The prisoner

I arrived at Lowdham Grange Prison in deepest Nottinghamshire one February night last year. Soon afterwards, a charming middle-aged, bearded prisoner introduced himself to me. He was a devout Christian, but shared my intellectual interests, although he was primarily a legal academic and was serving ten years for fraud.

I will call this prisoner David. He was a natural blond or redhead, very English-looking, and with a fine double-barrelled surname. But his father, who now lived in Canada, was Welsh. And his mother, to whom he had been very close, had been a Jewess, a Levy mysteriously adopted from Portsmouth.

Life on E-wing, with its grim Nottingham manager and dour Liverpudlians, wasn't easy, and I soon came to rely on my new friend. But very quickly he was moved away, beginning the rapid progress that was soon to take him to the super-enhanced houseblock, K-wing. I was very alone without him, but sometimes they allowed him to come back and visit me.



I remember one talk we had with deep gratitude. It took place on the last Sunday of March, a sunny afternoon. Most prisoners were out in the yard, but we drew up two chairs in a corner and I told him about all about my mother. I still felt very betrayed by her because she had left her house to her much younger lover. Over two hours, however, David was almost able to persuade me that there had been no betrayal. I cried before he left me.

After six and a half months I was finally able to join him on K-wing. On my first evening, he left me after a brief welcome because he had things to do in Education. I gave little sign that I cried, but our relationship began to die from that moment. It took time, though. We had lots of wonderful theological discussions as we walked around the yard of this, the intellectuals' wing. And he also opened his heart to me. There had been an incident when he was 23. He had been about to qualify as a solicitor, but he had thrown a sickie to be with a girlfriend and his new boss, a hard man, had sacked him. His life had gone wrong after that.

Gradually, I grew to understand that there was something truly wrong with David. He was unpleasant, needling, in all sorts of subtle ways. I walked less and less with him in the yard. Then came the first time I shouted at him, as he sat across a table from me, his bearded face smiling and obstinate. I began to share my growing suspicions about him with other friends. Then he would make a great effort to be reconciled with me, and our relationship would recover a little, only to plummet again.

Finally, on Boxing day, I decided to open my heart to him on a certain matter. He listened very calmly, quietly and patiently, and for much of our discussion there were witnesses. Dinner was served at 5 o'clock, and there was as unpleasant incident with a worker in the serving area. Until we were banged up at 5.45, I went on trying to tell David about my troubles, but he retreated coldly into his cell. When I went into mine, and they slammed the door, I resolved that I would have no more to do with him.

Then things got bad. My experiences over the next month and a half included two moves to progressively worse wings, and ranged from being twisted up by three officers on the segregation unit to fighting all night for breath in my various rooms, and to being offered the choice by the consultant psychiatrist at Lowdham Grange between taking medication for the psychosis I had admitted to or being sent to a criminal lunatic asylum.

I refused the medication and a few days later, on 6th February 2009, I was awakened by a posse of officers and nurses and told I was being moved, they did not know where. I felt a little scared as I was being marched towards reception. But how beautiful it was to see the Nottinghamshire countryside under snow, and almost a relief to draw up once again at the great wall of Belmarsh.

I never succeeded in dropping David entirely. His winning ways won him a wide acquaintance. The evangelical Anglican chaplain loved him very much, the Pentecostal chaplain treated him with unusual tolerance, and the Catholic priest with formal friendship mixed with barely concealed loathing. David maintained excellent relationships with the prison's leading atheist billionaire inmate. All the teachers and support workers knew him, as did all of the prisoners. He was often on the phone to his motherly Danish wife, the mother of his two Baluchi stepsons, whose Afghan father had been an eminent doctor and had risen to be the royal physician in Saudi Arabia. Even the rabbi liked David.

I remember the last time I saw him. It was in the education block, and he had been helping one of the teachers with her lessons. "I'm so tired" he said to me in the crowded corridor as we waited to be let out for lunch. He was smiling ingratiatingly, his beard seeming almost to shake in sympathy with his own suffering. And I think I wished him in German soft rest and sweet dreams.