This number business is the way everything work in this barren world. A world ruled by the chime of the big round clock that sit right at the top of a square-faced stone building. A clock with power, because when it strike a number, it always telling you is time to do something. Time to wake, to eat, to work, to sleep. It even strike at night, hour after every hour when a man trying to catch a little rest. A time of troubled sleep, a time to forget. And in this world of work and numbers is not what you done, but how long you going have to pay for it. You get called a seven-year man, a fourteen-year man or a lifer. Most of us here for life. Penned in like animals, treated like them too.

Three floors in the big stone building where I sleep, with many windows facing out. They let in the sun when it shine, but mostly the window them let in the cold. Shake and rattle when the wind whistle through the cracks, make me shiver and cower under the thin blanket we get given. The walls, they is over two feet thick. Most times, a dirty brown. Wooden floors that many, many feet march cross. And in every room on every floor, all I see is nothing but filthy, rotting hammocks. We so crowded together it feel like backra don’t even want to leave space for us to breathe. The same way it was on the Moffatt. If this isn’t misery enough, there is the lice, the rats. Just like on the hulks. Big ones. Live under the floorboards and all through the night them gnaw and squeal and steal and run cross you feet. Even slaves not forced to sleep locked up inside a building.

Outside in the pebble courtyard not a leaf of green to be seen. When the wind come up it blow that pebble, sand and grit into you eyes, you nose, down you throat until it suck you dry. All round the yard is a high stone wall with guards standing at the only way out, a wide iron gate, so wherever you look is a barrier, a barrier to a man freedom.

Backra call this number world Hyde Park Barracks. And this number world is meant to make you feel small. Feel empty. Make the life force drain right out of you.

The only good thing bout this barracks place is the stone it built from. Sandstone. I come to learn convicts build it. Brick by brick, all handmade, too, and it seem like them build it good.