Half A Christmas For Prisoners’ Wires

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32178, 23 December 1969, Page 3

Half A Christmas For Prisoners ’ Wires

(By

DENIS MCCAULEY

The average age of the two girls is 241. Between them they have 31 children. It is a life by halves. Each has a husband in prison this Christmas.

Gail is 23. Her husband was recently sentenced to 18 months in a Brisbane prison for selling marijuana. Before he started his sentence he spent three months behind bars awaiting trial and on remand. Gail has a 12-month-old baby and is expecting another. That is her half. Judith is 24 and has two children, aged 2J and It. Her husband is serving a sixmonth sentence for a variety of crimes committed on a week-end splurge in Christchurch. The house they live in belongs to Gail’s mother, who

is overseas. It is big, far too big for its inhabitants, and beautifully furnished. A large carving hangs from the ceiling. Exquisite pottery crowds the mantelpiece beside a social security cheque. AU the valuables belong to Gail’s mother and cannot be sold to get the extra money both girls need. Riches and poverty exist side by side. Gail, although the older of the two, still gives the impression of adolescence. She is quiet and calm- Where Judith uses a dozen words, Gail uses one and a smile. What gets you through these lonely days in this vast house? “Togetherness,” she says and smiles. Although she is the younger looking, her beauty is beginning to give way to the strain. When she was living in Brisbane her house was searched four times. On the last occasion it started before dawn and lasted eight hours . . . police care, 20 policemen, dogs. Even the baby was woken and its bed searched. Then they took her husband away. Most of their money went on legal expenses and when her husband was finally sentenced the rest paid her fare back to New Zealand where she could at least live free in her mother’s house. She first met her husband at an art exhibition. He is an artist, a good one judging by the carving and the pottery of his owned by Gail’s mother.

Na Money When Judith's husband was arrested in Christchurch she was in Auckland, hundreds of miles away. Penniless, with

her children to support, she asked Justice Department officials for the fare to Christchurch. She was told there was no need for her to see her husband. She had no-one to turn to. Her parents refuse to speak to her because she left home at 16 against their wishes. Judith and her husband moved into a new house a week before he was arrested, but that has gone now. She had no way of making the mortgage repayments. After her husband’s arrest police raided her home, to. “They took the place to bits

. . . they took a typewriter. ‘You can’t take that,’ I said, ‘it’s lent to us.’ They took it any way ... I don’t know if its owner ever got it back. They even dug up the bloody garden . . . two big cops. It wasn’t much of a garden . . . we’d only been there a week . . . but we had a few plants . . . they dug out everything. I don’t know what they were looking for, but they never found it.” Then there was the chance meeting with Gail, who was passing through Auckland on her way to Christchurch. Now the two girls share their strange world. Often they read until two or three in the morning . . . letters from their husbands, novels, poetry sometimes. Often they just sit up, smoking roll-your-owns. Sometimes the companionship goes sour. “With both of us in the same boat we have some nasty moments,” says Judith. “If Gail is feeling particularly bad there’s not much I can do to help. It just makes me feel bad, too.”

According to Gail: “It’s only the people living around here that pull us through the bad spells. We were really low a couple of days ago, but lots of people have brought little presents for the children. The neighbours have all been so kind.”

A boy next door mows their lawns. His father does any odd jobs . . . fixing a fuse, clearing a blocked sink. A woman down the street is having a Christmas party for the children. This web of kindness is the only safety net under their precarious existence.

And how do they feel about their husbands this Christmas? “I don’t blame him at all,” says Gail. “He didn’t do anything really wrong. A friend gave him some money to buy marijuana in Sydney. The friend got caught with it and somehow it got out that the stuff came from my husband. But they charged him with selling it! They turned our place upside down four times, but they never found any there. As far as I know he’s never smoked it himself.” It is not the first time Judith’s husband has been convicted, although his previous offences were all long before she met him. That he turned back to crime when he was away for a week rankles with her. It may have been her fault in some way, she thinks, but cannot see how. For Judith it is nearly oyer. Her husband is soon to be released and they will go back to Auckland, or perhaps some smaller North Island centre. This will leave Gail in her huge house, facing a frightening year—and half a Christmas once again at the end of it.

Letnon-Aid.—Next time you put water on the dinner table float a couple of twists of lemon in the water jug. The water will quickly develop a pleasant refreshing tang.