Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

‘It’s about where you want to stay. You’re a high profile prisoner and if you
want to stay in protective custody sign this form – you don’t have to sign it,
but you’re a high profile prisoner’.
‘Yes, I understand. It’s OK here’. I signed the piece of paper. I understood
this kind of discipline and regarded it as character-building discipline.
Anyone seeking protective custody is, after all, usually someone a little
wimpish who needs to have his backbone strengthened. But once you get
used to it all is well. Besides, it’s a nice single cell. At Wandsworth Prison I
had to share a cell. Only if you bashed up your cellmate would you, as a
disciplinary measure, be given a single cell. I had my single cell.
* * * * *
Somehow I dozed off to sleep. Around 6 a.m. I woke up as the door trap
opens and an officer whose face I cannot recall from the evening before asks,
‘Tea or coffee?’.
‘Tea, please’.
‘Sugar?’.
‘No sugar’.
He took a styrol foam cup from the tray, drops a teabag into it, walks a few
paces across the corridor to a recessed kitchenette in the wall, turns on a
tap, fills the cup, then walks back, places it on the trap, and then I take it.
‘Toast?’.
‘No, thanks’.
But he handed me the paper bag containing two pieces of toast together
with a 500 mL carton of milk, then shuts the trap.
I thought of the funny German saying I heard while in Mannheim Prison
about shutting a trap and the monkey inside is dead: ‘Klappe zu, Affe tot’.
Taking a couple of pieces of paper towel from the bucket I pretend they
are plate and serviette. Because I want to have nothing but water in my
body, and before I poured the milk down the toilet, without my glasses I
managed to read what was on the carton:
Produced and packed by:
PRIME SA
Cadell Training Centre
Boden Road
Cadell SA 5321
160