Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [7]
‘They’ll screw up their suspension,’ muttered Jimmy. Nick was more curious as to what the truck was doing driving cross-country towards Princetown. Wasn’t the road good enough? Soon they could hear the growl of a diesel engine and see the thick mud caked on the corrugated flanks of the vehicle. It pulled up a hundred yards short of the low stone wall that guarded the community of Princetown from the wilderness of the moor. The growl died and for a moment nothing happened.
The windows of the cab were dark, grimy with mud. Nick, Sin and Jimmy waited.
Dartmoor prison. Thirty-two acres of grim Victorian repression crystallised in stone. A more forbidding and depressing collection of buildings it would have been difficult to imagine. The main prison block squatted on the moor like a satanic mill worked by men of shame. Hewn from the dour indigenous rock, the barracks embodied the desolation that surrounded it.
For the men who lived there, unable even to see the hundreds of miles of freedom represented by the moor because of the intentionally high positioning of the cell windows, Dartmoor prison was a hulk of human despair. The bricks, the walls, the courtyards - all were as grey as their thoughts, their dreams. The 21
only respite from the bleak monotony that was their lives was the weekly visit to the work-farm outside the sprawling complex, when some of the men would get a snatch, however brief, of life beyond the walls of repression.
For Pemo Grimes that time was now, and he intended to make the most of it. Trudging over the moor with ten fellow cons, he decided he wasn’t going to overdo things today. It was far too warm to be overly energetic in his digging and planting, despite it only being early May. Sunlight cast a golden mantle over the moors. It lifted Grimes’s heart to see the usually dismal setting smiling for once. It inspired optimism, an emotion habitually alien to the long-term con. It made the remaining seven years of his sentence seem not quite as unbearable as they had the night before as he lay on his bunk, listening to the rain and the porcine snoring of his cell-mate. Shit, even the screws looked almost human today. There were three of them escorting the party that morning. There should have been more but staffing difficulties were bedevilling the prison. Nothing new there. Who the hell in their right mind would want to work in a place like this? Being a screw here, you really did share the sentence with the cons, something Grimes always derived a gritty satisfaction from. He could almost feel sorry for the bastards. They chose this. It didn’t say much for them. You had to have real personality problems to end up being a screw. What was the difference between a con and a screw? A few bars, and a uniform.
The work party had left the circular complex some distance behind now. Grimes turned to savour the view of Princetown. He could just make out the Devil’s Elbow and promised himself again that the day they let him out of the gates for good, he’d walk slowly - not rush, but walk slowly - to the pub, relishing every step. Once inside, he’d drink till he fell over; pick himself up, and do the same again. All the time staring out of the window at the prison, and telling himself he’d never go back. Still, that was for another day.
As he turned away from the view of the pub, Grimes’s attention 22
was distracted by a flurry of activity over to the north of the town, just beyond the grey wall that marked its boundary.
Three figures were bustling around a large, rusting cattle truck parked on a slight rise of ground. Sunlight reflected off something metallic; straining his eyes, Grimes made out a squat amplifier.
Guitars and amps were being lugged out of the back of the truck and dumped on the grass, wires and cables were unravelled carefully. He would have put it down to some sort of spring fête it it