When
Arthur Hailey died last month, his name brought
back fond memories of a certain joy born from adversity.
Up until I arrived in Cell 15, C Wing, H Block 4
on the 12th July 1978, the name Arthur Hailey meant
nothing to me. The last books I had read in Cage
11 before being 'greeted ' - to my surprise and
relief, routinely and in an atmosphere free from
any hostility - to the blanket wing by the class
officer Tommy Keenan, were two recommended by Gerry
Kelly.
Nineteen
Eighty Four and Animal Farm with hindsight
now seem apt as mental preparation for the Orwellian
world I had descended into after an aborted escape
attempt. At the stroke of a Northern Ireland Office
pen my status had transformed from being a political
prisoner to a common criminal. The sole criterion
upon which such British logic was based was my escape
effort. The brave new world I walked into was one
in which Big Bear - the name given to jailhouse
governors - had assumed the function of Big Brother;
where language was distorted to mean the opposite
of what it had originally been designed to express.
Prison management violence was termed rehabilitation;
being beaten through repeated thumps to the head
from a library book over an anal search mirror was
heavy reading. Prison staff broke prison rules as
frequently as the prisoners ever did and with much
more violence. Audaciously, the NIO would inform
the public that the screws were protecting society
from the violence of the prisoners. My new world
was indeed a criminal world, where the screws rather
than the prisoners constituted the criminal class
of the H-Blocks.
In
the midst of this reason-inverted world, life went
on and prisoners amused themselves in whatever ways
they could. The ingenuity and creativity that developed
inside concrete walls and behind sealed up windows
left few to doubt that necessity was indeed the
mother of invention. The occupants of the wing I
had arrived on had about a month or two earlier
been moved en masse from H5. There, an orderly had,
without the knowledge of the screws, made available
a paperback book for the blanket men. It was Hotel
by Arthur Hailey. Everybody on the wing had apparently
read it. It must have been a secular relief from
the numerous books on the lives of saints provided
by chaplains, before the administration banned them
too. Even filling the heads of prisoners with religious
bunkum was considered a step too far by our godly
No 1 governor who in true Orwellian fashion, showed
his Christian love through his many acts of hate.
The
H4 IRA block O/C of the day, Larry Marley, was reputed
to have at one time worked as a gravedigger. Qualification
enough in our minds to add the touch of the ghoulish
to any tales of the crypt he might have. When he
decided to share a Halloween story with the others
on his wing on the last day of October 1978, he
started a trend that proved a powerful weapon against
the soul-destroying tedium of being locked up 24/7/365.
From that point on men would search their memories
for books and films to tell out the doors after
lights-out, once the night guard had completed sweeping
the wing of urine which the prisoners had lashed
out the doors - the product of the bodily fluids
for that particular day - as soon as the day screws
had gone off duty. The story became a bizarre form
of theatre - a nightly trip to the cinema and away
from the bowels of a psychological hell.
History
has recorded the Leon Uris story, Trinity,
being told by Bobby Sands. Arthur Hailey never gets
a mention but in the wing I was on he was more a
part of our culture than Leon Uris. QB V11
was the only Uris book I recall listening to into
the wee small hours. Wheels, Airport
and Moneychangers by Hailey were told to
us by with immaculate detail. Years later when I
revisited the books I was amazed at the memory retention
of those blanket men who stood for hours barefoot
on a cold cell floor to shout them out the door
to the rest of us.
Arthur
Hailey died at 84 in the Bahamas. He probably passed
on never realising how central a role he played
in morale maintenance during the H-Block protest.
His alleged 'lack of literary finesse' meant nothing
to us; his imagination everything. A former British
RAF pilot, his output made it into places he never
dreamed of. In 2001 Arthur Hailey said 'I don't
think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on
real life.' Blocks, the real lives of blanket
men, is a story in search of a teller.
