I go back to the scruffy staff room and have a cup of coffee. I look out for another teacher to latch onto to take me down to the canteen for lunch. This sounds like it should be a relaxing interlude but it is in fact quite an odd and stressful experience. The canteen is surprisingly small and is staffed by prisoners. The food is served on red plastic plates and we eat it with red plastic cutlery. There is a convention that the education team sits at a designated table, as if we were a gang in an American movie. This means that I have to talk to other members of the department during lunch. This could be a good thing except that the acoustics of the canteen are such that it is almost impossible to have a conversation. The prisoners have lunch in the same canteen in staggered shifts. Some of the women complained to me that the prisoners doing the serving give their mates extra and deprive others.
Lunch finishes at 2:00 PM and I go back to the to the department to try to prepare something for the afternoon sessions. This involves trying to make some sense of the chaotic teaching materials available, which is a bit of a hopeless task. At 3:00 PM movement is called again and the prisoners arrive for the afternoon sessions. At least in the afternoon we don’t have all the tension of the morning coffee break. Lessons last until 4:30 PM when the final movement of the day is called and at last the prisoners leave and we can all go home.
In my time at Mayfield I only had one real confrontation with a prisoner. The young woman in question was Jo, a pretty rough and obnoxious young woman. She was quite attractive looking except that she had two front teeth missing, perhaps as a result of prison dentistry, which favours extractions much more than dentistry on the outside. Or maybe she just had had her teeth knocked out in a fight: that wouldn’t have surprised me. Jo kept up a constant stream of commentary, most of it using very foul language. She was completely resistant to any attempt to get her to moderate her language and behaviour. When I asked her to moderate her language her response was to come out with a barrage of foul language including reference to her mother. If the women misbehave the tutors have the option of sending them back to their cell. This is an option some tutors readily take up, resulting in a seriously depleted class at the end of the day. I really should have sent Jo back to her cell given her behaviour, but I didn’t.
At break time Jo took some coffee and sugar but also took a couple of extra sachets of sugar and secreted them in what could colloquially be called “the titty bank”. I was tempted to say, in a tribute to Hollywood, “What you got in the titty bank, bitch?” But of course I didn’t. Instead, I reminded her that taking coffee and sugar back to the house blocks was not allowed. She was of course all injured innocence. She then said that if I thought she had taken some sachets of sugar I should call an officer. Given the security risks attached to the sachets I decided that that was what I would do. Jo had been at it all morning and this was a step too far. Ann, another voluble and rather annoying young woman, also joined in the discussion, chuntering away indignantly in Jo’s defence. They made an extremely annoying pair.
I walked down the corridor to the office and explained the situation to Jasmin and one of the officers. They decided to go down to the classroom and confront Jo while I remained in the staff room. Jasmin came back and told me what had taken place when they had confronted Jo. They had spoken to Jo and said that they had to take my concerns seriously. Jo had reacted by stripping off her top and bra and laying bare the facts. No sachets were found but I’m sure Jo removed the sachets when I left the room, probably passing them to another prisoner. I now had to go back to the classroom and take the class with Jo and Ann there. This was not something I was looking forward to.
When I went back to the class Jo and Ann indulged in a bit of triumphalism. Ann was particularly keen to point out that I looked like a twat now: “Sir, you look like a twat now,” were her exact words. I should have sent them both back to their cells but I didn’t. I did wonder what any of this had to do with teaching.
If I am interested in teaching it is because I want to pass on my skills and knowledge: I don’t want to be Boss Kean out of Cool Hand Luke. Jo was so unpleasant that she even alienated the other women, many of whom are genuinely interested in taking the opportunities afforded to them to learn. While the women were waiting to get searched on the way out of lass Jo said. “What am I in for? I’m in for rape that’s what I’m in for.” This just led to looks of contempt and indifference from the other women. Jo had no supporters apart from the misguided Ann who seemed to me to be not a bad person. Jo, on the other hand, probably is a bad person. At the end of the lesson she leaned out of the classroom window and started to spit out of the window. Earlier when I got back from the break she was standing in front of the class and had written Sex Lesson on the whiteboard. These juvenile antics were typical of her general behaviour. Jo was also pregnant and if she was in prison long enough she would have given birth there. I did wonder just what she would be like as a parent.
One notable consequence of the titty bank incident was that later on a friend of Ann’s then turned up at my final class and helped to make it go badly. When you offend one woman you may be offending a clique or even a family. There seemed to be quite a few prisoners who also have family members in Mayfield. Jo, for example, had a cousin in Mayfield, a big and extremely loud young woman who thankfully had not turned up to any of my classes so far.
House of Glass 