The convict and the farmer
Peter J. M. Wayne
INVISIBLE CRYING TREE: THE TRUE STORY OF AN EXTRAORDINARY FRIENDSHIP by Tom Shannon and Christopher Morgan Doubleday, £9.99, pp. 198 For a lifer to be moved three times in one year is unusual. Normally, a prisoner serving an indeterminate sentence might expect to spend three or four years in a long term 'dispersal' establishment before transferring progressively onwards through the system towards more open conditions. He would usually be inclined to behave himself despite not having any remission to lose for so called disciplinary offences. A momentary flash of anger; a 'roll' in the corridor; or a screw-directed tirade of abuse might cost your average inmate an irritating few lost days. It costs a lifer immeasurably more. For when it comes to evaluating how much of a danger this man still poses to the public, 100 little red- penned entries in his file are read, re-read, analysed and totted up in the columns for and against early release on parole licence. If he wants out, he learns to bite bullets. After all, a few wrong words might come back to haunt him ten years later. Lifer reviews have always been notoriously retro in character.
Tom Shannon, seven years into his life sentence, doesn't seem to realise this — or if he does, he appears not to give a fig. Throughout the 12 months of correspon- dence this book comprises, we follow the vicissitudes of a man misanthropically regressing from the relative liberalism of Maidstone Gaol, through the badlands of Blundeston, and finally on to Albany, a kind of prison that time forgot, used for many years now as an island dumping ground for disruptives, recalcitrants and other mainland non-desirables.
The letters themselves yield up a mixed bag of curiosa penologica cleverly coaxed out of our anti-hero by Christopher Morgan, gentleman farmer and opera buff, writing to Shannon under the auspices of the Prison Reform Trust's penfriend scheme. Much of what Shannon has to tell his new friend is depressingly familiar one man's 'fight' against a system he's con- vinced himself exists solely to destroy him — but the text does occasionally come to life if only by virtue of his wildly idiosyn- cratic spelling, lovingly preserved by his editors. In Shannon's world, `hestericle' fel- low prisoners attend lestifels religious', screws Instacate' riots, and `inadiquif white recidivists wage constant racial war with the `carra beans'.
At times, Shannon verges on the hysteri- cal himself. He is obsessed with what he sees as the nihilistic tendencies of the youngsters (he's 55) around him. Rather hypocritically, he counts death by drug overdose `more worthy' than death by homosexually contracted AIDS, only to reveal a few pages later that had someone who makes a pass at him been `a sweet looking kid' instead of `the ugliest bastard in the nick' he might have been tempted to take the plunge. He also lies — let's give him the benefit of the doubt — exagger- ates. Nobody, in my experience of over 30 prisons, has ever been subjected to the `anul probe' he claims to have undergone during a lock down search in Maidstone.
A wide-eyed Morgan laps all this up. As a young man he had listened to the roman- tic incarceral tales of his father's friend, the Hungarian freedom fighter General Veresz. But that's about as near as he'd ever been to a bolted, barred cell door. Despite his obvious good intentions, there are times when I feel his interest in Shan- non verges on the prurient: `Tell me about the gangsters . . the drug scene . . . the hustling.' On the face of it, he's such a respectable old buffer. He organises furni- ture restoring weekends, (`we only have room for eight'), at the farmstead. He is careful to keep this address secret at all times and 'disturbed to see how intimate some of the lady penfriends have become with their cons'.
His wife nevertheless writes to a prisoner of her own, 'Anne's con', in Wakefield. And how I'd love to have been a fly on the side of their Aga as they read and com- pared their respective prisoners' letters over breakfast, or to have seen the look on Shannon's hard face when he was called up to collect the tag of smelly things thyme, camomile, lavender, rosemary [which] come from what we call our fra- grant bank,' that Morgan sends him whilst he's down the block in Blundeston.
One disturbing aspect of prison life that Invisible Crying Tree lays uncomfortably bare is the recent proliferation of prisoners using hard drugs to help get through their sentences. Shannon probably correctly anticipates that it will not be long before somebody is killed over a drugs deal gone wrong. He recounts numerous instances of violence provoked by `scagheads' getting into debt or stealing from other cons to support their habits. One 'youngster' has his drugs parcel 'cut out of his bum' by jeal- ous peers. Morgan 'can't bear to think about it'.
Perhaps I can add my own two penny- worth. The Home Secretary thinks he's being very clever indeed by introducing the mandatory drugs testing programme this year. The squeaky clean new look Prison Service has this quite frankly unattainable aim of creating drug-free prisons by the end of 1996. What both the politicians and the bureaucrats have signally failed to understand is this. By blanket testing pris- oners for a variety of drugs they are actual- ly encouraging many of those who quietly enjoy the benefits of cannabis to switch over to the recreational use of heroin. I watch this happening around me every day. Does anybody doubt what I say? My rea- soning is quite straightforward. It takes 28 days for traces of cannabis to leave the human system. It takes traces of heroin only four. With resultant odds against test- ing positive and a month's remission at stake each time, one can see the fatal method in the prisoners' madness. Michael Howard will be needing an invisible crying tree of his own to wail upon before very much longer. The system will be awash with junkies and junkies mean nothing but trouble. Far be it from me to point these sort of things out to him. But never let it be said he wasn't warned.
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