An Open Prison Read online

  I declined this invitation, but took it as a hint that enough had now been said about Robin Hayes and his misfortune. At the same time I remembered that two or three men whom I had met in America had charged me with messages of regard to John Stafford. That species of second-hand cordiality more often than not slips my mind, but I was glad to be explicit about it on the present occasion. It would serve to wind up this not particularly necessary call on the Head Man. (It was thus that we referred to John Stafford among ourselves and occasionally to the older boys.)

  So I delivered the messages I had been charged with, and Stafford with his customary conventional politeness offered an appreciative word or two about each of the senders. I then got up to take my leave. But Robin Hayes still ran in my head, and I paused at the door to say another word about him.

  ‘There’s one further thing about young Hayes, Head Master. It’s something he told me – although without seeming to be at all concerned. It seems that the judge who tried his father has a grandson now in School House.’

  ‘Ah, yes – a junior boy called Daviot. His parents are dead, and he is his grandfather’s ward. Both boys were at Birnam Wood.’

  ‘Birnam Wood?’ For a moment I really thought that I had been offered some arcane reference to Macbeth. Then I remembered that this was the sufficiently unlikely name of quite a well-known prep school. Robin Hayes’s prep school, in fact.

  ‘Both Hayes and Daviot?’ I asked. ‘They can’t have been contemporaries there.’

  ‘Obviously not. But they did overlap. Hayes was in his last year there when this Daviot child was in his first.’

  At this moment the Head Master’s telephone rang, and he turned to the instrument with a resigned gesture to me which concluded our interview in a gracefully informal manner. So I walked back to the House. As I did so, I tried to recall just what Robin Hayes had told me about David Daviot. He had certainly said nothing about a prep school. But his attitude to the judge’s grandson had been fairly casual, and there was no reason why he should have said more than he did. Probably what he had not very accurately called an irony did irk him more than he cared to acknowledge, and he had wanted to say nothing more about it.

  As I returned to the House I was made aware of various evidences that the new term was now advancing upon us rapidly. From several vans ‘luggage in advance’ was being distributed higgledy-piggledy in front of one house or another – and with an uncertain accuracy which was occasioning the customary rude exchanges between the railway people and the school porters. Refrigerated vehicles were delivering in a more orderly fashion a routine consignment of the endless provisioning required for some six hundred hungry (and often unreasonably fastidious) boys. On the playing-fields several men perched on ladders were giving goal-posts a belated lick of paint.

  I made no pause to inspect any of these activities, being curious to discover whether Robin Hayes’s mother had indeed written to me, and if so to what effect. I was habituated to going rapidly through a fairly substantial batch of mail, since boarding-houses at an English public school seldom run to a secretary, and had certainly never done so in my own case. So I separated out the envelopes clearly suggesting private correspondence. The third of these, when opened, proved indeed to be from Mrs Hayes.

  Dear Mr Syson,

  You will by now have heard of my husband’s misguided conduct. My daughter and son must not be affected by it in any way. My husband’s absence will be of less than two years’ duration. This is a common enough period of separation within families: for example, when a father or son is on a tour of duty overseas. I do not propose therefore that my children visit their father in his present situation. But I myself have done so, and may do so again if family business requires it. I found him much (and I judge needlessly) concerned about Robin’s immediate future. I myself see no reason why, when Robin goes on to Oxford, he should not read Law: it is what I have intended from the first as a preliminary to his being called to the bar. Will you be so kind as yourself to visit my husband, and set the matter in a proper light? You simply write to the governor of Hutton Green, who will arrange a time.

  Yours sincerely,

  Editha Hayes

  My first response on reading this letter was one of displeasure before its deplorable tone. Merely regarded as an effort at prose composition, it conveyed a curiously bleak effect. But neither with that, I saw at once, nor with the specific concluding infelicity of her manner of laying an injunction upon me, had I any concern. The woman’s husband was in prison; if she had been thrown off balance there was nothing surprising in the fact; it would be wrong in me to stand on my dignity and turn her proposal down. It could not but be to the advantage of her son that I should discuss his affairs with his father, whether in prison or out of it. So I wrote a reply at once.

  Dear Mrs Hayes,

  Thank you for your letter. I had a talk with Robin this morning, immediately after his return to school. He is now Head of House: my head prefect, that is to say, and as a consequence a school prefect as well. I am very pleased he has returned to us.

  I will make at once the arrangement you suggest for a meeting with Mr Hayes. Here I would remark only, and as a generally held academic opinion, that reading Law at Oxford is not in all cases the best preparation for entering upon a barrister’s career.

  Yours sincerely,

  Robert Syson

  Having sent off my letter, I went to the telephone and drummed up an unattached junior colleague I had noticed about the place to come to an evening meal with me. Robin Hayes, I guessed, would be relieved that he wasn’t going to have an immediate further tête-à-tête with his housemaster.

  II

  I drove over on my mission to Mr Hayes some ten days later. All that my Ordnance Survey map showed me was a Hutton Park, near the middle of which stood a mansion-house named as Hutton Hall. I had no difficulty in locating it. Although in part screened by trees, its general character became apparent at about half a mile’s distance as I reached the crest of a ridge of high ground to the south of it. It was large but architecturally undistinguished, built perhaps for some up-and-coming person in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The building disappeared as I dropped downhill again. Presently I was driving through a straggling and nondescript village without arriving at any glimpse of Mr Hayes’s involuntary residence of Hutton Green. On its further outskirts I passed on my left hand first the church and a comfortable-looking hotel, and then several hundred yards of low stone wall. I supposed that here could only be the boundary of Hutton Park, and was confirmed in this view on coming upon a carriage drive and a lodge: the drive flanked by stone pillars on which hung open gates, and the lodge apparently unoccupied. It was absurd that I was still entirely at sea. But I should certainly have continued to drive on had I not happened to spot, fixed to one of the pillars which was crowned by a prancing and heraldically improbable hippogriff, an unobtrusively conceived metal panel which read:

  H.M. PRISON

  HUTTON GREEN

  Thus finding my search at an end, I backed and then ran up the drive. It went straight through the park between lines of beeches, and over a considerable area on either hand any scattered timber had been removed in the interest of athletic pursuits. To my right there lay a cricket field with its central area, sufficiently broad for three or four pitches, roped off to discourage undesirable out-of-season incursions; to my left was a somewhat undersized soccer ground, surrounded by what appeared to be a well-maintained running track. I concluded that the disgrace of Hutton Hall (for one describes as disgraced a large house fallen upon hard times) must have come about by stages, and that it had quite recently been a boys’ private school before becoming a rural receptacle for the criminal classes.

  I believe it was in some confusion of mind that I drew up before the front door. My instructions had been to give my name and ask for the Governor, but I recall that what my inward eye imagined with some vividness was being received by a seedy and depressed menial in thre
adbare and greasy black, who had declined with the house’s decline from butler to general factotum around the place. Of course the door was opened by a warder. The man was certainly that – being dressed almost, but not quite, like a policeman. It is probably difficult for a normally constituted individual to undergo a first encounter with any species of professional gaoler without at least a small degree of irrational alarm. I managed to state my name and business, but retained little power of detailed observation until I was shown into some kind of waiting-room and left to myself.

  What I was first aware of was a faint antiseptic smell, reminiscent of the boys’ part of the House when it has had its thorough clean-through before the beginning of term. It was a small, bare room, with a bench and some uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs. On the walls were three or four group-photographs in which a man in civilian clothes, and with features that seemed curiously familiar to me, sat in the middle of one or another bevy of uniformed men all precisely resembling the warder – the ‘screw’, I suppose he might be called – who had admitted me. This, too, was disquieting. For some reason the thought came to me that the young Shelley (unlike Thomas Gray before him) had thought of Eton as a prison. This idle reflection was barely out of my head when I found myself ushered into the Governor’s presence.

  He was a man of about my own age. So much I saw at once.

  He had been sitting behind a big and very tidy desk. But from this he jumped up the moment I entered the room.

  ‘Pog!’ he exclaimed. ‘I was sure it must be you.’

  How I came to be called Pog at Harrow I don’t think I ever knew. All ‘Pog’ suggests is ‘pug’, and although not good-looking I certainly bore no resemblance to that particular breed of dog. Nicknames, moreover, were not much in vogue in my time. But ‘Pog’ it was – whereas Owen Marchmont had never been other than ‘Marchmont’ to intimates and mere form-fellows alike. The day on which public-school boys would address one another by Christian name (except on holidays spent together) still lay in the future. I made some reply to Marchmont’s familiar greeting, and for moments we regarded one another with the compunction which attends suddenly recognising before us what happens beneath the unimaginable touch of time. I then said what first came into my head.

  ‘Why Hutton Green, Marchmont? It’s not on the map as that.’

  ‘I suppose because Hutton Hall or Hutton Park wouldn’t sound quite right. Suggest elderly gentlefolk in a high-class sunset home. Not that we haven’t got a few of them in residence. Listen.’

  The morning was warm; there was an open window beside me; what I heard through it as I obeyed my old schoolfellow’s injunction was a faint hollow click and then a further hollow click which could only proceed from one activity in the world.

  ‘Croquet?’ I said.

  ‘Just that. They have quite a lot of free time, and all ages have to be catered for. By the way’ – and Marchmont glanced at me sharply – ‘are you related to this chap you’ve come to visit?’

  ‘Not remotely.’ I hope I didn’t say this as if repulsing an aspersion. ‘I’m a housemaster at Helmingham, and Hayes has a son with me. Hayes wants a word with me about the boy. Or his wife says he does.’

  ‘That woman frightens me, Syson. Turned up here as if she was doing the place a favour. Told me she was a magistrate. She gave me to understand – quite by the way – that she might pretty well turn in a report on me to the Home Secretary. I tried to explain how we did our best with people like her husband. It didn’t seem an angle on the affair she was much interested in.’

  ‘Does Hayes play croquet?’

  ‘I’d have to ask my Head Warder, who keeps the balls and mallets. But probably not. Hayes works in the gardens, and attends various classes from time to time.’

  ‘Classes?’

  ‘No end of them. And of course workshops as well. All tucked away in a warren of hutments behind the house. Elements of Accountancy is the popular thing at the moment. Makes some of them feel they’ll get away with it better next time. And the locksmith’s shop is pretty well frequented too.’

  There was a flavour of burlesque about this which made me feel that Owen Marchmont was a man not altogether at one with himself. This thought prompted me to an inquiry which would have been impudent except by a kind of unspoken appeal to the unregarding frankness licensed between schoolfellows.

  ‘What brought you into this line of country, Marchmont?’

  ‘Coming out of the army and looking around. And I’d read a bit about the theory and the history of the thing. Penology, that is. I thought something might be done; even that there was a climate of opinion growing up that might help that way. But, once in, one can’t be spectacular. And the basic situation is quite intractable. Who was the chap said something about a robin redbreast in a cage?’

  ‘Blake, I think. It puts all heaven in a rage.’

  ‘Right. But I don’t go with the poets much. Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage. Bosh. They bloody well do. Even if you gild the iron bars no end. Harrow or a snot-school. There’s never been a boy at either of them who hasn’t had his weeks feeling that he’d swop for a desert island like a shot.’

  I was shocked by this, and almost forced into silence. Yet something, I felt, I had to say.

  ‘I can see,’ I ventured hesitantly, ‘that yours must be a job in which it’s sometimes hard to fight disillusionment. But there must be another side to the picture. There must be occasions when – well, when a touch of the humane and compassionate makes all the difference.’

  ‘Taking away a man’s liberty is a staggering thing.’ Marchmont seemed scarcely to have heard what I had said. ‘But for thousands of years it has gone on to the enslavement of millions. And every one of them has felt, as the prison doors clanged behind him, that he is a man cast alone among animals. Not necessarily savage animals, as in an arena. Just nasty, smelly, skulking ones.’

  ‘Yours seems to be rather a special sort of prison, Marchmont. But I suppose you speak from your experience of others as well. What about the old lags who go back to prison again and again? They can’t have that cast-among-animals feeling.’

  ‘They may feel something as bad. Who was the wench got working on Ulysses’ other ranks?’

  ‘Circe.’

  ‘Turned them into swine, but had a line in manufacturing wild animals too. Right? Your old lags may feel they’ve had both treatments: into savage animals first, and then broken in for the circus of Pentonville or the Scrubs.’

  I found all this interesting enough, although force rather than clarity seemed to be the main characteristic of Marchmont’s mind. I felt, however, that my mission at Hutton Green was still bodefully before me, and that I’d like to get on with it.

  ‘At least,’ I said, ‘this unfortunate solicitor has presumably not been turned into a porker. What are the conditions under which I see him? Will one of your men be present?’ As I asked this question I didn’t much concern myself about the answer. What I did feel anxious about was the possibility that the Governor himself would take it into his head to usher me into Hayes’s presence. I saw such a procedure as obscurely embarrassing. But my mind was at once put at rest.

  ‘One of my chaps listen or peep in? Lord, no! You’re not likely to be passing Hayes a hack-saw or some powerful explosive, are you? The Head Warder will take you along to him, and you’ll find there’s a bell you can ring when you’ve had enough of one another. I hope you can stay to lunch with me?’

  I declined this invitation, explaining that over the next couple of months my time would seldom be my own. Although I liked my rediscovered schoolfellow Owen Marchmont, I felt an impulse to get away from Hutton Green as quickly as I conscientiously could.

  The Head Warder was an elderly man with a benevolent and sympathising air. I suppose it is by relations that imprisoned persons are most commonly visited, and he probably imagined me to be Mr Hayes’s elder brother. The room into which he showed me was that in which I had waited previously,
and it was again empty.

  ‘He’ll be along in half a minute,’ the Head Warder said soothingly. ‘He’s been in the garden, and probably feels he needs a wash and brush up.’

  I had no doubt imagined a prison as a place in which the inmates are marched smartly up and down, or round in circles, by warders shouting ‘left-right, left-right, left-I-say, left-I-say’ in a commanding military manner. But it was clear that Hutton Green was conducted on other principles. I sat down, thanked the Head Warder as he left me, and composed myself to await Mr Hayes’s leisure. I didn’t feel I had much to say to him, and was inclined to doubt whether he really had much to say to me. I was here, I told myself, only because the luckless man’s wife liked pushing people around. Or, for that matter, making them stay put. Her son was eighteen and her daughter was twenty, but she had written as if it were for her to determine – and in the most absolute manner – whether these adults should visit their father in prison or not. I didn’t need myself to be a father to know that, in the present age, any such writ simply doesn’t run. Letters from apologetic parents, confessing their inability to persuade Billy or Bobby to this or that, came to me at the rate of several every term. I was often constrained to dissimulate the embarrassing fact that I myself hadn’t a good deal more influence over Bobby or Billy.

  There were footsteps in the corridor. I found myself trying to decide – and then, with an instant shift of impulse, trying precisely not to decide – whether they suggested Robin Hayes’s ‘furtive shuffle’. The door started opening, came to a momentary stop, moved again. Mr Hayes had hesitated on the threshold of the depressing little room, and then summoned up sufficient resolution to enter it. Or so I read that brief pause. He was now before me, and I rose hastily to my feet. I wondered whether to take the initiative in offering to shake hands. It was up to him, I thought, since after a queer fashion he was my host. But with a glimmering of good sense I did make the movement and accomplish the ritual. But now, and just as he had hesitated to face me, did I hesitate to face him. I didn’t want to look him in the eye. But this meant looking at his clothes, and that I didn’t want to do either. At Hutton Green were they put in some distinguishable prison uniform? I didn’t want to know – and the result of this was that I ended up looking at the hand I had just taken. This provided me with one simple fact at least. Mr Hayes worked in those gardens quite a lot.