The second prison
Print. May 27th, 2001The image is etched on a million minds: Gerry Conlon, dark eyed and defiant, emerging from the Old Bailey in October 1989. His conviction, and those of the other members of the Guildford Four, had just been quashed.
Paul Hill, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had slipped away. Conlon faced the cameras, raging and railing, his two sisters clinging to his side.
“I’ve spent 15 years in prison for something I haven’t done, for something I knew nothing about!” he declared. “I watched my father die in prison for something he didn’t do. He’s innocent, the Maguires are innocent, the Birmingham Six are innocent. Let’s hope they’re next.”
With that, he departed to begin the rest of his life.
Things shaped up well at first. Proved Innocent, Conlon’s autobiography, was published to great acclaim in 1990. The film that resulted from it, In The Name Of The Father, directed by Jim Sheridan and starring Daniel Day Lewis, was a massive hit.
Conlon also immersed himself in the campaign to free the Birmingham Six. Their convictions were eventually overturned in 1991.
Then the problems began. Conlon had hoped the release of the Six would finally liberate him, allowing him to establish something resembling a normal life. It didn’t.
Three police officers charged with fabricating evidence in the Guildford case were acquitted in 1993. The verdict was seized upon by those in the British establishment intent on sullying the Four’s innocence.
The episode upset Conlon’s already fragile equilibrium further. So did being attacked in the street by National Front thugs who squirted ammonia at him.
With time on his hands, demons in his head and compensation money in his pockets, Conlon embarked on a period of chaotic drug use. Alcohol and crack cocaine were the means, obliteration the desired end.
By the late 90s, he was in trouble. The drug habit had become a hellish burden, but life in London was interfering with his attempts to quit. He moved to a town on England’s south coast (the name of which he does not want revealed) and got clean. He has been free of drugs ever since, and continues to live in the same place. His psychological difficulties, however, are severe. His lifestyle is semi-reclusive — he leaves his flat only three times a week, twice to see a psychotherapist, once to do his shopping. He is traumatised and depressed. Memories of jail — the squalor, the hatred, the beatings — run like a never-ending horror movie in his head.
“The minute I walked out those doors of the Old Bailey, little did I know that
I was starting a second sentence, rather than finishing a first,” he says. “The second sentence is now nearly as long as the first. And it’s a lot more difficult, because it is not a physical one, it is a mental one.”
We are sitting in Conlon’s flat. It is clean but spartan. Only a large television and a handful of videos hint at any kind of homeliness. His net curtains remain permanently drawn, and he assiduously conceals his identity from the other tenants in the house.
Gerry Conlon is likeable, articulate and fiercely intelligent. But he is also, by his own admission, devoid of self-belief.
Several times during our interview he seems on the verge of tears. The brown eyes are narrowed, despairing. Many of his answers are preceded by heavy, quavering sighs.
Conlon’s wrongful imprisonment began when he was 20 and ended when he was 35. On the day of his release he was given only the prison pay to which he was entitled: £34.60.
His compensation claim was later settled for around £500,000. Most of the cash is gone now. Conlon doesn’t miss it.
“I had very little understanding of money,” he says. “And how could you if you lived on £3.50 a week [in jail]? It was nothing for me to give somebody £10,000 or take four or five people on holiday.
“But I’m not really worried about the compensation,” he continues. “I’m worried about having a life.”
Conlon has never been offered counselling, nor has he received an apology.
“I’m devastated by it,” he says. “I feel insulted by virtue of the fact that we were all innocent and only one person has got an apology [Paul Hill, whose wife, Courtney Kennedy, received a letter from Tony Blair last year]. It’s right that he should get that, but I feel I’ve been left in a situation where my innocence is questionable because of the lack of an apology.”
Meanness of spirit seems to have characterised officialdom’s treatment of Conlon and other victims of miscarriages of justice. At one point, he shows me a letter from his solicitor, Gareth Peirce, to Dr Adrian Grounds, an eminent psychiatrist.
In it, Peirce outlines the psychological hardships experienced by Conlon and by Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six, and bemoans the dearth of assistance available to them.
The solicitor goes on to reveal how she made inquiries at RAF Lyneham, where some of the returning Beirut hostages had undergone counselling, about the chances of Paddy Hill receiving similar treatment.
“I was, however, told that was impossible `because of the IRA connection’,” she writes.
Neither Hill nor Conlon has or had any connection with the IRA.
With such malignant attitudes still festering, it is unsurprising that Gerry Conlon had to wait his turn with the NHS before being referred to psychotherapist Barry Walle 18 months ago.
Although Conlon is full of praise for Walle on a personal level, he believes he could benefit from more specialised help.
“You come out of prison with a prison psychology,” he says. “I still think in prison terms in relation to dealing with people. I think I’ve got the wrong set of tools for this life. I think this government must do the right thing and offer us the facilities and treatment to regain the tools we need to live in society.”
Conlon gave Barry Walle permission to talk to this newspaper. Walle compares his patient’s symptoms with those of victims of “very severe childhood abuse”.
“Gerry’s condition is really a complex and severe post-traumatic stress disorder, with all the usual concomitants: sleep disturbance, nightmares, flashbacks, depression, switches in mood,” he remarks.
Walle believes significant improvement is possible within about two years, but he acknowledges that Conlon is “trapped” at present.
“He’s totally adapted to prison, and so the only way he can begin to feel comfortable is by running his life like he’s in prison. The arrangement in his living room is like that — the bed is in the exact position it would have been in the cell, and so on.”
Conlon says he has not slept in his bedroom for six months. He estimates that he gets about four hours of disjointed sleep in the average 24-hour period. The sagging skin beneath his eyes backs up his words.
“I have the most horrendous nightmares you can imagine,” he says. “The bed becomes saturated in sweat, and I have to get up at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, having to dry my hair and have a wash because of the sweat.”
Asked what the bad dreams are about, Conlon hesitates.
“I’ve seen some very sick things happen in prison. But the most terrifying nightmares are the ones about my father: the lack of concern, the lack of medical assistance. Watching him struggle for breath. And turning blue. And dying. All these prison officers at the time rejoicing. I remember a Geordie prison officer doing a jig.”
He falls silent.
Giuseppe Conlon was convicted on explosives charges along with six members of the Maguire family in 1976. All the convictions were subsequently overturned, but not until 11 years after Giuseppe’s death in 1980. The last time he saw his only son he told him: “My death is going to clear your name. Then you clear mine.”
The Conlon family has never recovered from Gerry and Giuseppe’s imprisonment. Gerry has seen his mother and sisters once in two years. Communication is difficult and emotionally exhausting.
According to Gerry, the healing process has been retarded by the British government’s attitude. He says that not only has his mother Sarah never been given an apology, no offer of compensation for her husband’s death or her son’s imprisonment has ever been made.
“My mother’s haunted by all this,” he states. “She’s haunted to the extent that when I’ve tried to broach the subject of what happened to us, she can’t listen to it.
“She is going through her own memories of that period. I think she is going through them along similar lines to myself, and I think she is frightened of hearing more bad news.
“But I would like to tell her that my father may have been small in stature, but he was huge in heart,” he continues. “He was a giant among people, in the way he carried himself, and his dignity was always intact.”
There is another major complication in Gerry Conlon’s relationship with his family. Since his post-traumatic stress disorder manifested itself, he has been unable to remember anything that happened before his 1974 arrest. His memories of home life have either been wiped out or are psychologically inaccessible to him.
“I can only go back to Saturday, 30th November, 1974 at half-five in the morning, when they came to arrest me at 32 Cyprus Street,” he says. “Because I can’t remember prior to that date, I can’t remember any love from my family, and I can’t remember me having any love for my family.
“I don’t know how to understand kindness or love,” he goes on, haltingly. “If I’m shopping and I see families together, it makes me feel a little disturbed. It seems that everyone has someone, or has a connection. I seem to be on my own, outside of all this pleasure, or ability to enjoy life.”
Does he have any recollection of feeling happy?
“None at all.”
Barry Walle provides the likely, if alarming, explanation.
“There is quite a bit of evidence now to suggest that the brain actually grows new networks, new connections, and shears off old, disused ones,” he says.
“The consequence of that for Gerry is that after 15 years of hard time in jail, with no positive emotion whatsoever, most of his ability for positive emotion has gone. He knows no joy.”
Today, Conlon is crippled by his inability to deal with apparently mundane situations. He gets panic attacks if he uses public transport — the last time he was on a bus, he says, he “started spouting leaks from everywhere”.
He avoids people’s eyes on his rare trips beyond the front door. He admits that he has been recognised on a few occasions. When a stranger asked “are you that guy from prison?”, Conlon told him he was mistaken.
He is no longer in contact with the Birmingham Six or the other members of the Guildford Four. His distressed mental state has led to the break up of both of the significant relationships he has had with women since leaving prison.
There are no happy endings to this story. Barry Walle believes that “there are times when Gerry is quite a high suicide risk”.
I ask Conlon about suicidal feelings.
“They come up about five or six times a day,” he responds.
“This is not living. This is scraping by from day-to-day, psychologically. Sometimes I get so many memories flooding back of so many different things.
“When you see someone who’s been stabbed in each eye and then pinned to the stairwell with a sword that a prisoner had — When you smell the kid who stuck bits of mattress on himself and poured white spirit over himself, and set himself on fire . . .”
He pulls himself back from the horror.
“There are days when I do despair. There are days when I go to see Barry Walle and I cry for two hours. There are days when I don’t know if I can face tomorrow. It’s harder sometimes to stay alive than it is to die.”
Conlon’s freedom was stolen from him in 1974. He has never truly got it back. He is more tormented these days than he was in his cell.
“Inside, I had those last words of my father driving me on and on,” he says. “I had the Birmingham Six standing in front of me to encourage me. Now I’m just sitting here, dwelling on memories that I can’t extinguish.
“I think irreparable damage has been done. There have been times when I’ve wanted to go back to prison. There are times when I’ve felt like it’s the only place on this earth I belong.”
Gerry Conlon looks out the window, and sighs again.
“That can’t be right,” he says.