An Unvarnished History by Josephine Tey — Read

Kif found prison not at all the place of half-grim half-picturesque incarceration he had unconsciously pictured. It was a place of iron routine and heart-searing monotony. It was like hospital without the companionship and good-humour. In some ways it reminded him of the army; the new-comer as in the army--as in most human communities--found himself doing the least bearable work; 'scrounging' and 'winning' were certainly not possible through lack of opportunity, but wrangling was in full swing; and if he were particularly young and innocent, which did not apply in Kif's case, his mates took an unholy delight in opening the new-comer's eyes to the wickedness and hardship of the world. Kif bore the dull work and the incredibly dull food with philosophy; he had asked for it; he recognised that. Even if he were still puzzled by his arrival in that _galère_, he admitted that he was paying the inevitable penalty for bad luck and illegal practices. But the monotony ground his philosophy into dust and ashes. He did his best to avoid it by getting himself shifted from one kind of work to another as often as chance offered or could be manufactured; he had not had four years of army service in war-time without learning all that was to be known of self-preservation. But the monotony remained: smothering, maddening, indescribable. He had thought the hours of soap-selling monotonous, but he knew now that they represented the wildest excitement; there was all the world to look at and wonder about, all the crowding petty incident which he had never noticed and which made life bearable. He had rebelled at the moribund life at Tarn, but, even there, there had been the spice of variety; what he had thought of as a smooth sphere was a thing of many facets; a journey to town to-day, to-morrow snedding turnips, at the end of the week a dance; if there was nothing more there was the changing weather. Here there was the same work at the same time with the same faces, the same food, the same surroundings, and the same atmosphere--always. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow. To Kif especially, that was unspeakable misery. He had bouts of cafard which expressed themselves only in an added quiet, but while they lasted warders would look at him a second time and thereafter appear aware of him; and Kif, always quick to notice atmosphere, became aware of their attitude; which was very bad for Kif. He was a bad lot, was he? And they were frightened of him? Well, that was a good jape. No one so far had ever feared him--his hand or his eye or his tongue. And Kif, good-natured, easy-going, not yet twenty-two, found some relief from the awful monotony in the thought that he counted as different from the herd, and in watching the warders watch him.

His biggest anchor to sanity and to his native good-humour he found in the books with which the chaplain supplied him. (Visitors other than the padre he resolutely refused to have, either 'outside' or 'prison'.) They did for him now what they had done at Tarn--created a coloured world in a drab one. The padre was a cheerful Christian with a high ideal of brotherly love and a habit of not listening to what was said to him. He approved of Kif, and though their tastes in literature lay far apart--the chaplain's ideal would have been a mixture of Mrs Hemans and R. M.