It was on our fourth day in Pretoria Prison that we decided to tell the comrades about the money we'd brought in. Before our arrival we'd decided to wait until we had 'sussed' everyone out before revealing our secret: we did not want to have someone go straight to the authorities with the information. But it was soon obvious to us that the comrades were not sellouts. They conducted themselves with integrity, seemed to be united and there were no obvious antagonisms. As Denis appeared to be the most senior of the prisoners we decided to tell him first. He would be able to advise us when or whether the others should be told and how and where to hide it. To avoid losing all our cash if it went wrong, we decided that Stephen should reveal his stash first; if it worked out OK then I would reveal mine later.
During the pre-breakfast walk up and down the tennis court Stephen broke his news to Denis. Predictably Denis was amazed and excited; probably a bit suspicious too. But that was to be expected for it must have seemed a bit odd to an old lag to have a four-day-old prisoner come sidling up to him and claim to have a couple of hundred Rand stashed away in his guts. After Denis had recovered his composure, Stephen asked him for advice on how to hide the money. Probably thinking it the best thing to test Stephen's credentials, Denis offered to take the money and hide it himself. After all, if Stephen had been given the money to trap Denis, it would have been a bit difficult for the authorities to claim that he'd been sitting with it for the previous 15 years.
Denis took the money and concealed it inside a spare tube of toothpaste he had in his cell. To us this seemed a bit dicey but he assured Stephen that as far as he could remember his toothpaste had never been violated. Denis also spread the news among the other comrades.
A few days later, after deciding with Stephen that it was safe to do so, I too approached Denis. We were walking in the yard and when I revealed my secret he came to an abrupt halt and stared at me in astonishment. What are these new guys up to?, he must have been thinking. Money in prison, as he knew full well, is used for three things only: bribery, smuggling and escaping.
Three hundred and sixty Rand would have seemed a lot to any prisoner at that time, but to Denis it must have sounded even more as he had never had a chance to come to terms with current notions of inflation. In his amazement at the revelation he could do no more than advise me to do the same with my money as he had done with Stephen's. The toothpaste tubes turned out to be good hiding places: as long as the money was kept in them it was never discovered.
In the course of our first days Stephen and I discussed with each of the others the question of escaping. This did not raise their suspicions as escaping is the most natural thing for prisoners to talk about, especially new prisoners. All the comrades said that they had of course thought about escaping, but none of them came up with any concrete or viable ideas of how they thought it could be done. This amazed and disappointed us as we had expected them to have some pretty thoroughly worked out plans, or at least some good ideas, as some of them had been in captivity for a long time. It made us think that perhaps we had been naive in imagining that we would be able to escape from one of South Africa's most secure prisons. Perhaps we really would have to serve our full terms. The thought was demoralising in the extreme.
Denis in particular had given the question a lot of thought and had attempted an escape while in detention just before he was sentenced. The only time a collective escape had seriously been considered, many years earlier when the comrades were at Pretoria Local, the first prison in which they were kept, it had been betrayed by one of the prisoners, Raymond Thoms. Thoms was the only white political prisoner who was thoroughly broken by the prison experience. He went a bit mad and started narking on the others, who naturally sent him to Coventry. He committed suicide some time after his release.
Denis himself considered the chances of getting out of the prison to be fairly good but did not hold out much to getting away from the prison, off the terrain and out of the country without outside assistance. Naturally, any thinking he had given the problem involved making an exit via the prison yard, but he could only offer suggestions, not a thoroughly worked out plan. He, quite understandably, appeared to accept that the security situation around the prison might be thoroughly sewn up.
I approached Alex separately because he appeared to be a little aloof from the others. Surprisingly he was not aware that we had brought money in with us. I told him of the money, how we'd brought it in and what we'd done with it, but did not say that our intention was to use it for an escape. Later that same day he came back to me and said that if any escape plans were being hatched he would definitely like to be one of the chickens.
His response singled him out from the others, none of whom drew the conclusion that we had brought the money in for the specific purpose of escaping. I asked Alex if he had any bright ideas how an escape might be pulled off, but he didn't have any. He did point out, however, that whatever plans were contemplated they would all involve the making of keys. How we could make these he didn't know as there were no obviously suitable materials around out of which to make them. I said to him that I had been thinking of making a key out of wood but he rudely rejected this idea. The giant prison locks, he insisted, would require keys of a much more robust material to turn them. I believed otherwise.
In our first weeks at Pretoria Steve and I carefully studied the layout of the prison to see if there were any obvious cracks in the prison's security. From our initial observations all escape routes had their origin in the prison yard. It was reasonable to think this, for once you were in the yard the only barrier between you and freedom was the yard wall. Any other starting point meant that you were placing more barriers in front of yourself, not fewer. You could take your cell as the point of departure but once out of it you had to get out of the prison building, and that meant into the yard. There were only three entrances out of the prison building and two of these led directly into the yard. The third, the front door leading into the street, could not even be considered. The only way to get to it was by passing clean through the administrative section and opening a great many doors and gates on the way.
How to get out of the prison yard was another question. The yard gate, although it led out of our prison, opened into prison property next door - into the site of the old Pretoria Local which was about to be knocked down. This was not much good, but as the demolition progressed we thought it might begin to offer some prospects. Otherwise it might be possible somehow to get over or under the yard wall into the street. There had to be some way. We would eventually discover it - it would just take time.
The security arrangements that had been installed indicated that the prison authorities also recognised that if an escape was to be attempted it would have to start from or go through the yard. There were searchlights that lit it at night like a football stadium, and after lockup a large, ferocious guard-dog was placed in it. The dogs were of the sort that would not have hesitated in tearing a loose prisoner apart. The pos with its armed guard eliminated the possibility of prisoners making a dash for freedom during the day.
However, we did notice a few cracks in the security: the dog was never placed in the yard exactly at lockup (4.30 p.m.) and sometimes up to an hour later; between lockup and 10 p.m. there was no warder on the pos. This meant that if we could get out of our cells shortly after lockup and into the yard before the dog arrived it might be possible to scale a wall to get into the street. The prospects did not look brilliant but there was some hope. One thing was clear: we could not rely solely on cracks in the security arrangements to get out - we had to develop our own capabilities to exploit the weaknesses.
To be able to get into the yard after lockup, or to be able to do anything at all for that matter, we would need keys. But how could we make them? How would we get the measurements? Between us we knew very little about how locks worked. I had only a vague idea, having once picked the back door of my parents' home with a piece of bent wire. The giant prison locks looked more formidable than anything we'd experienced in civilian life. Still, we couldn't allow ourselves to be intimidated by their size. Inside they were probably the same as any ordinary lock.
For many nights I sat on my bed and stared at the lock on my grille. It was completely accessible, just bolted to the frame. You could even see right through the keyhole and get your hand around to the other side of it because there was a fair space between the grille and the outer door. I had to make a key for it, but I didn't know where to start. Since the warders never left their keys lying about for us to take measurements or impressions so there was no alternative but to work it out for myself.
I dared not tell anyone apart from Stephen that I was planning to make a key, for we had no idea what sort of response we would have received from the comrades had the subject been mooted first. We knew that it would be a different matter to announce that we'd made a key that worked.
After two weeks I decided to stop staring at my lock and to get down to the business of finding out its secrets. I lit a match to see what was inside it, but all I could see were the scrape marks against the inner faces where the key had turned. Then it occurred to me that simply by measuring parts of the lock I would be able to work out some of the dimensions of the key. By measuring with a ruler the diameter of the round part of the keyhole, I would get the diameter of the key shaft. The width of the head, or the 'bit' in locksmith's lingo (see Diagram 3), and the shape of the ward cutaways in the side of the bit, I could establish by pushing a piece of paper through the keyhole and pressing it with a knife against the interior of the lock. The measurements I could then take directly from the impression on the paper.
The final and most crucial measurements were the heights and relative heights of the 'cuts' in the bit. These, I knew, were the working part of the key as they lifted the levers inside the lock to the correct heights so that the bolt could slide in and out. I'd noticed that there were five cuts on the warders' keys, but as the outer two were always equal in height and the inner two always equal in depth there were in fact only three measurements I had to know.
To find the height of the two outer cuts was the easiest: I could simply measure the distance between the outer edge of the shaft hole to the outer radius of the scrape marks inside the lock. Once I knew this, finding the depths of the inner three cuts was made easier because I would only have to know their depths relative to the height of the outer two. Fortunately, on this first key the cuts were all of the same depth relative to each other. In other words, the middle cut was as deep relative to the inner two as these were to the outer two, the key being symmetrical so that it could be used from either side of the door.
The only way to establish the actual depths of the three inner cuts was by staring at the warders' keys and making an estimate based on eye judgement. This might sound fantastic but there simply was no other way short of waiting, probably forever, for an opportunity to physically measure them when a warder inadvertently left his bunch of keys lying about. At every opportunity I would stare at the warders' keys, and there were plenty of these as they derived a sense of power by displaying and jingling them in front of us.
I estimated the cuts to be 2mm deep and then drew a life-size diagram of the key on a piece of card. I cut it out and tried the shape in the lock. Of course it did not turn the bolt but it did not jam in the keyway, indicating that at least some of the dimensions were correct. The key looked good on paper but how to turn it into a real, working key was altogether another matter.
In the absence of any other suitable materials I decided to try making the key out of wood. I searched the workshop for some suitably hard wood and found a number of offcuts from an earlier job carried out by the comrades. Between Stephen and me, we roughly cut out the pieces for the key from the bits of wood I'd found. There were three pieces: the shaft, the bit and the handle. Cutting the pieces in the workshop did not arouse suspicion as they bore no resemblance to the parts of a key. All the comrades made odds and ends for themselves and as new prisoners we had many things to make, such as stands for our shaving mirrors, boxes for our pens and hangers for our clothes.
The next step was to assemble the pieces and turn it into a key. This could obviously not be done in the workshop so we had to figure out a safe way of getting the pieces and the necessary tools up to my cell. We'd noticed that the other comrades smuggled things in the bottoms of their thermos flasks, which we were allowed to take up to our cells at night with tea, coffee or soup. This seemed a good way, so one afternoon I hid a small triangular file, some wood-glue and the pieces of key in the storeroom next to the workshop. At supper-time I secreted them in the bottom of my flask and at lockup took them up to my cell.
As soon as the day-warders had knocked of duty I set to work. I first rounded one end of the shaft so that it would fit into the keyhole. Then I filed a rebate in the bit and glued it into the slit in the end of the shaft I'd just rounded; into the slit at the other end I glued the handle. Finally I filed the ward cutaways into the side of the bit and the cuts into the top according to the dimensions I'd worked out (see Diagram 4).
Then I tried it out. To my absolute amazement it worked the first time. Not only did it work, it turned with such ease that I thought it had broken inside the lock. I got such a fright that I withdrew it immediately and hid it among my clothes in the cupboard. I sat on the edge of my bed with my heart pounding and my hands trembling. Soon there will be a troupe of warders marching up to my cell to drag me off for attempting to escape, I thought. I started imagining TV cameras peering down at me through tiny holes in the ceiling, hidden microphones which had heard the lock turning and secret alarms signalling the lock had been tampered with. Such are the effects of a 'guilty conscience'.
After I'd calmed down a peculiar sense of defiance and achievement began to creep over me. It was a feeling we were all to experience many times later on, a feeling which is difficult to describe but one which anyone who has cocked a snook at authority will know.
I retrieved the key from its hiding place and tried it again. True enough it really had worked. As the key had to be turned two full revolutions for it to be properly unlocked, I turned it round once and then half the second turn. I dared not turn the bolt all the way in and swing the grille open as I feared that for some reason it might not relock. If the lock was found to be only half-locked this could be blamed on a careless warder, but there would be no way of explaining a fully open door with its bolt right in.
The next morning I took the key and file downstairs in the same way as I had brought them up. I hid the key behind a bookshelf in the storeroom and later returned the file to the workshop. In the workshop I broke the good news to Stephen, which he greeted with such excitement that the others demanded to know what we were so happy about. But we had agreed not to tell anyone until key number two had been made - the key for the outer cell door. We thought that premature announcement might lead to us being regarded as provocateurs.
The success of the first key proved that it was possible to make keys out of wood. The reason why we had at first thought that wood might not be suitable was because whenever a warder opened a lock it was done with such vigour that we were led to believe that the lock mechanism offered a lot of resistance to turning. The opposite in fact was the truth. The vigorous turning was no more than part of the warders' need to demonstrate their power over us. The keys could have been made of metal, and later were as we perfected our methods, but wood had certain distinct advantages: it was readily available in the workshop; the pieces of the keys could be roughly shaped more or less openly - the warders would never have imagined that a key could be made of wood and if they had spotted one of us cutting a piece of wood it could easily have been explained away as something else; a wooden key operated relatively silently; it did not leave scrape marks inside the lock; it was easily disposable; the final shaping and measuring could be done in the cell after lockup.
Now that we had found a material out of which to make keys and had developed a method of constructing them we could proceed with the next ones until we had all we needed to get ourselves into the yard and out of it. It was not quite as simple as we had first thought because the double-locking action of the locks confused us. As far as we could see the doors could be locked with two completely different sets of keys: one set by the warders during the day and one set by the night-warder. According to our comrades the day-keys were master-keys which could turn the locks both turns while the night-warder's could only turn them once. The logic for this, they explained, was to make it pointless for a prisoner to attempt to persuade the night-warder, through force of collusion, to be let out as his keys would not be able to unlock the mastered cell doors. The section doors through which he needed access were not mastered. The night-warder was in fact locked inside the prison by the departing day-warders and was let out the next morning when they came back on duty.
The second key turned out to be a much greater obstacle than the first one. Door two was a panelled steel door with only one keyhole - on the outside (see Diagram 5). As such, the major dimensions of the key could not be obtained in the same way as the first one's. But as both keys looked pretty much the same in overall size we guessed that some of the dimensions would be the same. These were the diameter of the key shaft, the length of the bit and the depth of the neck. As can be seen from Diagram 6, the ward cutaways were extraordinarily complicated and the shape of the cuts also much more complicated.
The main problem with door two was that we seldom had access to the outside of it. When we were to be locked into our cells we were usually brought smartly from downstairs and locked up immediately. The only times we could get to look at the keyhole was during shower-time when we were usually left unattended in the section, and on Friday mornings when we were locked in the section to clean it. Shower-time was not really suitable as the time was short and a warder could come into the section at any moment; Fridays were a better prospect as we were left in the section unattended for several hours with our cell doors open. The other problem was that if Steve or I started peering into locks the others would see straight away what we were up to, and we didn't want to be seen doing anything surreptitiously. It was clear that to proceed the others had to be told.
After making a blank key for door two based on the measurements of the first key and on guesswork, I broke the news about the first key to Jeremy one afternoon in the workshop. I decided to tell him first not just because I worked next to him but because he was the most approachable and Steve and I had judged that he would be more interested in participating in an escape than the others. We did not know what to expect but to our relief he responded with considerable excitement and interest. I told him of the problem we faced with door two and asked him if he would be prepared to assist by asking Dave R if we could test the new key in his door the coming Friday: Dave's door because it was the last in the passage and furthest from the section door; mine being the first and hence the worst. Jeremy agreed to do this and later in the day informed me that Dave had agreed.
Before the Friday I also told Alex about the first key. He found it hard to believe that a wooden key had worked but was most excited about the prospects. To prove it for himself he took the key from me and tried it in his grille at lunchtime. Clearly it worked as well in his lock as it had in mine, for that afternoon, with a broad grin on his face, he hollowed out a piece of wood, put the key in it, glued another piece of wood over it and planed the two pieces to make it look like a single block.
The number two key was tested that Friday but it did not turn at all because the ward cutaways were incorrect. At this early stage we were not entirely sure of the function of ward cutaways and did not realise that they were there only to clear ridges (wards) in the keyway which blocked the use of incorrect keys, and that the bit could simply have been cut away on its side to clear all the wards.
I was bitterly disappointed at the failure as I'd expected the key to work the first time like number one. I was planning to tackle the third door - the section door - that weekend and for us be out in the next few weeks. After the first success it was difficult to reconcile myself to the thought that the job of making keys was not going to be as easy as I had at first thought and that it would be longer than a mere few weeks before we were free. It was also difficult to cope with the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing that could be done with door two until the next Friday. I had still not adapted to prison time, which is different to outside time in that it lacks the distance dimension. The next Friday seemed eternally far away.
Testing with a new key the following Friday resulted in our first disaster, and also our first experience of extreme good luck. Having become bolder and because everyone now knew, I tried out the key in all the number two locks. It turned part of the way in all of them, indicating that the ward cutaways were correct, but did not bring out the bolt in any except mine. I should have realised that this meant something was wrong but the excitement of seeing the bolt move blinded me - I wanted to see it come out and go back in again. At first I was worried about turning it all the way out for fear that it might not return, but I could not contain my curiosity and gradually turned it out completely. I then tried to turn it the second time to master lock it but it would not turn any further. The realisation of what I had done suddenly hit me like a punch in the chest. I tried to turn the bolt back in but it would not budge. I began to panic and tried to force it in, but all that happened was that the key broke. Fortunately it did not come to pieces inside the lock and I was able to extract the damaged implement. Fortunately too the door was open - it would have been difficult to explain a door that had locked itself closed. Unable to do anything about it, there was simply no option but to leave the door with the bolt sticking out and hope for the best.
Luckily, when the warders locked us up after lunch they said nothing about the bolt being out and even started to blame each other for not being able to unlock doors properly. All that we could conclude from the incident was that it must have been possible for an overzealous warder to jiggle his key out of the keyhole and accidentally turn out the bolt. The key had worked in my lock and not in any of the others' because when I turned it my bolt must have been partially out and the levers already lifted up. Turning the bolt fully out caused the levers to latch, preventing the bolt from moving in again.
After this near-disaster it was unanimously decided that all future testing of number two doors was to be done when they were locked. This presented a giant problem as the only time they were locked was when we were inside our cells and thus when we had no direct access to the keyhole. The narrow panes of the cells' passage windows opened sufficiently to allow you to stick an arm through but at full stretch your hand was still at least a metre from the keyhole. Obviously we had to make some kind of device to enable us to reach it.
Several schemes were devised. The first were inordinately complicated and would have involved using a series of pulleys and ropes. These proved too difficult to implement and were unrealistic in that they would have involved bringing a load of equipment into our cells. We finally hit on an idea that was, like all good ideas, remarkably simple. It was to construct a simple crank mechanism out of a broomstick, a block of wood and a screw.
Each cell had a broom in it and all we had to do to turn one into part of the crank was to drill a hole at the end of the broomstick ('so that it could be hung up'). To assemble the crank you removed the broomstick from the brush by unscrewing the holding screw with a knife. You then passed a long screw through the hole and screwed it into one end of the wooden block. The square end of the key shaft you inserted into a square hole that had been chiselled into the other end of the block.
The block and key dangled at the end of the broomstick and to reach your keyhole you passed it out of your window. To see what you were doing you held your shaving mirror at the correct angle with your other hand. The key was simply inserted in the keyhole and then cranked around with the broomstick like a steam-engine crankhandle (see Diagrams 7 and 8).
This method of unlocking our number twos proved very successful, mainly because it was so simple and did not require us to bring anything special into our cells. The block with the screw sticking out of it could be left openly in a cell as a 'clothes hook' and it could be attached to the broomstick quickly and with the minimum of fuss.
It was about August 1978 when I started attempting to open my outer door by this method. I did the testing at night after the eight o'clock inspection round when the music had ended. This was the best time as it was easier to hear the movements of the night-warder after quiet had set in. Fortunately my cell was in the best position for this as I could easily hear when the warder moved out of his office and passed through the doors leading to our section.
At this time Alex one day presented me with a piece of hacksaw blade which he had picked up some time earlier after the plumbers had been working in our section. He had kept it for a rainy day and in the end it became our most valuable key-making tool, without which the making of the wooden keys would have been much more laborious and risky. It was a short piece, about eight centimetres long, which I kept hidden between the sole and heel of my shoe for the entire duration.
We also had access to all the files any prisoner could ever dream of. These were kept in a special steel tool-cabinet in the workshop and were provided for use whenever we needed them (for jobs in the workshop, of course!). The tools were seldom counted and whenever a count was due to take place ample warning would be given. This allowed us to return any 'borrowed' tools we might have had out. I kept one file hidden in the hairs of my broom for many months while making the first wooden keys. This hiding place proved adequate for the most thorough of 'skuds' - shake-ups (searches). Later on we made keys which enabled us to enter the workshop and open the metal cupboard whenever we wished, doing away with the need to keep such dangerous items as files in our cells.
Several other locksmith's requirements were procured in various ways. Denis managed to order a pack of epoxy glue under the pretext of needing it to repair broken cups. This he passed on to me which I used for various jobs including the building up of key-cuts that had been filed too deep and, later, for gluing together the pieces of the metal keys we made. To speed up the curing time of the epoxy I made an allen key out of a nail so that I could open the cover of my cell lamp, which I could reach by standing on top of my cupboard. Glued objects placed inside the lamp cover would set it in no time under the heat of the bulb.
*****
The impression might be given in the following pages that the escape preparations were responsible for generating a certain degree of antagonism between us political prisoners. This was not so. While there were differences - some of them severe - over the planning of the escape or whether one should go ahead at all, we remained comrades to the end. The very escape was testimony to this comradeship, for without doubt had it not existed no escape could have taken place.
We were not in prison for criminal activities but for our political activities and beliefs. This had a profoundly uniting effect on us and helped us avoid the dog-eat-dog individualism which characterises prisoner relationships in ordinary prisons. We were all members of the ANC and therefore shared the same views on the political situation in our country and bore the same attitude toward our jailers. Most important of all, as members of a revolutionary organisation we were disciplined and shared in our suffering collectively. No one sought advantages over another or sought privileges that others did not have.
Our unity was the prime reason for our being kept separated from other prisoners. If we had been brought together with ordinary prisoners our example of struggling collectively for improvements would have undermined prison authority. The only way the prison masters can maintain control in an ordinary prison is by promoting individualism and competitiveness. Although prison, because it is such a personal experience, naturally brings out the worst forms of individualism in a prisoner, disunity has to be ensured by additional institutional measures. In South African prisons this is chiefly brought about by having a system of rewards in the form of a grading or classification system and by promises of parole and remission. Prisoners who behave themselves are promoted to higher categories which confer increased privileges in the form of more letters, visits, spending money and the like; persistent co-operation is rewarded with remission and parole. To us these things meant nothing as those who had earned greater privileges shared them with those who hadn't. And for us there was no remission or parole.
Had we been placed among ordinary prisoners we could never have considered escaping. At that time there was a standing reward for information leading to the prevention or exposure of an escape attempt. In ordinary prisons there was little need to apply this as there would always be some prisoner wanting to ingratiate him or herself to the authorities in the hope that it would bring remission. From us they had no hope of getting to know of a planned escape. For us an escape was a political act, not an individual flight for freedom. It was this implicit trust in each other as comrades that made the escape possible.
Our comradeship also gave us the strength to withstand the conditions imposed on us. It was not easy to live at close quarters with nine or fewer people for years on end. Inevitably small things about your fellow prisoners got on your nerves. In an ordinary prison such irritations and frustrations would be relieved through aggression but in our prison a structure had been developed by the comrades to deal with them without resorting to violence or personal attack. This was our 'recce' - short for 'recreation committee'.
'Recce' had nothing to do with recreation of course and was so titled because we did not want the authorities to know of its existence. It consisted of a democratically elected committee of two, each member of which had the responsibility of discussing with four others matters of mutual concern. It served as an anonymous conduit for complaints by one or more prisoners to the others. It was also the body through which our collective demands were formulated and presented to the prison authorities. This was an additional reason why it had to remain a secret - the governers were not interested in group demands; only in personal 'complaints and requests'.
The prisoner who wanted to raise something would speak to his representative who would in turn discuss it with the three under him and pass it on to the other 'recce' representative. In this way we could pass on complaints and make demands and requests without holding open meetings. If there were any matters that required thorough and urgent discussion then general meetings were held. These were frowned upon by the officers, but never in my time did they openly intervene and stop one. They kept having our favourite bushes and trees uprooted, which forced us to hold our meetings in the often unbearable sunshine, but this never deterred us.
While we were at Pretoria Denis was the accepted 'leader' of the prisoners when it came to approaching the authorities. He had over the years won their respect and they considered him the most senior of the prisoners. The commanding staff in any case preferred to deal with one prisoner rather than face a united front because they liked to think that requests were coming from an individual rather than from a collective: they never wanted to appear to be giving in to group pressure.
While our unity and comradeship was our greatest source of strength it was also the source of the controversies that arose over the planning of the escape. A failed attempt, everyone knew, would lead to severe disruption and threaten the unity which gave us our strength. The differences arose out of this: some felt that the preservation of unity was paramount; those bent on getting out found it difficult to accept that others did not display the same drive to get out.
But despite the agonising over the escape plans we remained good friends underneath it all. We shared in each others ups and downs and offered each other comfort and advice. When a prisoner was refused a visit, did not receive a letter or had a problem with a girlfriend or wife, we all knew about it and commiserated with him. The strength of our friendship was such that at no point was there any doubt that our plans would be compromised. More than anything else it was this that made the escape possible.
