remember that you were found guilty of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour on the evidence of boys who were no older than him when you first knew them. You have been observed with this boy.’ He picked up the paper he had before him. ‘You have been seen “consorting” with him on more than one occasion.’

‘Who says so?’ I cried. ‘This is untrue.’

‘Keep away from him. He is a bad lot. Here, under the very noses of the warders, he has been dealing in illicit tobacco, opiates, alcohol – God knows what. He is to be punished – and you must have no dealings with him of any kind. I am moving him to the stone-breaking yard.’

‘But the boy is sick,’ I protested.

‘No, he is not.’

‘In the infirmary, I heard . . .’ I faltered.

Major Nelson let fall the paper he was holding. ‘I have read Dr Maurice’s report. The boy is quite well now – fit enough to break stones for a day or two, I can assure you.’ The governor picked up the slim blue-bound volume from his desk and held it out towards me. ‘Go – and take the book.’

That night, alone once more in my wretched cell, I felt the refusal to commute my sentence like a blow from a leaden sword. I lay awake, dazed with a dull sense of pain. I had fed on hope and now anguish, grown hungry, fed her fill on me as though she had been starved of her proper nourishment. From that day’s first, brief encounter with Major Nelson, and from his kindness towards me with the book, I recognised, with gratitude, that there were gentler elements in the evil prison air than before, but nonetheless I was where I was, and as I was, immured, broken and disgraced. Prison life makes one see people and things as they really are and that is why it turns one to stone.

The next morning, when breakfast had been cleared and before chapel had been called, I stood crouching by the hatch in my cell door waiting to hear the girlish voice of Private Luck. At the very moment I expected him to speak, he spoke. ‘Good morning, my friend. Today I am planning to tell you of Vikram and the Vampire – it was a favourite tale of Sir Richard Burton in the good old days.’

‘Stop!’ I hissed through the iron door. ‘Stop, Private Luck. Are you my friend? Are you?’

‘Of course I am your friend,’ he answered indignantly. ‘I may be your only friend here, Mr Oscar Wilde. I have killed another man for you – does that not show friendship?’

‘Atitis-Snake, the poisoner, is to be tried for Warder Braddle’s murder,’ I said.

‘That is his story, Mr Wilde, but we know the truth. It is our secret – and you will pay me my one hundred pounds. I know you will because you are a man of honour. You will give me an IOU.’

‘This is madness,’ I cried. ‘Did you speak to the governor about me and the boy? Did you? Did you, Private Luck? Answer me.’

It was a moment before Luck spoke – and when he did I had to strain to hear his whisper. ‘I know you want the boy, Mr Wilde. I will do what I can for you, but it will not be easy. Things are not as they were once upon a time. It will be very expensive.’

‘I do not want the boy,’ I cried aloud, in desperation. ‘
I do not want the boy!
Do you hear me?’

‘Everyone will hear you, Mr Wilde. Take care.’

‘What have you told the governor? What have you said?’

‘I have told him nothing, Mr Wilde. I have said nothing. I have not seen the governor. I will keep your secret. You will pay me, Mr Wilde, and I will stay silent as the grave.’

18
Punishment

T
he weeks passed.

In Reading Gaol, where the seasons run their course unnoticed, and in whose garden no bird is ever heard to sing, summer turned to autumn, slowly. Each morning, between breakfast and chapel, without fail, like grotesque parodies of Flute and Bottom playing Thisbe and Pyramus in a prisoners’ production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, Private Luck and I whispered and called to one another through the wall between our cells. (Our conversations were a habit I could not break; Luck was a personality I could not fathom.) Each night, I lay awake on the wooden plank that was my bed, thinking of all that I had had and lost and knew that I would never have again.

In November I wrote again to the Home Secretary, pleading once more for my release. Even as I wrote I knew it was a futile exercise. Pity seems to beat in vain at the doors of officialdom. Power, no less than punishment, kills what else were good and gentle in a man: the man without knowing it loses his natural kindliness, or grows afraid of its exercise. I looked forward with horror to the prospect of another winter in prison: there is something terrible in it: one has to get up before daybreak and in the dark-cold cell begin one’s work by the flaring gas jet; through the small barred window only gloom seems to find an entrance; and days often go over without one’s being once even in the open air: days on which one stifles: days that are endless in their dull monotony of apathy or despair.

That said, I must acknowledge that with the arrival of Major Nelson the atmosphere within the prison gradually changed – almost entirely for the better. Beyond my fear of Luck, and of what he might say and do, in every other respect, my lot improved. I was allowed more books – and spectacles with which to read them. I was permitted writing materials at all times in my cell. What I wrote would be removed each night before ‘lights out’, but that did not trouble me. I could read Dante at my leisure and make excerpts and notes for the sheer pleasure of using pen and ink. I read Dante every day, in Italian, and all through. It was his
Inferno
above all that I read. How could I help liking it? Hell, we were in it. Hell: even with Nelson at the helm, that was Reading Gaol. I decided to take up the study of German. (Indeed, prison seems to me the proper place for such a study.)

I was invited to inspect the ‘prison library’ – a single shelf containing an assortment of prayer books and religious texts, half a dozen sentimental novels,
The Pilgrim’s Progress
and an expurgated edition of the complete works of Shakespeare – and propose suitable additions. With assistance from the chaplain (now a regular visitor to my cell), I selected Milman’s
History of the Jews
, Farrar’s
St Paul
and Renan’s
Life of Christ
and
Story of the Apostles
. The chaplain saw no objection to these last two, so long as they were in the original French. ‘Is French much spoken in the prison?’ I asked. ‘Not at all,’ said the chaplain. I suggested the poems of Chaucer, Spenser, Keats and Tennyson – and the governor agreed. I told Major Nelson that the existing library contained none of the novels of Thackeray or Dickens and suggested that a complete set of their works would be as great a boon to many among the other prisoners as it would be to myself. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, with a glint in his eye, ‘I think we can run to a cheap edition of the works of Dickens. Ten pounds is what the Prison Commission allows us to spend on recreational materials in a year. You may spend it all.’

I spoke with the governor infrequently, but when I did, invariably he enquired about my reading – and my writing. I think the good man had hopes that I would prove a Victorian John Bunyan and that my ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ would be the
Pilgrim’s Progress de nos jours
.

I knew that I must write again – or try to do so – but I could not settle on a theme. From the window of my cell, on the eve of the execution of Charles Wooldridge, I had watched the executioner, just arrived at the prison, crossing the yard at a steady pace, wearing a pair of gardener’s gloves and carrying a little bag. The picture of one man on his way to prepare for the death of another haunted me. I thought that might be the starting point for my prison ballad.

My hours of recreation were now spent profitably, reading poetry, writing notes, learning German. My hours of labour were spent in the garden at Reading Gaol, pushing my wheelbarrow, pulling up weeds, turning the earth, raking the gravel, brushing away leaves.

The tools of my gardener’s trade – my barrow, broom, trowel, rake and spade – were all stored in a small, square lean-to hut affixed to the side of one of the potting sheds. My supervising turnkey would unlock and lock the hut for me at the start and finish of each day’s endeavour. Close by the hut, surrounded by a ridge of bricks, two feet high, was the garden’s compost heap. Standing on the ridge, I could see across the garden wall to the adjacent yard where the prisoners assigned to the punishments of shot-drill and stone-breaking spent their days. My life was one of bucolic ease. Theirs was one of torture.

Shot-drill required the prisoner to lift a twenty-five-pound cannonball from the ground to his chest height, move it three paces to the left or right, and then set it down again. This task was performed repeatedly, continuously, for hours on end, with occasional minute-long breaks at the watching turnkey’s discretion. Its only purpose was punitive. Stone-breaking, which took place alongside shot-drill, was an equally punishing exercise, but offered more variety: you could swing your pick from left or right. And a least there was some useful outcome to the stone-breaking: the broken stone was sold on to local builders.

On one occasion, out of idle curiosity, I stood balancing precariously on the brickwork ridge around the compost heap, and saw the boy, Tom, now capped and hooded like the adult prisoners, wielding his pick at the centre of the group of stone-breakers. As I watched him in dismay, I realised that, beyond him, the warder on the far side of the stone-breakers was standing, hands on hips, watching me. He blew his whistle. ‘Get down. Get down now,’ he shouted to me. As I obeyed on the instant, I noted, with relief, that he had not called me by my number or my name.

On another occasion, unobserved, I went over to the hut mid-afternoon. My supervising turnkey had seen me by the vegetable garden pushing my wheelbarrow and had ordered me to ‘stop malingering’ and start pulling weeds. I had gone to fetch gloves and a trug for the purpose. As I pulled open the hut door, there was a sudden movement within – and a furtive, scrabbling sound. For a moment, forgetting where I was, I thought it might have been a dog or fox and started, startled. Almost at once, I realised it was not an animal at all, but the crouching figure of a child.

‘For Christ’s sake, Tom,’ I cried, ‘what are you doing huddled here?’

He made no answer, but shrank back into the darkness of the hut. ‘You can’t stay here,’ I whispered. ‘They’ll find you. You’ll be whipped.’