The First Casualty by Ben Elton Page A

stark contrast to the friendly welcome which Captain Abercrombie had enjoyed. Whereas on his first public exposure to the wider prison population he had provoked a cacophony of derision, now on entering the mess hall shortly after leaving the governor’s office he was met with a sullen silence. Every head seemed to turn as he made his way into the room. Every eye seemed to follow him as he shuffled towards the vats from which the evening stew was being served.
    ‘What do you want?’ the prisoner who had the task of serving the food enquired.
    ‘My meal,’ Kingsley replied.
    ‘Warder!’ the prisoner shouted. ‘Warder, here, please, sir, if you would, sir, please.’
    A uniformed warder approached the bench on which the stew urns stood.
    ‘What’s to do here then, Sparks?’
    ‘I don’t see as how I should have to serve a coward, sir.’
    ‘I know how you feel, Sparks, but the man’s got to eat.’
    ‘He’s a traitor, sir. I won’t serve him, sir. Stick me on the Mill if you will, sir, I don’t care.’
    The warder turned and addressed the assembled hall.
    ‘Will any man serve this prisoner his stew?’
    Of all the hundreds of men sitting on the benches at the long thin tables not a single one spoke. Kingsley was utterly alone, the object of such contempt and derision as he would not have thought possible. A copper and a coward. In the minds of the population of Wormwood Scrubs in the late summer of 1917 a man did not sink any lower than that.
    ‘Perhaps I might be allowed to serve myself?’ Kingsley suggested quietly.
    ‘And perhaps you might be allowed to shut your fucking face until I ask you to open it.’
    ‘You have a statutory obligation to feed me.’
    The warder’s fist smashed into Kingsley’s mouth.
    ‘Try eating with no teeth in your head,’ he shouted as Kingsley staggered but managed to remain upright. ‘Prison rules states prisoners be served! Not serve themselves! If I lets you get hold of that ladle who knows what mischief you’ll make of it! Why, you might use it as a weapon or else a spade to tunnel out with. A fellow as clever as you, Inspector , could probably turn it into a flying machine.’
    ‘You cannot let me starve.’
    Once more the fist flew out and this time Kingsley was knocked properly to the ground.
    ‘I — said — shut — your — fucking FACE,’ the warder snarled. ‘We has food provided, that’s our duty, that’s our job. We has food aplenty but you can’t serve it. No you can’t, them’s the rules. And if you can’t serve it and no man’ll serve you, well, then you might very well starve and personally I don’t know as how there’s a way around it.’
    A loud, deep voice rang out from across the room.
    ‘Ah’ll serve yon prisoner his vittles, sir.’
    The man spoke with the unmistakable accent of the Clyde.
    Staggering to his feet, Kingsley peered across the hall to where he saw a man stand up. A huge man with quite the most startlingly orange hair he had ever seen. Kingsley recognized him instantly, for this man had once been almost as significant a press hate figure as were the leaders of the Irish Republicans. ‘Red’ Sean McAlistair, regional secretary of the dockworkers’ union, a man whose influence in the vast Port of London probably exceeded that of the chairmen of the P&O and White Star lines combined.
    McAlistair had been seated at the far end of the dining hall amongst about a dozen serious-looking men. They were slightly separate from the rest, and the chairs immediately beside them were unoccupied: clearly these people, like Kingsley himself, were set apart. Socialists and trades unionists, strikers imprisoned by a society that was taking an increasingly dim view of those it considered to be putting class war before Great War.
    McAlistair began to cross the hall and prisoners stood aside to let him through. His vast bulk was his protection, that and the group of silent men he had been sitting with.
    Arriving before the bench upon