Notebook
At a dinner party recently I found myself sitting next to a quietly spoken, youngish man who had rather progressive views about the Catholic Church. I thought at first he might be a priest in mufti, recently returned perhaps from a spell helping Marxist terrorists in central America. As it happened, however, he turned out to be the Governor of Wormwood Scrubs, Britain's largest prison, which contains schne of the country's most fearsome felons. On parting he suggested that I might like to look in some day to see what a prison was really like. Never having received such an invitation before, I accepted with alacrity and we fixed a date without more ado. Normally it IS necessary for journalistic visitors to get Home Office permission, and I was very impressed by my new friend's spontaneous informality. It was only after I had swallowed the bait that he mentioned the unearthly hour at which I would be expected to arrive, 7 a.m., in time to see the early morning ritual of 'slopping out'. in the event the experience was much less depressing than I had expected, as is so often the case with objects of dread. This is not to suggest that life in Wormwood Scrubs is a bed of roses, particularly in the early morning when prisoners emerge from their cells after 12 hours or more incarceration. But it is not so utterly unlike army barracks or boarding school life as to be wholly unfamiliar, and after a few hours inside I began to feel, if not at home, at least not completely cut off from all contact with What is recognisable and therefore reassuring. The redeeming feature was the Englishness of the prison officers; that same quality which transformed the wartime Western desert into a simulacrum of BlackPool beach in a heat wave. One was constantly plied with mugs of steaming tea, through the mists of which everything looked pleasurably blurred, even the maximum security wing. Meeting the prisoners also proved much less of a strain than I had expected. After chatting quite cosily to three or four multiple murderers, child rapists and suchlike monsters, none of whom seemed in any way different from anybody else, one soon became quite blasé about mixing in such notorious company, to the point where an introduction even to Brady, the Moors murderer, seemed almost routine. By teatime I was beginning to feel quite at ease, as if prison life was almost natural. The young assistant governor, who Showed me around, Was a great admirer, believe it or not, of the work of Michael Oakeshott, and seemed to find nothing incongruous about discussing abstruse Points of philosophy while leading me from wing to wing, rather in the manner of some don conducting a visitor around the courts of Cambridge.
Clearly I lack the temperament for investigative journalism since my curiosity is always deflected from noticing what is wrong by there being so many more remarkable manifestations of things that are amazingly, even miraculously, right. Doubtless there are many scandals waiting to be exposed in Wormwood Scrubs, as in all prisons. (But how tedious to expose the obvious, which is why the New Statesman nowadays makes such dull reading.) To my mind, much more extraordinary were the many little signs of how a hell-hole can be transformed into a place not wholly bereft of human felicity. Christopher Booker reports how he and his fellow journalists, returning from covering the Olympic Games in Moscow, could not stifle shouts of joy and relief when they finally escaped from Russian air space. This was not my reaction when the time came for me to leave the Scrubs. I felt more like a deserter who leaves his regiment in the lurch. But even after only one day inside, I had begun to feel part of the place, involved in its problems, anxious to help rather than criticise. Perhaps that is what is wrong with prisons. Even the worst of its institutions possesses a certain Victorian charm which attracts loyalty. I came, I saw, and, far from conquering, ended up quite disarmed.
Talking of prisons puts me in mind of Ronald Biggs, about whose fate there is so much speculation. Could it be that he will really rather welcome compulsory repatriation, even if it does mean returning behind bars? In former times exile was regarded as one of the cruellest punishments of all, since nothing could be more painful than the certain knowledge of never again being able to set foot upon the soil of one's own land, whose sights and sounds were dearer than life itself. Such a deprivation would certainly cause me acute agony, and I can imagine few worse fates. Better, then, prison in one's home land than freedom abroad? Perhaps not that. But better a few years of prison in one's home land than permanent exile abroad. Contemporary popular obsession with the joys of foreign travel — sunshine, golden beaches etc — has tended to make us very unmindful of the extent to which many people go quite to pieces if cut off from their ancestral roots. For them exile is a form of death, a truly capital punishment. Whether Biggs comes into this category I do not know. But if he does, then it might be that he would find an English prison very much preferable to a Brazilian beach party, as at least a move in the right direction towards the recovery, not of his freedom, but of his birthright.
A colleague of mine has been sent a young man as his new secretary. Apparently employment agencies now do this without any warning. My colleague just came into his office and found a black beard behind the typewriter instead of a fair maid. Not that he is disposed to complain, since the beard has turned out very efficient and helpful. Even so, the prospect of one day having a male secretary does worry me a bit. It would not seem right somehow to ask a man to get the sandwiches or make the tea. I know this is unreasonable. But the fact remains that one has lost the habit of being served by males, except in restaurants. In former times, of course, all secretaries were men, as indeed were most servitors. But modern office life has developed a different convention, and it will take a long time before I can say, 'Take a letter Mister Smith' without feeling a little awkward. There will, however, be one consolation: not having to cough up for a bottle of scent at Christmas. Presumably even the most expensive pipe tobacco will make less of a dent in one's pocket.
The range of the gossip columnists gets ever wider and more all-embracing. It is no longer only politicians, peers, pop-singers and their ilk who attract leering attention. Nobody nowadays can feel safe, not even Regius professors of Greek tucked away in the obscurity of academia. One such recently found his marriage break-up exploited to titillate the readers of a London newspaper. One would like to think that this indicated a greater popular interest in classical studies. More likely, however, it means that even ivory towers no longer provide protection against idle curiosity. This particular academic, however, is no weak and ineffectual don, and he intends to take the offending newspaper to the cleaners. As Martial once observed: `Nempe canes iram saevi caveant dominorum'.
Peregrine Worsthorne
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