If symptoms persist . . .
I WAS on prison duty last weekend. There wasn't much medical work to be done, but the strange thing about prison is that the number of forms one has to sign remains constant, regardless of what has or hasn't happened. First I went to the kitchens, where the warder-chef gave me the day's menu to countersign and certify as a balanced diet. 'They can't complain about that, can they sir?' he said of the menu.
'But they will,' I replied.
'I know, sir. There can't be no more thankless job than a cook in prison. I've been doing it for 30 year and I've only got 8 more to do, thank God. After I retire, I don't never want to see another criminal.'
He said he had something to show me. It was a bottle of prawn cocktail sauce, as large as one of the shells for the guns of the battleship Missouri, and possibly twice as lethal. It had been intended for use at the dinner for the staff to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of their prison.
'You see them holes in the lid,' he said. 'That means the bottle's been tampered with.'
He asked me to smell the contents: rancid, but as far as I could tell no burnt almonds. The warder-chef insisted it was poisoned and could have wiped out half the staff.
After the kitchen inspection, I went to bring succour to the sick. My first patient was carrying a book about Wittgenstein. Even Dr Watson would have been able to deduce from this that he was not an average con. In fact, he was an astro- physicist who had murdered his wife. I cannot reveal the diagnosis — whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent — but I can reveal that we had a pleasant chat about Wittgenstein, puz- zling over whom I wasted many hours of my youth. We talked of private lan- guages, of family resemblances and of the duck-rabbit — which finally convinced the attendant nurse of what he had long suspected, namely that I was a raving lunatic.
Speaking of which, or of whom, I had then to inspect the prison hospital. There I found Rocastle, whom I had first met some months previously, shortly after he had received his 'Dear John' letter from his wife (common law, naturally). He announced he was suicidal and was put at once into the strip cell, dressed in a flimsy gown with which even Executioner Pierre- point would have been hard pressed to hang him.
This time he was in bed between two lunatics, the first of whom was the very image the French have of our football hooligans: tatooed, beefy and stupid. Rocastle was in for diarrhoea and sto- mach pains. The source of his symptoms was obvious: he had so craved a drink that he took to furniture polish, of which he had lately drunk a considerable quan- tity.
'Prison furniture polish, sir,' put in a warder. 'The worst sort.'
'But it don't half give you a buzz,' said Rocastle. 'Isn't that right, doctor?'
'I don't know,' I replied. 'I so rarely drink it myself.
Theodore Dalrymple
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