To Live Outside the Law: Caught by Operation Julie, Britain's Biggest Drugs Bust by Leaf Fielding

Author:Leaf Fielding [Fielding, Leaf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Criminals & Outlaws
ISBN: 9781846687969
Google: fm_8TgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1846687969
Barnesnoble: 1846687969
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2011-01-14T15:00:00+00:00

To Live Outside the Law

145

was holding. ‘Fielding, you must understand that the men’s nutritional requirements have been carefully worked out.

Government regulations ensure that the diet is adequate.’

He read me the menu for the previous day. ‘It sounds pretty good, I must say,’ he commented. ‘I wouldn’t mind it myself.’

‘It does sound good,’ I agreed. ‘And if that was what I’d been given, I wouldn’t be standing here. But the potato-cheese cake you mentioned had no cheese in it. Lunch was potato cake with potato and cabbage. Governor, I have a health-food shop – food is my business. I do know what I’m talking about. The vegetarian diet is deficient in protein, vitamins, minerals and fibre.’

‘I’ll look into it,’ he said.

As all the cons knew, the kitchen crew commandeered the best of everything – tea, milk, cheese, eggs and meat.

Most of them had the look of pink porkers being fattened for slaughter. Apart from gorging on the supplies, they flogged them off. You could buy tea and milk off some of the kitchen crew, but it sticks in the throat to pay for stuff that should already be yours. The lazy bastards were also throwing away hundredweights of vegetables, dumping them straight into the bins rather than going to the trouble of washing and preparing them. I didn’t tell the governor that. He should have known already.

He did look into my complaint. For a few days the food improved dramatically, but it soon deteriorated again.

The lack of fibre in the diet made me constipated. Soon I was suffering from piles. I reported sick, though the hospital was a place to avoid. My request for bran was treated with

146

Leaf Fielding

suspicion, as is any petition by a prisoner; all the staff know that convicts are devious as well as deviant. Even so, what trouble can you cause with bran? I was given a pillbox of it to sprinkle on my porridge at breakfast. The next day I stood in the applications queue outside the screws’ office and went on doctor’s report, and the next day and the next and every day until the doctor got sick of seeing me. He gave me a big bag of bran and told me to stay away until it was finished.

What a relief – and not only for my bowels. Each day I’d had to nerve myself to face the increasingly irritated comments of the screws. I knew I was starting to get a reputation among the uniforms as a smart-arse trouble-maker. If I’d continued going on doctor’s report every day, sooner or later I would have found myself separated from the rest of the sick parade, locked in a room with some angry screws. The hospital was where many of the nick’s beatings took place. You could die in prison and people did, some of them young and healthy. Jailors and jailed both knew that no screw had ever been convicted of the murder of a con.

Your choice, as a prisoner, is to do your bird as a man or as a worm.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.