Part 4
Everything was coloured by that relation. One looked on England with new eyes, and old thoughts became startling new discoveries. Stafford lay for the most part steeped in slumber as we were marched through its streets in the morning, accompanied by a small, inquisitive crowd. It looked incredibly sleek and prosperous beside our Irish towns. The villas were sleek and comfortable; the roads were sleek and neat; the very grass beside the canal looked sleek as though nurtured with the centuries. Everything had an air of being well fed and well groomed, and quite consciously proud of the fact that it was part of a prosperous whole, where no invader’s foot had trampled, where no spoliation had dared to efface the moss that had gathered for centuries on the gables, or to rough the smooth lawns. The villas might be the latest examples of modernity, yet that was the air they suggested, for they became part of something that was smooth and sleek. How different to our Irish towns, that look as though they—not the people in them, but they themselves—live a precarious day-to-day existence. Each suggests the history of their nation. One has grown sleek with prosperity, and smooth and round with the large air of the conqueror, with shores that have never known invasion. The other has been hunted from end to end by rapacious conquest; the forests that were its pride burnt away the better to root out its people; the people hunted until they lost the instinct to build for themselves permanent abodes, and, more latterly, rack-rented till they stealthily hid any small savings and kept middens before their doors, until a show of poverty from being a disguise became a habit; rising against the conqueror in a series of revolts foredoomed to failure, but triumphant in what they spoke of—a spirit still unbroken; stricken to earth again by soldiery that marched through the land; and harnessed by a network of legislative acts that intended to inhibit industry and commerce with the nations of the earth, and that succeeded in their intention. And yet there was no question of a choice between the two. For with one individuality had become smoothened away, the wheel having come full circle; with the other individuality was sharp and keen, angular it might be, but alive for the future.
H. P. and I were speaking of these things when we arrived at Stafford Jail. It was about six o’clock in the morning as we were marched through the gates and lined up outside the prison. The building looked gloomy and forbidding as it frowned down on us with its hundreds of barred windows. It had lately been used as a detention barracks; that is to say, as a prison for soldiers, the major part of the population of England having donned khaki but not having doffed their sins therewith. Therefore, it was staffed by military, who received us from our escort and marched us up the great building to the cells that had been allotted us. And once again I heard the key grate behind me.
XII.
Stafford Jail covers a large space of ground surrounded by high brick walls, and contains three prisons, with the usual outhouses, such as the Governor’s office, the reception-cells, the cookhouse, laundry, hospital, workshops, and chapels. In the centre stands the original prison, known as the Old Prison, a building of an old type of architecture, with high gabled roof and large windows. A path ran beside it, between it and the Governor’s office, and this path led at each end to the two newer buildings that face each other and complete the square. One is known as the New Prison, of menacing exterior, with small windows heavily barred. The other is known as the Crescent, because of its shape. Both are plain solid buildings, but in the Crescent the windows are large and less dungeon-like. Windows mean much to the outward look of a prison, but they mean much more to its inward life.
In the ordinary life of the jail—if it is at all possible to speak of a jail containing an ordinary life—women occupy the Old Prison, long-sentence and penal servitude men the New Prison, and short-sentence men the Crescent. While we were there soldiers under sentence occupied the Old Prison, and the Irish Prisoners of War the other two prisons. Dublin men occupied the Crescent, having been brought there on Monday, immediately after the surrender; and the men from the country districts were put into the New Prison as they came to hand, together with a few Dublin men who had been swept up during the week after the Rising.
Flanking the jail on each side are the Union and the Lunatic Asylum, and to judge from the size of all three, the population of that part of England seems to be in a bad way. Afterwards I had an opportunity of looking from one of the higher windows over the walls, and I could see factory chimneys stretching to the horizon. Factory chimneys, lunatic asylums, jails, poorhouses, and sleek suburbia: a pretty picture of civilization. All the jail buildings were in red brick, which was at least warm to the eye. The New Prison held about four hundred cells, and the Crescent about the same.
Being one of the later Sweep-up I was placed in the New Prison. Within, it was not unlike a church in some ways, chiefly in the matter of gloom. It was comprised of three wings, branching from the central hall. Right and left ran a long high hall, with church-like windows at each end. Each side formed a wing, and opposite the gate there extended a third smaller wing. The walls of each wing rose like a cliff on either hand, with three tiers of cells like so many caves. Round the cells run balconies with spiral stairways connecting them. Across the midmost balcony wire netting is extended lest men’s nerves get the better of them. Half-way down each wing the monotonous succession of cell doors is broken on each side, and a little recess formed for latrines.
Each wing bears a letter of the alphabet, and each cell a number. Each man on entrance has his name inscribed on one side of a cardboard form, and his cell number on the other. This is placed in a wooden slot outside his cell. The name is turned to the wall, and the number turned to view. By that is signified that his name is no longer needed, and he becomes a number. Inasmuch as the system is subtly devised for the extinction of personality, of identity, this is a deft piece of symbolism of which any dramatist might be proud. In Stafford I was C 2:21:—Wing C., Balcony 2, Cell 21.
Cells are ever the same, even as their occupants are presumed to be. My cell at Stafford was the same as at Castlebar, save that the upper half of the walls was painted yellow instead of being whitewashed, the lower half red instead of yellow, and the floor paved. The window was much smaller and very dark. Unlike Castlebar, it had no gas jet inside. Instead of this, a square thick pane of glass beside the door covered an incandescent burner that was lit from outside. The cavity in which the burner stood narrowed to a small slit in the outer wall, lest any prisoner should magically narrow himself with a view to escaping through an aperture a foot square. Beside the door appeared the usual bell handle. By turning it sharply to one side a gong was rung above the latrine recess, and the same action registered one’s number outside.
XIII.
All that I had feared in Castlebar now returned upon me; yet, curiously, not so keenly, not so sharply. Already there had been a dulling of consciousness, a blunting of the susceptibilities. During the early morning we were examined medically and then bathed in antiseptic. We needed it; herded on the dusty floors of Richmond Barracks we had collected what was to be collected, and had, as a Tyrone lad put it, “grazed our cattle through-other”; and the doctor nodded gravely over his inspection, like one who thought, “Well, this is the Irish nation: report has not spoken untruly of them.” Then we were taken back to our cells. During the afternoon we were taken out for a quarter of an hour’s exercise in silence round one of the yards at the back of the prison, and solemnly informed that if any attempt to communicate with one another were detected we would be removed to special punishment cells and fed on bread and water for a week. Back to our cells then until the following afternoon.
That was our life. We were awoken at five and brought out for lavatory parade. Soon after six breakfast was served out to us. This consisted of a tin mug of tea, a square lump of white bread, and a small piece of margarine. Inasmuch as the mug served for soup as well as for tea, and presumably the tea was decocted in the same vessel as the soup, there was a strong similarity of taste between the two. Nor was the fluid that reached us always very hot. We were not permitted either knife, fork or spoon. While we took our breakfast the staff retired to theirs, and the curiously deathly prison silence descended on the place. At a quarter to eight the staff returned with the jangling of many keys, and soon the shouts of commands rent the air. For we were now to scrub out our cells. On the ground floor each man had, in addition to his cell, to scrub a portion of the hall opposite his door. When this was accomplished, if the staff-sergeant had any general instructions to announce, or could by any means devise an occasion for instructions, we were put on parade in the hall to hear him discourse. The staff-sergeant had a Biblical gift of iteration without the Biblical music of phrase. Nor had he the faculty of disguising his repetitions. He had, however, a certain ornateness of expression which, though it was not exactly Biblical, succeeded in relieving the monotony of his discourse. If he had two simple announcements to make he occupied himself for half an hour with them, and with variations on them, striding up and down the line of us, shouting at the top of his voice, while his staff of non-commissioned officers stood amongst us to see that we gave due heed to what he said. He was an excellent man, however; and meant kindly.
Back then to our cells, where we sat till dinner. This was brought round (by orderlies appointed from among ourselves) at twelve. Dinner consisted of soup and a lump of white bread. The soup was contained in the same mug as the morning tea, and was, until one became accustomed to it, a strange looking spectacle. In the midst of it floated a lump of something that varied according to one’s varying luck. If one were fortunate it was, mainly, meat; if one’s luck were only fair, it consisted of fat, with streaks of lean bravely running through it; if one’s luck were completely out, it was gristle, with bits of meat set in it like amethysts in quartz (and indeed the meat was illuminated by strange colours astonishingly like amethysts). Either the animals slain for our eating were curious beasts or my luck was badly out, for the succession of gristle that came to my turn was noteworthy. Afterwards I managed to smuggle out one of the islands that floated in my soup, and sent it entire to a member of the English Parliament, thinking the effect might be remarkable if it were thrown dramatically across the floor of the House, as Burke once threw a dagger. Two or three potatoes in their skins were served with the soup; and the whole meal had to be manipulated with one’s fingers. I became quite expert with the course of time in discovering where pieces of meat crouched in their layers of gristle and bringing them to the light of day with my forefinger. Yet often I decided that the meal was not worth the fatigue involved, and left it where it stood.
The afternoons served our scanty pleasure, for then we were taken out for exercise, which usually lasted twenty minutes to half an hour, and on some occasions longer, according to the pleasure of the sergeant in control. For the staff worked through the prisoners in batches through the day. How one looked forward to that glimpse of sky overhead, to that beat of the summer’s sun on one’s body. The yard was of great size as befitted the size of the prison, and was laid with ground clinkers, or some black earth of the nature of ashes, surrounded by a concrete path. There was no colour to be seen anywhere, save the red bricks of the gaol and the black floor of the yard. Yet the sky was blue overhead, and the sun was golden; and though these things were plaintive in what they told of a summer passing in pomp elsewhere, yet their immediate gift made that half hour of the day the moment for which we lived during the 23½ hours’ existence in a cell. Moreover, after a time I tried an experiment. I quietly stepped out of the file into the yard and began running easily within the circle that the others made about me. I saw the sergeant look at me, not quite knowing what to make of the innovation. Then another stepped out, and ran behind me; and another, and yet another, till there was a string of half a dozen of us. Nothing was said the first day; and the innovation once begun it was continued. Thus we had another event to which to look forward during the long hours.
At five came tea, which was a repetition of breakfast; and then set in the hours we most dreaded. The staff went home at five, and silence settled down over the prison—a silence that was not broken till five the next morning. Now and then as the night watchman passed in his padded shoes I would hear the spy-hole slot being moved aside and would know that an eye was looking in upon me. Then the slot fell back again. The eye had passed on to the next cell. But all the time the silence was profound.
The lengthening day, with the altered hour, gave light till ten at night. That is to say, the customary twilight of the cell did not change to profound gloom and then to darkness till after that hour. That made the case worse, for one would not take refuge in sleep. It would be hard to say how many times I counted the number of bolts that studded the door, how many times I counted the number of bricks in each wall, how many times I measured the number of feet from end to end of the cell, from side to side, and from corner to corner. This was one’s occupation for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, save for the time given to sleep, until one fell back on bitter blank staring ahead.
Sometimes, as though to make the silence still more oppressive, I heard one of the other prisoners somewhere down the prison break into a song. Then a harsh voice would loudly call on him to be quiet; and silence would be supreme again. Already on my first day I had established friendly relations with my corporal. He was, I discovered, a London Irishman, and he happened to be more easily quickened to interest on that account. I asked him once what the other men did with their time, when he spied in upon them, thinking to find comfort for my hours in a more intelligent knowledge of the life that was silently proceeding around me.
“Most of them just sit on their stools and stare at the wall. It’s horrible to see them. Lots of them are crying—some that you wouldn’t think of. And a lot of them are praying, always praying. And that’s worse, for things are not as bad as that. It makes me feel bad to see them.”
I thought of Dame Quickly with her, “Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet,” and smiled. But I wished I had not asked him my question.
Yet, strangely enough, the thing that I had feared with such horror in its coming at Castlebar did not quicken in me such fear now that it had settled upon me. The process had, as most processes do, brought its own rather ghastly relief. In Castlebar I had been keen and sensitive; my mind had been quick to speed ahead and anticipate the approaching evil; and that, if painful, was a preferable estate to this dead inertia, when the mind seemed hardly to have any existence in the body.
* * * * *
and I cannot wonder at it; for often one would spring to one’s feet and march up and down the cell in a mental excitement that was almost unendurable. Such times, when they came, came intolerably, for they came with diminishing frequency; but the usual state was inertia. There was something of learned patience about it; something of a reserve that waited its day; but deeper set than these things was the blankness of being that it was the first duty of the whole system to achieve.
I tried, for instance, to bring before me the faces of those whom I knew, and to imagine what they might be doing as I thought of them. I sought, thus, to give myself a life in the life that others were living; but could I think of those lives, could I bring their faces before me? It was not that they fled me. The mind simply would not rise to the effort. I tried to surrender myself to problems of thought that had fascinated me in the past, and to problems of being into which all life’s meaning had been crowded. But at most the wheel only spun round, never gripping the metal; and more often the wheel refused to move. The life within the cell was significantly told by the card outside: the name was turned to the wall, and only a number was turned to view. Prison cells are not dwellings, they are sepulchres.
So the days passed, one by one, while the summer rolled by outside. Even the will to fight seemed lost.
XIV.
Sunday brought relief. That day there was no exercise; but when we were aroused we all went to Mass. The Protestant Chapel was used, for there was no room elsewhere for both prisons-full. Everybody went, whatever our creed, both for the comfort of one another, and for the joint comfort of worship. There I saw for the first time the Dublin men from the Crescent, many of them known to me, many of them wearing the uniform of the Republican Army, in some cases scarred by battle. It was a large concourse, and the body of song was a joy to hear after our enforced silence. The warders sat at regular intervals on seats above us, with their backs turned to the Altar and their faces toward us, like strange idols perched aloft.
The priest, I learned, had told the first men on their arrival that he was there to fulfil his functions only, though he abhorred their actions and could have no dealings with them. This he had announced at their first Mass, and he had till now preserved that attitude, never suffering himself to discover by closer contact the cause of the sufferings that stirred his anger.
The following day I put myself down to see him, and during the course of the morning he visited me.
“You wish to see me,” he said. He was exceedingly kind and courteous.
“Yes,” I said; “I wish to congratulate you on the fact that you are not here in prison with us.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“For preaching sedition, or at least reading seditionary stuff. You recall the epistle you read yesterday? I think it was misapplied, mind you. You were exhorting us to do just what we had done, and had been thrown into prison for; but you read it all the same, and deserve congratulation. Do you remember:
‘Be ye doers of the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves, for if a man be a hearer of the Word, and not a doer, he shall be compared to a man beholding his own countenance in a glass. For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was. But he that hath looked into the perfect law of liberty, and hath continued therein, not becoming a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work; this man shall be blessed in his deed.’
“That’s sound talk; every word of it applies; and we are blessed in the deed, though we are in prison all the same.
* * * * *
In that connection you think over that phrase about the man who looked into a mirror, and presently forgot what manner of man he was, till he became a doer of the Word after having looked into the perfect law of liberty. I thank you for that epistle; and I congratulate you that you are not in prison.”
Afterwards he moved among us intimately and always. He made it his business to know each man personally, and there was scarcely a man to whom he did not endear himself. In very literal truth he spent himself and his substance for us all. He got into touch with the men’s families at home, and reassured both man and family as to the state of the other. During those days, indeed, he lived his life with us, and every man turned to him as to a brother. What he said to me of his opinion of the men may pass; but I subsequently heard that he said publicly in his chapel in the town that if his hearers wished to know what faith was, what religion, what principle and truth, he would commend them to look in the jail. He had his convictions and emotions as an Englishman; we had ours as Irishmen; but there is no man who was at Stafford Jail for his convictions and emotions who does not cherish with affection the name of Father Moore.
Some Sundays afterwards he had occasion to read the following epistle:—
“Be you humbled under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in the time of visitation. Casting all your care upon Him, for He hath care of you. Be sober and watch; for your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion goeth about, seeking whom he may devour; whom resist ye, strong in faith....”
As he did so, his eye travelled over to me; and the following day he came over to me.
“I know what you are going to say. You make me watchful of my epistles,” he said.
XV.
Deadened and inert though the barbarity of solitary confinement caused one to become (and even as solitary confinement ours was particularly severe and therefore particularly barbarous) there were times when the whole being rose in revolt. Anything would have been preferable to it. On one such occasion I demanded to see the Commandant of the jail. When he came, I requested to know exactly why I was being punished, and for what offence. I told him that I wished to have his answer in writing and to be able to communicate with my solicitor with a view to taking action. My thought was that a personal suit against him might prove abortive, but that it might cause a publicity the effect of which would be healthy.
He replied that I was not being punished; that I was simply being “detained.” I said that this could not be. According to prison regulations, solitary confinement of so severe a nature was punishment at least equivalent to birching. Would he birch me without acquainting me with the cause of such a punishment? No, he said, he would not. Then why, I asked, was I receiving a punishment equivalent in severity without a cause assigned. I wished to be provided with a cause, and to be provided with it in writing.
The Commandant himself was gentlemanly and courteous. A few days afterwards when I repeated my request he told me he was simply acting under orders, and that he could not change matters without orders. I asked him then if he would communicate my request to the War Office, under whose instructions he proceeded; and he promised to do so.