Arthur & George

booming, the barracks turning out. And he always wins the game – he likes that too. No one ever gets off the Bill. If the soldiers don’t get them, the citizenry does. There’s a five-pound bounty for turning in an escaper, so there’s no incentive to look the other way. Then it’s a spell of chokey and a loss of remission. Just not worth it.’
    ‘And the other thing the Governor told me was that I am not allowed to change my religion.’
    ‘True enough.’
    ‘But why should I want to?’
    ‘Ah, you’re a star man, of course. Don’t know the ins and outs yet. You see, Portland has only Protestants and Catholics. About six to one, the ratio. But no Jews at all. If you were a Jew, you’d be sent to Parkhurst.’
    ‘But I’m not a Jew,’ said George, rather doggedly.
    ‘No. Indeed not. But if you were an old lag – an ordinary – and you decided that Parkhurst was an easier billet than Portland, you might be released from Portland this year as an ardent member of the Church of England, but by the time the police caught you next time, you might have decided you were a Jew. Then you’d get sent to Parkhurst. But they made it a rule that you can’t change your faith in the middle of a sentence. Otherwise prisoners would be coxing-and-boxing every six months, just for something to do.’
    ‘The rabbi at Parkhurst must get some surprises.’
    The Chaplain chuckled. ‘Strange how a life of crime can turn a man into a Jew.’
    George discovered that it was not just Jews who were sent to Parkhurst; invalids and those known to be a little bit off the top were also despatched there. You might not change religion at Portland, but if you broke down physically or mentally, you could be transferred. It was said that some prisoners deliberately put pickaxes through their feet, or pretended to be a little bit off the top – howling like dogs and tearing out their hair in clumps – in an attempt to gain a move. Most of them ended up in chokey instead, a few days’ bread and water their only reward.
    ‘Portland is in a most healthy situation,’ George wrote to his parents. ‘The air is very strong and bracing, and there is not much sickness.’ He might as well have been writing a postcard from Aberystwyth. But it was true too, and he must find what comfort he could for them.
    He soon grew used to his cramped accommodation and decided that Portland was a better place than Lewes. There was less red tape, and no idiotic regulation about being shaved and barbered in the open air. Also, the rules governing conversation between prisoners were more relaxed. The food was better too. He was able to inform his parents that there was a different dinner every day, and two kinds of soup. The bread was wholemeal – ‘Better than baker’s bread,’ he wrote, not as an attempt to evade censorship or ingratiate himself, but as a true expression of opinion. There were also green vegetables and lettuce. The cocoa was excellent, though the tea was poor stuff. Still, if you did not want tea, you might have porridge or gruel, and it surprised George that many insisted on having inferior tea rather than something more nutritious.
    He was able to tell his parents that he had plenty of warm underclothing; also jerseys, leggings and gloves. The library was even better than at Lewes, and the terms of borrowing more generous: he could take out two ‘library’ books, plus four of an educational nature, every week. All the leading magazines were available in volume form, though both books and journals had been purged of undesirable matter by the prison authorities. George borrowed a history of recent British art, only to discover that all the illustrations of work by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema had been neatly removed by the official razor. At the front of the volume was the warning written in every book borrowed from the library: ‘No turning down of pages.’ Underneath it a prison wag had written, ‘And no tearing out of pages.’
    Hygiene was no better, though no worse, than at Lewes. If you wanted a toothbrush you had to apply to the Governor, who seemed to answer Yes or No according to some private, whimsical system.
    One morning, in need of metal polish, George asked a warder if there was any chance of obtaining some Bath-brick.
    ‘Bath-brick, D462!’ replied the officer, his eyebrows leaping towards his cap. ‘Bath-brick! You’ll ruin the firm – you’ll be asking for Bath-buns next.’
    And that was the end of