Billy Rags by Ted Lewis Page B

besides, there’s a terrible hum drifting over from the chapel and speaking personally I don’t think I could take another four days’ worth. No, as far as I’m concerned now’s the time to negotiate.”
    Walter said: “Yeah, all that’s fine, Billy, it’s all fucking lovely, but how do we know Hepton’s playing it straight? We’ll get clobbered once we set foot outside of here.”
    â€œNo, no, Walter,” said Terry. “I’m telling you: Hepton’s straight.”
    Walter mumbled for a while about getting clobbered but when we put it to the vote he voted with the fors. There were eighteen fors, four abstentions and against were Monks, Climie and Ford but they were head cases and didn’t really count.
    So that was it. Terry went back to the barricade and negotiated us a meal and no loss of privileges. We went out to a battery of magistrates and screws formed in threes, but Moffatt wasn’t there.
    We stripped, bathed, changed our clothes, went downstairs to the hot-plate and got ourselves a dinner and went back to our cells to eat it. A few of the screws had been round the cells smashing record players and ripping letters and photographs and burning private towels, that kind of thing. They’d been sensible enough to leave me out.
    Although the screws must have tried hard to get us all done for assault, in fact only Dave and two others were given the arbitrary honour of copping for that one; the visiting commission was tempering justice with common sense; they didn’t want a backlash against the sentences. In fact they even had the nerve to accept Terry’s explanation of how he came to be in the office. Terry was first one up in front of the commissioners and he told them that he’d just come out of his cell and got caught up in the mad rush and despite trying desperately to disentangle himself he’d been carried along in the tide and once in the office the rest of us hadn’t let him go. Nobody on the Board believed a word of it but Terry got acquitted; the commissioners would appear straight and just men on the paper on which the minutes were taken.
    Apart from the token assault charges the rest of us were done for mutiny and destruction of government property and we got forty-two days behind our doors and the equivalent loss of earnings. We all kept our cell privileges such as wireless, newspapers, tobacco, etc. It was the most toothless sentencing any of us had ever been dished out. Almost a seal of approval on our actions. Nobody could get over it. Particularly the screws. They weren’t just mystified, they were fucking furious.
    So they retaliated with about the only weapon they’d got left in their armoury: the three-man unlocking rule at meal times. The food was kept downstairs on a hot-plate and normally you were taken down in threes and you brought your food back to your cell. There were a number of gates between the cells and the hot-plate and normally these were left unlocked until everybody had been there and back. But now the screws locked and unlocked every gate on the way there and on the way back with each trio of prisoners. And they took their time doing it. This effectively dragged out meal times to about one and a half hours and it worked out that about three-quarters of us got lukewarm food. To me it was a case of beggars not being choosers. We’d got off light and easy and I figured forty-two days of lukewarm food was neither here nor there. But not Walter. He elected to register his protest by going on a hunger strike. For the privilege of being starved I can do all sorts of wonderful things such as chin screws, smash prison property, generally be a pest, but to do it voluntarily is just squandering my seed. But it was one out all out and so I included myself in. The wing was on hunger strike. And a lot of bloody good it was too. I’ve never seen screws so happy. There was a sparkle back in their eyes