He’d found another kind of life at Feltham. In with boys his age from up and down the country, most of them the same as him – no family to speak of, and no money to their names, persuaded into thieving by necessity. An older lad he knew, John Parker, had been serving time for pilfering a case of baking powder, which he’d tried to flog back to the bakery he’d pinched it from in Colchester. John had been a mouthy sort, but harmless. There were rougher lads you had to steer a path around: the thugs who came to shove you down while you were minding your own business in the dining hall, who bloodied up your nose for pointing your eyes at them in the plunge bath. But trouble had been easier to avoid in borstal than it had been on the streets of Bootle.

He’d gone in like the rest of them: resentful, clueless, cursing his bad luck. Dispatched into a house with eighty others, then a group of twenty with a prefect leading them. In grade one, days were regimented and mundane (parade drills in the yard at six a.m., then cleaning duty), supervised by warders in civilian clothes. No speaking with the other boys at mealtimes and no games allowed or common recreation. For a few months, all he’d done was sweep the floors and scrub the lavatories. But at least he’d slept on a thick mattress, under blankets, in a cubicle with MAYHOOD on the door, and not a bolt-lock to be seen. In fact, the Feltham gates were always left unmanned, with only seven feet of concrete wall at the perimeter – anybody could’ve scaled it with a bit of application. (The two lads he’d seen try it had been apprehended in a nearby village that same evening, and they’d done six months on stoneyard duty, smashing rocks to powder. No one else had bothered after that.)

In time, he’d earned a stripe and was allowed to join a working party. Every lad from grade two onwards had to learn a trade before he got discharged. Some had chosen tailoring or bootmaking; others had gone down the engineering route, or blacksmithing, or carpentry; the rest had found they liked it better in the kitchen or the laundry. He’d considered signing up for farming party to begin with. Just outside the boundary wall, there was a tract of land for them to cultivate, with guidance from a local resident – it wasn’t quite the many hundred acres Frank Lloyd Wright had bragged of owning in Wisconsin, but it kept them occupied throughout the year. Half the veg they ate at Feltham were produced on that small farm, and this made their meals good and wholesome; not the pigswill they doled out at the men’s prison. He’d seen lads planting, mowing, raking in the fields with sunshine on their backs, and thought it looked appealing: honourable work that wouldn’t tie him down to one place on the map. But then his pal John Parker had decided on the building party, so he’d followed him and joined the navvy gang.