Prison Writing

I thought this was going to be easy. I thought I’d just pull my prison journals from where they sit now, in one of the drawers of my old writing desk. The desk is scored with scratches and scarred with holes. Some I made as a boy, bored and misusing my compass needle. Even then the desk was covered in holes and scratches. Which did my father make, sixty years ago in Cape Town, wishing he were outside under the African sun? Where did my grandfather scrape at the wood in the cool, bright air of Darjeeling when it was Britain?

We walked in the woods around here when I was a child. One time we walked for what felt like miles on a narrow path. The steep slope made my legs shake. After hours we found the cave. My father, my grandfather and I lit a fire to cook on and we squatted around it.

I know I need to write about my experience of prison, to perform my translational function for the reader. But again and again when I try to access those memories my attention slides off, silk on polished wood. Surface, surface, surface. But surface can reveal, if we scratch and gouge wounds in the wood, like a small boy bored with maths homework, who never guessed what the next thirty years would really bring.

See how I avoid it though? Even here, I’m telling you more about my desk than my writing technique. Prison is so hard to explain. A soldier I met in prison said to me that incarceration is as strange as deployment, and as hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been there.

Freya the puppy is teething. I try to keep her away from the furniture but I allow her to gnaw at the oak coffee table. Zoe had it made for me, for my thirtieth birthday. The words around it say So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. She wanted to give me new words from that book, to deflect me from driving toward death. She couldn’t though, no other person could.

I’ve turned away from death now though. People who’ve known me a long time see the difference and askwhat changed and sometimes I tell them it’s experience or the humbling of court and prison or just time to think but really the turning point was before that. Christmas Day, 2017.

Freya gnaws at the table legs that are so thick and solid, bigger than my thighs even when I played rugby every week. Two years now, but I’ll be running out again at Christmas. How long do Vizslas live? Twelve to fifteen years.

Twelve to fifteen years ago I was married, living in that little house in Hertfordshire. Working too much, never home. Burying myself in activity because silence, oh silence was terrifying. When it’s quiet my life becomes visible and audible again, it said on the first page of that book of poetry. On Saturday night, in the bathroom. The scent of lavender, the steam, the tender glow of candlelight. I read those words to you and my eyes filled with tears, hot and wet and inescapable and for the first time I didn’t care that another saw me crying.

Twelve to fifteen years from now, those aged teeth marks on the table legs remain and Freya is gone. She won’t echo my yawn in the morning and stretch her spine out with a prrtch of pleasure. We live in that farmhouse we bought when it was a hollow shell. The sun has set, the fire is burning, the children are in bed. Other dogs snore nearby, not Freya. I touch the teeth marks on the table leg and in the silence tears come to my eyes. You hold me and I breathe your hair, striped with grey now.

This weekend you asked me when do you know that it’s real? I couldn’t say, not yet. But I thought, the moment you turned up with that cold sore and I realised I’d be kissing you for decades and never kissing anyone else so what did it matter?

The fire burns in the cave. My father, my grandfather and I squat round it. There may be shadows on the walls but I do not see them. We do not see them. All we see is the flames, dancing their brief life.