Education here at the Weare is compulsory. There are two reasons for this. First, recent research has revealed that 60 per cent of all inmates throughout the system have a reading ability below that of an average 12-year-old; our well- meaning director general has decided it's time to raise their academic standards. Second-and this applies more directly on board this prison ship-there is nothing else to do. Having decreed some time ago that prisoners must spend more time out of their cells engaged in "purposeful activity," the directors at headquarters, area managers and governors in situ are now finding this more difficult to provide.
When I first started coming to prison, way back in the 1970s, there were plenty of stimulating activities for the inmates to engage in: mail bags to sew, garden gnomes to paint, fishnets to crochet, blankets to weave. I was once in a prison workshop where the prisoners were forced to weld together the bars for their own cell windows.
In today's streamlined, politically correct prison service, most of these workshops have been taken over by anger-management courses, drug rehabilitation programmes, offending behaviour seminars, and the naif new boy in the stable-"employability" initiatives. When in doubt, send the men to school. The trouble is, you can lead a con to water, but you can't make him drink.
Some weeks ago there was a disturbing television programme on BBC2 about the problems posed by a gang of four maladjusted teenagers in a special needs centre in east London. Their classroom antics (which were pandemonious) reminded me of the daily shenanigans here on the hulk. Three prison teachers have resigned over the last fortnight. The staff shortages have become so bad that they've started to employ other prisoners to help. So began my teaching career.
The head of education allocated me to the "basic skills" group where, she felt, I could best use my talents to "give a hand up to those who need it most." When I arrived the supply teacher was already looking brow-beaten. He had taken the trouble to write his name on the board. Originally, it had read "Mr Walker." Someone had rubbed out the l and replaced it with an n.
Within ten minutes the class numbers had decreased from a baker's dozen down to eight.
"Got toofache, sir..."
"Need to get frew to my brief on the phone."
"Sir, I jus' feel like a complete pile o' shit vis mornin'."
"Keep gettin' migraines, sir. S'alright if I go back to my cell?"
Four of the remainder assembled themselves round a table in the corner. Soon an argument was raging over a game of Scrabble. A character called Pintsize had added an r to the seven letter word "secrete."
"What the fuck's secreter? Naw, you ain't 'avin' vat."
"'Course I am. My stash is secreter than yours."
"Bollocks. Somefink's either secret or it ain't. Anyway, the word weren't secret. It was secrete."
"Eh? So what's the difference? Sir, what's the difference between secret and secrete?"
"One's an adjective and one's a verb."
Mr Walker's answer didn't really throw a lot of light on the problem either. The lads just looked bamboozled. Pintsize, meanwhile, had buried his face in a big red dictionary, desperate to find a plausible definition.
"Secrecy, secret, secrete, secretion..." He paused for a second. "Yeh,that's it!" he exclaimed jubilantly. "Secretion. Process by which special substances are separated from blood, saliva, urine or other bodily fluids."
"So what? You still ain't told us what the bleedin' hell your secreter is."
"Cor, you ain't 'alf fick. Don't you lot know nuffink? Simple, innit. A secreter is somebody who leaves 'is DNA behind at ver scene of a crime."
That sealed it. Blinded by forensic science, nobody raised any further objections and Pintsize got his points.
Eventually I found someone who wanted to do some work. Terry was a traveller whose peripatetic lifestyle as a boy had occluded any formal education.
"Fing is," he explained quietly, so nobody else could hear, "I've got two boys of my own now, Darren an' Christopher, an' they do go to school. Every day they come 'ome full o' what they've bin doin, askin' me this an' that. When they show me what they've written, an' ask me what I think, I feel a proper cunt coz I still can't read."
For the next hour and a half we worked intently. It turned out that Terry could read a great deal more than he thought he could. He was just a bit lazy and he had a habit of reading the first couple of letters of a word, then guessing the rest. By the end of the session, I felt we had achieved something. I gave him an easy reader version of The Elephant Man to take back to his cell.
"That's great, Terry," I told him. "I've thoroughly enjoyed working with you this afternoon. Same time same place tomorrow? Carry on the good work-for Darren and Christopher?"
"I'd love to, Peter, but I never thought to say. I'm gettin out in the mornin'."
