117 Days by Ruth First

Author:Ruth First
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2023-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

. . . about myself here. My cell is approximately ten by eight. It has a table and a hard wooden stool, backless. In one corner is a raised platform on which I enthrone the sanitary pot so-called. That is all. There is a square window about eight to nine feet up, barred with wire mesh over glass that is so heavily crusted in dust that you really see through a glass darkly. Through it I can see the sky and just the tip of a brick gable of the jail hospital. Blankets and the felt mat on which we sleep must be kept rolled and folded against the table from 6 am to supper. Clothes, food, toilet articles are either neatly laid out on the table or kept in paper carrier bags. For some reason known only to the obscure civil-service mind, no suitcases or bags of any sort are allowed, only paper carrier bags or topless cardboard boxes. At supper-time shoes must be placed outside cell doors, for some equally obscure reason, and must remain there until breakfast. The light is recessed into the wall behind wire mesh so as to throw a beam of light across the cell and leave everything below four feet in shadow.

I am finding the nights worse than the days. Lights out at 8 pm. I try to find exercises to keep me up till 8.30 but then I wake too early and from dawn to 5.30 is spent turning and tossing having fearful nightmare dreams. Quite awful and I contemplate getting up and pacing. But no shoes! So I just stay and suffer. I recounted to myself memories of childhood, not in full but to try to discover what makes a man face trial for treason twice in a matter of seven years.

I pace my cell, for two hours I reckon, thinking about the silly tedious time-consuming and primitive jobs I have done at one time or other, and seen done, and then invent ways of doing them. There are a few good ones; there may even be gold in them.

Incredible how fertile one’s ingenuity becomes when there is all the time in the world to exercise it, no distractions or stimuli at all.

I have been keeping a record and find that I am averaging eighteen words (spoken) a day. ‘Thank you’ three times for meals. ‘May I have a match, please?’ twice at exercise times.

I keep my vocal cords exercised with an evening song session, taking advantage of the captive audience, B, H, and two warders outside, and the quite remarkable bathroom-type acoustics of the cell which enable me to go from basso profondo to mezzo-soprano! Aided of course by the fact that I’ve cut this smoking jazz down to two a day for the second thirty days and intend to drop it entirely for the third. Just one of the gimmicks I’m trying to ensure that I stay strictly non-obsessional and as non-neurotic as possible in circumstances specially designed for creating neuroses.

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