CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERGRASS
being a non drug abuser in a bail hostel
ON 14 December 1991 I was arrested in the Queen's Hotel, Southsea, and charged with obtaining services by deception, i.e. using someone else's credit card. I spent two reasonably comfortable days in police custody and was placed in front of Portsmouth magistrates on the Monday morning, after spending a few uncomfort- able hours in a kind of cage — dog-kennel dimensions — under the courtroom. To my solicitor's relief, I was granted bail but the condition was made that I should reside at the Dickson House bail hostel in Fareham, Hants, pending further court appearances.
On the Monday afternoon, I was provid- ed with a rail warrant by the Portsmouth probation service for the short train jour- ney to Fareham, which I made in the com- pany of a long-haired, effeminate young man named Simon, charged with burglary and a number of drugs-related offences. This was not my first sojourn at a bail hos- tel (I once spent seven months in Clark's House, Oxford, a relatively relaxed place) but it was to be by far the most harrowing.
Dickson House set out to rehabilitate its still technically innocent charges with a routine of structure and discipline. A plump Scotswoman named Lena with a very genteel accent was assigned to be my personal counsellor; she spent an hour or so telling me that I was on no account to bring drugs into the place (a most unlikely contingency, since I atri profoundly opposed to drugs) and to report back to her anything I saw or heard. She then showed me into a room for three which I was to share for a week or so with a very fat, tattooed burglar named Ian and a very thin child-molester named Andy.
It didn't take me long — one sniff — to realise that pot had recently been smoked in the room; the next 24 hours were an orgy of pot-smoking, both in and outside the room, apparently involving nearly all of the bail hostel's 28 residents, who told me that the drug helped them to `lighten up' a little in the stressful situation in which they found themselves. Bored with all this, I did what I had been asked to do and 'grassed' Ian to the hostel staff, for which he threat- ened to 'bury me six feet deep', which he again threatened to do when I remonstrat- ed with him for playing his stereo, with unmelodic vocal accompaniment, until 3 a.m. I sensed that Ian was 'all mouth and no trousers', as they say, and unlikely to do me much harm.
Things took a more serious turn about two weeks later, after a fairly miserable Christmas and New Year, by which time I had been moved into a double room with a con man named Big Steve, a devout Roman Catholic, who was even more pro- foundly opposed to the drug culture than myself. We two soon became known — and feared — as the Dickson House twin `supergrasses'. On the morning of 3 Jan- uary, I inadvertently 'grassed' a rather charming young man named Little Steve not for drugs but for constantly rapping on our door during the night. The staff had been waiting for an excuse to get rid of Lit- tle Steve and used my complaint to 'breach' him. He was sent to Winchester prison. This action brought down the wrath of almost the entire hostel upon me, not because they cared particularly about Little Steve or his fate but because he turned out to have been their main supplier of drugs. Deprived of their regular supply of `light- ening' narcotics, the residents rapidly reverted to their violent animal natures.
It all came to a head at supper the next evening when the dining-room was set out with two tables — one for the grasses and one for the non-grasses. The tension was palpable in the small, claustrophobic room. Big Steve and I were made to sit at the grasses' table. Of course, sauce bottles were thrown, and an ugly full-scale riot seemed about to develop. I retreated to my room to consider what to do; Big Steve, more courageously, went across to report to the hostel office where, as ill-luck would have it, a lone and rather inadequate female was on duty that night.
Big Steve returned to join me in our room and we waited. We did not have to wait for very long. A howling mob of our fellow residents, actually only five in num- ber but sounding like many more, headed by the hostel's senior bully and narcotics `fence', Tony, a former army training sergeant, had soon kicked down our door. Then Tony picked me up with his left hand and threw me into the room across the way where he and a young man with a long record of violent crime, Barry, proceeded to beat me up. I tried to smash the window with a view to jumping from the first floor, but it was double-glazed.
All the things you hear about such moments are true. My past life, all 541/2 years of it, flashed in front of my eyes. I had not been so frightened since I had looked down the barrel of a gun belonging to an ETA terrorist in San Sebastian in 1973. The terrorist had been intent on killing me and I had no doubt that Barry and Tony, in their drug-deprived frenzy, intended to kill me too. But my room- mate, Big Steve, with great presence of mind set off the hostel's fire-alarm by hold- ing a lighted match to the room's smoke warning device. At the sudden jangling of fire-bells, the two criminals who were pul- verising me reacted and ran like the rats of psychologists' dreams.
Would it be an exaggeration to say that Big Steve had saved my life? We both returned to the safety of the staff-room for the rest of the night, in the course of which our room and possessions were smashed and scattered beyond recognition by our assailants. My little wooden locker was reduced, literally, to powder. The female staff member had had a direct panic button to Fareham police station but had appar- ently decided not to press it. The deputy warden of the hostel had been telephoned at his nearby home and told of a `violent incident' but had chosen not to come in.
Next day, I was removed to a nearby cot- tage for my personal safety. Tony, who had somehow avoided capture, traced me there and attempted a forced entry. This time I really thought the end had come but, after hiding under a bed and in a cupboard, I decided to dial 999. It is the one and only time in my life that I have been pleased to see a policeman. Tony was arrested and now languishes along with the other assailants in Winchester prison.
Throughout all this, the bail hostel staff were pathetic. The best they could come up with for me was a transfer to another hos- tel (Winchester!), where, as they admitted, the chances of one of my attackers turning up after re-bailing were fairly high. I had had enough of them all by now, and, on the afternoon of Monday, 13 January, I quietly took the law into my own hands and `breached' myself. As I did so, I felt strangely happy as well as free.
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