Maddon's Rock (16 page)

I don’t think we really believed our ears for the moment. It took time for the harsh reality of it to sink in. But during the evening we went through a process of mental readjustment which was frighteningly humiliating. We had to accustom ourselves to the idea that we should be cut off from the world as we knew it for three and four years. It seemed like eternity.

Next morning we were packed into the same three-tonner with the wire-caged back and driven off. “Where d’yer reckon well serve our time?” Bert asked. All the cheerfulness had been beaten out of him.

“God knows,” I said.

We skirted Plymouth and drove inland through Yel-verton. We turned right there and began climbing. It was sunny with cotton wool clouds and the plain below us a patchwork of cloud and sun. The earth looked warm and
glowing. A tor with an RDF mast on the top of it appeared away to our left as we sat looking down the winding road to the flat country of the Tamar. And suddenly an awful fear gripped me. For I knew where I was. I knew this part of the country. Several times I had stayed with a friend of mine at his family’s place at Dartmeet. This was the Moor. And the road we were on led to Prince town.

I had heard some talk about long-term military prisoners being imprisoned there. I hadn’t thought much about it. But now that rumour gripped at me like a stomach ulcer. I looked at Bert, blissfully unconscious of his whereabouts. He caught my eye and grinned wanly. “Turned a’t nice again, ain’t it,” he said. Then he shook his head. “The kids’d like this sort of country. D’yer know they ain’t never seen the country? Bin in ruddy Islington all their lives. The eldest is only four. The missus was kind o’ lonely an “I reck’ned I’d soon be going overseas. That’s why we started raisin’ a family. Poor little chaps! All they seen o’ the world is bombs an’ rubble an’ dirty tenements. They ain’t never seen street lights after dark, nor eaten bananas—but the eldest, already ’e knows the difference between a Spitfire and a P38, can tell a bomb from a V-i an’ knows the barrage balloons by ’is own pet names. An’ now, when the stupid war’s nearly over an’ I reckoned ter be able ter show ’em the sea an’ a spot o’ country like this on me demobilisation leave, this ’appens. It’s just damnable!” he added savagely.

I put my hand on his shoulder. There was nothing I could say. Thank God I had no family. But I felt I’d let him down. I ought not to have acted so hastily—I ought to have thought of the consequences. And yet if we’d obeyed Rankin, we should have got into that boat and we should not have been alive now. I thought then what irony of fate it was that Rankin, who had brought the charges against us, owed his life to me. He, too, would have been in that boat if I hadn’t refused to obey his orders.

The truck had reached the top of the long climb out
of the plain. We were in the moors now and all about us were fire-blackend hills. Here and there patches of gorse that had escaped the flames blazed golden in the sunlight. The road snaked out behind our humming wheels, curving like a white ribbon over the shoulder of a rock-crested tor. Behind the tor the sky was dark with smoke. Away to our left the moors rolled endlessly to the sky-line, and everywhere smoke curled up from the warm, peaty earth. In a valley close below the road men with flaming brands were setting fire to grass and gorse, the flames crackling merrily in a great curve that the wind had made. They were burning the moors over to improve the grazing—swaling, they call it. They do it every spring. They were not supposed to do it during the war because of the blackout. But they did it all the same, beating the flames out at night.

We picked up the railway and a few minutes later drove into Princetown. I waited with my heart in my mouth. If we turned left in the market square … The truck slowed and then turned. I suddenly felt frightened. To suspect the worst is one thing. To see your suspicions confirmed is another. This meant solitary cells and the coldest, dampest, most horrible prison in the whole of Britain. Cold little stone houses bristled at the road edge. They were warders’ houses. Then a high, bleak wall beat back the sound of our engine. The truck stopped and the horn was blown. Voices and then the heavy sound of bolts being withdrawn. I looked quickly at Bert, surprising a dumb, hurt look in his eyes as he stared with horror at that blank wall. I looked away. A voice called out, “Okay!” The truck ground forward in bottom gear and bumped noisily between great iron-studded gates that had been thrown back. As we went down the slope into the prison, the gap in the wall through which we had entered closed on us as the two great doors were swung to and bolted.

The truck stopped. Our escort came and unlocked the wire cage. There was a warder with him. “Come on, you two—out you get,” the warder ordered. And then added automatically. “Come on, look sharp now.”

Bert and I jumped out. We were in a kind of V formed by two of the many wings of the prison. The wings were ugly rectangular blocks built of solid granite from the nearby quarries. The roofs were of grey slate rising to a shallow crest. Each prison block was punctured by rows of neat little barred squares. Cell windows! Rows and rows of them like square portholes in grim, age-old prison hulks. A round brick chimney dominated the prison, belching smoke in the sunlight. Bert looked about him, dismayed and awed by those sombre granite blocks. He turned to the warder. His voice sounded husky as he said, “What’s this place, mate?” The warder grinned. “For goodness’ sake where are we?” Bert repeated.

“Dartmoor,” the warder answered.

It took a moment for this to sink in. The warder didn’t hustle us. Bert gazed about him, an expression of surprise and horror on his face. Then he turned to the warder again, “Come orf it, chum. You’re kiddin’. That’s the place they used ter send the ol’ lags to, the ones wot were sentenced ter long stretches.” He turned quickly on me. “’E’s kiddin’, ain’t ’e, Jim?”

“No, Bert,” I said. “This is Dartmoor all right. I’ve often seen it—from the outside.”

“Dartmoor!” Bert’s tone was one of utter disgust. “Blimey!—give me the merry Glass’a’se any day.”

“Come on—stop that talking?” the warder bawled out with sudden impatience. Then he marched us away out of the sunlit compound between the granite blocks into the cold, dark interior of the prison with its clanging doors and the sound of iron-shod boots ringing hollow on stone-floored passages. We were inspected, interviewed, docketed, clothed and finally marched to our cells. As the iron door clanged shut and I was alone, I realised at last that we had been absorbed into the soul-destroying machinery of the prison. The walls closed in on me, the ceiling clamped down on my head, the barred square of light that was the window seemed to recede until it was barely wide enough to put my hand through. A sudden panic seized me. I felt crushed by the
smallness of that rectangular cubicle. Six paces long four wide. Steel bars at the door. Steel bars at the window Pencil scribbles on the walls. Initials and dates cut deep into the stone. The dingy carbolic cleanliness of it clamped down against my brain so that I wanted to scream. And ahead of me streamed the years I was to spend there. Four years—say, just over three if I got full remission for good conduct. One thousand, one hundred and twenty-six days! No—I should still be here in 1948, and 1948 was a leap year—one thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven! Twenty-seven thousand and twenty-four hours! One million, six hundred and twenty-one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes! And I had calculated all that in a minute. Just one minute! And more than a million and a half minutes to go. I suddenly felt I wanted to scream. Footsteps sounded in the empty corridor, keys jangled. I sat down on the bed. I must get a grip on myself.

Then somebody began tapping on the wall. I replied. Thank God for my basic training. I knew morse and realised suddenly that even in the confines of my cell I was not alone. I could talk. The jail telegraph was morse. The message tapped on the wall above my bed was passed on from Bert and told me that he was in the next cell but one. The knowledge that Bert was there, even if I couldn’t see him or talk to him, was a great comfort to me.

I am not going to dwell on the time I spent in Dartmoor. It is only an interlude in the story and has no real bearing on what happened later, save that it toughened me mentally and physically. I doubt whether, without that period in Dartmoor, I should ever have had the guts or desperation to do what I eventually did. It was sheer desperation that drove me to Maddon’s Rock on one of the wildest sea enterprises it is possible to conjure up even in a dream. It was Dartmoor—the damp, grim, granite awfulness of Dartmoor—that gave me the courage. Now, as I look back on the year I spent in that wretched prison, it seems like some frightful nightmare, so faded and veiled are its memories by more recent happenings.

The dread of solitude, however, has never really left me. I hated that cell with a bitter loathing. It crowded in on me, it symbolised my isolation from the rest of the world, it was the thing above all that seemed bent on destroying me utterly—crushing my spirit and warping my brain to madness. I have always had a tendency to claustrophobia—a dread of being alone in small, enclosed spaces and a morbid curiosity in any cave or shaft that took me into the bowels of the earth. The result was that I was happiest sweating my guts out in that damned quarry which had provided the stone to build the prison or labouring on the prison farm. I didn’t mind the cleaning, the discipline, the work—so long as I was in the company of other human beings. Even now I cannot read accounts of men who suffered solitary confinement in German concentration camps without feeling panic seizing at me. I think if that had happened to me I should have gone mad. But as long as I had plenty of hard work during the day and a book to read at night, I managed to stave off the feeling of loneliness that I dreaded more than anything else.

There were about three hundred military prisoners in Dartmoor at the time. Of these only about a third were in for military crimes for which they had been sentenced, like Bert and myself, by court-martial. The rest were soldiers who had committed civil offences for which they had been tried and sentenced by civilian courts. Their crimes covered the whole gamut of civil offences—assault, theft, arson, burglary, manslaughter, looting. Some of them were pretty tough; hard-bitten die-hard criminals from London’s East End, sly characters from the race-courses, tough little men from the Gorbals district of Glasgow, men to whom razors came more readily to their hands than a rifle, men without any social conscience, bullies, liars, cheats, habitual criminals, murderers, men with minds so warped by their upbringing that they took it for granted that the world and every one they met in it was against them. All the riff-raff, hooliganism, abnormality that the Army had swept up in the maw of conscription and had been unable
to digest. And a few, like Bert and myself, who seemed to have landed up there by mistake.

I’ll never have a better schooling in world misfits than I had there. Sometimes it made me hate my own kind I was so disgusted. And sometimes I wanted to burst into tears at some example of kindliness exhibited by a man who looked tough enough to kick his best friend to death if he should so much as trip over a curb and be temporarily at his mercy.

All the time I was in Dartmoor I never really ceased to be conscious of the grim history of the place. You couldn’t escape it. There were initials everywhere.
J.B.N. July 28, 1915—1930
. I always remember that. It was deeply etched into the wall above my bed. I often wondered about J.B.N., for I had been born on the day he entered Dartmoor and by the time he was out I was a boy of fourteen. The cells, the prison yards, the workshops, the kitchens, the laundry—everywhere the ghosts of these men who had been forced to live out long stretches of their life in this place clung to walls and tables and benches in the form of initials and dates. But these ghosts of the past were not obtrusive. They were too numerous. The walls had seen too much misery and wretchedness and hopelessness to retain any impression of individual cases—only there was a general atmosphere of wretchedness imprisoned on those damp-streaming walls.

It’s a strange irony that this prison, which had been built for French and American prisoners of war at the beginning of the nineteenth century and had been a horrible Home Office ash-can for the country’s human refuse for almost a century should now hold British soldiers. But we weren’t the only occupants of Dartmoor. Ours was a world apart, an almost military world with prison discipline. But there was another world within those walls—the world of Borstal. Why the authorities turned over part of this most disreputable of all our prisons to be a home for Borstal Boys, God knows. But they did, and the boys shared the Moor with us. It was not an easy marriage. Their world was a softer, pleasanter
world than ours. They were divided into houses like a school. They were allowed a number of little privileges which made our own lot harder to bear. And the easier discipline gave rise to riotous outbreaks for which there was no cure. For these boys were only boys in the eyes of the authorities. Their ages were anything up to twenty-three or so, and many of them were hardened criminals.

All these impressions came slowly. At first I was too dazed and too absorbed in the task of adjusting myself to the life to absorb much of the atmospere. But gradually I came to take the background for granted and then, when I had time to think and take stock—that was when I began to feel frightened. But I got over it. I established a routine for myself so that I would never have time to think. I always made certain I had something to busy myself with in the evenings in my cell. I caught up with the days and kept a calendar, but I never allowed myself to think of the months stretching endlessly ahead of me. I tried not to think of what had brought me here. To kick against the pricks and to count the days to release—that would bring no satisfaction. I no longer tried to sort out the mystery of whether there really had been something wrong with the
Trikkala’s
boats or what Captain Halsey had been up to during the twenty-one days he had been sailing in an open boat in the Barents Sea. I accepted it all and that way got some peace of mind. I tried not to think about myself at all, but abstract things—geography, history, cross-word puzzles. Anything but myself. I wrote to my family to tell them where I was. It was not an easy letter to write. I knew how hard they would be hit by the news that their son was in Dartmoor. But after that my correspondence with them was easier, for it became entirely impersonal.