Cane Rows

Because prison is such a bleak place, those surprising little moments of beauty and tenderness can really catch you off-guard.

Recently, I was facilitating a visit for an Irish prisoner who's halfway through a twenty stretch. I took his 22-year old daughter and her 2-year old son down to see his granda, because he hadn’t seen them in over a year.

I got up to go to the coffee bar to get some hot drinks and biscuits in but it was really to give them a bit of space on their own while I queued. I took a look around me, first glancing back at my happy prisoner with his daughter and her son and then, my gaze wandered to the other prisoners getting their visit.

Pretty, brassy girls I'd seen dolling themselves up in the toilets before the visit; now sitting with their handsome, banged-up bad boys, doubtless promising to stay true.

Slow, lithium-heavy VPs (Vulnerable prisoners; usually sex-offenders) being visited by wee middle-aged mothers with tight lips and even tighter perms.

An elderly Sikh couple visiting a troublesome youngest son; everywhere you turned was another tableau from London’s tapestry: so many cultures and colours arrayed against the drab buff concrete walls and watched over by morose, grey-skinned prison guards whose sharp eyes looked only for smuggled drugs and illicit handjobs.

I noticed two black families visiting their respective loved ones; one for a father and the other for a son. Not in itself remarkable.

But it was the women that really struck me. As soon as the son's mother and the father's daughter got into the hall, they both picked up plastic forks at the coffee bar.

They didn't know each other but each nodded an embarrassed recognition. Almost before they'd even greeted their loved ones, the two women, with little sentimentality and much practicality, sat their two prisoners down and got straight to work on sorting out their cane rows.

The son chatted and joshed with his younger brother in one group and the father dandled a grandchild on his lap in the other. And all the while, the two women worked on their hair, nimbly picking out the partings in the afros with the plastic forks and defly plaiting the tight curls.

Every now and then, the women would smile indulgently to themselves as they listened to their men's conversations. By the time they had finished, at the end of the visit, they had made their men look handsome again.