Some lads got a break. Some got a warning. I got Borstal Training, handed down in a Crown Court that smelled of polished floors and sheer, unyielding judgement. Six months to two years for police assault. Open-ended. It was a sentence that settled into my chest, heavy and cold, long after the judge had walked away and left the room quiet.
Everthorpe Borstal rose out of the Yorkshire flatland like a threat carved into brickwork. I stepped off the prison van, my stomach tightened to a hard knot, the cold slicing straight through the cheap, thin issue denim they had given me. The gates clanged shut behind me; they were heavy enough to bury any belief that the world outside still held a place for me.
Inside, the corridors felt scrubbed until the very life had been scraped out of them. The air tasted of bleach, boiled cabbage, and an older sadness that clung stubbornly to the bare walls. The officers spoke only in clipped, hard instructions. There was no welcome here. No attempt at reassurance. They had processed too many boys to waste their breath pretending that any of us mattered as individuals.
The processing stripped you bare before they even told you to take your clothes off. My name was instantly replaced with a number. My file was carried under somebody else’s arm, a list of failures I couldn’t dispute. They clocked the scar on my eyebrow, marked down my build, and noted I had a temper. I kept my face still, refusing to show them anything, although my heart was thudding against my ribs like boots pounding on concrete.
The cell they gave me felt built specifically for containment rather than for any kind of change. It housed a steel bed, a thin, sorry excuse for a mattress, and a sink that wheezed more than it flowed. A barred window was perched high up, just enough to tease you with daylight, but unreachable unless you fancied earning yourself a disciplinary. This was not a place that softened its message for anyone.
From the wing, the soundtrack of boys trying to manage their own raw fear drifted into the cell. A laugh sounded a shade too sharp to be genuinely real. A voice rose in a short, heated argument with a screw. Someone else was humming a tune that felt as though it did not belong to youth. You learned quickly that these walls did not just echo; they recorded everything.
Chester Crown Court drifted back into my head, the cell forcing me to replay it, every single detail. The judge was calm as stone. The copper I had swung at sat stiffly in the gallery, victorious. My mum gripped her handbag tightly, trying to stop herself from simply falling apart right there. One spark of temper in the wrong, careless moment had changed everything. One terrible, thoughtless night. One bad decision. Now the Borstal had hold of me.
On exercise, the yard stretched out, bleak and endless. The wind tore through us in waves sharp enough to wake every nerve in my body. Lads watched each other with that steady, calculating stare you only learn when you’re young and desperate: who was easy, who was angry, who was worth avoiding altogether. A ginger lad with a flattened nose gave me a simple nod. It was quiet. Respect offered without softness. I nodded back. Sometimes, that was everything you needed just to get through the first day.
Workshops lined the far side of the yard. Painting. Welding. Carpentry. Bricklaying. All the trades meant to straighten lads out. Their job was to break them, then rebuild them. That is what the officials liked to say. Maybe they even believed it. For me, the whole idea sat distant, cold like a promise made in the completely wrong language.
That first night, I lay on the thin mattress, listening to Everthorpe breathing around me. Boots on the landing. A sudden shout from a locked corridor. The metallic cough of a bolt sliding into its final place. The whole building settled into its own hard rhythm. I counted the beats until the initial fear finally gave way to something colder, something harder.
I told myself one thing, a simple truth. It was not dramatic. It was certainly not noble. It was just honest enough to keep me going.
I will get through this place without letting it write the ending for me.
At sixteen, that quiet, hard-won thought was enough to hold the dark back.
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