IN THE CELLS WITH JIMMY

The challenge of completing my short sentence in HMP Norwich without serious mishap was made immeasurably easier by Jimmy. On the outside, I knew Jimmy's ex-wife, and her best friend was one of mine. They were Scottish, refugees from the heroin epidemic that was taking hold in Scottish working-class districts in the late 1970s as narcotics followed the oil money into cities like Aberdeen. That's where Jimmy was from. Both Jimmy and his wife had been users of heroin but they moved south in an attempt to break the chains closing around them. She had been more successful than he had. Jimmy found me after a couple of days and introduced himself. We had met only a couple of times on the outside where he had quite a fierce reputation. He told me that as soon as one of his cell mates moved on, there’d be a space for me in his cell.

Jimmy would come to find me during exercise in the yard, and during association. He looked out for me as we went to collect meals from the servery, and generally made his presence felt. I could read at least some of the signs of prison hierarchy and while Jimmy was clearly not playing to the hierarchy, his convictions for robbery, violence and hard drugs carried visible status. He was small, wiry and Scottish and you ‘didn’ae mess with him’. I could ask Jimmy stupid questions about the impenetrable procedures for collecting post or getting tobacco.

After a few weeks I moved in. My arrival meant the cell was back to being a threesome and by that time I realised what kind of sacrifice Jimmy was making on my behalf, but after a few days the third guy was shipped out. Sharing a cell with Jimmy was easy. He knew how he wanted to do his time – he had two more years of a four-year stretch to go. I was a passing distraction and a relatively welcome one. We talked. He told me a lot about what heroin had done to him, to his friends, his relationship with his wife and his children. There was nothing but heroin in heroin addiction he said. Nothing else mattered. Whatever you thought you loved, you always loved heroin more.