Prospect's prisoner, Peter Wayne, is back inside after disappearing on the way to a drug rehabilitation centre, where he had been dispatched by a lenient judge. After nine months in London's drug-soaked underworld he was caught stealing a first edition of Winnie the Pooh (worth ?2,750) and sentenced to one year's imprisonment.
"so, bearing in mind that so few of these men speak any English whatsoever, I was wondering whether it might be possible to acquire a few phrase books for the wing, maybe from education or the library, so that I could learn a few words of their language, just so they don't feel quite so isolated...?"
The recently appointed governor of Wandsworth looked doubtful. He had come here from Gartree Prison with a reputation as a forward-looking, dynamic and liberal fellow, with a brief to drag this Victorian basilica of human discontent screaming into the 21st century. Given that he has already arranged for televisions to be placed in inmates' cells, I had optimistically stopped him in his tracks during one of his daily tours of inspection.
"Phrase books? Dictionaries? For the asylum seekers you mean?"
He pondered the implications of my request with a sceptical raised eyebrow, trying to figure out my hidden agenda.
"One of the officers based on their landing said it's like the Tower of Babel up there. And we all know what happened to that," I offered. Ever since the sudden arrival of 50 or so detainees, our wing has been filled with the unintelligible cacophonies of the Balkans, eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent and equatorial Africa.
"Well it's a jolly good idea," he admitted opening up the little black book he always carries to jot down his observations. "The problem of course is money. You see, the prison service has been ordered by the Home Office to provide 500 places for these foreign nationals. Trouble is, nobody has seen fit to provide me with any extra budget to deal with their requirements..."
"But surely we could afford a couple of dictionaries, " I argued, "I thought I might start with Russian. We already have lads from Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Belorussia."
"Mmm. Leave it to me," the governor said, rather non-commitally I thought, scribbling illegibly into his aide-m?moire. "I'm not promising anything though," he repeated. "Don't any of the officers speak Russian?" he asked. And on that risible note he bolted off back towards his gubernatorial bunker.
I had already asked one of the staff whether he knew any Russian, and he had answered that yes, he knew one word of it and that one word was nyet. "That's all I'll need to know. The Ruskys'll not be getting any special treatment from me."
On arrival at Wandsworth the "foreign nationals" are, without exception, stripped of their civilian clothes, then made to dress in battleship-grey jumpsuits bearing the legend "Wandsworth Laundry Services." From reception, they and their meagre possessions are bundled upstairs to E4 landing, where they remain locked for 23 hours a day in cells the size of pebble-dashed boxrooms. Most of the men-from Albania and Kosovo, Romania and Poland, a constellation of the Russian federated states, India and Pakistan, Malaysia and Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria and miscellaneous other states -have no idea how long they will have to remain here. Ineffably, a decree has come down from on high that Wandsworth (and other prisons scattered around the country) are the best and safest places for them to be housed whilst their cases are reviewed and more detention camps built.
Days went by without me hearing anything else from the governor. The general consensus of opinion amongst the screws is that if the "bloody foreigners" want to communicate with us, then they will just have to learn English. Of course one dreads to think what sort of English they will pick up in a place like Wandsworth. I began to look elsewhere for the elusive dictionaries.
After fruitlessly badgering the librarian, teachers and social workers, I eventually came up trumps with the Roman Catholic chaplain who very kindly supplied me with three Russian linguaphone tapes and a pair of Teach Yourself volumes on Albanian, Bosnian and Serbo-Croat. These I now have with me in my cell. Each day I try to learn five new words (and believe me it's an effort) in each of these languages.
Since I returned to Wandsworth (I was last here a decade ago) I have enjoyed what they call a "privileged" job on the food servery. It's tedious and sometimes exhausting work but it keeps me out and about and I can keep up with all the prison gossip. There is a rule here (quite strictly imposed) that "servers" are not supposed to talk to the disgruntled convicts as they shuffle along the hotplate to collect their meals, but determined to try out my newly acquired linguistic expertise, I have managed to flout this rule and can now (if only sotto voce) enquire in any number of Balkan tongues, how many slices of bread they would like; whether they would prefer an apple or an orange; or if they would like to partake of half a bowl of the ghastly prison porridge offered each morning.
When I see the thin, shy smile of recognition break on the face of a young Kosovan refugee whose family were lost in a blitzkrieg of ethnic cleansing I feel a warmth well up inside me. I like to think that I'm doing my bit to further the cause of human understanding. Our fast-track governor has pointedly avoided eye contact since our conversation. Still, he's a busy man. Won't someone give him some money?
