Parker The Frying Pan

A Prison and Its Prisoners
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30429-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 270 Seiten

In 1970 Tony Parker was permitted by the Home Office to make a series of visits to HMP Grendon Underwood, the UK's first psychiatric prison, there to interview inmates and staff for a study of the institution and its unique community. 'Tony Parker deserves a place in any future history of literature for his contribution to the creative use of the tape-recorder... We can only guess at the qualities of patience and perceptiveness which have enabled Mr Parker to make of his material one of the most important studies ever to have been published of the habitual criminal.' TLS 'The reader will find himself as deeply involved with his characters as Mr Parker is himself.' Spectator

Tony Parker was born in Stockport on June 25 1923, the son of a bookseller. His mother died when he was 4. He began to write poems and plays in his late teens. Called up to military service early in the Second World War he declared himself a conscientious objector and, in lieu, was sent to work at a coal-mine in the North East, where he observed conditions and met people who influenced him hugely. After the war he began to work as a publisher's representative and, voluntarily, as a prison visitor - the latter another important stimulus to his subsequent writings. After Parker happened to make the acquaintance of a BBC radio producer and imparted his growing interest in the lives, opinions and self-perceptions of the prisoners he had met, he was given the opportunity to record an interview with a particular convict for broadcast on the BBC. The text of the interview was printed in the Listener, and spotted by the publishers Hutchinson as promising material for a book. This duly emerged as The Courage of His Convictions (1962), for which Parker and the career criminal 'Robert Allerton' (a pseudonym) were jointly credited as authors. Over the next 30 years Parker would publish 18 discrete works, most of them 'oral histories' based on discreetly edited but essentially verbatim interview transcripts. He died in 1996 (though one further work, a study of his great American counterpart Studs Terkel, appeared posthumously.)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Parker, Tony

Leseproben

1: Separating the Boys from the Men

1 TERRY

Aged twenty-one; slightly built, athletic, every movement of his hands or arms as he talked swift and controlled. Fair, curly hair, a pale complexion, wide-set blue eyes, a quick and ready smile. He looked out of the window through the bars across the exercise-yard to the wall, at the rolling green fields and wooded hills in the distance, stretching up into the summer-blue sky.

*

—That you’ve actually killed someone, it’s a long time before the fact even begins to sink in. For nearly a year I felt nothing. You don’t believe it, you can’t think of the implications, what it really means. I’d no remorse about it, it didn’t seem connected with me at all—more like something I’d heard about, that someone else had done, someone I knew vaguely, an acquaintance. But not me: I wouldn’t let myself think it, it didn’t come home to me; it took a year before I started to feel even a bit bad about it inside.

It happened like this, that there was me and another bloke who was a lot older, he was about thirty, he’d been in prison a few times. He’d heard about this factory, he said, on the outskirts of the town. Wednesday night they were supposed to have a lot of money there, ready for paying out on Thursday in wages. They never put it in the safe, they kept it in the third drawer down in a filing-cabinet; the safe was just a blind. He knew one of the workmen at the place, who’d given him the tip. There was only one middle-aged nightwatchman, we could be in and out of the office in five minutes while he was away over the other side of the factory on his rounds.

We were drinking in a pub; when it came closing-time I said No I wasn’t interested, I wouldn’t do it. We wandered around for a bit in the town, went in an amusement arcade; round about half-past midnight I said ‘All right, come on, are we going then?’ He had an old van, it took us half-an-hour to find the place; we could see the light in the office and the man sitting there. We watched for a while, then about one o’clock he got up and went out, we could see his flashlamp moving round the building. When he’d got down the other end we opened the window and climbed in. The filing cabinet was locked, we had to break it open with a bar. There was nothing in the third drawer down, only a lot of papers; nothing in the fourth drawer, or the second, or the first.

I never even heard the nightwatchman come back; I suddenly turned round and there he was in the doorway. I hit him, he went down, but he caught hold of my legs and dragged me down on top of him on the floor. I just seemed to explode, I laid into him, I hit him and hit him, I was yelling at him ‘You bastard! You bastard!’ all the time.

The other bloke pulled me off him. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ he said, ‘Come on, leave it, we’re going.’ We hopped out of the window again, got in his van and drove back to town. He dropped me off at the end of our road, I walked home and let myself in, had a wash and a cup of tea and then I went straight to bed.

I slept late in the morning; when I got up I went straight out down the town to the pub for a drink. The other bloke was there, he came over, we took our drinks to a table in the corner, he said ‘It’s all round the town this morning, that feller’s dead.’

I didn’t say anything, I didn’t feel anything; I just shrugged. I think he must have gone straight round to the police and given himself up and grassed me; they came for me that afternoon at home.

He got six years, I got life. Not guilty to murder, I pleaded. Guilty of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility, that was what the jury found. The Judge said that I’d be released eventually if it was thought safe that I could be. Five years, six years, seven years—maybe nine years, I don’t know. They don’t give you much encouragement to start thinking about when you might be let out. You get very depressed; but there’s nothing you can do, only try and live with it, immerse yourself in a few things you enjoy doing—sport, studying, trying to interest yourself in whatever work they give you to do. Keep your nose clean, behave yourself; and maybe one day…. You can’t think any further than that.

I’ve taken up playing the guitar a bit, mostly folk music and pop, Bob Dylan songs, Joan Baez, stuff of that sort. I’ve passed a couple more ‘O’ levels since I’ve been inside; I think it’s about nine or ten I’ve got altogether now. Now I’m going to start on Maths and Economics at ‘A’ level. I suppose after all I might as well.

*

—Oh yes, school, I was one of the bright ones; perhaps too bright, I don’t know, maybe that was the trouble. What I mean is we’re a working-class family, my father’s a miner; sometimes I wonder if it might have been better if I hadn’t looked so promising. My brother, he’s older than I am but he wasn’t too good at school, he’s got on all right though; married, good job, settled down. I was the one they had ambitions for, specially my mother. I couldn’t take it somehow, I was rebellious, I didn’t like the feeling of being owned, people telling me what I ought to do. My father was all right, though he gave me a good hiding now and again when I went too far. But my mother, I don’t know what it was with her, we could never seem to hit it off. If she told me to do something, I automatically went and did something else. The trouble was I didn’t have any fixed ideas of my own to offer, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Only I wanted to belong to myself, I didn’t want to be someone else’s person, I don’t know if you understand that?

Infant school, junior school, from there I more or less walked through the eleven-plus, then I went to the big grammar school. A bit of trouble when I was fourteen, I think that was the first time; me and some other lads broke into a store, we got done for that and for fighting, assault. I got probation for two years. Twelve months after that I was in trouble again for an air-gun, shooting at street-lamps, vandalism I think that was the charge. The Probation Officer put in a good report about me, said I was working well at school, which I was, so all I got was a £5 fine.

‘O’ levels at fifteen: took six, passed six—English, German, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology. Then up into the sixth form. Only by then I’d lost interest, nothing seemed to have any meaning; I didn’t work, I didn’t study, I played truant. I was knocking about down in the town with my mates, going in pubs, drinking, breaking into shops and stealing money but never getting caught. I took three ‘A’ levels at seventeen and failed them all. I wanted to leave school, I was fed-up with it.

My parents were worried sick. But whatever they suggested, I wouldn’t agree to it; I was dead set against trying for university; all I wanted was—well, like I’ve said, that was the trouble, I didn’t know. When they said ‘But what do you want to do, Terry?’, I’d no suggestions to make. Eventually there was a school trip, Luxembourg, Germany. If they paid for me to go on that, when I came back would I do another year in the sixth, get a couple of ‘A’ levels and then go on to the local Technical College and do Zoology? I was tired of all the arguing, I said Yes all right.

I went on the trip, then back to school. Nothing was any different, I still didn’t work. The more people got on to me, the more argumentative and bad-tempered and rebellious I was. I was drinking more, fighting more, truanting more. Of course I didn’t get my ‘A’ levels at the end of that year either. That was it, I left school then. No thoughts of working for my living, there was nothing I wanted to do. The pocket-money my parents gave me wasn’t much, but that didn’t worry me; the blokes I was knocking around with, if we wanted something we went and pinched it, broke into garages and emptied the tills; shops, offices—not large-scale crime, just pilfering and thieving loose cash.

It only went on a few months: and then I got this.

*

—People say, well, they say prisoners should be punished, don’t they, locked up for years as a punishment for what they’ve done? Perhaps they’re right. They don’t seem to want to know why people commit crimes, and perhaps stop them doing it again. Not that I think there’s any one particular reason: backgrounds, home life, difficulties about getting on with parents, drink, depression. Yes, I used to get very depressed, I wasn’t happy at the sort of life I was leading, but nothing anybody said seemed to get through to me. I hadn’t the interest to go on any further, I hadn’t any ambition, somewhere along the line by the time I was fifteen it just seemed to have petered-out. No, I couldn’t say that it’s come back much, yet. If you ask me what I want to do now, well it’s hard to think of anything, I seem to be living in a vacuum. Perhaps one day I’ll get to an open prison—but that’s about as far as I can think, about being in another sort of prison, progressing that far. But not about being free again, nowadays I hardly ever think about it.

I used to, a couple of years ago; I thought about it and I talked about it. ‘When I get out, I’m going to do so and so. I’m going to go back home, get a job, work for my living’, and all the rest of it. As I say, now I just think as far as ‘Well it’d be nice to get to an open prison eventually’—but nothing beyond that....