Reading between the Lines

‘The trouble with prison’, a former probation officer once told me, ‘is that nobody wants to be there’: not the prisoners, obviously, nor the staff. If that’s true, it would mean that in HMP Wandsworth, a squat black fortress that was the site of 135 executions between 1878 and 1961, there are more than 2,000 people – roughly 1,600 prisoners and 600 staff – yearning to be somewhere else.

Walk down one of the corridors radiating from the central hall, and you can see why. Your senses are assaulted. The noise is relentless: banging on cell doors, clanging of iron gates, shouting. The air feels as if it has stood still for years: you long to install an industrial fan to whip it up. There’s a smell of old food, and worse. And there’s almost no natural light. Victims of ‘prison pallor’, the men drift about like shoals of ghosts. It would be easy to lose track of the time of day, and even the time of year – except that, in summer, the cells heat up like ovens. Designed for single occupants, most are now shared by two men. If you lay on one of the bunks and reached out, you’d touch the opposite wall before your arm was straight. The thought of being banged up with a cellmate you don’t like, or even trust, is terrifying. And yet I love my monthly visits to ‘Wanno’. The hour and a half I spend with a group of about ten men is challenging, thought-provoking and often entertaining. There’s sadness, but always laughter too. As I leave to catch the bus home, and the men are locked back into their cells, I hope we all have much to mull over. It was in the 1990s that Sarah Turvey and Jenny Hartley, academics at the University of Roehampton, decided to do some research into reading groups – then becoming all the rage amongst middleclass women. The benefits of these groups were not just literary and intellectual, they found, but psychological: they built communities, eased loneliness. If this is what they could offer the middle classes, Sarah and Jenny wondered, how much more might they benefit offenders, male and female, serving lengthy sentences in prisons up and down the UK? ‘Getting into prisons is much harder than getting out of them,’ says Sarah. Today, there are forty-eight reading groups, but when the charity began, over twenty years ago, there were just two: one in HMP Coldingley in Surrey and one in HMP Bullingdon in Bicester. Sarah was insistent on just two things: first, that the groups must be purely voluntary; there should be no whiff of formal, compulsory education, and no certificates or tests; no right or wrong. If a prisoner chooses to say that he’d rather ‘eat my eyeballs than reread On Chesil Beach’, that’s fine. Second, it should be the prisoners who choose the books they want to read – albeit helped by suggestions from the volunteer working with them. Once a book is chosen, a copy is given to each member of the group. They have a month to read it before reconvening for discussion. It is a simple, effective formula. The most successful books allow the prisoners to vent their feelings. When we read Animal Farm, I asked my group what they thought was the best kind of political system – was democracy in this country working, for example? Absolutely not, they agreed. ‘We need to get rid of all Etonians,’ one growled. ‘We need the people in charge to have been to state schools, and grown up on estates, so they can understand where we’re coming from.’ I never suggest a book with the aim of prising open prisoners’ pasts, but I’m struck by how often that’s what happens. In the first session I oversaw, some years back, the men had been reading Toast, the memoir in which Nigel Slater looks back on his childhood through the prism of 1960s food – Arctic roll, grilled grapefruit, Nesquik. One man volunteered that his parents had taught him to cook as a child, putting a chair back-to-front against the stove so he could stir Bolognese sauce without getting burned (such a touching image: what on earth went wrong?). He was frightened that by the time he was released from prison, he’d have forgotten how to cook. ‘I’m sure you won’t,’ I reassured him. ‘Cooking’s like riding a bike: you don’t forget how to do it.’ ‘But I’ve got thirteen years.’ Another man told us he’d been born in HMP Holloway, where his mother was an inmate. She’d died when he was small, and – like so many prisoners – he’d grown up in foster care. His ‘father’ was an abusive monster, but his mother tried to make things right, laying snack-packs of Jaffa Cakes on his pillow at night. By the time the group next met, he had moved on. I often wonder what’s become of him. I suppose I should have guessed that Stuart: A Life Backwards, Alexander Masters’s extraordinary biography of homeless sometime-jailbird Stuart Shorter, would inspire strong reactions. ‘Stuart’s just like me,’ one man said, ‘mistake after mistake after mistake.’ Stuart’s description of being visited in prison – the anticipation before, the loneliness after – had struck a chord with him. Visits from his family, this man said, had become so painful – his brother constantly complaining about the cost of catching a train to see him – that he’d asked them never to visit him again. ‘When was that?’ ‘2007.’ But memories stirred up by books can be joyous as well as heartbreaking. For our first meeting post-lockdown the group had read The Old Man and the Sea, and it turned out, to my astonishment, that in his life before prison a member of the group had been a marlin fisherman and was able to describe for us the beauty of the creature, with its long, shining snout. One man wondered whether, when Hemingway writes of the sharks attacking the marlin’s carcass, it was really a metaphor for how literary critics had stripped him bare. Not for the first time, I realized that many of the men I meet in Wandsworth are a great deal cleverer than I am. Generally, we end with a poem – though I find it impossible to gauge what the men will like. When I took in one of my favourite poems by George Mackay Brown, they unanimously agreed that it was ‘rubbish’. But when I introduced them to Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’, expecting them to find it impossibly old-fashioned, they loved it, passing it round the group and reading a verse each at a quick canter. ‘Was Walter de la Mare a Christian?’ one asked. ‘I don’t know. Why?’ ‘Well, these lines, “Tell them I came, and no one answered/That I kept my word, he said”, they sound like Jesus, don’t they?’ Not all men feel able to share their thoughts like this – at least not to begin with. But, given time, most of those who begin by sitting on the edge of the group, arms crossed and silent, gradually begin to open up. ‘Can we read My Family and Other Animals?’ asked one man at the end of a session during which he had said not a word. So we did – transporting ourselves one dark, wet, winter afternoon from dismal Wandsworth to sun-soaked Corfu. ‘Don’t you feel scared?’ some of my friends ask. The answer is, ‘No. Never.’ I know ‘my’ men are serving long sentences, but, as I’ve no idea what they’ve actually done, I’m far more likely to feel frustrated than afraid. Sometimes, the room we are meant to meet in has been double-booked, and we have to sit in the passageway where it’s almost impossible to hear yourself think. More than once, I’ve received a text as I’m making my way to Wandsworth on the bus: a prisoner has gone missing and the whole place is in lockdown. The reading group has been cancelled. Or a prisoner will apologize and say that he hasn’t been able to read the book because he’s still waiting for new glasses. And then there’s ‘churn’: it’s not unusual to arrive and find that half the prisoners from the previous session have been moved on. In the face of all this, I never cease to be amazed by the dedication of the wonderful prison librarian. He not only oversees our groups but also organizes ‘Storybook Dads’ weekends, when prisoners’ children are welcomed in to have their dads read to them. And he makes sure, for those new to the prison, that there is a ‘Books for first-nighters’ trolley, with fiction and non-fiction carefully chosen to ease anguish. Despite what my probation officer friend says, here is a rare example of somebody who really does want to be in prison: being a prison librarian is not just a job but a vocation. Recently, he took me to look around his library. It is a light, orderly, comfortable space, with books to suit every taste and reading ability. I was impressed. He smiled: ‘I try to make it a little piece of paradise.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Maggie Fergusson 2023