Hell (28 page)

I grab an apple
for lunch and return to my cell. Reading
Fletch’s
story is no less painful.

I go over it
three times before pacing up and down. My problem will be getting him to agree
to publish his words in this diary.

Mr
Bentley opens my cell door to let me know that the
Deputy Governor wishes to see me. As I am escorted to
Mr
Leader’s office, I can only wonder what bad news he will have to impart this
time. Am I to be sent to
Parkhurst
or Brixton, or
have they settled on
Dartmoor
? When the Deputy
Governor’s door is opened, I am greeted with a warm smile.
Mr
Leader’s
demeanour
and manner are completely
different from our last meeting. He is welcoming and friendly, which leads me
to hope that he is the bearer of better news.

He tells me
that he has just heard from the Home Office that I will not be going to
Camphill
on the Isle of Wight or Elmer in Kent, but
Wayland. I frown. I’ve never heard of Wayland.

‘It’s in
Norfolk,’ he tells me.
‘C-cat and very relaxed.
I’ve already
spoken to the Governor,’ he adds, ‘and only one other member of my staff is
aware of your destination.’ I take this as a broad hint that it might be wise
not to tell anyone else on the spur of my destination, unless I want to be
accompanied throughout the entire journey by the national press. I nod and
realize why he has taken the unusual step of seeing me alone.

I’m about to
ask him a question, when he answers it.

‘We plan to
move you on Thursday.’

Only three more
days at
Hellmarsh
, is my first reaction, and, after
asking him several more questions, I thank him and return to my cell
unescorted. I spend the next hour considering every word
Mr
Leader has said. I recall asking him which he would rather be going to, Wayland
or the Isle of Wight. ‘Wayland,’ he’d replied without hesitation.

In prison it’s
necessary to fight each battle day by day if you’re eventually going to win the
war. First it was getting off the medical
centre
and
onto Block Three. Then was escaping Block Three (Beirut) and being moved to
Block One to live among a more mature group of prisoners. Next was being
transferred from
Belmarsh
to a C-cat prison.

Now I shall be
pressing to regain my D-cat status, so that I can leave Wayland as quickly as
possible for an open prison. But that’s tomorrow’s battle. Several prisoners
have ‘Take each day as it comes’ scrawled on their walls.

I try to write,
but so much has already happened today that I find it hard to concentrate. I
munch a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut (32p), and drink a mug of Evian (49p)
topped up with Robinson’s blackcurrant juice (97p).

Supper.
I catch Fletch in the queue for the hotplate, and he
agrees to join me in my cell at seven. ‘
Miah
[murder]
is cutting my hair at seven,’ I tell him, ‘so could we make it seven fifteen? I
can’t afford to miss the appointment, as I’m still hoping for a visit from my
wife on Thursday.’

Association.
I sit patiently in a chair on number 2 landing
waiting for
Miah
. He doesn’t turn up on time to cut
my hair, so I return to my cell and wait for Fletch. He does arrive on time and
takes a seat on the end of the bed.

He doesn’t
bother with any preamble.

‘You can
include my piece in your book if you want to,’ he says, ‘and if you do, let’s
hope it does some good.’

I tell him that
if a national newspaper serializes the diary, then his words will be read by
millions of people, and the politicians will have to finally stop pretending
that it isn’t happening or they will simply be guilty by association.

We begin to go
through the script line by line, filling in details such as names, times and
places so that the casual reader can properly follow the sequence of events.
Tony (marijuana only) joins us a few minutes later. It turns out that he’s the
only other person to have read the piece, and it also becomes clear that it was
on his advice that Fletch decided not only to write about his experiences, but
to allow a wider audience to read them.

There’s a knock
on the door. It’s
Miah
(murder). He apologizes about
missing his appointment to cut my hair, but he’s only just finished his spell
on the hotplate. He explains that he can’t fit me in tomorrow, because of his
work schedule, but he could cut my hair during Association on Wednesday. I warn
him that if he fails to keep the appointment on Wednesday, I’ll kill him, as my
wife is coming to visit me on Thursday and I must look my best.
Miah
laughs, bows and leaves us.
I’ll kill him
. I said it without thinking, and to a convicted
murderer.
Miah
is 5ft 4in, and I doubt if he weighs
ten stone; the man he murdered was 6ft 2in and weighed 220 pounds. Strange
world I’m living in.

Fletch, Tony
and I continue to go over the script, and when we’ve completed the task, Fletch
stands up and shakes me by the hand to show the deal has been agreed.

For the next
two hours, I transcribe out
Fletch’s
words, adding to
the script only when he has given me specific details, background or names. By
the time I’ve completed the last sentence, I’m even
more
angry
than I was when he read the piece to me last night.

I lie awake in
my thin, hard prison bed, my head resting on my thinner, harder prison
pillow,
and wonder how decent normal people will react to
Fletch’s
story. For here is a man of whom any one of us
might say, there but for the grace of God go I.

These are the
words of the prisoner known as Fletch (murder, life imprisonment, minimum
sentence twenty-two years).

My name is…
*
I am thirty-eight years old and serving a life sentence for a murder I did
not commit, but I only wish I had.

My whole life
has been a fuck-up from the start I was born in
Morriston
in Wales and although I loved my family, I have only had six real relationships
in my life, or as real as I felt they could be.

The sort of
relationship you want to rush home to, and regret leaving in the morning when
you return to work.

I met my wife
when I was seventeen, and even today would happily die for her. We had a
twenty-year relationship, though both of us had other lovers during that time.
Of the six relationships I’ve had, two have been with men, which is where the
complication begins. Because of years of sexual abuse I suffered during my
childhood, I have never really enjoyed sex, whether it
be
with a man or a woman.

Even today, I
detest sexual contact and accept that it is what has caused the break-up of my
relationships. I was always able to perform, and perform it was, but in truth
it was nothing more than a chore, and I gained no gratification from it.

I never felt able
to tell my wife the truth about my past, despite the twenty years we’d shared
together. It’s so easy to claim you’ve been abused, and shift the blame onto
someone else. It’s so easy to claim you couldn’t prevent it, and it’s also
virtually impossible to prove it.

The truth is
that I had no idea that what I was experiencing wasn’t the norm. Wasn’t every
child going through this? My childhood ended at the age of nine when I was sent
to a home.

Overnight I
became a plaything for those who were employed to care for me, those in power.
They even managed to secure a place of safety order from a court so I couldn’t
be moved and
they
could carry on
abusing me.

During the
1970s corporal punishment was common in children’s homes.

For some of the
staff it was simply the way they got their kicks. First they
caned
little boys until they screamed, and then they
buggered us until we were senseless; not until then did they stop. Nine other
children from that home can confirm this statement; two are married with
children of their own, two are gay, five are in jail.

Two of the five in jail are serving life
sentences for murder
.

After a time,
the abuse becomes a form of love and affection, because if you didn’t want to
be caned, or belted with a strap, you give in and quickly accept the
alternative, sexual abuse. By the age of twelve, I knew more about perversion
and violence than any one of you reading this have ever read about, or even
seen in films, let alone experienced.

By the age of
twelve, I had been abused by the staff at my home in–, local social workers,
care staff and a probation officer. All of these professions attract
paedophiles
, and although they are in the minority (20%),
they are well aware of each other, and they network together, and most
frightening of all, they protect each other.

I know a child
who was articulate enough by the age of fourteen to tell the authorities what
he was being put through, so they just moved him around the country from home
to home before anyone could begin an investigation, while other
paedophiles
carried on abusing him.

At the age of
thirteen I ran away and made my way to–When I reached–, I began sleeping rough
in–. It was there that I first met a man called*****, who offered me somewhere
to sleep. That night he got me drunk, not too difficult when you’re only
thirteen. He raped me, and after that began renting me out to like-minded men.
Whenever you read in the tabloid press about rent boys for sale, don’t assume
that they do it by choice, or even that they’re paid. They are often locked up,
and controlled like any other prostitute, and have little or no say in what
happens to their life.

*****
controlled me for about six months, bringing to the flat judges, schoolmasters,
police officers, politicians and other upstanding citizens who are the
back-bone of our country (I can tell you of birthmarks, wounds and
peculiarities for almost every one of these men).

One night in
the West End when I was still thirteen, I was arrested by the police while
***** was trying to sell me to a customer. I was collected from the nick by a
social worker, who took me to a children’s home in–. The home was run by a
magistrate, *****. For the next fourteen days, [he] buggered me night and day
before issuing a court order that I should be returned to [my original
children’s home], where it was back to caning and systematic abuse.

After a couple
of months, I was transferred to–, a hospital for emotionally disturbed
children. Once again, the staff abused me and this time they had a more
effective weapon than caning.

They threatened
to apply EST, electric shock treatment should I try to resist. I ran away
again, returning to–, and have lived there ever since. I was only fourteen at
the time, and ***** soon caught up with me. This time he installed me in the
flat of a friend where seven or eight men would bugger me on a daily basis.

One or two
liked to whip me with a belt, while others punched me, this could be before,
during or after having sex. When they eventually stopped, they occasionally
left a small present (money or gift) on my pillow. This wasn’t much use,
because I never got out of the flat, unless I was accompanied by *****.

By the age of
fifteen, I was sniffing glue, regularly getting drunk, and having sex with
countless men. But it didn’t hurt any more. I felt
nothing,
it was all just part of my daily life.

This life, if
that’s what you can call it, continued for another four years, during which
time I was photographed for porn magazines, and appeared in porn films.

By the age of
eighteen, I no longer served any purpose for these men, so I was thrown out
onto the street and left to fend for myself. That was when I committed my first
crime.
Burglary of a department store,
Lillywhites
.
I was arrested and sent to
Borstal
for six months.
When I was released, I continued with a life of crime, I wasn’t exactly trained
for anything else.

By now I was
six foot one and weighed 190 pounds, so didn’t find it difficult to get a job
in security, which is so often on the fringes of crime.

In 1980, at the age of eighteen, I met my future wife, who had no
idea what my real job was, or that for twelve years I had been sexually abused.
During the next five years, we had two sons, and twelve years later in 1997, we
decided to get married.

I was already
earning a good living as a criminal, and everything went well until I was
arrested in 1997 for DSS fraud. I had been making false claims in several names
for several years, to the tune of £2.8 million, for which I received a three
year sentence, which caused my marriage to be put off.

During my time
in jail, I began by letter and telephone, to let my wife know that I had for
sometime
been involved in a life of crime. But it wasn’t
until I was released that I revealed to her any details of the sexual abuse I
had been put through. Her reaction was immediate and hostile. She was
disgusted, and reviled, and said she couldn’t understand why I hadn’t reported
these men to the authorities. What authorities were there for me to report to?
‘I was only nine years old when it all began. After all it was the authorities
who were buggering me,’ I told her, ‘and by the age of eighteen, when I was no
longer of any use to them, they threw me out onto the streets’