The Wicked Mr Hall (19 page)

F
rom my cell window, I can see the prison sports fields. Some weeks have passed and spring is in the air. Today I walked in the sunshine for an hour. It was very pleasant. Inside the wing things haven’t been so good. I have been fined twice and put on charges for having homemade hooch. I watched them pour it away. After making it, I’d moved it from one place to another. Drinking it lets me lose myself in thoughts for a few hours. This place is riddled with drugs – heroin, cannabis, cocaine – yet an old man’s homemade wine is poured away. Do the authorities really think a 72-year-old, quietly drinking wine in his cell, is a threat to them?

My friend Hughie Docherty is also getting grief. His cell has been searched on a number of occasions. Hughie is one of that rare breed that can survive without drink or drugs. The screws have even smashed his toilet bowl. They
are annoyed at not being able to find anything. The reason? Hughie is IRA. Even though he’s been in prison for twenty years certain warders blame him personally for the Canary Wharf bombing. He has been put in the punishment block for refusing to squat and let them search his anus. A man who has done nothing wrong refuses to let an angry prison warder stick rubber-gloved fingers up his arse and he is punished for it.

In this place it is hard not to feel anger. I have just heard that my proposed transfer to Kingston has been turned down. They have waited two years to tell me that I will end my days here. The dream of having my own TV set has died. Murdering paedophiles such as Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have them. Yet I have been refused. This is my life.

April 1999. I have not written anything for three years. The time has passed slowly.

I wait for death; but when will I die? It is ironic that I have a strong constitution, I could live to be 100. Now at the end of my life I am paying for my sins – I am too old to work, I spend all of my life alone in my cell. Soon the century will change, I am a man out of my time, all of my old friends are dead, no one visits me. I am rotting towards the millenium.

In the summer of 1997, ‘E’ Wing went up like a powder keg. The atmosphere was bad. The screws were pushing their luck. Full Sutton is a top-security prison, and if you take liberties with the people who are housed in such places, you must expect a reaction.

To be honest, I found it exciting. There were fires, and they took over the prison. The people who were my oppressors lost their power, and they no longer had control. It made an old man happy.

I stayed in my cell throughout the whole thing, which lasted for three days. We were told that the television cameras were outside. For those three days, we were an independent state. We might as well have had our own government, and within the confines of the prison walls we were free.

When the anger subsided, the authorities surveyed the carnage, before coming to the obvious conclusion that ‘E’ Wing was uninhabitable. We were all moved into the system. I was transferred to the south coast and back to HMP Kingston. For something that I had previously perceived as a dream move, the reality proved very different. I no longer had the finance to purchase my own television, and I made no friends. I experienced loneliness on a new level. I constantly asked for a transfer and after a few months they moved me to HMP Garth in Lancashire. This proved no better, and I wanted to go back to Full Sutton where I at least had some old friends. It took a further eight months for me to come full circle, and in November 1998 I returned to the prison I now regarded as home and the place where I will die.

No one visits me. My few close friends still look out for me in my old age, but I have no part to play in the twenty-first century. Only death can release me now, and I will wait for it as patiently as I can.

To any criminal, to anyone who thinks they might have
the capacity for murder, to anyone similar to myself, I would urge you not to do it. Think again. In the final analysis my life is an impoverished nightmare.

Let me be a lesson to you.