Iron bars do not an author make
Peter J. M. Wayne
MY LIFE AS A GIRL IN A MEN'S PRISON by Kate Pullinger Phoenix House, £15.99, £9.99, pp. 222 In these difficult times of post- Howardian penal austerity, there is always a drama whenever one of my editors sends into the prison a new book for me to review. Gone are the days when access to literature was considered a basic human right. In the wake of two SoIonian reports on prison security, gubernatorial enquiries are launched into the suitability of any incoming volumes before they are finally, if ever, issued. When My Life as a Girl in a Men's Prison arrived last week, zealously suspicious eyebrows were immediately raised by its provocative title, and I found myself pleading my case in front of the Number One Governor. What with all the palaver, I hid the book under my pillow when I got it back to the cell. Alas, Kate Pullinger's second collection of short stories didn't live up to any prurient expectations the philistine screws may have had.
A number of these tales were inspired (so the author claims in a patronising disclaimer about how she 'consciously avoided' stealing prisoners' stories) by the year Pullinger spent as writer-in-residence at Gartree top security prison in Leicester- shire, on one of the Arts Council- sponsored bursaries set up ostensibly to encourage literary creativity across the carceral estate. Fair enough. This is a scheme which I heartily endorse and in which I have participated over the years. But as for guarding prisoners' confidences . . . let us examine what comes out in Pullinger's 'fiction'.
The English teacher in the title story, `My Life As . . .' opines that
prison smells like a huge locker-room that somehow ended up inside an even larger greasy spoon, sweat and socks mixed with custard and frying mince.
OK. Cliché-ridden the similes may be, but Pullinger undoubtedly got a whiff of lunch and the laundry as she made her escorted way along Gartree's ever-stretching corri- dors. One begins to worry though when, in `The Visits Room', the author recounts the detailed mechanics and bodily legerdemain involved if prisoners manage to reach orgasm during clandestine sexual inter- course on visits: I get a letter from him; he tells me not to
wear any knickers, to wear a big long skirt. To sit on his lap, my skirt covering us, and then to move in a slow way that will let him get inside me.
This does seem to suggest Pullinger is being less than discreet with information that can only have been gleaned from her adoring and desperate student- prisoners.
In 'Willow', 'twelve men sat behind twelve tables. Shaved heads, tattoos, a superabundance of biceps', all attendees of a course on women's studies run by a lesbian teacher who wonders if they touch each other 'ever, at all . . . none of the men seemed to be actually, actively, admittedly gay or "prison bent " ', as she fantasises about killing her own lover. `Was this something she had in common with them . . . a longing for women's bodies?' the teacher ruminates intrusively, longing to know what goes on on the other side of the sterile classroom walls she inhabits.
The longest (and for this reviewer least offensive) of the prison-related short stories, 'Irises', juxtaposes the equally male-dominated worlds of prison and Cambridge university (`ot' course, prison is far more friendly', Pullinger gushes), chart- ing in a sort of blackly humorous way the ill-fated relationship which develops between a graduate lifer and his prison visitor. 'Have sex,' a character about to be murdered invites the protagonist, who isn't easily shocked. 'But the plastic around our sausages suddenly felt a little tighter.' At times like these, one can almost (but not quite) forgive Pullinger's presumptive style.
Only about a third of her stories (which `chart my interests and enthusiasms over the last decade') concern themselves with matters of incarceration. The rest of this unfathomable collection comprises short semi-surreal pieces about, inter alia, fetishists, fantasists, feminists, bicyclists, even vampirists, with names — Boris, Mina, Dorian, Esmeralda, Vladimir, Fancy, Magda, Carlotta — as unlikely as the stories which contain them. Quite the most ridiculous tale in the book concerns a girl (this is a very girlish collection) who picks up a heavily disguised Prince of Wales in an Irish pub in Camden, then takes him up to Hampstead Heath 'to shag up against a tree', carefully insisting (of course) that His Royal Highness wears a condom throughout the whole knee-trembling experience.
If this is a collection to 'delight and dazzle' as the dust-jacket promises, then I must be missing the point somewhere along the line. I've a good mind to pass the book on to the screw in reception for a second opinion. As one of Pullinger's murderers comments just after strangling his female victim, `. . a week after that I chopped her up. I had to get rid of her body somehow . . . she began to smell'.
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