Prison

(1)

I rather thought, whilst the country was locked down in the interests of public health, now might be as good a time as any to tell you about the brief times I was locked up in the interests of department store profit health. 

As it happens, the first time wasn’t for shoplifting, or hoisting as it’s known in the game, but prescription forgery. My friend Morphine Steve’s girlfriend Caz, who later went out with my other friend Motorbike Jim, showed me how to do it. She wasn’t an especially literate girl, but she knew the form, as you might say. 

Bill Major, the man who first called me Auntie, having been aware that this knowledge had changed hands, happened to find himself in his GP’s surgery, whilst the doc’ had popped out of the room, with a prescription pad on the desk. It would have just been rude not to peel a few off. So whoop whoop, Bill’s your uncle, Pus is your Auntie, and away we went. It was July 1977, and two weeks after I’d been the front page headline story in the local rag, The Wimbledon News, with the headline: Public School Punk Rocks! This article, incidentally, was syndicated by my supposed mate Wensley Clarkson on said paper to the Sunday Mirror and Reveille, and I never saw a penny. Wensley has gone on to become a successful true crime writer, including an awful book on John Bindon which reads like Reveille and, not least, ‘Killer On The Road’ about Kenny Noye, in which he makes his subject out to be a psychopathic murdering thug. Well done Wensley, you were spot on — thing is, he’s just got out. Incidentally, Wensley was then going out with, and is still married to a girl called Claire Maconic, known locally as ‘The Parrot’, because she squawked like one.

Anyway back to the prescribing our own Diconal scenario — Diconal is a phosphorescent pink tablet manufactured with silicone, which one can crush up and inject, but carries attendant risks. It is an opioid but also induces visual and aural hallucinations and the Georgian coving and dado rail in my hallway are painted in the same shade of pink, for old times’ sake — like all good criminals, we knew when to stop, just we couldn’t, or didn’t. So the inevitable happened, and I cracked The Wimbledon News again, this time only on the inside pages, with the rather more inglorious headline: Punk rocker on drugs charge. However, this was after what, if I wanted to sound like a villain I’d call the trial, but was actually a hearing at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court, where I pleaded guilty. 

To jump back to the bust itself, at my parents’ house in Wimbledon Park — I’d left home three years earlier but had to retreat back briefly — it could have been worse, because I’d burgled a chemist a few weeks before and also had large jars of Dexedrine, Diazepam, etc., in my bedroom but no Class A, as I’d failed to get the DDA cabinet off the wall. On actually gaining entry to the premises through the upstairs back window, there had followed an hilarious Laurel & Hardy moment when I had fallen through the false polystyrene tiled ceiling to the shop, and tumbled unceremoniously onto the floor in full view of the shop window, brightly lit with displays of nappies and lipstick. Anyway, whilst the police took said pills, that’s all they did and they were only interested in any remaining haul from the Diconal escapades, which was minimal, as they’re proper moreish, hence the recklessness.

My parents refused to stand bail for me: my mum was in Martini oblivion and my dad consequently at a low point anyway, and I think they thought a short sharp remand shock might work, if only because nothing else had. So off I went from the initial court hearing to Ashford Remand Centre in Middlesex. Although there were some big fellas there and it went off here and there, largely it was like junior school — you had meals in a dining hall, not off a tray in your cell, and there were young teenagers flicking peas at each other. I wrote to my dear friends the Sullivans, surrogate Godparents I might describe them, asking for a bail surety, and got the sweetest ‘no’ you’ve ever had. Anyway it was only two weeks, and I had one visit. Bill Major came to see me with another friend, Bill Wells who ran a British motorbike shop called Merton Motorcycle Spares. They brought me twenty Players’ cigarettes in two packets of ten, and the Major said they’d sort me out a lawyer. They did indeed sort me out a lawyer, who smoked dope and worked for Release and was cool. I only had one meeting with him, in a pub called The Horns by Shoreditch Church; it was a Monday lunchtime and they had topless dancers and strippers on. Anyway he might have been a cool guy, but the barrister he instructed was newly qualified and useless, and my uncle, a very successful solicitor still practising, though never really in criminal law, had to help me get a replacement.

So, moving on, after two weeks in Ashford, back I came in the meat wagon to Wimbledon Magistrates Court, where Bill Major and a couple of other pals had also organised someone to stand bail for me, an entertaining lunatic dipsomaniac Irishman called Mickey MacDonald who, all those endearing attributes aside — and I mean them to be endearing — ticked all the boxes, being a householder with no criminal convictions, or so he and we thought. However, when he went into court and took the oath, the police objected on the grounds that they had found a conviction from a few years before. This was when, in the company of a man named Mickey Friar, who was Oliver Reed, the film star’s, right hand drinking man, he had been charged with: ‘The attempted theft of a dolphin’. I was the one not laughing as the court wanted reports, and it looked like being shipped back to Ashford for a further three weeks. 

Anyway, I was allowed to make a phone call, and I rang my friend David Wynne, the sculptor, who lived in a beautiful house called Rushmere, next to the alma mater that had disowned me, well until punk rock that is, and who had an amazing bohemian household where I used to hang out. David Wynne after that sculpted the Queen Mother Gates to Hyde Park, but at that time had sculpted inter alia, the Queen and The Beatles; also the Taylor Woodrow tug-o-war over the Edinburgh Gates to Hyde Park. When I rang that morning, not only did he say he would come to the court and stand bail for me, but he was in full throttle in his studio, and arrived at the court and took the stand in his overalls with marble or granite dust in his hair. On top of that he liaised with my parents to have me back for the three weeks until the next hearing, so I was released. The surety was £500 and, as we were leaving the court, David Wynne took me aside and said: ‘You might think I’m a rich man, but if I lost that £500, I won’t be able to take my family on holiday this year.’ I nodded and he added: ‘I’m sure you will turn up for court, and I’m sure as it’s more or less your first offence you won’t go to prison, so come up and see me afterwards and let me know how you get on.’ I managed to keep a relatively low profile and duly did turn up and get two years’ probation. When I turned up at David Wynne’s afterwards he handed me an envelope with £100 in, saying: ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down. That’s so you can go on holiday too.’ What a gentleman — I left a couple of days later and hitch-hiked all the way to John O’ Groats and onto the Orkneys, then back via mine and Bills Major and Wells’ friend Ginger’s place down in North Devon, but that’ll have to keep for another time. Before I left David, knowing I was a William Blake fanatic, gave me a copy of Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' with a forward by the great Blake scholar and brother to economist Maynard, Geoffrey Keynes, who was a friend of David's. It is inscribed: from Geoffrey Keynes to David Wynne 5 Jan 1973, and beneath that: and from David Wynne for Julian Isaacs 8th July 1977. I still have it.

So that was Ashford Remand Centre. Oh, I forgot, my gran sent me a radio in, which was proper handy. Also she was a housekeeper and companion to an aristocratic lady called Frances Chenevix-Trench in Alexander Square, South Kensington, where at one time the film star Ava Gardner lived next door. My gran was permitted to have me to supper once a week, although we ate, not with Mrs. Trench, but in the kitchen downstairs. When I went on the week following my release from Ashford to see my gran, she asked me if I’d come up and say hello to Mrs. Trench, which was the standard procedure. I’d get offered a glass of sherry and we’d converse for ten minutes or so. Being aristocratic, she loved the horse racing like my gran and I, so there was always something to talk about. This time I queried the invitation, asking my gran if she was sure about it under the circumstances, and she replied that Mrs. Trench had said she would like to see me. I went up into the first floor drawing room, where Mrs. Trench sat in her habitual armchair, dressed in her habitual purple. Purple is traditionally ‘semi-mourning’ and she was a widow and traditionalist and never wore any other colour. I bade her good evening, and she asked me to sit down, then she said: ‘Your grandmother’s told me where you’ve been. I wouldn’t worry too much about it — one of my ancestors was hanged in the Tower.’ Next stop Act Two. Two Years Later. HMP Brixton and Pentonville.