Chronicles in the Life of Peter Blank, Part 5

Episode 5. Peter Goes To Jail
One day, quite unexpectedly, two burly gentlemen from the local constabulary confronted Peter (16 years) at his place of work. It seems that he was being charged with the theft of some equipment from a church in a nearby neighbourhood as someone fitting his physical description had been seen there late at night. The evidence was watertight, he was to be detained overnight and would face the mere formality of a trial the next day. Without the opportunity to seek for support, he was bundled into a police van and driven to a police station at an unknown location. No need for interrogation -- they had all the evidence they needed -- he would now learn first-hand what novels alone had taught him. Fingerprinted, photographed and empty-pocketed, stripped of necktie and shoes -- even the leather buttons were removed from his Harris tweed suit-coat -- before he was lead into a concrete-walled cell scarcely larger than the mattress-covered iron bunk that was cemented to the wall within. Completely devoid of windows, save a tiny grilled opening in the door, the room carried the heavy weight of dank musty air. The room was much taller than it was wide, and high in the centre of the ceiling a solitary light globe behind a wire mesh glared mockingly at the frightened form below. The putrid stale smell of the sweat and urine of previous occupants added a unnecessary melancholy to the already terrifying circumstance. Why a bed was provided was a mystery as sleep was as elusive as the reason for this sudden incarceration. Hope of an exoneration also was evasive as his imagination filled with episodes from the recently read "Foxe's Book of Martyrs". The night passed as slowly as a knee-climb on Pilate's Staircase in a thunderstorm.
Morning was announced, not by the entrance of the sun (as this room had seen none) but by the noisy arrival of a heavily guarded tin plate of some grey lumpy matter. This strange grey mound supported an equally grey spoon, which stood to attention like a solitary tree on a hilltop. One of the guards emitted some profound statement about the grey mound being porridge and that they would wait while he ate it. Peter had no stomach for such generosity despite the fact he had not eaten since the middle of the previous day and simply shook his hands in a gesture to suggest that they guard their valuable porridge somewhere else.
With no tool for measuring time, the eternity was punctured when the door swung wide and a pair of voices called for "Hey You" to follow "NOW!" Along long corridors and then into the back of a van the stocking-footed Peter padded. The drive to the courthouse was immeasurable brief compared with the long lone wait in an anteroom at the courthouse.
Then late in the afternoon, hunger having been and now long since forgotten, unwashed, unshaven, wearing a button-less tweed suit and minus a necktie and footwear, eyes red with too much anxiety and not enough rest -- just when Peter felt in no presentable state to be on trial -- an announcement was made to the effect that it was his turn "in the dock". How could a young man, innocent of the alleged crime, feel so guilty, so criminal, so miserably abandoned? The newspapers had already carried the story of his "crime" yet he knew that not. His employer had told all the staff at the office, and reports with embellishment and exaggeration had filtered through the town, but he knew not that either. He knew only that he felt the humiliation and shame of exposure as if he were on public display naked.
With an unreasonable shame in the eyes, which looked only down, with the smell of furniture polish to the nose and the buzz of unfamiliar jargon to the ears, his bewildering few moments in the courtroom told him nothing.
He was, it seemed, just as quickly jostled into another anteroom, there to wait under the heavy cloud of ignorance and anxiety.
It was there in that half-panelled leather-lounged room that matters took a decided turn when he was finally informed what was happening, what had happened, and what would happen. With overwhelming relief and unbelief, he listened as it was revealed how the real crime perpetrator had confessed and that he would receive, in due course, not only his necktie, coat buttons and shoes, but also an official letter of vindication and apology.
These he did receive, but the scars of incarceration and the unexplained feeling of needless guilt remained and so the lesson for Peter is not finished yet.


-- Lionel Hartley, Not Finished Yet -- Chronicles in the Life of Peter Blank
"This serial saga, although novel, is not a novel. It is merely a series of true-life episodes highlighting the extraordinary working of an extraordinary God in a very ordinary life. Each episode contained a lesson for Peter Blank, a lesson we can all learn, from a lesson-book life that is not finished yet."
As first appeared in FreEzine Magazine July 2000 ff