Nicholas Temple-Smith
Prologue
They hanged me on a Tuesday. I knew the drill, so I knew perfectly well what was going to happen. Halfway through the twentieth century we may have been, but they still followed procedures laid down when Dickens was alive. The, shall we say, event was going to take place at nine o’clock in the morning of the tenth of October, so that meant that Mr Pierrepoint would be arriving no later than four o’clock on the Monday afternoon. Even though I knew it wouldn’t be possible, I still tried to listen out for the sound of him knocking on the big double doors. Of course, I didn’t hear a thing. Besides, there was a lot of other noise most of the time, during the day certainly, even though I was away from the rest of the general population by that time, and supposedly in some kind of isolation. During the hours of daylight there is never silence in His Majesty’s Prison, Pentonville.
The cell was brightly lit. No dripping dungeon this, but a functional room, large enough for one person, in this case me, to sit at the plain deal table to eat, read or whatever, or to lie on the cot. Or even to pace up and down. But not very far, of course. Seven paces up, then seven paces back again. It occurred to me that never again would I be able to walk more than seven paces. Then I realized that of course I would walk a little further than that the next morning. There was a cupboard against one wall of the cell. No one had opened it in my presence, but I knew what was in it – nothing. Its sole function was to mask the door in the cell wall that led to the execution chamber. If you ever read anything about the long walk to the gallows or any drivel like that, pay it no heed. From condemned cell to trapdoor is but a few paces. I also knew that come the evening I would be taken out to exercise; not out of any concern for my future health, since I wouldn’t have any future health of course, but so Mr Pierrepoint and his assistant would be able to prepare their equipment for the morning. At some point too, he would have a peek through the spy hole in the door at the condition of my neck. Nothing wrong with my neck – a good, strong, healthy neck three decades old. No doubt Pierrepoint would add an extra half-inch to the drop to make sure.
That night I did manage to sleep reasonably well. Two warders sat in my cell, as per regulations, making sure, no doubt, that I did not harm myself or worse, do myself in. The proprieties must be observed, after all, and no private enterprise was allowed. My death was to be organized by the state. I woke at about seven-thirty and to my surprise I found I was hungry enough to eat the breakfast they provided. There was nothing particularly hearty about it, but it was food after all and I did have an appetite. On the dot of nine the cell door opened and the prison governor came in. I liked him. He had always been kind to me and had about him the air of someone who was rather embarrassed by what he had to do but would not let that stop him from doing it well. A pace behind him came Albert Pierrepoint. I recognized him from pictures I had seen of him in the papers. He looked very dapper in a pinstripe suit, highly polished shoes and with a white handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket. The two warders had sprung to their feet at the sound of the key in the lock and one of them had pushed the cupboard aside on its castors to reveal the open doorway in the wall.
“So, it’s time,” I said.
“Yes,” replied the governor, and stood aside to allow Pierrepoint to approach me.
I held out my hand to him “Good morning, Mr Pierrepoint,” I said, “I have always wanted to meet you, though of course not in these circumstances.” And that was no word of a lie. Like a lot of people I had long been curious to meet the country’s chief executioner.
“Good morning,” he replied and shook my hand briefly, then without letting go of it, in a continuing motion he pulled it gently behind me. One of the warders took my left hand and brought it behind me too, and Mr Pierrepoint bound them together with a leather strap. It was tight, but not painful. Nothing would be painful, that I knew – the whole process was designed to avoid pain of any sort.
Mr Pierrepoint said to me “Follow me, lad. It’ll be alright.” and he walked ahead of me through the doorway in the wall. I followed, with both warders behind me to see that I didn’t baulk. So, through the door and up two steps and I was in the execution chamber. I was dimly aware of the governor and two or three people standing against the far wall, but they were just witnesses. Pierrepoint was in charge of the procedure. And for the first time, I saw the noose. Not a cowboy coil or any of that fancy American nonsense. Just a single loop running through a metal-lined eye. Above it, the rope had been looped back several times and held in place by a length of twine, to take up the slack. Pierrepoint took me by the shoulder and led me to the trapdoors. They were big – about four feet by eight, both of them. Across the join was a big T in chalk, which was where I had to stand.
“How long a drop are you giving me?” I asked Pierrepoint but he didn’t answer. While the assistant hangman was buckling a large leather strap round my ankles, Pierrepoint stood facing me. He reached for the handkerchief in his pocket and I thought he was going to blow his nose, but it wasn’t a handkerchief after all – it was the hood. I don’t know why but I had always imagined they used a black hood. This, however, was white, and very clean, I remember noticing. I suppose they washed it between executions. Pierrepoint put it over my head and I knew that his face was the last thing I would ever see. A moment later I felt him put the noose round my neck and adjust it with the knot slightly under the left of my jawbone. A second after that I heard the scuffle of feet as Pierrepoint moved away from me and almost at the same moment I felt the trapdoors give beneath my feet and I fell through. I imagine that from the time the governor entered my cell to the moment I went through the floor was about twenty seconds, if that.
Now, a judicial hanging by means of a measured drop is designed to cause instant death by simultaneously snapping the spinal cord and also the spine itself, between the second and third vertebrae. I didn’t know that then, but I read about it later. I also knew that since the long drop was introduced there had been only one execution at which death had not been instantaneous and, as far as anyone can tell, painless. That had been in the 1870s. All others had been perfect – from the point of view of efficiency, at any rate.
Mine was the second that didn’t go as laid down in great detail in the Home Office regulations. I fell for the merest fraction of a second and then the noose brought me up short. It tightened under my chin, just as it was supposed to, and threw my head backwards with a force that should have killed me in an instant, as planned. But it didn’t. For a moment I felt a pain worse than I had ever felt before, bright lights danced before my eyes and for a second I was winded. Then I hung there motionless. There was no sound. No creaking of the rope, no reverberations from the noise made by the falling trapdoors. Just silence.
And it was into that silence that I shouted, “Christ, that fucking well hurt!”