If symptoms

persist .

ONE night last week, I agreed to cover the prison for a friend of mine. Normally, nothing happens and one receives one's fee simply for having sat by a telephone all evening. Unluckily for me, however, the telephone actually rang — at two in the morning. I awoke, confused, out of a deep slumber.

`Unwin's cut himself. You'll have to come in.'

Is this any way for a prison switchboard operator to speak to a professional man, as one of my aunts admiringly calls me?

`Is the cut deep?' I asked.

`Quite. You'll have to come in.'

`I'm asking because if he's cut the tendons, he'll have to go to hospital anyway.'

`I couldn't tell you. I haven't seen him.'

I said that I wanted to speak to the nurse in charge of the prison hospital, but the switchboard operator — recently, in our new technological age, retitled the `Communication Centre Officer' — was unable to find him.

I drove to the prison, a grey Victorian mock castle, in no very happy frame of mind. When I arrived, I discovered that the prisoner had not yet been brought to the hospital wing. 'I didn't know where you'd want to stitch him,' said the nurse belligerently. I had the impression that because he was on night duty, he wanted to keep me up as long as possible.

Unwin, a drug-addicted burglar, had cut his wrists at ten o'clock but only called attention to himself at two in the morning. Like many a considerate pa- tient, he didn't want to bother the doctor while he was awake.

`Aren't you going to give me an injec- tion of pethidine first?' he asked.

`No,' I replied. Under local anaesthe- tic, I put in six neat little stitches.

Next morning, I was still on duty for the prison and went to see Unwin. I asked him why he had done it.

`I wanted to be out of it,' he said. `You mean you wanted to shuffle off this mortal coil?' I asked.

`You what?'

`You wanted to kill yourself?'

`Oh no, I just wanted to be out of it.' What did being out of it entail? Unwin, who was not gifted with words, was unable to explain further, but I suspected it had something to do with his desire for an injection of opiates.

The governor was worried about Un- win, and wanted a full report about him. Unwin was not only a potentially suicidal recidivist burglar, but had in the recent past been an instigator of prison riots. He had several methods of causing the gov- ernor considerable embarrassment.

Part of the assessment of a person's mental state is to enquire after their interest in and knowledge of present world events, it being assumed that any normal man follows the news. Unwin had followed the situation in the Middle East closely.

`The answer's simple,' he said. 'Nuke Israel. When all the Jews are dead, the Arabs won't have any enemies, so they'll kill each other. Then there won't be no more trouble.'

`And how did you come to this conclu- sion?' I asked.

`I read it in the Bible,' he said. 'It's all there, in the Bible.'

Theodore Dalrymple