Happiness is Door Shaped by Ray Deveroux

Author:Ray Deveroux [Deveroux, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786238009
Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing
Published: 2016-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Back To Work

I still had injuries. Although I was fit to travel and drive my car, I was deemed to be not fully fit to go back on the landings, so after seeing the occupational health advisor, I was put on light duties. I was put on sentence planning.

Joy of joys!

Senior Officer Gerald Lander, “Gerry” was very pleased to see me. Told you, you would end up working with me didn’t I? Oh yes mate, I lied, living the dream, couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be.

What do you reckon of the new suicide document, he asked. This was the new ACCT document he’d been telling me about some months earlier when he first tried to “head hunt me”.

It’s good, I said, is there an instruction manual to go with it?

Funny you should say that, said Gerry, there is a course that the gaffer wants you to attend while you are on light duties.

Great stuff – loosely translated from prison talk as: oh bollocks!

I was to attend a course on how to deliver the new ACCT document in our outside training room. Tutors had come down from Newbold Revel, the Prison Service training headquarters, to deliver this to their willing students. I was one of about ten Officers on the course, along with Gerry.

It ran for a week. In the end I quite enjoyed it and was interested in finding out more.

Back at the jail, Gerry was pleased to see that I had taken the course seriously and was, along with my new best pal Gerry, going through the jail imparting my worldly knowledge on the ACCT document. I got so involved in the ACCT process that I went on to write new policies and training material. I stuck with the ACCT document and taught it for over twenty years in the Prison Service, alongside the Listener Programme, a course that enabled prisoners to be taught by local Samaritans to listen to prisoners in distress.

Such was my involvement, I received a Butler Trust Award and in the Queens Diamond Jubilee Year, I was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) by the Queen for services to vulnerable prisoners.

I had finished light duties and was looking back to returning to my wing. There had been a few changes with staff; Big Taff had left his wife and shacked up with Vanessa. They made an ideal couple – both big and loud. Taff was telling me that he had left the Army after twenty-two years and wanted to get back into uniform. Civilian life wasn’t suiting him.

He had got married after a tour in Northern Ireland, in the mid-seventies, early eighties. Life in Ireland was not pleasant for everyone; especially young women that wanted to get away from the troubles. Young soldiers were easy targets; a few too many beers down their necks and a roll in the sack meant, for some of them, an easy way out. I don’t say that all the women were the same. However, I have met more than a few squaddies who have met their wives this way.

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