A prison book group
From the vaults.
Fifteen or twenty years ago I was invited to High Down prison to talk to the book group there about my novel A LONG WAY DOWN. The group had won an award, and, regrettably, I was their prize. I wrote about the visit for a newspaper.
The first member of the High Down reading group to arrive in the prison library is Francis, who’s in his fifties and speaks with what sounds like an Italian accent. He is holding a couple of books: one is my novel A Long Way Down, the subject of today’s discussion, and the other is Dodie Smith’s teenage-girl-coming-of-age classic I Capture the Castle.
“I thought it was charming,” says Francis, as he returns it to Kay Hadwick, the prison librarian and the founder of the reading group. “Charming,” he says again, with evident satisfaction. Just about everything in the exchange – the choice of book, the choice of language - seems familiar but unreal. Surely this is an old Ealing film, with Francis in the role usually played by Alastair Sim?
The High Down prison reading group has been in existence for four years, and in that time the members have read Michel Houllebecq and Razor Smith, Adam Thirlwell and Erwin James, Patrick Suskind and Alice Sebold. And though some of the names on that list suggest that a whole metropolitan dinner party has been arrested for some heinous middle-class crime – plagiarism, say, or nanny-poaching - High Down is a Category B prison (Category B prisoners are defined as those “for whom escape must be made very difficult”, a phrase which seems to invite Category C and D prisoners to show their ingenuity), and it’s got as many clanging doors, dismal grey corridors and unsurmountable walls as Michael Howard and Ann Widdicombe could possibly want.