Quite Honestly

I used to have a boyfriend, Jason, who laughed at me and called me a ‘do-gooder’. ‘Meet my girlfriend, Lucy,’ he would say. ‘She’s a do-gooder, of course.’ And then he’d laugh. I don’t know what he wanted - a ‘do-badder’? A person who sets out to do one bad turn to somebody every day? No one wants that, surely? Anyway, I got tired of being called a ‘do-gooder’ and Jason and I split up, which I did regret, because I found him rather attractive and quite funny at times. But I didn’t know why he was so irritated by my ambition to do a bit of good in the world.

I ought to introduce myself - I’m always called Lucy, but I was born Lucinda Purefoy. ‘Purejoy’ Jason used to call me when he was in a good mood. Oh, and I’d better tell you this right away. When I was young my father was a vicar in a big north London parish and Mum always said that he’d been spotted as having ‘bishop potential’. This made Mum laugh, because she’s more than a little irresponsible and tends to OD on gin and tonic before dinner. Although she had married one, she had little time for vicars, and even Dad agreed that some of the things they got up to at the General Synod showed naked ambition at its least attractive. Anyway, Mum was right and Dad got made the bishop of a large chunk of Surrey and Hampshire. He gets into the papers quite a lot because he can’t see what’s wrong with gay marriages, if that’s what people want. He’s extremely tolerant and told me I must make up my own mind about God. I have to admit that I haven’t got round to doing it yet. Probably that’s because I’m always kept pretty busy. I don’t want to boast, but I did manage to get four decent A levels which took me to uni (Manchester), where I tended towards politics and sociology.

It was there I got interested in crime and the causes of crime, which I put down to poverty, a failing system of education and the values of the monetarist society which regards success as owning a four-wheel drive to take the children to school in and a second home in the Dordogne. At the time I hadn’t even met a criminal.

After my degree, and work experience at the Guardian, when all my friends had gone off backpacking across Australia or thumbing lifts in Thailand, I really longed to do some good in the world, but I didn’t necessarily want to go to Nepal or Cambodia to do it.

What I mean to say is I’d had a lot of privileges. Although my father being a bishop was more than a little embarrassing, I had, like I say, a secure and loving family. So I felt I had to repay my debt to society. But I really had no idea how to do it until I heard about ‘praeceptors’ and met Terry Keegan. Quite honestly, it wasn’t until then that I found a real purpose in life.

I first heard about praeceptors from my friend Deirdre Bunnage. Deirdre was one of those irritating girls at school who were always telling you about their marvellous new boyfriends or the fact that they’d been asked to spend a long weekend in Acapulco with someone who’d been on television. Anyway, I hadn’t long left uni when I bumped into her in the bar of the Close-Up Club in Soho. My then boyfriend, Tom, was very keen on getting into television so he joined the Close-Up and we went to hang out there in the hope of meeting someone in a television company who wanted to give Tom a job. Most of the people we met and talked to were also hanging out in the faint hope of meeting someone from a television company with a job to offer, so Tom wasn’t getting very far. I was sitting with him at the bar, making a glass of white wine last a long time, when my old school friend Deirdre came over.

‘I suppose your life seems pretty empty since you finished at Manchester,’ she said. She was wearing that sort of surprised smile which I always found annoying. The fact that she was accompanied by someone she introduced as a ‘well-known rap artist’ added considerably to my irritation.

‘Social Carers, Reformers and Praeceptors. You know what a praeceptor is, don’t you? Don’t you remember any Latin from school? Anyway, we’ve got to go. Come on, Ishmael.’ And with that, Deirdre went off with her rap artist, who turned out, in the fullness of time, not to be a rap artist at all.

‘Why do they go on doing it? They’ve been to detention centres, youth custody, prison when they’re seventeen or over. Put them inside for however long you want and they just come out and do it again! So they have to go back to prison, to their boredom and our considerable expense. Why can’t they ever stop? Have you any ideas on the subject?’

‘No, none of that.’ The large grey-haired man, with brown appealing eyes and a crumpled suit, swung gently in his office chair. He was Orlando Wathen, criminologist and chairman of SCRAP, giving me the once-over when I applied to be a praeceptor. ‘Some of these lads come from quite decent homes. They could hold down a reasonable job. What’s so great about pinching laptops from the cars of sales reps who’ve stopped for a pee in a service station? There’s a piece in here.’ He searched among the books and pamphlets that littered his desk. ‘Here it is! “Petty crime in the metropolitan environment”. It’s by a doctor. He suggests it’s all because they take too much salt in their food. Seventy-five per cent of those convicted of theft in the Grimsby area admitted they liked their food well salted. Bloody nonsense! I take salt with my food and I don’t steal laptops.’ Mr Wathen looked up at me appealingly. ‘Perhaps you’ll discover what makes your customer pinch things.’

‘All our praeceptors say that, but they haven’t enlightened me yet. I got your father’s letter.’ He searched and found it under a pile of pamphlets. ‘He signs himself Robert Aldershot. That’s not your name, is it, Miss Aldershot?’

‘We all have to rise above the unfortunate circumstances of our birth.’ Mr Wathen was shaking with suppressed mirth. ‘What’s in a name anyway? My parents called me Orlando. No doubt they thought they’d produced a handsome wrestler who’d win the heart of the beautiful Rosalind. Instead of that they got a fat criminologist who’s completely mystified by the causes of crime. You do realize, don’t you, that your customers are likely to resent you and refuse to cooperate?’

The one person who had no doubts at all about the causes of crime and the rising number of young criminals being locked up was SCRAP’s chief executive, Gwendolen Gerdon. Gwenny, as everyone called her, was an oversized, blonde-haired, pink-cheeked woman, in her forties I suppose, who spoke in a high-pitched, rather breathless, little-girl’s voice. She seemed to find crime and the causes of crime hugely entertaining. She never blamed the criminals we were meant to reform for any part of it. Instead she blamed the judges mostly and then the Home Secretary and the police for their unfair and unjust persecution of so many really quite harmless young men.

All the same, Gwenny was clearly the power behind the SCRAP office. She did the work while Orlando Wathen swung in his chair, speculating fruitlessly on the deeper causes of house-breaking, fraud and grievous bodily harm. It was Gwenny who organized our training sessions, every weekday evening for a month, after which I suppose we were meant to emerge as fully fledged, and reliable, praeceptors. We got talked to by prison officers, an assistant governor and someone who worked in prison education. But the one who depressed me most was a probation officer whom I was to come across again, not always happily, in the months to come. Mr Markby was generally of a sandy colour. He had sandy hair, a small sandy moustache and a dry, breathy sort of voice like the sound of wind over the desert.

‘Just remember that you and the client [he meant ex-prisoner] aren’t “friends”,’ Alexander Markby told us. ‘You’re his, or perhaps her, guide, philosopher and teacher. So don’t offer him a cigarette, or he’ll start to expect cigarettes all the time. Don’t tell him what a good time you had at the pub the night before. That would put you on the same level. That’s not right. You must never step down from your position as a teacher. Keep your distance.’

Rather surprisingly, Gwenny seemed to approve of the probation officer’s advice. ‘Take Alex’s word for it and you won’t go far wrong.’ And she added, laughing, ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t sleep with a client of either sex. We have had that happen in the past and it has always led to disastrous results. Keep in touch. That’s the main thing. See that he’s got a mobile and calls you morning and evening. First of all, see he’s got somewhere to live and get him work. Make a nuisance of yourself until you get someone to give him a job - part-time if it has to be. Oh, and we’ll want your full report at the end of each week. At the end of the course I’ll meet you all individually and give you the names of your clients.’

On the final Monday morning, our little group of praeceptors posed with Orlando Wathen for a photograph on the steps of the SCRAP office. Then Gwenny told us who our prisoners were going to be. ‘Alex Markby has suggested you for one of his very own clients,’ she told me. ‘He was impressed when I told him your father was a bishop and he said you might be able to give this chap a bit of moral backbone.’ Not for the first time I cursed my father’s choice of a job. What was moral backbone anyway, I wondered, and did I really have any of it to spare?

‘The client’s name is Terry Keegan.’ Gwenny chuckled. ‘He operated round the Ladbroke Grove area. Uncle almost in the big time, played a minor role in a Notting Hill Gate bank robbery. His grandmother lived round Bethnal Green and she can remember the Krays and the Richardsons!’ She spoke of this family with a kind of awe, rather in the way some other sort of snob might discuss the relatives of a duke, or a movie buff might recall the great days of James Cagney and Greta Garbo.

‘Terry began offending when he was about twelve. He was in a detention centre by the time he was fourteen.’ Here again Gwenny spoke as though she was admiring the achievements of one so young. ‘Last time he got four years for house-breaking from that bastard Judge Bullingham down at the Old Bailey. I have little doubt that he was stitched up by the police.’

‘Well, yes. I suppose he had.’ Gwenny admitted it reluctantly and then added, ‘But that doesn’t alter the fact that Judge Bullingham’s a bastard. You’ll soon find out. The entire judicial system is completely hopeless. Anyway, Terry’s coming out of the Scrubs on Thursday morning. He’s been told to expect you. Orlando and I think it would be rather nice if you met him at the prison gates. He’s got black hair, rather curly. Oh, and an unusually cheerful grin.’