The Sword of Damocles        

By Michael J Freeman

Volume 7 of the “I Pornographer” series of Eroticartist.co.uk        

                                                       Chapters

1. Back Inside

2. In a Padded Cell

3. Death’s Door

4. The Trial

5. Wormwood Scrubs

6. Doing Bird

7. Freedom Delayed

8. Reward

9. Defending Myself

10. The Videx Video Show Trial

11. Day Two of the Trial

12. Day Three of the Trial

13. Day Four of the Trial

14. The Verdict - Day Five of the Videx Video Show Trial

15. The News of the World

16. On the Dole

17. Bella

18. A Gift From The Gods

19. Gaining Space

20. Hardcore

21. Raided

22. Unrequited Desire

23. Perverting the Course of Pubic Justice

24. Confessions

25. A Convict Again

26. Back Inside

27. Doing Bird

28. Tripping Again

29. No Mercy

Michael J Freeman

                                              www.eroticartist.co.uk

Back Inside

Chapter 1

I awoke in a dirty prison cell in a narrow iron prison bunk bed; above me lay another prisoner whose body sagged down the wire bed springs above. I glanced next to me and another prisoner was sleeping on an iron frame bed only six inches off the floor.

The cell was twelve feet by eight feet approximately and I was dying for a piss. Sleepily I rubbed my eyes and saw three chamber pots under a wooden washstand at the end of the cell. I got up and took the lid off one of the yellow aluminium pots and my nostrils were assaulted by the foul smell of urine. I directed my piss into the pot that was lined with yellow deposits of hundreds of prisoners who had pissed before and turning my head away from the fetid stench I pissed.

Memories of the day before me flooded into my head, the police smashing into the Videx offices, the police lies about me squirting acid at them, the magistrate refusing bail, the interminable wait in dirty stinking cells and being brought here to Brixton Prison awaiting trial remanded in custody.

I pulled on my brown ill fitting prison clothes, brown identifying a prisoner as un-convicted and looking at the snoring faces of my fellow inmates. I remembered snatches of conversing with them the night before.

Suddenly I felt my bowels move and knew that I had to obey Nature. I squatted down over the stinking piss pot and defecated then wiped myself on lavatory paper. I needed to wash as I always did and picking up a plastic jug I poured water in it splashing water over my face before washing my anus.

Suddenly one of the other prisoners awoke “Smells like a shithouse in here” a good looking Latin looking guy said a look of disgust on his face.

“Sorry but I had to go” I apologised.

“I’m Ray” the good looking prisoner replied, holding a towel to his face...

“I’m Mike,” I said, trying to summon a grin that was more like a grimace.

“Pleased to meet you Mike but I’ve got to get straight,” Ray said, pulling out a plastic tube from under his bedclothes.

I watched horrified but fascinated as he assembled a hypodermic syringe, then flexed and unflexed his hand until the veins bulged, stuck the needle into his vein and the syringe filling with bright red blood then shooting up.

“Ah” Ray gave a long sigh and relaxed.

I looked out of the small square of sky I could see through the heavily barred window. “I have got to survive” I thought then I got down on the cell floor and started to do press-ups. I repped until I felt the burn then stood up. “Got to keep fit” I excused my eccentric behaviour.

“I can do those even after a fix” Ray said getting out of bed and assuming the press-up position and doing ten press-ups.

I must admit I was surprised “It’s good to keep up your strength in these places” I said.

Then the other guy who was still asleep on the top bunk started to stir and wake up.

“Pew! What’s that fucking smell” he said.

I looked at the curly black haired prisoner apologetically.“Sorry mate I had to go” I explained.

“Yeah, he had to go,” Ray repeated, breaking out into a laugh that showed a row of pure white teeth. “I had to get straight, Mike’s all right Steve” Ray said.

Steve sat up in bed and started to strap up his arm. “Got to shoot up myself man, Ritalin, it’s shit, got chalk in it fucks up your veins” he said pulling out the second set of works I had seen that morning.

I stared shocked at finding myself in a cell with two junkies. I eyed the sharp needle as Steve pushed it into a vein and paranoia flashed through my brain. “I could be murdered anytime in this cell.” I knew that there were mainliners around who would kill a person for a grand cash. I had to get out of this cell.

A bell was ringing “Slop out” Ray informed me.

I could hear the sound of cells unlocking the shouting of screws, metal on metal, the crashing of doors and the rattle of keys as the prison awoke. Suddenly the cell door opened and I picked up my stinking pot and walked out onto the One’s landing to join a queue of prisoners slopping out their pots and filling plastic jugs with water.

“Only two trips to the recess” a screw shouted.

I joined the line of pot carriers and edged towards a large sink with a flushing system where prisoners were emptying the contents of the pots and flushing it away. The smell was overpowering as a thousand faeces and gallons of urine released their smells into the air. “I’m in the belly of the beast again” I thought a feeling of self pity shooting through my brain then I glanced sideways and was shocked to see a legless man on crutches making his way across the recess floor that was wet and shiny with piss to empty the contents of his pot. “Thank God I am fit and healthy and living in an undamaged vehicle” I thought wondering what a man with no legs had done to get into this terrible place.

I filed past the hotplate carrying my plastic tray and a ladle full of porridge was poured into one of the compartments, then cheese goulash in another, a spoonful of diluted jam and a bread roll then I held out my white plastic mug under an urn with a prisoner operating the faucet.

A prisoner hotplate worker at the end of the queue held a small ladle of white sugar. “On your porridge or in your tea?” he asked.

“On my porridge” I replied then I walked back to the cell and sat down eating the prison food remembering the tastes I thought that I would never taste again...

“Urrgh! How the fuck can you eat that shit?” Ray said watching me fork a mouthful of cheese goulash into my mouth.

I remembered that it was my favourite prison breakfast for years and laughed. “It’s not too bad actually except for the eyes” I said.

Ray plonked his goulash on my tray. “Want it?” he asked.

“Yeah okay” I agreed thinking that I was used to the best food and here I eating prison goulash again and enjoying it. The porridge was lumpy and contained chaff, “proper oatmeal” I thought as I spooned it down.

After breakfast we had to see the doctor. I walked into a converted cell on the ground floor with a prison doctor sitting at a table accompanied by a fat Chief Prison officer, the latter who looked at me in distaste while the doctor wrote some observations about the previous prisoner in a folder.

“Name and number to the doctor” the gold braided Chief bellowed in my ear.

“Michael J Freeman, sorry I don’t know my number” I apologised.

“Remember it next time” the Chief bellowed an angry look upon his face.

“Are you fit?” the doctor asked, looking up at me over his bifocals.

“No not really I have an E Coli infection” I replied wanting to get out of the cell with the two junkies and into the hospital. I could have grassed them and got them moved and nicked but it was against my nature and the hospital was the best and cleanest place to be in prison.

The doctor looked at me angrily, his face going red, veins starting to bulge in his forehead. “Who do you think you are giving me this rubbish?” the doctor said shouting loudly going into a paroxysm of rage.

“Sorry I am just repeating what my private doctor Nick Berry told me” I said apologetically wondering what would have happened if a patient had informed him of this information from a GP. I knew that prison doctors usually were GPs from the local area.

“Arrange for Freeman to have a urine test and transfer him to the hospital immediately” the doctor ordered the Chief angrily.

“Right lad, left turn, quick march and up to your cell, and bring only your personal belongings” bellowed the Chief.

I was happy as I ran over to my cell and grabbed my few belongings “The doctor has allocated me to the hospital” I explained to the startled faces of Ray and Steve.

“Goodbye mate,” Ray said.

“Yeah, be lucky” Steve said

The hospital was spotlessly clean and the screws wore white jackets.

“Freeman” a hospital screw was shouting.

He took me into an office and asked me to piss into a bottle then placed the urine sample on the window ledge where I could see it from inside the ward.

“This is your bed space” a screw said to me. “No lying on the bed during the day”          

“Yes Sir” I replied with a smile looking at the fresh sheets of a real bed so different from the filthy cell and the smell of urine and faeces that I had just escaped from. I saw some books on a shelf and went over to look at the titles. Most of them were Westerns but I was pleased to find a copy of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and sat down to read it again thinking about how the CIA had supposedly used it to program President John Edward Kennedy’s assassin and John Lennon’s too I thought. I sat in the chair by the bed and immersed myself in the book.

“Visit for Freeman” a screw who had just entered the ward was calling.

   The Visits Room was crowded as I sat on one side of a long table and waited for Sara.

Sara suddenly entered the room and came walking towards me, her face wreathed in smiles and sat down opposite me.

“Mike are you all right”? Sara asked, tears in her eyes.

“Oh I am fine and don’t worry. Just try and get Offenbach to get me bail” I replied knowing that it was a useless task in the light of the false “squirting acid” allegation  from Inspector Kruger of the Obscene Publications Squad, especially for a convicted murderer on life license.

“Nick sends his regards.”

“Oh great, tell him that I will get off at the trial” I said confidently.

“How long will that be Mike? I‘m really missing you” Sara said.

I gazed into Sara’s large brown liquid eyes that were misty with tears and tried not to cry too. “Could be months,” I whispered.

“Visit over for Freeman” a screw said, appearing suddenly behind Sara.

“But I have just sat down,” Sara managed to say.

“It will be longer next time” I whispered knowing that the screws were waiting to see how I reacted to a short visit. A psychiatrist had arranged a “temper visit.” They knew that some guys would drop their pacifist act if they thought that they or their girlfriend had been insulted.

I stood up and kissed her and I felt her push a small package into my mouth that I knew was hashish.

“Your Mum is upset but says that she will bring you a dinner today,” Sara said.

“Tell her that I’m in the hospital and that I’m not allowed food there” I replied.

“Come on Madam” the screw said as I reluctantly disengaged myself from Sara’s embrace.

“Stand on the box” a screw said in the search room.

I stood on the box and he ran his hands down my body and up inside my crotch and down my legs.

“Take off your shoes.”

“Open your mouth.”

“Lift up your tongue.”

“Right step down and wait in the passage” the screw ordered.

Back in the hospital ward I sat in the toilet assembling a makeshift pipe out of the cardboard tube of a toilet roll. I placed a piece of hash on the pipe, lit it with a lighter and inhaled. One or two prisoners who entered the toilet while I was smoking sniffed the air suspiciously and I hoped that neither of them were grasses.

I could see my urine sample in the office and it was there for several days and I knew that it had not been sent off. I felt fine at the moment but I knew that I was under stress and that it could cause a relapse.

In a Padded Cell

Chapter 2

 “Baker” a screw called “Simmons” and as he called a prisoner’s name the prisoner went forward to be put into a Black Maria.

“Muldoon” the name shocked me, my old name.”Why was the screw using my old name?” I thought. It wasn’t my name now and I was not going to answer to it.

Soon the prison yard was empty except for me and four screws were staring at me, then the one with the clipboard came towards me.

“What’s your name lad?”

“Michael J Freeman, Sir” I answered

“You’re Muldoon, aren’t you lad?  Why didn’t you answer?” the screw shouted angrily.

“My name is now Freeman and it is illegal for me to use the name of Muldoon because I don’t want to break the law Sir” I replied.

“Well you are not a Freeman now are you lad now get your arse in that wagon” the screw ordered in an angry voice.

I was taken to a magistrate’s court  and remanded in custody to appear for trial at the Central Criminal Court charged with offences under the Obscene Publications Act and Protection of Children Act

Anger coursed through me as I thought how warmongers like Thatcher red in tooth and claw with the blood of children. Her alcohol addict husband Denis was an arms dealer and her son Mark a mercenary talking of protecting children.

Back at the prison hospital I received a solicitor’s letter from Ted Malman informing me that I had been charged with producing video titles seized during a raid on my home two years ago and he would be representing me and engaging Queen’s Counsel.

“The bastards they have waited two years to charge me” I thought.

I was now awaiting two separate trials on obscenity offences. I was worried about being recalled under my life licence and the charge of attempted grievous bodily harm by squirting acid at the police and because it was an offence of violence. I had a copy of the HM Parole Board, a government document which said “a danger to the public” was a reason for immediate recall to prison without a trial.

Sara visited me regularly on almost a daily basis and supplied me with a constant supply of cannabis that made life easier. One day she could not get any and on the way out I caused a scene in the search room. I don’t know why...

“Up on the box lad” the search screw ordered.

I climbed up on the box and he rubbed me down.

“Okay step down lad” he ordered.

I stepped down.

“Open your mouth.”

Instead of opening my mouth I swallowed, making a gulping sound that I thought sounded rather comical.

The next minute a screw’s hand was around my throat in order to prevent me swallowing and I was lifted high in the air transported out of the search room, carried down a set of stairs across a tarmac yard and manhandled into the Segregation Unit where I was bundled into a strip cell.

Two massive security doors were slammed behind me. I started to laugh out loud. If anyone would have looked through the Judas hole in the big iron door they would have seen a madman cackling and laying on the floor. Actually the floor was comfortable and I realised that I was in a padded cell. I looked around the cell and it was absolutely bare except for a plastic chamber pot, a plastic water jug and cup. I looked up at the window and it was barred and meshed so that nothing could get in or out. I realised that they would examine my excreta each day looking for what the screws thought that I might have swallowed.A few hours later I heard the muffled sound of feet and the outer door opening the door of the cell.An Asian doctor dressed in a suit shirt and tie entered accompanied by two screws. “What have you taken?” he asked.I smiled ignoring the two aggressive screws who were giving me menacing looks. “Nothing,” I answered.

 “Was it LSD?” the Indian doctors asked a concerned look on his face.

I realised he had been looking at my record and wondered why most prison doctors seemed to be Asians these days. “Well it would be rather a stupid place to take LSD in prison, don’t you think? One would have a bad trip” I said.

The doctor looked at me a smile flickering around the corners of his mouth. “Freeman, what would you like to eat?” he asked.

I realised that I was hungry and that the doctor wanted me to have a bowel movement. “I’m a vegetarian, a big jug of milk and some bread and cheese and a raw onion” replied knowing that these things would be in the prison kitchen and that it would be pointless asking for something exotic like smoked salmon, cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches.

I ate the bread and cheese and took a long drink of the milk. I awoke the next morning and taking the lid off the plastic chamber pot. I opened my bowels, then I put the lid of the chamber pot back on as quickly as possible because of the putrid stench of ordure in that confined space.

A screw came to the door and an eye appeared at the spy hole. “Have you anything to slop out? He said his voice muffled by the padded door.

“Yes,” I replied, nodding my head.

The door opened and a screw stood there.

I took the lid off the pot. “Look a big one Sir,” I said, smiling broadly.

The screw retched involuntarily as the foul smell hit his nostrils and he put the lid on the pot, banged the door shut and hurried away presumably to rake through it looking for foreign objects or packets of drugs while I lay there on the comfortable padded floor laughing out loud until my sides ached and tears ran down my cheeks. “Maybe they analyse it looking for traces” I thought, giggling. I wasn’t bored now and was enjoying myself again as the joker.

I sat on the floor and ate my prison porridge and a boiled egg swigging the vile prison tea called “diesel” by the inmates. Soon the door was opened by a screw and a prison orderly entered to take my tray.

Later that morning a screw unlocked the doors and informed me that I had a visit but he didn’t take me to the Visiting Rooms but to the Closed Visiting Room. I knew that I had been placed on closed visits because of the swallowing incident. I was stripped, searched by two angry looking screws and directed to a small cubicle with a panel of plate glass separating me from the other side.

I thought that it would be Sara but soon a screw wheeled in Simon Parrit in a wheelchair stopping in the passage where I could see him.

“Right strip search Sir” one of the two screws snarled.

As I watched I became angry at this unnecessary search of one of my friends and waved to him in support. Before meeting disabled people through Tuppy Owens Outsiders Club I thought that the disabled were treated kindly by most people until I discovered from their sad tales that the opposite was true. Now I was forced to watch as two screws possessed by evil abused a severely handicapped person before my eyes. I was horrified as his distorted twisted body was exposed.

“How can people do this to a disabled person?” I thought.  The screws were trying to make me angry and if I had been at liberty I surely would have beaten the two so-called “prison officers” who demanded that one address them as “Sir” on pain of punishment for “disrespect to an officer.” I hated this kind of bully and the prison service attracted a fair share of them although there were a few decent ones around.

After the screws had finished humiliating Simon they pushed him into the cubicle.

“Thanks for visiting me Simon” I said knowing from experience that only true friends visited one inside.

“The bastards,” he said angrily.  

“Those two are evil,” I said.

“Yes I will make a complaint. Hey Mike I heard you on LBC” Simon blurted, eager to give me the information.

“Really” I replied, smiling, staring at Simon’s perfectly normal, even handsome, head mounted on that horribly distorted body, a prison from which he could never escape.

“Yes I was driving and suddenly you came over the radio on LBC during the Siege of Wimbledon as the papers are calling it” Simon said excitement on his face.

“Yes they took me and my company out Simon.”

“But how are they allowed to do that? It's illegal” Simon said indignantly, staring at me through the plate glass expecting me to give him an answer.

“They did it and Videx Ltd is no more without anyone appearing in a court of law” I said expressing my feelings. As I spoke I noticed that one of the screws stood listening to our conversation.

“You should cut your hair before you go to court and wear a suit and tie” offered Simon, staring at me earnestly through the thick glass.

I knew ridiculous as it may sound, dressing in this way  did often lead to defendants being treated more leniently by the judge as it was a sign of conformity and accepting the authority of the court.. I knew that I would never conform and would never cut my hair to appear “respectable.”

“No, I won’t cut my hair or wear a suit Simon, I will go as I am” I said.

“But you look like a rebel,” Simon observed.

“I’m a revolutionary artist, not a rebel without a cause” I said quickly, taking in the screw’s look of contempt in the background.

“Visit over for Freeman” said the other screw who had returned to listen as well.

“Special search for Parrit” one screw said a pleased look on his face as if he was going to enjoy doing it.

The two screws entered the cubicle and pushed Simon’s wheelchair out into the passage and began searching him again.

 I could not believe it but Simon was stripped searched again on the other side of the glass within my view and anger rose up in me.

 Simon’s eyes met mine and I knew that others had treated and abused him before.

 As the oafish and brutal screws tried to humiliate him by exposing his deformed body I looked at him with pity helpless to intervene. I knew that they were trying to make me angry and lose self control. I would like to have thrashed this evil pair within an inch of their lives and images of me smashing through the glass and beating the screws started to flicker in my mind.

After the closed visit was over and Simon had gone the two screws turned their attention to me and started to subject me to a strip search again in order, I knew, to humiliate me and make me lose my temper.

“Take off your shoes” one screw ordered glaring at me, his face near mine where I could smell his sickening after shave and deodorant and as he snarled I saw his animal like tobacco stained teeth.

During the search one screw knelt down and banged my shoes on the floor.

I looked at the standing screw who was running his fingers around the seams in my shirt and looking him straight in the eyes I mouthed the words “You are gay.”

The screw’s face turned an angry red colour “What did you say?” he snarled a remark that made the kneeling screw jump to his feet.

“Nothing Sir” I replied smiling, enjoying winding up these bastards.

The other screw knelt down again and I looked at the other one in the eyes and mouthed the words “You suck cocks” placing my thumb in my mouth and making a fellatio sign.

The screw exploded with anger. “He’s doing ít again Sir” he shouted.

The kneeling screw jumped up “What’s he doing Sir?”

“Making obscene gestures Sir.”

“Right laddie you are on a charge of dumb insolence. See the governor in the morning.”

The padded cell episode had given me a welcome respite but the closed visits and boredom of lying in a padded cell made me want to get back to the prison hospital again where I could read books.

Death’s DoorChapter  3

I tried to keep fit in the hospital by doing press-ups but one day I felt really ill. There were two hospital screws in the ward and I walked up to one and said, “I think that I have a temperature Sir.”

The screw looked at the other one and chuckled and then stuck a thermometer device on my forehead with a smack of his open palm. I wondered what he was doing at first because I had never seen one of these devices before.

The two screws stood grinning then I saw their looks of astonishment...

“Good God, it’s a hundred and four” the hospital screw uttered in amazement.

Then I felt all the strength drain from my body as I fainted and hit the floor with a thump.

I awoke in bed in the emergency ward and struggled out of bed because I had to piss. It was night I noticed as I made my way over to the recess. Inside all the windows were open and two guys were smoking hash. There was a cold wind blowing through the recess.

“Can you shut the windows mate?” I asked one of the prisoners.

“No mate, can't you see that we are having a puff?” one replied.

I felt ill and cold but I knew that my request was unreasonable to them even though I was ill. I had a piss clutching my cold sweat soaked pyjamas around me then shuffled back to my bed. The ward was dimly lit and I noticed a screw sitting in an observation box that had glass windows watching me. I climbed back into my bed that was cold and clammy from my sweat and the rubber mattress.

As I lay there I became aware of a radio playing in the screw’s observation box and another radio inside the ward and they seemed to be talking to each other. I realised that I was hallucinating before I slipped into unconsciousness.

As I awoke next morning I slowly became aware that I was lying in water. “Someone is trying to kill me” flashed through my mind and I thought that someone must have emptied a bucket of water over me. Then with a shock I realised that the water had come from my own body. Suddenly I felt the urge to vomit and I spewed up a stream of sick that went all over the floor.

I tried to sit up but the bed coverings seemed to be made of lead and I could not lift them off my body. I gestured weakly still laying there in a bed that was waterlogged with a rubber mattress underneath that prevented the water from escaping.  A prisoner orderly approached with a mop and bucket and began cleaning up the vomit.

“Sorry mate” I said weakly.

“Oh that’s all right son” he said.

I smiled weakly knowing that I was not far from death’s door before slipping into unconsciousness again.  

The next time that I regained consciousness I was in a warm dry bed. I realised that I was not going to die and happiness swept through me. The next minute as in a dream Sara entered the ward accompanied by Nick Berry and walked towards me.

“Was this happening or am I dreaming?” I thought.

“Hello Mike” Sara’s smiling face appeared with tears in her eyes...

Soft lips on my face, lips kissing me...

“We had a call that you had regained consciousness; we came as soon as we could” Sara whispered.

I was beginning to realise that I had indeed been on the verge of death but had made a dramatic recovery. I looked up at Nick...

“They gave you antibiotics Mike,” Nick informed me.

“What were they?” I asked resentful at the fact, in spite of my survival, that my body would take six years before my gut flora were working properly and other things. “I would have survived and healed myself outside but the shock coming back to prison had caused a relapse.”

“Oh Mike I was really worried,” Sara said, tears running down her face.

I saw that the two screws in the ward did not stop our body contact or even observe me and I realised that someone who has just returned from Death’s Door is instinctively given a certain amount of respect by other humans.    

Six months had passed in a flash and I was due to appear at the Old Bailey on charges under the Obscene Publications Act.

The Trial 

Chapter 4

I peered out through the small slit of glass from inside the Black Maria incarcerated in a small steel box, caged like an animal, sitting on a piece of curved steel that had been designed not to give any comfort to the passenger. It was early morning and as the van moved up Jebb Avenue and pulled out onto the road I passed the places that I had grown up in. It was raining and people were wrapped against the cold wind of an approaching English winter.

I knew that the Crown Prosecution thought that they would convict me on the homosexual films that they had taken from a raid on my house in Surrey over two years ago. They had not prosecuted before because they were not sure that they would secure a conviction. Now after the massive amount of adverse publicity that I had received in the media that implied that I was a child pornographer who had featured children in a film containing “sadomasochistic” scenes and other explicit sexual “perversions” no doubt the jury would have heard of Mike Freeman or they would be chatted to by helpful Porn Squad detectives before the trial.

“Mike you will have to agree that Videx Ltd goes into voluntary liquidation if you want a light sentence” Ted Malman stood with his back to the locked iron door of my Old Bailey cell.

“What’s a light sentence?” I asked.

“The police analysis of the bottle alleged to have contained acid proved that it was only as strong as water from a swimming pool so they have dropped that. Fifteen months and you have already done six. Five months off for good behaviour and you will be out in four months” Ted said stroking his thin black moustache grinning.

He reminded me of a used car salesman but wore a Republican tie, an odd incongruity I thought. “What if I don’t?” I asked as making movies was the best thing in my life, an activity that I enjoyed, one that satisfied my creative drive, my desire to oppose authoritarian censorship and my reason for being...

“You will get four years. If I were you I’d make a deal now. Plead guilty to all the charges and agree to liquidate Videx Ltd” Ted said as if he were offering me a great deal.

I knew as he spoke that he was stabbing me in the back and why he always reminded me of a spiv. He always dressed in pin striped suits with padded shoulders; he stunk of alcohol, wore silk handkerchiefs in his top pocket, slicked his long black hair back with grease.

“I thought that you were going to get me off of these charges...” I said slowly watching him change from a friend into an enemy.

“Mike, that's all changed now, didn’t you read the papers in there? It is impossible to get you off now...” Ted said, stroking his moustache.Reluctantly I knew that if I didn’t agree to destroy the thing that I loved, my creation Videx then I would spend much longer in prison and might get lost in the system and quietly recalled.

“Okay the, tell the judge that I agree to the liquidation” I said forcing the words from reluctant lips.As the jury filed in I realised that I was being fitted-up like the proverbial kipper. The jury was composed of geriatrics, four men and eight women. One of the women was standing, glaring at me banging her walking stick on the wooden floor, her white hair contrasting against the angry red of her face.

“It’s all bent” I said to Ted angrily realising that I had no chance of acquittal.

The mask slipped from Ted’s face as he looked at me like the reptile that he was and I saw the greed of Mammon in his eyes. “Yes Michael it’s all bent, and let me introduce you to your counsel who is an ex policeman. Why don’t you plead guilty and stop wasting everybody’s time?” Ted replied a smirk on his face.I looked at this traitor and knew that one day I would have the opportunity for revenge. “No I won’t just on principal and I will fight for the right of freedom of expression” I stubbornly replied.``Well if you want to be a martyr then I can’t help you” Malman replied, turning and ringing the cell bell. Immediately the metallic sound of a screw’s key in the lock told me that the screw had been right outside the door all the time while Ted Malman was in my cell. Indeed I had felt like killing him and could have done quite easily with my bare hands. The rage welled up and exploded in my head. I remembered him approaching me after I had given a speech at  the Williams Committee debate in the Mall.

“Michael John Freeman, how do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” the words rang out piercing my brain, here I was again charged with the same offence as usual...

“Not guilty," I replied.

I looked at the coat of arms above the judges head. “Dieu est Mon Droit” and “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” God is my right” and “Evil be to him who evil thinks.”

“God is on my right and not the Queen’s, there is nothing morally wrong with sexual pleasure for the Creator invented all those feelings to perpetuate the human race and to multiply the sexual ones” the words flashed into my head...

There was a place for all those that went forth and multiplied but no place for the unnatural ones who were destroying Mother Earth. We had to destroy them or they would destroy us.

I thought no evil unless pleasure was a sin because I was the creator of millions of erotic images that could never be destroyed, images that would eventually be seen to be acceptable to a civilised hedonistic society because they depicted beings who were happy and who were experiencing mutual pleasure. Looking at sexual imagery makes one more sexual as violent imagery made one feel more violent. There was one exception that if one were sexually repressed and indoctrinated to believe that homosexuality was a sin viewers would get extremely angry at the creator of these images that disgusted and revolted them; images that they thought would corrupt and deprave others to such an extent that they would become homosexuals...This was nonsense I believed as I remembered boys in their early teens who were homosexual at school and had remained so into their adult life.

I wanted to go to Heaven and at some future time I planned to disappear and retire to some little paradise of my own and have lots of children whom I would teach.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury it is required that before you go any further with this case that you look at the several films in this case that Michael John Freeman has published and for which he has been charged under the Obscene Publications Act the prosecution alleging that they would be liable to deprave and corrupt a person likely to come into contact with the alleged obscene article in this case the films that you will see as is required under your jury service”  the judge informed the court. The judge read out a letter from Sir Lawrence Gowing, the artist and eccentric professor of painting at the Slade, who said that I was a genius of a painter but that I could not say the same about his films!  I was sketching the judge at the time and I held his gaze resolutely. Then a QC asked me for a sketch. “Don't forget to sign it,” he said. I thought of Picasso signing serviettes!

The jury went out and I thought of the old ladies and men watching Dial a Guy and What a Gay Day and knew that my fate was sealed. Both scripts had been written by the gay actors themselves and as I discovered gays loved fellatio...

The jury filed into court after seeing the films looking shocked and some of the ladies were obviously showing symptoms of post traumatic shock syndrome and several regarded me with a mixture of horror and fear.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury thank you for carrying out your duty. That task is over. I think that this is a good time to retire for lunch so I adjourn this court until two o’clock this afternoon” the judge announced.  

I heard footsteps approaching a key rasping in the lock and the cell door opened. A screw stood by while a prisoner orderly carried a tray with some take away restaurant boxes on it and a half bottle of wine.

“Your restaurant order mate,” a smiling dressed in a white kitchen jacket and wearing the red band of a trusted prisoner said smiling pleasantly.

“Thanks mate” I replied.

Sara had sent in a meal as is an unconvicted prisoner’s right when one is refused bail in the Old Bailey.

I ate the prawn curry and rice with relish and it was the first decent food I had eaten in the last six months

As I ate and drank I wondered why Malman had gone bent on me. As usual when looking for the answer to why people do things it is always wise to examine the money motive first. “Yes that was it Sullivan was paying him to put me back inside, out of the way, taking Videx off the market and eliminating competition. First he had paid a “member of the public” to make a complaint against Sex Slave because it was my hardest film, a rape fantasy. Ironically it was the one I had given him as a sample when Sullivan first approached me with a business proposition. I regretted making Sex Slave but after reading research that said that it was women’s most common fantasy I decided to use it as subject matter for a fantasy film and very careful to show that it was a dream and no-one had indeed been raped.  I got the answer in one! The Slug had a lot to answer for and as I sat in that Old Bailey cell and I vowed to take revenge one day.

The whole trial was a farce and I was already pre convicted. I would go through the proceedings, one of the players in a theatre, among the 17th century bewigged judge and Queen’s Counsel in silence. Not being able to shout out and protest, to tell the jury how I came to be in that court and the plots and corruption that had led me here today. No, my counsel was the only one who spoke now except to ask me questions under cross examination if he so chose. “I should have defended myself” I thought but I had no choice but to go up there on the stage my lines already written with me acting in order to receive fifteen months for making films that contained explicit sexual imagery.

“Michael Freeman is a filmmaker who is trying to change the law in Britain today. He did not set out to break the law but refused to censor his films because he does not believe in censorship and believes everyone should be allowed to see whatever subject matter they want.  Would any of those films deprave and corrupt a person likely to come into contact with them?” my defence counsel’s voice droned through the court as the jury sat with faces that spoke of my guilt. I didn’t need a defence as I was all ready convicted.

It was not a defence but more of a rehearsal between counsels and made none of the points that I would have made about freedom of expression. The defence finished prosecuting counsel, rose to his feet and swept back his robe in a dramatic gesture, placed his hand on his hip. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury you have seen several films today that are representative of the videos published by Videx. I say that they are depraving and corrupting to whomever is likely to come into contact with them. Sex Slave shows a graphic rape scene in which a housewife is brutally raped. The scenes seem real and I say it is obscene in the legal meaning of the word.  You have seen other films that show the perverse and obscene practices of male homosexuals and having seen these obscenities I ask you to bring in a verdict of guilty on the defendant Michael Freeman, guilty of publishing images contrary to the Obscene Publications Act that would be likely to deprave and corrupt whomever would be likely to come into contact with them” prosecuting counsel read his lines and sat down a smug expression on his face.

“Have the ladies and gentlemen of the jury reached a decision of guilty or not guilty” the judge asked...

“Guilty on all charges” the foreman of the jury stared at me self righteously as he gave the verdict.

I stared back, fixing him in the eyes and he looked away.

“Michael John Freeman the jury have found you guilty of producing several videos that are liable to deprave and corrupt those likely to come into contact with them, I sentence you to fifteen months imprisonment on this charge. Before sentencing you I  examined your conviction for murder in 1969 and decided that it bore no relevance to a decision and recommendation I may have made to the Parole Board with respect to a possible recall. Have you anything to say before they take you down?” the judge asked.

Actually I was pleased with his remark about my murder conviction being of no relevance in these circumstances. “Well Sir, thank you for your last observation about my life sentence but I must say that I find the Obscene Publications Act an artificial device to impose state censorship” my defiant words rang with truth around the court designed by a man who believed that God would hear those accused who spoke the Truth in this hallowed chamber.

“Take him down” the Underhill holding gaze briefly before two screws took my arms and escorted me below.

Wormwood Scrubs

Chapter 5

I sat in the prison coach handcuffed to a fellow convicted prisoner.

"How long did you get, mate?” the redheaded prisoner asked.

“Fifteen months for making porn films,” I replied.

“I don’t agree with kiddies being used but everything else is all right except for those snuff films” the prisoner said with the same remarks, doubts and taboos as the general public.

“No I make films using professional actors” I answered staring out of the window to catch a glimpse of what might be my last sight of the world while I served ten months of a fifteen month sentence, one third being remitted for good behaviour. “I’ve already done six and that makes four to go. But then I am on another obscenity trial for publishing the Videx Video Show” I thought.  Rain rolled down the coach window and bright neon stained the glass with iridescent colour as the human cargo sped towards West London and the old Victorian prison of Wormwood Scrubs.

“Whoa did you see the bristols on that” shouted a con, and almost the whole coach laughed as if they had been told a good joke.

A slight smile came to my lips as I realised that these sexually frustrated males would have to rely on masturbation, the main source of their fantasies porno magazines that dared not show nudity many published by my arch enemy David Sullivan, alias The Slug

“Fucking hell, did you see those two Richards, their skirts were up their arses, cor would love to give them both one” another convicted shouted.

This remark with its implication of two willing girls caused the whole coach of convicts erupt with laughter. It was as if this was a fun vacation and everyone was enjoying themselves.

“If only the fucking judge could see us now” a wit commented wiping his face of the tears of laughter that rolled down his face with the back of a tattooed hand.

The merriment and ribald comment on any females that the prisoners caught sight of was continued as the coach neared White City and turned off the motorway but as it turned into Du Cane Road and as the grim walls of the prison were illuminated lights glinted on rolls of razor wire on top of the walls the raucous and convicted became strangely silent.

The coach turned into the prison entrance and made its way towards the massive gates. I glanced at the door of the Hostel where I had been forced to stay on my release after ten years that was, I counted in my head , nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy nine, ten, eighty, eighty one, eighty two that’s thirteen years ago, almost fourteen and I realised that I wasn’t even sure of what year this was. I remembered the philosophical observation that the past, the present and the future exist simultaneously in one’s mind.

“Twenty two bodies on Sir” the escort screw shouted as the coach entered and the driver drove along the prison road past huge cell blocks most occupied, their yellow lights shining through the rectangular barred windows to stop at blocks reserved for convicted prisoners serving sentences.

The escort screw unlocked the coach door and travelled down the gangway unlocking our handcuffs which we held up to facilitate our unshackling.

The screw unlocked the gates of the prison wing that was going to be our home for times ranging from months to many years.

The smell of prison assaulted my nostrils as we entered the locked down wing. The smell of cabbages, urine and sweat and I shuddered reminded of its awful reality.

In Reception we divested ourselves of our civilian clothes and were strip searched including squatting over a mirror and dressed in grey prison clothes, issued with two blankets, sheets, and a pillowslip containing our property, a bar of soap and toothpaste.

A screw led the way past rows of locked cells from whence came the sound of many radios and sometimes a cough, name cards displayed on each door, name and sentence towards a lighted office with glass windows that contained a screw.

“Twenty two bodies on Sir” the escort screw said in a loud voice.

“Right Sir.”

The escort screw hurried off finished for the night.

We lined up while the screw filled in a door card.

“Name, religion, sentence? The screw demanded.

“Freeman M J, fifteen months, no religion” I replied.        

“Fifteen months, what?” the screw asked.

“Fifteen months, Sir” I replied obediently.

Five thirteen” the screw answered, handing me a white door card. “Check your cell number, put your door card up and get water before you bang up.”

“Thank you Sir” I said politely, thinking of my time off for good behaviour, taking my card and. leaving the office. I walked towards the iron staircase and made my way up it, my shoes clattering up the iron steps, the noise it made as it swayed slightly as one climbed up five sets of stairs to the top bringing back memories of doing this many times before. I walked along the landing to number thirteen and going inside I took the plastic jug and made my way to the landing recess where I filled it from a tap mounted on the wall. Then ignoring other prisoners who hanging about and chatting I went along to my cell went inside and swung the big metal door that closed with a crash of metal on metal. Paradoxically I felt safe and sound in my concrete and steel box. I looked up out through the bars at the stars twinkling in the sky sometimes obscured by dark passing clouds and saw that it was a full moon.

Doing Bird

Chapter 6

I had been transferred from one prison to another except that I was a convicted prisoner now and wore a grey uniform. I quickly got into the routine of Wormwood Scrubs. I got the job as a landing cleaner and when I had finished I retired to my cell and drew erotic pictures, or pornography as everyone called it. I liked to defy the system and carry on making porn but the screws, the prison police, didn’t take any notice and even congratulated me on my artistic abilities sometimes when they did cell searches.

“Freeman” the visits screw was calling my name.

The visiting room was crowded with chattering people, wives, girlfriends, children and just friends. Then Sara and Jean walked in and smiling they walked towards me and both kissing me they sat down. I noticed that they both wore white ankle socks and looked very young, their hair tied with ribbons.

“Oh Michael are you all right” Sara said sitting down facing me across a plastic topped table an anxious expression on her face where she knitted her eyebrows..

“Yes Michael, are you bearing up?” Jean asked.

I looked at their concerned adoring faces and smiled and was acutely aware that their posh cut glass accents were rare in this room. I feel great” I replied, spreading my arms in an expansive gesture.

“Shall I get some tea and biscuits Mike?” Sara asked, looking over to where WVS women served at a little snack bar.

“Yes please Sara” I replied.

I watched Sara as she walked over to the WVRS snack bar. She was wearing a long yellow and orange Malaysian dress and wearing the red to purple jacket I liked that she had got from Monsoon in Covent Garden. “I will free in a few weeks and having sex fun with her; a threesome with her Jean going through my mind.” I thought that fucking her would be okay because Alan had fucked with the Queen of the Orgies at the Videx Christmas Party.

“You look well Mike but Sara told me that you nearly died?” Jean said, reaching across the table and grasping my hand.

“I would love to fuck you Jean” I said.

Jean laughed showing her white teeth and rouged lips. I noticed that she was carefully made up and that her long natural hair was piled up in a classical style and tied with a red ribbon and as I studied her face, the retrousse nose with  a few freckles II felt a tingle in my penis.

“I don’t suppose that Sara would mind? She asked with a grin.

“No we could have a threesome” I replied grinning and enjoying myself immensely.

Sara arrived with a tray of cups of tea and packets of biscuits. “I got you McVitie’s digestives” she said happily sitting down and adding her hands to join Jeans.

Here I was in Wormwood Scrubs visiting room being visited by two beautiful and sexually attractive women. “Sara tells me that you have another charge coming up after you are released this time? Jean asked.“Yes and my solicitor David Offenbach will go to the High Court to apply for bail if I am not released at the end of this sentence in a few weeks time” I replied.

“Yes Nick has told David that he will stand a surety of twenty five thousand pounds” Sara supplied.“Visit over Freeman” a screw said.Time had flown by and I stood up immediately embracing and kissing  First Sara on the lips then Jean. Then I grasped their hands and led them towards the prisoner’s exit that was just out of sight of the  supervising visit screws. I started to kiss Sara passionately and felt her hand grasp my rigid penis.“I miss you so much Mike” Sara whispered.

“ And I miss you” I said, feeling Jean start to press her body against mine too. Both girls explored my body and suddenly my penis was out...

Suddenly the door opened and the wings assistant governor appeared and took in the sight of three bodies entwined together in a passionate embrace. He just stood staring, gobsmacked but saying nothing. Seeing him standing there we all disengaged giggling.

“Come on Freeman I’ll take you back to the wing” the wing governor said.

“Goodbye Sara, goodbye Jean” I said smiling.

I stood there watching them walk towards the exit.The AG unlocked the door and I followed him through double iron gates into the grounds of the prison. I was acutely aware that it was unusual for a governor of any rank to escort a prisoner that was always done by screws.

“I have been following your career Freeman and I must say that you have got yourself into prison. You have to bend with the wind sometimes but I have recommended that you are paroled at the end of this sentence” the AG said.“Thank you Sir but I thought that one had to be convicted of a crime of violence to be recalled?” I said.

“Things are altering and one only needs to be charged with a crime of violence these days” the AG informed me a serious expression on his face.

“I didn’t know that making blue films was against the law Freeman” my landing officer, a friendly guy commented.

“Yes it’s very heavy censorship now and the BBFC, that’s the censor has an acronym GOIL that means “glimpse of inner labia” I said and this means a cut” I said laughing.

“Me and the lads, we have a few of your Videx films and they are good, the only ones on the market really...” the screw said.

“Videx is finished now guv, it was taken out by the Porn Squad, on orders from above like” I said, regressing to a mixture of Cockney because it was more acceptable to prisoners and screws alike...

“Well that’s a shame because everyone else, it just tits, tits tits” the screw said with a laugh his voice tinged with regret.

“Yes it is all tits now but the legal boys and the Soho porn shops are doing a roaring trade in the hardcore American stuff” I said knowing that the head of the Porn Squad known as the “bagman” still went round every week to collect the cash that went upstairs.

“Yes but you like to see English girls in the films, it's different, know what I mean?”

“Yes I know what you mean guv” I replied knowing that it was a question of identification with the actor’s accents. “It’s all corrupt guv, you can get pirated American stuff but not English made films” I said. I couldn’t explain to the screw that Scotland Yard detectives were all bent because the media had done a pretty good job of convincing the public since the “Downfall of Scotland Yard” in the Seventies when porn squad officer’s were sent to prison for corruption, that it had all  been cleaned up years ago. I remembered the two Porn Squad detectives asking me to pay them at the raid on my house in 1983 concerning the films that I had just served fifteen months for and my naive reply, “No it will be legalised soon anyway” and their reply as they drove off. “It will never be legalised you mug because there is too much money in it cunt.” I knew that if I had started to pay them when they had asked for and took the two gay films off the market then I would not have been charged and wouldn’t be standing on this prison landing today...

I decided to spend my time preparing for my next appearance in court and with this in mind Sara had sent me in some interesting books on the history of previous porn trials. Acquittals had been achieved by calling a succession of expert witnesses to say that they had seen the film and why they did not find it obscene. I wrote off a long letter to Derek Malcolm, the film critic of the Guardian to whom I used to send copies of all the films I produced. I would call Tuppy Owens, Eric, an ex Lloyd’s stockbroker who I had met at meetings of NCROPA,  who had two daughters who had let me watch my films, an art teacher friend of Tuppy’s who did erotic drawings of orgies  and a psychiatrist . Then another idea occurred to me.”I will call ex Chief Inspectors Alton and Bill Moody and question them about police corruption...  

Freedom Delayed

Chapter 7

The day finally arrived for my discharge and I had served ten months with five remitted for good behaviour.

We were all read the Firearms Act, given back our personal property and cash and officially discharged.”Am I really going out?” I thought as I had not heard if I had received bail or not.

There were three discharges that day and we were all taken to reception to be discharged. I dressed in my civilian clothes which felt smooth and well fitting after the blanket-like material of the prison uniform and then we were offered breakfast of porridge and goulash. I thought of the old saying of prisoners. ”If you don’t eat your porridge you will come back to eat it” and ate mine thinking that I still retained a superstitious part of my mind that made me afraid of folklore...

The screw called the two other discharges in the cell then handed me a rolled up copy of The Guardian that I ordered from the prison library. I noticed that my name Freeman had been crossed out. A pang of apprehension ripped through my gut. I tried to read the paper but I could not concentrate and I thought of Sara waiting outside the gate.

“Freeman you are being transferred to the remand wing because you are awaiting another charge” the screw informed me a knowing smirk on his face.

I tried to show no emotion as I got up and followed the screw back to reception where they issued me with the brown clothes of an unconvicted prisoner remanded in custody. This was the psych shock of the false discharge and I thought of Arthur Koestler’s experience in fascist Spain where he was given the false execution shock.

Soon I found myself in another cell in the remand wing of my prison, dinner on the table. I sat down and started to eat. “Be glad that you are alive and well” the words went through my mind. I knew that the false discharge was a deliberate psychological torture because they had known months before.

The next day I received a letter from David Offenbach telling me that my application for bail was up for hearing at the High Court this week, Nick was standing twenty five thousand pounds bail as a surety and that he was making an application for bail as my offence was a non violent one. As I read the letter, hope welled in my heart...

‘I was escorted to reception once again and dressed in my civilian clothes and this time I knew that I was really going out on bail. A screw read out the conditions of my bail and one was that I did not own any filming equipment. I signed the document and was led towards the gates by a screw.

“Hope that I don’t see you back again Freeman” he said kindly.

“I’ll try not to come back,” I replied, omitting the Sir.

Inside the gate house the screw unlocked a small door in the main gate to the outside world. I stepped through and immediately was embraced by Sara and Sarah Walker who led me towards their car.

“Oh Mike I’ve really missed you and I am so glad that you are free again” Sara said smiling happily.

I grasped both their buttocks and turning back towards the prison cameras. I was going to fuck both of these beautiful girls, I knew it and the watching screws knew it!

Sara and Sarah knew it too and both giggled. We all got into Sarah’s car and drove off down Du Cane Road.

The gods were smiling on me again, punishment, reward, punishment reward. I could take the punishment as long as I got the reward...

Reward

Chapter 8

I lay in my bed in Earls Court with Sara and Sarah between silken sheets on a comfortable bed with two beautiful girls caressing my body. Sara kissing my lips while Sarah sucked my penis. We made passionate love for hours and the last thing that I remember before drifting off into a blissful sleep was Sarah sitting on my penis while Sara licked my testicles and the shaft as it went in and out.

The QC appointed to me stared at me an amused expression on his face as I instructed him which witnesses to call at my forthcoming trial at the Old Bailey, the charge being publishing an obscene and indecent article named the Videx Video Show. “Yes

“Derek Malcolm eh!  Yes you have some impressive witnesses here” the QC said grinning. He paused dramatically. “Unfortunately I can’t call them,” he said.

I looked at him in amazement. “Not another bent bastard” I thought. “But I have studied the history of porn trial acquittals and this is how they were acquitted by calling expert witnesses in their defence and these are the witnesses that I am instructing you to call” I said vehemently.

“Not with me as your counsel you won’t” he said a smug expression on his face.

There had been no change in the law I knew for certain. “But there has been no change in the law saying one should call expert witnesses” I said indignantly.

“There is an unwritten agreement in the legal profession and if you want to call those witnesses then you will have to represent yourself” I he said smiling smugly as if that was a challenge that I would back down on.

I sat there trying to summon up the courage to stand up in court and defend myself in front of a jury and my guts churned and the butterflies were back again in my stomach. Then I remembered the last court appearance and my feeling of helplessness because I could not tell the jury the truth when represented by a QC.

I made up my mind. “Okay you are dismissed. I will defend myself” I said the dramatic words ringing in my ears as if spoken by another person. I saw the surprise on the QCs face. There was no going back now.

About two weeks later I got a letter from David Offenbach that instructed me tha I had to attend a special meeting and extraordinary meeting before Sir James Miskin at the Central Criminal Court otherwise known as the Old Bailey.

Defending Myself

Chapter  9        

I opened my mail to find among other things that Offenbach had sent me including a document entitled THE QUEEN AGAINST MICHAEL FREEMAN JOHN EDWARD CURREY SARA BHASKARAN SIMON LINDSAY JAMES HONEY. I Leafed through the document and found “NFE Exhibit No.” I laughed as it was illustrated with a close-up picture of me during what the media had dubbed The Siege of Wimbledon looking out of the Videx offices window dressed in a black sweatshirt with Videx Videos emblazoned across the front wagging my finger.

“Hey Sara, look at what Offenbach has just sent me. Simon, Lindsay obviously does not like his Christian name” I said.

Sara giggled and looked at the picture of me. “You look great Mike, you are laughing and unafraid” she said.

“I’m still laughing now,” I replied, taking a puff on my pipe and turning the page to discover a newspaper photo of Ted Malman and Superintendent Kruger of the Porn Squad engaged in conversation surrounded by thousands of leaflets that I had thrown out of the window. In another photo I stared down out the two men while a woman reporter looked on. Then I came across a statement made by “Simon Lindsay James Honey” taken by Superintendent Peter Kruger taken at Wimbledon Police statement. I quickly read through it to see if he had admitted anything. “Good old Lindsay, " he has replied “I don’t wish to make any comment” to most questions but admitted being in the Videx Video Show. Kruger asks him if he knew that an ad showing pictures of naked children was inserted in several magazines he says “no comment.” That’s what this case is all about daring to show pictures of naked children” I said.

“But what’s wrong with that, it’s just a beauty contest” Sara asked.

“These are people who believe that the public have to be conditioned to believe that there is something inherently indecent about the naked body; it’s all about controlling people.” I tried to explain. “Look here when charged under the Obscene Publications Act and the Protection of Children he says” I would like to say that I can see nothing at all offensive about the sequence included in The Videx Video Show filmed at the Eureka Sun Club. It is merely a documentary type sequence showing families indulging in a perfectly innocent past time i.e. walking around with no clothes on.”

“Good boy Lindsay and they have taken the bait thinking that they are going to prove that the most innocent part of the Videx Video Show is indecent and obscene” I said. If we get a jury of our peers I think that we stand a good chance” I said.

  I was due to appear at the Old Bailey today and after breakfast I sat down and had a good smoke of cannabis.

“I have always wanted to defend myself” I said to Sara as we prepared to leave.

“I think that you will be marvellous,” Sara replied.

“Yes I am going to act like a real QC” I said combing my long hair back. “Sara, can you tie a nice bow at the back from a piece of black velvet.”

“It suits you Mike and goes with your beard and moustache” Sara said with a look of admiration.

“Pity that I don’t have a cape. We should have hired out a costume” I said giggling and admiring my reflection in the mirror.

Sara and I sat in the specially adjourned court in the Old Bailey awaiting the arrival of Sir James Miskin. Suddenly a curtain opened as if on a stage and two trumpeters appeared dressed in medieval costumes and began blowing a fanfare.

“This is nice,” Sara said, smiling at me naively.

“Yes it is, isn’t it” I replied smiling as Sir James appeared bewigged dressed in ermine robes and sat down upon his throne.

I knew that the Lords and Ladies of the legal profession were representatives of the upper classes who believed they were royalty. Here I was a working class boy sitting before “His Lordship” having been summoned to appear in this extraordinary session at the Old Bailey in an historical context. I guessed that it was something to do with dismissing Counsel and deciding to represent myself.

“Michael, may I call you Michael?” Sir James said, smiling at me over his bifocals.

“Yes you may My Lord” I answered standing and putting my hand upon my hip imitating Jeremy Offenbach deciding to act as a QC and imitate their affected anachronistic speech and gestures as much as possible.

Sir James looked at me a surprised expression on his face. “Michael I have had you summoned here today because of this foolish decision, I think that you have made to dismiss your learned Queen’s Counsel and defend yourself. You may think that you know more about your case than anyone else but your appointed Queen’s Counsel can defend you better. I can give you the chance to change your mind and re-appoint counsel in your defence. What do you say?”

“I am very grateful to your Lordship for offering me this chance but I have to decline the offer for personal reasons” I replied.

Later I wrote letters to all the media I could think of including Time Out which had published articles that I had written on liquid cosh.

 The Videx Video Show Trial

Chapter 10

The day of the Old Bailey trial grew nearer and one day in June 1983 Sara and I made our way to the Old Bailey. I carried an attaché case and as I entered the court it was put through an X-ray machine. As I glanced at the monitor it showed the outlines of all the objects inside and I could see the outline of my hash pipe.

“Thank you Mr Freeman” the uniformed X-ray machine operator said, handing me back my case.

We entered a huge hall with marble columns and people walked across while others stood in groups and spoke in low voices about the cases that they were involved in. I found the court and a list of defendants was posted outside it headed THE QUEEN AGAINST MICHAEL FREEMAN JOHN EDWARD CURREY SARA BHASKARAN SIMON LINDSAY JAMES HONEY.

I looked around for Lindsay but couldn’t see him. “I want to go and have a puff” I informed Sara.

“All right then I’ll wait here” she said smiling.

The men's toilet was an imposing place with WC cubicles that had large wooden doors made out of a dark wood that showed the grain, probably oak, that reached  the floor so that one could not look underneath. I sat down on the closed lid of the WC facing the cistern and crumbled up some powerful black Afghani into the bowl. I applied the lighter to the hash that I had got from Nigel, watching it glow red until it died a grey cinder. I held in the pungent smoke in my lungs, pressing my chin down upon my throat so as to lock in the smoke, holding it in for as long as possible before exhaling it in two long plumes of blue smoke from my nostrils. The THC hit the receptors in my central nervous system and my brain began to buzz. I had another few pipes and watched the smoke float upwards until it was sucked out by the ventilator. As I waited for the evidence of smoking cannabis to disappear and the smell to disappear I noticed that unlike all other public toilets that I had visited there was a complete absence of graffiti and I realised that mainly the legal profession entered this side of the Old Bailey and that defendants in criminal trials usually came up from the cells. There was no “ACAB,” “Alfie 14 years” or drawings of penises or vaginas! These hallowed toilets were a prime example of the structure of the British Class system and the legal profession were at the top of the hierarchy.

As I walked back into the huge antechamber I felt the butterflies in my stomach but smiled confidently at Sara as I approached her. She thought that I was going to win this case and secure the acquittals of us all. A man appeared outside the courtroom and opened the doors.

“Come on let’s go in” I said and I took Sara’s hand and led her into the courtroom. “It’s empty” I said, staring around this huge wood panelled room. I found the place where the lead QC usually stands and opened my attaché case.

“It’s huge and beautiful, all the decorations, the throne, the coats of arms” Sara observed sitting down beside me.

I had been in too many courtrooms in my life including this one and I had been found guilty in every case. I looked around the court and saw how it was set out, the dock where the guilty stood guarded by screws and uniformed officials, the raised dais of the judge’s throne, the public gallery up above looking down to see justice at work. No CCTV cameras here I noticed. “We will televise all court proceedings after the revolution” I said to Sara.

Just at that moment I glimpsed a movement up in the public gallery and Tuppy Owens, Vieta, Sarah and Nigel entered smiling down on me. I smiled back “This is my show” I thought. This was a test case for video under the Obscene Publications Act and Thatcher’s Protection of Children Act. I was the first to be charged under the latter. It also  was a test case insofar as it was the Queen against the freedom of the people to enjoy uncensored erotic videos featuring nudity and explicit sex in their own homes. A not guilty in this case would, or should set the censorship criteria in Britain for the foreseeable future, “an historic moment in the history of censorship” I told myself.

The courtroom was starting to fill up now and Sara and I were led into the dock. Next to arrive was Lindsay Honey dressed in a smart suit and tie but still retaining his long bleached hair and a defiant diamond glittering in his ear, who was placed by the court officials next to Sara.

“Hello Lindsay, don’t worry we are all going to get off” I said grinning broadly.

“Please God Mike” he replied, hugging Sara and kissing her on the cheek.

John Currey was last to arrive defeated, scowling, a dark glum expression on his face, his jowls pulled downwards dressed in suit and tie as usual, his dark, wavy, greying hair freshly barbered and combed as if he were going to a funeral. He looked at me as he was placed at the end away from me and gave an indignant accusing look as if to say “I’m here because of you.”

The bewigged judge sat upon his throne and banged his gavel.

“Silence in court” an official shouted.

I was led back to the place where the defence QC usually stood and I started to arrange the books and magazines that I had brought with me. Time Out magazine had published a big article on the censorship of pornography and knew that it was supportive of me, there were also articles in other newspapers but I realised that there was a ban on reporting  the case    itself because the other connecting case for perverting the course of public justice still was untried. I realised that I had agreed to this trick and that I would get no publicity during this trial, a big mistake in retrospect and I wondered about free will and fate because I knew when I agreed to the separation of the trials that it was a trick.

I looked over and saw my legal team entering the court and beckoned to their solicitor’s clerk who came over. “I made a mistake in agreeing for the cases to be separated and I want to join them together again” I explained.

“All right Michael I will convey your message to David he said. “By the way the jury will be selected in a moment and you can object to anyone that you feel would be against you and question them but don’t object to anyone unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“All right, I understand,” I said, smiling and feeling confident.

As the jury were sworn in I observed that they looked like my peers including four young women whom I smiled at as they took their seats and one black man who looked me straight in the eyes. These were the people who would look at the Videx Video Show and decide whether or not they thought that it was good or evil, that’s what it really was, I thought. Whether or not that they thought that the sexual scenes depicted in the Videx Video Show were acceptable. I was confident that many of these people would have seen scenes of real fucking in magazines and sex on video before. I had read lately that many women were watching it now.

Soon all the formalities were over and it was almost time to start then the judge broke the silence.

“Ladies and gentlemen it is part of your duties in this case to watch the Videx Video Show and decide whether it would be liable to deprave and corrupt a person likely to come into contact with it or whether it contains any indecent images of children.” the judge said, looking at the jury.

Then he switched his gaze to me and his eyes locked into mine.

“Michael Freeman the court will now see the Video Show and a police officer will operate it. Now after the film begins no one will be allowed to speak in this court including you. Do you understand?”

“Yes my Lord, I understand perfectly” I replied.

The lights were dimmed in and the three video screens in the court, one facing me the other the jury while the judge had one in front of him flickered into life and an image of sex flashed into the screen...

“Stop” I shouted, my voice echoing around the courtroom.

“Turn on the lights and stop the video” the judge ordered an angry tone to his voice. The lights went on and he glared at me. “Mr Freeman you were told that as soon as the Videx Video Show went on everybody in this court would have to remain silent including you. Why have you disrupted the court?”

“My Lord the titles and music are an important part of any director’s film and mine is no exception. I would like the Videx Video Show to be played from the beginning and not miss out the titles as in the present situation” I said my voice ringing righteously around the court while I looked at the jury nodding my head at the red-faced OPS detective who had deliberately started the film after playing it to the point where the titles ended.

I noticed one male member of the jury looking at me and communicating by his facial expressions that he understood what trick that the detective of the Obscene Publications Squad had tried to pull.

“Play the Videx Video Show from the beginning” the judge ordered in a tone that said that he was not in on the dishonesty of the Porn Squad detective but the incident had rebounded to my benefit.

This time as the film began the court was filled with professional film music, titles rolled up on the screen, music De Wolfe, Roller Skating Baby, Wet Fun, Nude Family Fun, Spanking Sex, Romantic Landscape, Comedy, Current Sex Morals, Erotic Dancing, Comedy Sketch First Day at the Office, the last title was coming up now Written, Produced & Directed by Mike Freeman and his time there was absolute silence in court as roller Skating Baby starring Freda Hague appeared on the screen.

Freda was a professional skater and I remembered moving the lighting rig and disc jockey out of the studio into the street and the surrealistic scene as Freda pirouetted on a big metal drain cover in the middle of the road. I had persuaded her to take off one of the two pairs of knickers that she had been wearing under her short skating skirt and as her skirt flew up most male eyes would find the flash of her tight white knickers erotica I did. The End rolled up on the screen as Freda finished her routine and Wet Fun appeared; a bath orgy scene featuring the stars of Couples.

 I wondered how the jury would react to explicit sexual imagery but as I watched the happy smiling faces of the actors fucking and sucking, the beautiful colours of the Manhattan suite in Mayfair accompanied by soft music I relaxed. The End appeared again and Nude Family Fun appeared in the sequence I knew that had made those above think that they could take me out and send me back to prison for a long time under the guise of protecting children. This would be an excuse to quietly recall me on my life licence saying that I was a danger to the public and by the time that I got out, if ever, I would be a broken penniless old man.

As the scenes of the Eureka Sun camp appeared on the screen and it was filled with naked bodies set against the green countryside of Kent I knew that it was my figures in a landscape, a vision of humans naked and unashamed of all ages. To me it was idyllic and beautiful and I knew that what those above found indecent were the images of pubertal teenage girls whose emerging sexuality Nature had made so erotic to the male of the species. It was because they themselves found the images sexually exciting.

The optimum age in girls to become pregnant was about fourteen in order to create the perfect human baby with the most chances of survival. Controlling the sexual libido of young girls was a way of controlling the fruitful from multiplying and controlling males that would procreate with them. “Control is control per se”  the mantra flashed through my head as I remembered Sara and I setting our shooting equipment in a concealed spot among the trees and waiting for the BBC Game for a Laugh team to arrive on that sunny day in Fawkham Green, Kent.

The space in front of the catwalk was filling up not with naked people but with hundreds of males all of whom wore cameras around their bodies with telephoto lenses sticking out in front like erect penises. It was Fun Day, a once a year event  open to the public, a day where the owner Sid earned enough in a few hours to keep the five acre naturist camp going all year round and had contributed largely to the cost of a swimming pool.

No-one was in the pool on Fun Day; they were all crowded round the catwalk or as contestants preparing to walk out onto the stage and be judged on the perfection of their bodies, male adult and child, female adult and child.

“There they come,” Sara said.

 I turned the camera to capture the arrival of the Game for A Laugh Team who I wondered would be game for the laugh that I intended to play on them.

Sarah Kennedy leading the crew armed with a clipboard. I panned slowly as the BBC team set up in front of the stage. The visitors were only allowed to take pictures of the stage and their cameras and flashguns were silent and my headphones picked up the low buzz of the crowd. I turned the directional microphone and pointed it at Sarah Kennedy, known as The Matron in the BBC and I recorded her voice giving orders to the cameramen.

Then Sid, who was acting as compere today, walked naked onto the stage except for his socks and shoes that immediately created the image of pictures that I used to sell in the Sixties. Socks were as de rigeur as stockings and suspenders in those days and were seen as a fetish article.

I sat watching the beauty contest sequence that I had published as bait for the authorities and grinned there in the subdued light of the Old Bailey court thinking how artistic my imagery was...

 I noticed that hardly a camera clicked or a flash gun went off as the Mr Eureka contestants walked onto the stage except for those of naturist friends and families.  The undercover police officer with whom I was friends had the best body there and I knew that he would win. Then the adult women paraded and there was a fair amount of interest with flashes going off then came the teenage girls and a thousand cameras flashed and video cameras whirred.

I noticed that the BBC crew were right underneath the stage and pointing their cameras directly upwards to obtain a worm’s eye view of the girls and I knew that they were taking close-ups of their genitalia whereas I was in long shot. I had known a BBC cameraman Chris Powney when at Maidstone prison and he had told me how they would copy “blue films” on their equipment and “run off a few copies for their friends and I wondered what would become of this footage...  

“Okay let’s come out so they can see us” I said, taking the camera off the legs as we broke cover. Sara and I were naked and I had a battery belt around my waist. As I walked down the grassy hill towards the BBC team I stopped and got a shot of one of the crew telling Sarah Kennedy that they were being filmed.

Sarah Kennedy shouted out to the rest of the crew that they were being filmed and the two cameramen moved away from their positions under the stage and took up different shooting positions. They filmed for a short time capturing the end of the show when the winners were crowned. “Cut” she shouted and they started to pack up their equipment.

“Take the camera and film me talking to The Matron” I said.

“Okay Mike,” Sara replied, taking the camera.

As Sarah Kennedy walked up the hill to the car park in the woods I tried to intercept her. “I want to talk to you,” I said.

“Get away from me you maniac” she screamed, her eyes fixed on my big penis that swayed fascinatingly to the rhythm of my body as I ran towards her.

As she ran into the car park I was laughing out loud watched by the amused members of the Eureka Sun Club and crowds of departing male photographers who had come from far and wide, even from abroad to capture forbidden images of teenage girls. Then I approached the camera crew who were still packing up their equipment. I noticed the sweat marks under their armpits on this baking hot summer’s day. “Come on, take off your clothes and liberate yourselves' ' I cried.

The crew all looked at me a mixture of emotions on their faces realising that in this bizarre situation of being the only ones with clothes on while being surrounded by hundreds of naked people that they were the odd ones out.

The End appeared again. I saw no evil and the words that were above the judge’s head went through my head “Honi soit qui mal y pense” as the title Spanking Sex-Evelyn Simmonds is a girl who really enjoys spanking and coming  and gets it hard from Lindsay Honey and Jane Griffiths before indulging in an uninhibited threesome. I watched the film and I flashed back to the day that I made it. Evelyn and Jane were nurses and porn models who had done lots of spanking related photo shoots before they met me and were also into the scene in real life. The sound of spanking and caning filled the Old Bailey courtroom and then were replaced by the sighs and sounds of an uninhibited threesome before The End appeared again and Romantic Landscape appeared. Two young lovers strolled across the Surrey Downs and then made love among the swaying long grass, the whole episode was beautiful. The End appeared and Current Sex Morals introduced a short documentary. Teenage girls are interviewed about virginity and I thought about the Christian religion that valued chastity as a virtue that made one “holy and pure,” the paedophile priests, chaste nuns punished by Nature with cervical cancer and the thousands of young people persecuted and criminalised by the British legal system for obeying the natural biological programming and indulging in forbidden pleasures, the shame and guilt of masturbatory teens as they confessed to a priest and were made to say penance, then there was Erotic Dancing. Carla is an exotic dancer with really nice big tits. She enjoys erotic dancing and turning you on. As beat music filled those hallowed chambers and Carla danced across the three screens I wondered how people saw evil in sex then the End appeared again and Comedy Sketch First day at the Office-It’s Nicky’s first day in the office at his first ever job. Introducing Jessica Bond, a beautiful teenage blonde as the boy loving Della. Videx Viewers are destined to see a lot more of this leggy blonde. As the film played I remember shooting Frankie out of the office window as she walked down Wimbledon High Street. Male heads turning as they watched her dressed in tight white shorts as I filmed her secretly. Then the The End again and the last short film appeared on my screen Comedy-When it is time for a laugh with the comical adventures of PC Knockers the bent copper without any knackers played by Michelle a genuine transsexual former TV star of The Sweeny and Z Cars now a video star. In this comedy sketch we have Michelle as PC Knockers. Peter Orlando as Inspector Knacker of the Yard . Poarn as Miss Hotlips, Knackers nubile Thai secretary, and five of her lovely girls Kerry Turner, Karen James, Jill Cooper and Soona.

As the comedy sequence played and a crowd of kids followed PC Knockers along the road I could not resist a chuckle...

I watched the two hour show happily because I had made an artistic film where everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.

“Ladies gentlemen of the jury, you have seen the film the Videx Video Show and I feel that this is a good time to adjourn the court until two ’clock and have lunch. You may talk about the film yourselves but not to other people.

“Michael Freeman you will undertake to remain within the building during lunch?”

“Yes my Lord” I agreed, taking Sara’s hand and leading her towards the door as everyone started to file out of the court.

The restaurant was full of people and spotting Lindsay sitting with a solicitor I gave a wave and Sara did too. Lindsay made a motion that meant that “I’m with my solicitor.

I saw my solicitor’s clerk approaching.

“Hello Michael, do you see that man Lindsay is talking to. That’s David Sullivan’s solicitor and his QC might run a defence of duress against you” the solicitor’s clerk said and then was gone.

I looked over at Lindsay and realised that his QC could weaken my defence if he turned against me. Of course Lindsay could say that he had no control over what his QC said.  Sullivan was obviously paying for Lindsay’s defence and would try to get me convicted and I wondered why Lindsay had agreed to have him.

Afternoon

I went into the lavatory again and entered the dark wood panelled room and took out my pipe and smoked until I was high. The Afghani was a really clear high and I walked towards Sara who stood waiting outside the court, a spring in my step knowing that despite Sullivan’s negative influence I could still win.  Sara and I walked into the court hand in hand and sat down.

“Michael Freeman you have chosen to defend yourself, a mistake I feel, but in deference to you and because you have no previous experience, I make a suggestion. You as the Prosecutrix would lead but I suggest that we reverse the usual order and that you listen to the learned QCs for your fellow defendants before making your own speech. You forgo the first bite of the cherry so to speak. What do you say?”

“I thank his Lordship for his kind advice but I will stick to custom and take first bite of the cherry my Lord” I replied, assuming an arrogant look, my chin up, my hand on my hip. I could see by his look of surprise that the judge was taken aback by my confident answer and show of authority.

“All right then you will lead the defence, so you may like to start” the judge said.

I looked up at the big clock on the wall that was on the hour and felt butterflies in my stomach, the court was absolutely silent, no one was allowed to speak but me and as the clock ticked I could feel the tension rise. The actor in me wanted to build that tension further and hold it to breaking point before shattering the silence with a word. I was directing the biggest scene in my life. I played with the legal and reference books and typed notes that I had brought along and the tension became tangible. I looked at the big clock. It was almost five minutes had passed now and I still had not spoken. Suddenly I decided to speak and directed my gaze at the jury, my gaze travelling along their eyes, meeting them and smiling, several faces were sympathetic.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury” I said, fixing my gaze on a thirtyish male in the front row who I knew was the foreman of the jury.  “I am here today because I dared to make the Videx Video Show. Normally the way people see it is that they answer ads like this I said holding up the Knave men’s magazine.

The judge banged his gavel. “Mr Freeman you have not introduced this magazine as a listed exhibit and you may not show it to the jury unless you introduce it officially” the judge said pompously.

I held up the magazine. “I only showed it from a distance in order to illustrate to the members of the jury the way in which a person would most likely come into contact with the Videx Video Show my Lord” I said.

“All right carry on now but don’t do it again” the judge said.

I turned immediately back to the jury and engaged the eyes of the foreman. “Members of the jury this is the way a person is most likely to come into contact with the Videx Video Show, fill in the coupon on the bottom and enclose a cheque payable to Videx Ltd. You ladies and gentlemen are seeing it as part of your jury service. You have to decide that if a person in a free country sends off for a film like this is liable to be depraved and corrupted. What do deprave and corrupt mean? I said holding up a copy of the Oxford English dictionary. “I have looked up ‘deprave and corrupt’ in the Oxford English dictionary and they both mean the same thing “to make bad.”  I stood my hands on hips looking at the jury letting the words sink in hearing my voice as it was amplified. I realised that whoever had designed this court had made it into an auditorium where one’s voice rang true and clear. I thought of the fact that the ring of Truth has a certain decibel rating and can be measured on instruments. “Have you been made bad, are you depraved and corrupt? No of course not, have you seen any evil, any suffering or any pain? Why am I in this court today when Video Nasties, that are nothing more than pseudo snuff films featuring the murder mutilation of young women and girls, are freely on sale? I do have rules about what I make” I said, picking up a book entitled the Report on Film Censorship and Obscenity and holding it up despite the judge’s warning. I heard him cough but no speech about introducing the book as a listed exhibit. He had realised that he could not control me.

“This government commissioned report, the Report on Film Censorship and Obscenity was chaired by professor Bernard Williams became known as the William’s Report and it was my guideline. The report took evidence from all the experts on the effects of pornography on society and concluded that with the exception of child pornography and bestiality adults should be allowed to watch uncensored explicit sexual imagery.  All across Europe the free democracies have allowed their public to watch porno. Porno is a fun word in almost every other country in Europe. I don’t believe in censorship but I didn’t set out deliberately to break the law but to change it.

I sensed a ripple through the court and glanced at the clock and it was almost time to go home. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury I thank you for your patience in listening to my defence today but I see that it is time for us all to go home.”

The judge shot me an annoyed glance as he officially ended the first day of the Videx Video Show trial.

Day Two of the Trial

Chapter 11        

“I think that the young guy in the middle of the front row is the foreman of the jury,” I said.

“I think that he likes you,” Sara observed.

“I think that we now stand a very good chance of getting off. I read somewhere the more people watch porn the more acceptable the behaviour depicted becomes and I will be able to send them out to watch certain bits in the jury room again and again” I said with a chuckle.

Day two in Court

I walked into the court and as usual Sara and I were the first ones to arrive and people started to file in. The Obscene Publications Squad, the Dirty Dozen glancing over at me as I looked at my notes and various books acting the part of the confident counsel who is going to win his case. Inside my stomach was churning, the butterflies were there again. I glanced back at the Porn Squad and met their hostile gaze and a small smile appeared at the corner of my lips. “Yes you bent bastards' ' I silently mouth the words at my enemies. I recognised some of them, the ones that had raided my house in Surrey one late afternoon. Trampling around my house and searching everywhere, taking eight grams of pure Afghani that I had just scored from Nigel. Sara made them a pot of tea into which she added some very pure LSD and serving it to them. Two detectives talking to me at my  parent’s house, my father greeting them as mates when he opened the door, the two OPS officers taking me into my old little bedroom where I grew up from the days of the London Blitz and asking me to start paying them again like I did in the Sixties. They must have heard that I was a good payer. I remember their anger when I refused to pay them for a license. The threat of keeping my expensive shooting equipment, their angry retort when I told them it would be legalised soon anyway. The angry red faced Porn Squad detective giving me a contemptuous look. “It will never be legalised. Do you know why? There’s too much money in it you cunt” then the driver gunning the engine and racing away up Kingswood Road at high speed, his souped-up Q car making a growl of anger as its red tail lights disappeared up the hill .

As I stood there outside 4 Kingswood watching the tail lights disappear up the hill doubt crossed my mind. Here I was acting out the role of the man who legalised porn for adults in 1983. I would start a new Golden Age of the erotic cinema, all the great artists would stop pre-censoring their work and erotic masterpieces would be created.  I would erect an erotic statue; I had already done a small model. It would be cast in a shiny smooth metal so that people could touch it and interact with the surface in which they would see an infinite number of erotic scenes...

“This court is now in session” a voice rang out breaking my reverie.

“Michael Freeman, the court is now in session and you may continue outlining your defence.

The judge’s voice echoed through my head, I took a deep breath and looked at the jury, my gaze travelling along their faces and smiling and coming to rest on the foreman of the jury.

“Good morning Ladies and gentlemen. “What was I going to say, where did I leave off yesterday” I thought. I was really high today and I would just speak from the heart. “Ladies and gentlemen imagine you are walking down the street and there is a cinema showing two surprise free films.  It’s a promotion you believe. You go in after all everyone loves a freebie” I said smiling. I saw several of the jury smiling back. “You go in and sit down and read a big notice that says if you don’t like this film you can go through the green door and watch the other free film. So the cinema is full and the lights are dimmed. Your eyes look at the screen and the scenario is some teenagers going to a log cabin in the woods; they are on vacation. The next scene is of a girl alone in her room, she is admiring herself in the mirror and she looks like the girl next door. She puts on make-up, pouts in the mirror and then she lies on the bed, her hand slowly travelling upwards until it rests between her legs. She closes her eyes and we see that she is dreaming of having sex with her boyfriend. She is below the age of consent at sixteen in America in the state of Alabama. I looked at the women on the jury and smiled.

“We cut to outside her window and see a sinister figure watching her through a gap in the curtains. Suddenly we cut to a close-up of her face and her lips are open gasping in the throes of a powerful orgasm the camera pans down her scantily clad body. Suddenly we see that the watching pervert outside has entered holding a phallic knife and he frantically stabs her body as she screams in pain. Cut back to the teenage girl and her dead mutilated body is covered in blood” I said watching the reactions of the jury. The women in particular were really paying attention now.

“A notice flashes across the cinema screen. If you don’t like explicit scenes of violence against women then leave through the green and go to the other free show for adults, with no violence only sex. The lights go on and a voice says that there will be a short intermission now while people change free cinemas. Ladies and gentlemen, which cinema show would you go to? In the film business these days there are two ways of emotionally moving the audience, sex or violence, but although there is very little restrictions on explicitly violent imagery, pseudo snuff films for example, there are enormous state restrictions on the distribution of sexually explicit imagery, therefore if you want to carry on making movies for a living then you have to pre-censor your work and that it what happens in the world today. It is my opinion that watching violent films makes one feel violent and from time to time we get a civilian member of the public committing killings that bear an amazing similarity to many slasher film plots. If there was no censorship of erotic movies for adults and someone imitated the behaviour depicted in the film then there would be more sex in the world and less violence.    

Two of the jury were writing notes now, the black man and one of the women. I knew that I was winning and carried on speaking.

“The Williams Committee recommended the legalisation of porn for adults in the light of Denmark’s experience and the report of Doctor Berl Kutchinski of the Department of Forensic Science. After a five year legalisation of uncensored porn for adults on video Kutchinski reported a massive eighty two percent decline in crimes of violence against women. Professor Williams knew that after reading Kutchinski’s five year report that he would recommend the legalisation of uncensored porn for adults in Britain with the same results as Denmark because both were modern European democracies. The report was shelved and buried because Thatcher, whose declared enemy was the permissive society, got into power after a massive campaign of publicity in the Sun and The News of the World, and immediately shelved it. Her views on the permissive society are well known, pornography being part of that permissiveness. To make love and not war was anathema to the Iron Lady” I said looking at the clock and noticing that it was nearly time for lunch.

“I think that it’s going well and that we will all be acquitted” I said.

“You are a very powerful speaker Mike and I am sure that the jury will acquit you” Sara replied.

Suddenly I noticed Sullivan’s solicitor walking towards me then he halted in front of the table and pulled out a chair and sat down.

“You are doing well and the jury likes you” he said in a mock friendly way, his cunning, shifty eyes betraying his ulterior motivations.

I gave him a cold unfriendly stare. “Give my regards to David, will you “ I said smiling.

“Oh I will,” he said, getting up and walking back to his table.

“Is he Lindsay’s solicitor?” Sara asked.

“Yes but he works for the Slug,” I replied.

Afternoon

I sat in the toilet on the wooden seat facing the cistern and filled my pipe in preparation for this afternoon’s address to the jury. I wanted to be really high my canniniboid receptors buzzing with THC. I wondered what to speak about today and I knew that I would just speak, tell the truth about what happened and make my views on censorship known.

As I walked to the main hall of the Old Bailey I spied a group of Porn Squad members being addressed by a legal person in a suit. I lined up on one of the big marble pillars and approached the group on their blind side so that I was within earshot. I didn’t need to listen to him because it was a psychological tactic that I was using now. Suddenly I moved into view and soon caught one of the Porn Squad’s eyes.

The Scotland Yard detective saw me and began waving frantically at the legal eagle giving them a lecture that looked up in annoyance at this stupid policeman who was interrupting his lecture.

“Freeman, it's Freeman” he pointed.

I caught the lecturer’s surprised glance, winked and walked quickly away.

Sara was waiting outside the court and we walked in together.

 I looked at the jury wondering what to say again and smiled. “Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I was wondering which side of the free cinema you ended up in and whether you preferred the pseudo snuff movie to the porn film. The porn film was small budget, the same as the horror movie. Should horror films be banned? No I don’t believe in censorship because in a free society why should one adult or a body like the BBFC in Soho Square, London watch any film and decide in the name of usually protecting children and treating your like a child? Insisting I have watched it and now I am not allowing other adults to watch it because I think that it is indecent or obscene and it may corrupt and deprave you. A film examiner at the BBFC watches thousands of films so if he is not depraved and corrupted why should you be? This is an example of Big Brother and an authoritarian government. So I say unto you, if you think that a person likely to have sent off his cheque for thirty two pounds for the Videx Video Show watched it in the privacy of his own home would likely to have become depraved and corrupted by any of the shorts in the Videx Video Show and become a bad person then you should find me guilty.” I paused dramatically looking at the jury. “But before you come to that decision think that the Williams Committee report, a government report entitled the Report on Film and Video Censorship that can be bought at any government bookshop, studied the question of the possible deleterious effects on society, taking in account the views and research of all the experts and came to the conclusion, as did most of the other European countries that there should be no censorship of explicit sexual imagery for adults and that has been the case, since 1972 starting with Denmark after a five year experiment. We are moving into a more liberal era, where the old opposition from the right wing is waning and a new era of freedom beckons.

The judge banged his gavel “Mr Freeman this trial is concerned whether or not the Videx Video Show would be likely to deprave and corrupt those likely to come into contact with it. This is not a question of politics but of law” the judge looked at me a serious expression on his face.

“My Lord, I believe that all censorship is political and is imposed by the state and its servants.”

“Michael it is a free country and one is entitled to believe what one wants but please refrain from suggesting that this is a political trial.

“I am sorry to disagree with my Lord. Can I finish my address to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury?” I replied.

“Yes Michael you may” the judge replied.

“Yes ladies and gentlemen, talking about who are the censors and how they enforce their decisions let’s take a look at the BBFC and how they decide what to let adults of this country see in their homes. Every examiner on the BBFC knows exactly what he is looking for and he has a list of sexual images and phrases that he must cut.

Where does everyone in the film and censorship business get what everyone in the know calls the laundry list? Producing a film is an expensive business and going back to the edit suite to cut out the bits the BBFC requires you to make in order to get your eighteen rating adds to the budget.

The BBFC issue cuts lists which begin with the number of the frame of the scene to excised and end and if you don’t make it you could be prosecuted and appear in court on the very same charges for which I stand here today. Who decides what you the public see? Who made up the anagram GOIL, glimpse of inner labia that every BBFC examiner exercises. How can a glimpse of a woman’s vagina deprave and corrupt a person likely to be watching the Videx Video Show? If one disagrees with the notion that a glimpse of a woman’s vagina is inherently corrupting then how does one go about changing the law. One way is called publish and be damned that is to let oneself be prosecuted by those that believe in strict censorship for adults and be found not guilty. In this way one changes the law because the law must change according to prevailing moral values and that’s what I ask you to do ladies and gentlemen of the jury go out and find me not guilty and change the Obscene Publication Act. The Obscene Publications Act was amended by the honourable Roy Jenkins to include the words, even if the work is obscene but you find it artistic then that would  be another reason to find me not guilty” I said with a smile.

“Having had the traditional first bite of the cherry I rest my case my Lord.”

“Thank you Michael, and now it is the turn of the learned counsel for Lindsay Honey to speak.”

The counsel for Lindsay, a woman QC in the man’s world of the upper class legal profession stood up.

My client Lindsay Honey is a musician, a member of La Rox whose lead singer Ian Mitchel was a famous member of the Bay City Rollers. He got a job at the Videx offices the ones that you saw in that film First Day in the Office and became the dogsbody, that’s all he was, not a producer, he did not publish the Videx Video Show the company Videx Ltd did, and Michael Freeman as it tells you on the credits produced, wrote and directed it. Please find Lindsay Honey not guilty. I rest my case.

“The fucking bitch” I thought. “My Lord I would like to cross examine Mr Lindsay Honey the actor and musician” I said.

“Simon Lindsay James Honey will now enter the witness box.”

I looked at Lindsay standing in the witness box, a place to which I had led him. I smiled looking at him dressed incongruously in a suit shirt and tie. “Is your name Simon Lindsay James Honey but you prefer to be called Lindsay Honey?” I asked a grin spreading across my face as I thought of cross examining a good friend of mine. Of course he had done a few slippery things like using my actors, sets and equipment to make a film of his own but when I just made him load the filming equipment into my car every evening and upped his salary by giving him a brown paper envelope every Friday night he got the message.

“Lindsay, if you ever addressed me as boss what did I used to say?” I asked.

“You used to say don’t call me boss, call me Mike.”

I looked at the jury and smiled. “So you called me Mike and I called you Lindsay. You liked to please me and became what I thought was rather sycophantic, but as time went by I regarded you as a true friend. You became invaluable to me and also showed your talents as an actor. When I went to Holland to set up Videx Netherlands you became the managing director. No Lindsay you were never a dogsbody and I and Sara were your friends. You did not play any part in the publishing of the Videx Video Show except as an employee of Videx Ltd. I was an employee of Videx Ltd too as the managing director and as it says on the credits of the Videx Video Show it was written, produced and directed by me” I said.

The guy on the jury nodded in agreement.

“Lindsay, do you remember when we were on location and you used to phone your friend to order our refreshments; was I your true friend or were you my dogsbody?”

“I was your true friend “Lindsay replied, smiling now, his diamond glinting and his pale blue eyes flashing.

“Thank you Lindsay. That is all I want to ask you” I said, aware that I had brought his cocaine habit into the scenario and the underlying threat that I would mention what his refreshment was...

The prosecution stood up “Mr Honey, when you made these films like the scene in the Videx Video Show where you punished and then had sex with Jane Griffiths, who did you have a script?”

“Yes Sir,” Lindsay Honey replied.

“That script was written by Michael Freeman, the managing director of Videx, was it not?” The prosecution was an extremely ugly little man, his round bloated face covered in warts. His stomach bulging out trying to escape his shirt court as he spat out the question as though a positive answer would prove my guilt.

I could see the spittle spraying from his vicious little mouth as he spoke.

“Yes Sir” Lindsay Honey replied..

“That is all,” said prosecution counsel.

“If there are no more questions from learned counsel then we will proceed with the defendant John Edward Currey.

Counsel for Currey stood up.        

“Ladies and gentlemen, the jury my client John Edward Currey in charge with publishing the Videx Video Show. As a director he was not involved in the publishing process at all. He was a silent partner, a businessman that had invested a considerable sum of money to start up Videx Ltd with the intention of making an investment and earning a profit.  In fact he never watched the films except initially looking at the beginnings to see the technical quality and has never watched the Videx Video Show.  He tells me he does not like to watch hardcore pornography and has never watched a film in his life except the beginning of one of the titles that contained no nude scenes. The Videx Video Show was published by Michael Freeman without the knowledge of John Edward Currey. Therefore I ask you to find John Edward Currey not guilty” Currey’s QC said.

“He is backstabbing me as well” I thought.

Was it paranoia that here in open court I could see that all counsel, both defending and prosecuting, were conspiring to find me guilty.

Sara’s QC was speaking: “My client was in love with Michael Freeman and did everything that he told her and was not aware that making pornographic films could be an offence in this country because Freeman never told her...” the words filtered through to my brain because I had been thinking of other things. He too was attempting to convict me. It was not just an attempt to get their clients off but a deliberate conspiracy to run a defence of duress against me.

The judge adjourned until the next day.

Day Three of the Trial

Chapter 12

 I sat in the WC getting very high and I knew that today the prosecution would outline its case against me. I loaded the pipe with another charge of the black Afghani and applied the lighter, burning it to a grey cinder and holding in the smoke. I walked into the great hall of the Old Bailey thinking of the many famous and infamous defendants had walked this way. Infamy or fame depending on the pendulum of morality as it swung back and forth between freedom and authoritarianism. Thatcher and her friends in the media were continually publishing pro-censorship articles in the red top newspapers. I was caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea: the forces of censorship from the right wing and religious groups, the latter believing that the Devil made sexual pleasure and corrupt people in the police and high places that wanted porn to remain illegal so that they could reap massive profits from its illegality. I knew that the prohibition of any popular public commodity leads to endemic corruption that eventually infects the body politic as it had done today with porn and drugs. Britain was in an Al Capone era of corruption that went right to the top.

The court was adjourned for lunch until two ’o'clock.

Afternoon in Court

The prosecutor addressed the jury: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury when you watched the Videx Video Show you watched a film that mixed images of naked children in with sexual images of adults, fellatio, cunnilingus and sado masochistic images of a woman being caned until she begged for mercy, please don’t no more please. These images I suggest are clearly obscene and would be liable to deprave and corrupt who ever would be likely to come in contact them and if you believe that then you must find Michael Freeman guilty of the offences under the Obscene Publications Act, in the case of Lindsay Honey you saw him in the film caning that girl then having intercourse with her and if you think that he conspired with Michael Freeman too publish the Videx Video Show then you must find him guilty too.”

The prosecutor’s words went on and on and in the end I realised that I wasn’t even listening to him but just looking at him and become intensely aware of his ugliness

“Cast your mind back to the scene in which the genitalia of a naked man are juxtaposed with the face of a young girl. I suggest to you that the juxtaposition of a young girl’s face with a man’s penis and testicles is meant to suggest fellatio and in this respect Videx Ltd and Michael Freeman published a video which contained an indecent image of a child in breach of the Protection of Children Act...”

As I prepared to refute the prosecutor’s observation I realised that was what he thought of when he watched the nude beauty contest at the Eureka Sun Club and that the evil lay in his own mind.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury let me deal with the last allegation made by the learned Prosecutor. He says that he imagines that  he saw a young girl’s face in juxtaposition with a man’s genitalia that suggested fellatio.” I turned towards the prosecutor and wagged my left finger towards him. “I suggest that the evil lies in his own mind.  I pointed to the bone and cursed the Prosecutor “Honi soit mal y pense”-evil be to him who evil thinks.”  I uttered the curse in a loud voice and was surprised to see the Prosecutor stagger back as if struck by some invisible court and I had this strange feeling again that something magical was occurring and that the building had been designed to reveal the truth of a righteous anger. Everyone had seen the Prosecutor reel back and the guilty expression on his face. I looked at the jury and smiled. I would like you to go out and watch the Eureka Sun Club experience again and see if you can see what the Prosecutor sees. I expect that there are a number of you on the jury who know how to operate a video recorder?” and I saw several heads nod. I turned towards the judge.

“My Lord, I feel that one of the jury could operate the machine and  in the interests of justice I would prefer a member of the Obscene Publications Squad not to be present in the jury room. Instead I suggest that a member of the jury operated the machine. What do you say my Lord?”

The judge could not really believe what was happening in his own court with me acting and speaking like one of his learned friends and enjoying a great authority in the court.

“Yes I see no reason why your request cannot not be carried out as long as one of the jury can operate the machine?” the judge replied.

“Yes Sir I can do that” the foreman replied standing up.

“So be it then” the judge agreed.

I looked at my notes and re-read the part where the Prosecutor tries to convince the jury that the Videx Video Show was one whole film and not a magazine of different films. “His learned friend for the prosecution also suggested to you that the Videx Video Show was a continuous film when it is clearly a compilation of short films each titled and having the words the end appear and the title of the new short film appears. He says that the Videx Video Show is a film that mixed images of naked children in with sexual images of adults, fellatio, cunnilingus and sado masochistic images. I ask you to look at the Videx Video Show and decide whether it is as advertised the first video show for adults and a compilation of different episodes that are clearly separated from each other or one long two hour film. Watch the Videx Video Show as many times as you want and I thank you for your kind cooperation” I said.

The jury retired to the jury room to watch the Videx Video Show and I wondered how much of it they would re-watch. I thought now that I would be acquitted and the jury would reject the Prosecutor’s allegations without question.

When the jury returned I thought that two of the women jurors had red faces as though they had been laughing and that the traces of smiles lingered around their lips...

The judge adjourned the case until the next day.

That evening

Sara and I sat with Nick eating a delicious curry that Nick had prepared. It was so good that I wondered if it was a take away.

“Lovely curry Nick” I praised him.

“Yes Nick it’s excellent” Sara agreed in her posh voice. I noticed that she spoke with the same upper class accent as Nick now and I grinned.

“Thank you Mike, Sara tells me that you are doing well in court and that she thinks that you will be found not guilty?” Nick questioned.

“Yes I think so too but the other defence solicitors are running a defence of duress against me but I think that the jury have already made up their minds to acquit” I replied with just the slightest amount of doubt still lingering in my mind.

“What do you mean Mike, a defence of duress?”

“That none of the QCs, or any of the legal profession want me to be found not guilty and that they are defending their clients while back stabbing me” I replied.

“Why do you think that is?” Nick asked.

“We are entering a neo puritan age and with the sex hostile feminists gaining power that there is an unholy conspiracy of left and right to make porn politically incorrect” I replied wondering whether I was straying too far from the “who financially benefits from its illegality” answer.  

Day Four of the Trial

Chapter 13

When I read my newspapers and magazines on the fourth day of the trial I was excited to find that the Time Out and The Guardian both featured articles about censorship and pornography. I would try to use them in court as they were both against censorship.

As my attaché case went through the X-Ray machine the conveyor belt suddenly came to a halt and the attendant pointed to the phallic shape of My Japanese porcelain pipe.

“What is that? He questioned me.

 “A pipe” I answered wondering whether I was going to get busted for cannabis at the Old Bailey.

He opened the case and took out the small blue pipe decorated with a gold cannabis leaf. “You smoke it?

“Yes I do,” I said smiling.

Much to my surprise he put the pipe back into the case and handed it back to me.

“Thank you” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.

“Why did he get your pipe out Mike?” Sara as we walked into the great marble hall. “I’m going for a puff” I informed Sara as I had done every day of the trial.

I sat in the WC and the door bolted and as I smoked I blew the smoke up towards the ventilator and wondered why in a democracy why I had to use cannabis in a toilet. The answer was money again the same as any prohibited good that was much in demand- the corollary of prohibition was corruption.

I took Sra’s hand and I walked in the court. As usual we were    the first to arrive. I was really high and I looked down to the Director of Public Prosecutions’ (DPP) place and noticed that his personal notes were lying in a folder...I walked down the aisle towards it and stood by it but not touching it.

“What do you think you are doing?” the DPP questioned me an angry look on his face.

“I was just standing here” I grinned at him.

“If you touched anything you will be in serious trouble, it’s a criminal offence” he said.

“Of course it’s a criminal offence but I have been a law abiding member of society since I was released in 1979” I replied grinning, walking back to my own notes and leafing through them while the DDP checked for evidence of tampering and glaring at me. Always the joker where authority was concerned I was enjoying myself immensely now as the court filled up again. I ignored everyone around me and picking up The Guardian I started to read the article on censorship and pornography.

“The court is in session...”

“Michael Freeman you may continue with your defence ...”

The words of the judge penetrated my trance state and I realised that I must start speaking. I turned to the jury. “Good morning ladies and gentlemen of the jury you saw me reading today’s Guardian and there is a magazine here Time Out, it seems that porn and censorship are very much in the news today” I said grinning widely knowing that it was because of my trial. You saw the parts of the Videx Video Show yesterday and I suggest that if any of you have parts that you would like to see and discuss again then you should do that before I call my witnesses...” No one moved so I assumed that the jury had looked at what they wanted to. “I will now call my first witness...”

The solicitor’s clerk whispered in my ear.“The judge has two daughters” he whispered, pressing a medal on a ribbon into my hand. “Eric won this in the 2nd World war. Your art teacher witness has not seen the film” he informed me.

“Thank you” I replied thinking that my first witness Eric had two daughters too.

“I call my first witness” Eric Bourne I said.

Eric entered the witness box dressed in a smart suit, wearing a Lloyd’s broker tie. I studied him in the witness box and I had met him at NCROPA meetings and he had volunteered to be a witness.

“Is your name Eric Bourne of Battle, Sussex?” I asked.

“Yes that is correct.”

I held the medal up and looking at the judge, then at the Prosecutor an amused grin on my face. I began to swing the medal like a pendulum and was pleased to note all the juror’s heads turning in time. I wondered if the judge would bang his gavel and say   that “one can’t hypnotise a jury Freeman” but he said nothing. Really I began to surprise myself and have the feeling once again that in this ancient court of the Old Bailey the defendant could create magic and the gods would help him achieve Justice.

“Eric, have you watched the Videx Video Show?” I asked, still swinging the medal.

“Yes and I see nothing indecent or obscene in it and my two daughters have seen it too and we all agree that it is erotic art.”

“Thank you Eric” I said.

I looked over at the ugly Prosecutor who jumped to his feet. “Mr Bourne, do you usually watch hardcore pornography with your daughters?” the Prosecutor asked with a sneer that hinted at incest.

“No never but the Videx Video Show is not hardcore pornography at all but a series of short erotic films” Eric answered.

I smiled watching the Prosecutor’s disappointed face.

“You may step down now” the words echoed through my brain. Now for the art teacher; Tuppy had shown me his drawings of huge orgies done in pencil in a realistic style. I thought that he would make a good witness.”I would like to call Jeremy Taylor” I said, hearing my voice amplified by the court acoustics. I watched Jeremy Taylor climbed reluctantly into the witness box and it seemed to me that he would rather not be here and perhaps that was why he had not watched the Videx Video Show. “Is your name Jeremy Taylor of Wapping, Kent?” I asked.

“Yes it is,” Jeremy Taylor replied.  

“First of all, I must ask you, have you watched the Videx Video Show?” I asked fixing him with my gaze and I knew that here was a frightened little man.

“No, no I haven’t watched it”

“Well then Jeremy you may step down because you should have watched it” I said seeing the look of relief on his face but suspecting that he had seen it because it was on the documents of defence witnesses.

“Thank you” he said hastily leaving the witness box.

“I would like to call my next witness Derek Malcolm” I said a ring of triumph in my voice, smiling as I watched this old Etonian, famous film critic climb into the witness box. I started the act.

“Is your name Derek Malcolm and do you live in London...my voice floated the questions around the courtroom . “Are you Chairman of the Circle of International Film Critics... are you the Guardian Film critic...As part of your job do you watch erotic videos and films?”

“Yes I have watched thousands.”

I knew that as an advisor to the Williams Report he had watched a lot of hardcore pornography, films that he would have found distasteful and not watched unless it was part of some official duty. He had seen every film that he  had made up to this present day because I had sent them to him and spoke about them on the phone.  “Talking about the erotic genre have you seen the Videx Video Show?”

I noticed Derek raise his eyebrows at my use of the word genre and I smiled at him.

“Yes I have,” he answered.

“How as a film critic would you describe it in relation to the charges that I stand here accused of today?” I asked, holding my breath.

“The Videx Video Show is harmless erotica” he replied.

“Thank you Derek” I said, my heart bursting with gratitude for this public schoolboy who had come here and told the truth today. I looked over at the jury and smiled and I knew that Derek Malcolm’s testimony had made a big impression on them.

Afternoon.

The solicitor’s clerk whispered in my ear. “They have taken your art teacher to Scotland Yard to see the Videx Video Show escorted by an OPS officer and he is now going to say that it’s like child porn.”

“Thanks” I replied knowing that he had been badly frightened and as an art teacher who drew pictures of big orgies his job could be in danger. He had been threatened by the Obscene Publications Squad I knew that.

It was time to call the rest of my witnesses and I had thought up a plan “I would like to call Chief Inspector Alton” I said in a loud voice that shocked almost everyone into an upright position of attention. I knew that my solicitors had refused to call them the two ex Porn Squad coppers who had been convicted of corruption on the grounds of irrelevance to the case. I waited a bit letting the attention build. “Oh he is obviously not coming” said out loud “so I would like to call Superintendent William Moody” I shouted. I waited a further two minutes. I turned towards the judge “I have finished calling my witnesses my Lord I said with a smirk as I glanced over at the OPS detectives in court and had the satisfaction of an angry look from one of them who had tried to frighten my witness...

Nick’s Flat Earls Court later that evening

“I called Derek Malcolm like I said and the effect was electric when I asked him what erotic genre the Videx Video Show was   in and  he replied harmless erotica” I said with a laugh.

“Harmless erotic, Mike, when a powerful film critic like Malcolm says that the Videx Video Show is harmless erotica, then you are off  in my opinion” Nick said a smile of pleasure on his face.

“Yes Mike is doing very well” Sara agreed.

The Verdict - Day Five of the Videx Video Show Trial

Chapter 14

In spite of my expressed confidence I still expected some trick by the forces against me. Then the black member of the jury walked in with a folded copy of The Guardian under his arm and gave me a knowing look. I knew that he had read the anti censorship article in the previous day's issue and letters on the piece were already published in this day’s edition mainly for the stopping of censorship for adults.

 I prepared to address the jury. “Good morning ladies and gentlemen you have heard all my witnesses speak and I ask you to pay attention not only to Eric as a respectable father of two daughters but to my expert witness Derek Malcolm who in his own words has seen thousands of erotic films and his classification of the Videx Video Show as harmless erotica. Harmless and not like to deprave and corrupt those likely to come into contact with it” I said. In fact, to prove whether or not a person has been made bad is impossible and also a question of one’s own moral values, what one thinks is right and wrong. “Deprave and corrupt are anachronistic words from the Victorian era, an era of neo Puritanism that we are only just started escaping from twenty years ago with the Swinging Sixties that altered society for ever and saw the legalisation of porn for adults in mainland Europe, the United States. Today there is a backlash from forces of censorship driven by religious beliefs about sexual pleasure together with those forces of corruption whose financial interest is in keeping sexual imagery especially films for adults” I paused looking at the jury and was surprised to see the foreman of the jury nod then make a yawning sign. He wanted to go home that was for sure and I must not let myself ramble on as I thought that the jury had made up their minds.

“Michael Freeman I think that you have made your case now and it is time to hear the other defence counsel” the judge said.

“Yes my Lord” I replied a moment of doubt entering my heart as the counsel for John E Currey stood up.

I stood down and moved to join Sara, Currey and Lindsay in the dock and reached down and held Sara’s hand in mine.

“You were marvellous Mike” she whispered.

 “My client John Edward Currey is a businessman and he invested a sum of money in Videx Ltd. But he took no part in the running of the business. He was ladies and gentlemen in fact what is called a sleeping partner and it is these sleeping partners to whom one can go that are invaluable to this country because when a person needs capital to start a new business he can’t get it started without a business to invest in his business. Sleeping partners do not have to know anything about the business and in John Currey’s case, the making of films only the making of money. Michael published the film and he freely admits that not my client, therefore ignorance of the law is no defence but I am asking you to find John Currey, businessman, father of three children not guilty because he thought that the managing director of Videx Ltd would obey the law. Michael Freeman undertook to obey the law as a company director and all Videx Productions were vetted by the company’s solicitors.  I ask you therefore to find John Edward Currey not guilty” he said.

He had back stabbed me but I was not mortally wounded but now I had relinquished control and stood accused in the dock. The psychological effect of being in the dock was to point the finger of guilt in the name of the Queen. I looked above the judges head and saw the Queen’s royal coat of arms and the words “Dieu et mon droit” God is my right. I knew that the Queen believed that she ruled by God’s authority by the Divine Right of Monarchs. She was head of the Upper Classes and she kept the whole class system going by money filtering down from her massive wealth. I wonder if she knew anything about the massive corruption in the corpus of the state, government, police and media and if she did then would she do anything about it.

“My client Simon Lindsay James Honey is a musician and an actor and an employee of Videx Ltd and I suggest to you that he as such did not take part in any decision to publish the Videx Video Show but was just obeying Michael Freeman’s orders, who as you saw on the credits of the Videx Video Show wrote, directed and produced the film and in fact wrote every scene. Lindsay Honey was a good company employee, a good actor, a bit of a dog’s body and a little bit naive and I ask you to find him not guilty as such” she said.

“Bitch!”  I disproved the dog’s body label under cross examination I thought and she was careful to illustrate that I was the sole creator of the Videx Video Show. This was true except for the help I had from other artists but then I had made no secret of this fact in the court and I had defended it as a work of art. Most of my cas was gone now  Derek Malcolm but Derek Malcolm had told me that the Videx Collection would soon become collector’s items and I was happy that I had hidden a set of U-matic master tapes.

“My client Sarah Bhaskaran came to this country when she was ten and attended Banbury School of Art until she met Michael Freeman. She fell madly in love with him, first they made paintings and later films together like the Videx Video Show where the camera work was done by Sara for several of the scenes. I suggest that Sara took no part in the publishing of the Videx Video Show and there I ask you to find her not guilty...”

The defence was finished, next would come the verdict, I felt butterflies in my stomach and I smiled wanly at the jury especially the foreman.

The judge was speaking now and I looked directly into his eyes and held his gaze and he turned to the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard all the evidence in this case and I want you to come to a unanimous decision in respect of each defendant in respect to the two charges. Is the Videx Video Show liable to deprave and corrupt  those likely to come into contact with the Videx Video Show. Secondly, are any of all of the defendants guilty of publishing an indecent image of a child in contrary to the Protection of Children Act, that is an image of a child that is meant to titillate for example... the judge was saying.

His words went on an unheard drone now while I smiled at the jury and maintained an exterior composure while the judge summed up , careful not to appear biased towards defence or prosecution but stabbing me metaphorically several times so I felt the pain of doubt enter my mind. Would the jury find me guilty or not guilty?

“Now go out and reach your verdict...”

The words sent a pang of fear through me again. Here I was again being charged with the same crime of producing explicitly sexual images that were to excite people sexually and morally corrupting the youth. I had always been found guilty in the past...

The jury filed out...

The waiting began and I held Sara’s hand as the tension increased to paranoia level...

The jury filed back in... “This is it” I thought.

“How do you find the defendant Michael Freeman guilty or not guilty on the charge of offences under the Obscene Publications Act?”

“Not guilty” the foreman’s voice rang out strongly.

I smiled at him, a great joy entering my heart...

“How do you find Michael Freeman guilty or not guilty under the Protection of Children Act?”

“Not guilty “

And so the “not guilties” rang around the court and I stood up and lifted up Sara into my arms and kissed her in exultation and triumph.

“Ladies and gentlemen, after this trial I have removed your duty of doing jury service for the rest of your lives” the judge said in a note of criticism in his voice.

I took Sara’s hand and went over to collect my property from the QC’s position. The DPP was there collecting his trial papers too. I looked at him a challenge on my lips. “I have smashed your Obscene Publications Act single-handedly; it is useless against me now.”

He looked at me defeat in his eyes. “Congratulations but don’t get too cocky, your other trial is due soon” he reminded me.

I knew then with certainty that those above would do all they could to convict me of conspiring to pervert the course of public justice knowing it had been done. This was ironically a charge usually made against corrupt police officers for receiving money but was being applied to me for attempting to destroy evidence.

The News of the World

 Chapter 15

When we walked out of the Old Bailey there was no flash of press cameras, no microphones , no questioning reporters. Once again I thought of the way that I had been tricked into separating the two trials because “I would have been acquitted of everything today with this jury.

“Hello Mike,” said the News of the World reporter. “What was her name?” I wondered. Hello” replied.

Lindsay threw his arms around her from behind. “Hi Carol baby I’m dying to get my big cock inside you again” Lindsay said laughing at me, his face next to Carol’s.

“Mike, would you like a meal on the News of the World?” Carol said.

“Sure I would” I replied thinking that I didn’t have enough money to have taken them out. I had to pay the rent on Nick’s flat soon...Videx was dead.

I picked up the menu in the Chinese restaurant we had found nearby. It was quite expensive and I suspected that quite a lot of rich legal people ate here.

“Have anything that you like, the News of the World is paying the bill” Carol said leaning on the table towards me. Sara was seated on my left, Lindsay on the right.

“News of the World paying my bill; that’s strange” I thought.

Sara was looking through the menu.

“Mmm spicy prawns” she said in expectation as the loss of Videx meant we had no source of income. I had to make another film and start off again but a condition of my bail said that I may not own any filmmaking equipment while on bail.

“Hey, Mike, why don’t you order a drink? “ Carol asked, reading my thoughts.

 “Hey” I beckoned the waiter. “Can you send the wine waiter please” I asked.

A waiter walked up to our table holding the wine list. “Yes Sir, I am the wine waiter” he informed me. “Here you are, Sir” he said, giving me the wine list. I looked down the list and saw that there was some expensive wine here. “Give us a couple of bottles of Dom Perignon and a couple of bottles of the Chateau Rothschild” I said grinning at Carol while watching Lindsay’s hand sliding up her skirt to reveal a shapely thigh.

“Yes Sir” replied the wine waiter hurrying away.

“This would be a good scene in a movie.  I just ought to record images of my life and sell it” I thought.  

“Mike, I'm going to phone the paper in a minute. How much do you want for a story?” she asked.

“A story, I thought that you wrote one?” I asked.

“I did but they couldn’t print it because you were found guilty in my story” Carol admitted pursing her lips.

I laughed out loud while sipping the champagne taster that the waiter had just poured into my glass. I looked at the waiter and nodded. “Excellent fill everyone’s glass” I ordered.

“Do you wish to taste the red Sir? The waiter asked.

“Yes please” I replied.

I watched the dark red claret pour into the glass and I savoured its bouquet and took a small mouthful before swirling it around my mouth to savour its richness.

“Excellent” I said.

“Hey can me and Carol have a bottle of scotch and two cokes, ice and big glasses?” Lindsay asked.

I nodded to the waiter even though I was not paying the bill.

“Mike, you need a budget to make your next film. How much shall I ask?”

“Tell them to make me an offer and you rewrite the story” I suggested to Carol.

“Okay” Carol said, getting up and going to the wall phone.

She came back and sat down and spoke immediately. “They want to tell the whole story about the London Orgy Set and the names of everyone that attended,” Carol informed me.

“What and be Mr Nasty, a guy that grasses on all his best friends for money. No I would never do that” I said emphatically.

“We could not tell on Peter, grasses him” Sara agreed, her eyes wide with disbelief about what the News of the World wanted.

“Grass him” I corrected her laughing.

Carol went back to the phone again, then returned “Forty thousand pounds” she said.

“Tell them to fuck off” I said.

“Mike would never inform his friends,” Sara said indignantly.

I drank a glass of champagne. “To the next film” I toasted.

“To the next film” Lindsay toasted taking a long drink on his whisky and coke and topping up his glass. “To our next film” Sara toasted.

“Yes but you can’t make a film for nothing Mike” Carol reminded me. “I’ll go and get another offer,” she said.

“Take them for all you can get Mike” Lindsay said.

“No I won’t be Mr Nasty and grass on all my friends, they have been scared out of their lives” I complained.

“Yes and Geoffrey and his friend have gone to New York, the police frightened them out of their lives with raids, searching and reading personal documents. They were terrified; it was awful for them. Paula Meadows, Jane, Evelyn Pat; all our actors and actresses were threatened and even Nick’s friends, they raided all their homes” Sara said indignantly.

I had heard some things about the activities of the Porn Squad and this was no surprise to me. I grinned as I thought of all the indignant squeals coming from the armchair revolutionaries because the authoritarian state was actually harassing them. Threatening their professional standing and persecuting them like the regimes of extreme right and left that they had spoken so passionately about at NCROPA meetings. I remember telling them to protect the “pornographer because I am the tip of the spear, when I snap off they will come for you next.”

“Seventy thousand pounds cash Mike” Carol stood by me.

“Tell them to fuck off and sit down because unless they print your story then tell them to fuck off.  I mean you got to know the real us and you are better qualified to do a story in the light of an acquittal that no-one expected...” I said laughing.

“Okay one last try and I tell them what you said, that you want me to write the story and it will be about making films,” Carol said.

Carol was shouting down the phone and she came back with an angry look on her face. “They will pay eighty thousand for the story of the London Orgy Set” she said.

“Tell them no deal and tell them to fuck off” I replied and we all laughed at her.

I quickly ordered more wine while Carol was on the phone to the News of the World and we ate and drank and was merry on that triumphant day when I defended myself at the Old Bailey and got all of us acquitted.

I realised that the News of the World couldn’t do a story on Videx because of the contempt of court order.

“If I get off at the second trial then you will be able to do the story Carol” I said.

“But Mike everyone knows that they are planning to get you on the second trial” Carol said as a matter of fact.

As I looked at her I felt a sense of foreboding and knew that I had been kidding myself about defending myself on the perverting the course of justice charge and repeating the hat trick and that I would probably be convicted.

On the Dole        

Chapter 16

“I am going to move out Nick” I suddenly said as we were eating breakfast.

“Why” Nick asked even though he knew that I was behind on the rent.

“Because Sara and I have to go on the dole, I mean I can’t do that while I am living here in Wetherby Mansions. I’ve got to get a flat” I explained. I wanted to get out in any case because of the smell of the sewers that seeped into our bedroom which I suspected as a possible cause of my E Coli infection.

“Oh Mike do we have to?” Sara questioned.

'`Yes, I mean, I don’t want to go and Nick will be able to let the flat to someone who can afford it because we can’t now” I explained. Another reason that I wanted to get out was because Nick’s friends were not coming around anymore even though I had been acquitted. I was awaiting a second trial and I heard that the OPS were still harassing people. The smell of sewers was awful sometimes, especially now in the summer.

There was a little flat outside the back door to our flat and one day I met the priest: I  knew that he was a priest because he was wearing a dog collar.  I mentioned the smell to this weird looking man and he wrinkled his nose. “They need to mend the sewers; they have been here since Victorian days.”

As he spoke I had a paranoid image of the priest as some mass killer came into my mind, the smell reminded me of dead bodies, rotting flesh perhaps they were in his flat?

That night I heard some noises so I silently opened the back door. It wasn’t the priest dragging a body down the stairs in the middle of the night but someone breaking into the small shop above. The owner, an Indian, had been very friendly to Sara and I and we often bought vegetables in there. I climbed the iron staircase and opened the gate to be confronted by a drunken burglar trying to smash a hole in a plate glass window.

Thieves usually run when confronted but this one was blind drunk, irrational with big muscles. “Stop that” I said hoping that he would run away.

He grinned and smashed the brick against the window an evil look on his face.

“Look you had better run off the police have been called” I lied. The police were nowhere in sight although this was happening in the main Warwick Road with cars passing by and in the middle of bedsitter land, Earls Court.

The man grinned and slitted his eyes, his face taking on an aggressive look and I prepared to defend myself.

“What is going on here Mike?” Sara asked, emerging from the staircase dressed in a sari.

The burglar took one look at her and ran...

“He was trying to burgle the shop,” I explained.

“Come in Mike,” Sara pleaded.

When we entered the flat Nick appeared in a dressing gown. “What’s been happening?” he asked.

“Oh just a guy trying to burgle the Sawi’s shop; I frightened him off” I said, playing the hero again.

“Mike you are so brave, I would have had the courage to go up there” he explained an admiring look on his face.

“Yes Mike is always like that” Sara observed.

“It’s in your genes Mike, you have warrior genes while I have the Church” explained Nick ready as ever with a psychological explanation.

Flat hunting in Earls Court was an education and one of the first things that I learnt was that if you were English it was hard to get a flat. I had just looked around a flat that I liked. “I’ll take it” I said to the woman estate agent.

“Okay just give me your details” she asked her pen poised to fill in an agency form.

As I gave my place of birth as London she stopped writing.

“I thought that you were Australian,” she said looking surprised.

“No, I'm English,” I replied with a grin.

“Sorry we don’t let flats to English people only to Australians," she said.

I had been mistaken for an Australian before and even Londoners could not believe that I was born in London. I had altered the way that I spoke in my youth as a working class lad from South London trying to lose the Cockney accent and use my large vocabulary.

Finally we were shown around a one room bedsitter in Earls Court Road with a window that looked out onto the main road and a shared kitchen. The owner lived on the ground floor and was of Arabic appearance. The rent was eighty five pounds a week but I took it because I had heard that the Social Services paid one’s rent for a while.

Memories of a dissolute teenage youth came back to me of going to the dole a few times and getting a pittance out of them but this time it was different.  The woman who interviewed us was sympathetic and we left with our rent paid and eighty pounds a week.

We packed our few belongings and carried them just around the corner to our new home. The sun was shining and the front door was wide open as we entered with our suitcases and carried them up to the top floor and the bedsitter. The big front room was filled with a double bed and a set of Victorian wooden tables and chairs. We had come a long way from a six bedroom house in Surrey where I had started to make a new erotic movie called the Miller family. I wondered if I would ever make another film...

Next morning I met the guy with the adjoining flat in the kitchen where he was frying bacon and eggs. He looked macho gay and hard with his leather jeans, studded belt and leather waistcoat that he wore open to show off his six-pack, muscular arms, shoulders and torso. Having been in prison I never made the mistake that homosexual men were soft and effeminate one only had to think of the Krays.

“I’m Jimmy, I live with my boyfriend” he said waiting for my reaction to his openly gay stance.

“I’m Mike living with my girlfriend” I replied, shaking the hand that he offered.

Jimmy smiled his approval.”We are out most of the time” he informed me.

Sara walked into the shared kitchen “This is Sara Jimmy, Sara this is Jimmy” I introduced them.

I am pleased to meet you Jimmy” Sara said.

“Pleased to meet you” Jimmy replied with a big grin.

“I’ll make some tea Mike,” Sara said, putting on the kettle.

When Jimmy opened the door of his room I saw a good looking blond headed youth of about 19 sitting on his bed and the sound of pop music coming from a ghetto blaster. I reckon Jimmy was about the same age as me in his early forties and by his physique must work out. The analogies, hetero-homo flashed into my mind. He was a homosexual dominant male with a young boy and I was a heterosexual male with a young girl...I wondered if gay men worried about their genes surviving on the Earth like I did?

Earls Court was a swinging place lit up at night in neon, a miniature Soho, business girls walked the pavements alongside the continually traffic jammed Earls Court Road while a stream of pedestrians visiting the bright lights, clubs, pubs , shops, restaurants and the sex shop the high street passed by on the pavement below our third floor window.

We would sit in our front room watching the hookers soliciting cars and a favourite place for a couple of the girls was on the opposite side of the road. They would stay in the same place assuming sexy poses dressed in really short skirts, high heels and wearing low tops, their faces painted, eyes thick with mascara fluttering at passing male drivers.  I never saw any sign of the police and indeed there was hardly any trouble because everyone was having a good time.I found that I could score a fiver deal of good Moroccan in a pub by the traffic lights of the one way system where cars revving up, waited for a green light before racing for the bridges across the Thames.The dealer much to my surprise was Jimmy my gay neighbour. I sat at the bar watching a stream of punters enter the pub to buy a drink, that was necessary by the house rules it seemed, then go over to Jimmy’s table and score. I saw money pass to Jimmy and then him giving them a deal.“Fuck it” he saw me and quickly I walked over. “Got a fiver deal mate?” I said and smiling he served me pressing a little piece of cling film wrapped hash into my hand. I walked away like a normal punter. It seemed that the pub had a “license” as well as the girls out on the street outside!

I could get hash outside my door anytime now but ironically I was short of cash now and I had to ration myself. I thought of the Furry Freak Brother’s motto: “Times of no money are better than times of no hash.”

Bella

Chapter 17

I was sitting in the one big armchair smoking a pipe when I heard the sound of Sara mounting the stairs talking to another girl.“This is Bella, I met her in the Indian shop” she explained. “Bella this is Mike” she introduced us.I looked at the pretty Asian girl before me dressed in a short skirt and low top that showed a generous amount of her ample swelling breasts. I wondered if she was one of the street hookers who worked the Earls Court Road. “Pleased to meet you Bella” I said, kissing her on the cheek.“Pleased to meet you Mike,” Bella replied, returning the kiss.“Sit down Bella, won’t you?” I offered and as she sat down on the settee revealing a large expanse of shiny white flesh. I could tell that she waxed her legs.“Bella’s from New York” Sara supplied.

“What part?” I inquired.

“Queens, I live downtown,” Bella replied.

Her accent sounded phoney to me. “Do you live around here?” I asked.

“Yes I have a flat just across the road” Bella answered.

“Bella works in a clothes shop in the Kings Road '' Sara supplied, seemingly having acquired the history of Bella in the space of going to the greengrocers to buy some fresh chillies.  “I’m going to cook a spicy hot meal now with noodles and rice. Would you like to join us Bella?” asked Sara.

I loaded up my pipe and holding the lighter flame to the piece of blond Moroccan in the bowl, took a big hit and slowly exhaled the smoke from my nose. I watched Bella’s reaction and she smiled so I extended the still smoking pipe to her.

“Thank Mike” she replied, taking the pipe and inhaling deeply then blowing out a long stream of smoke that lingered around the table lamp then drifted across the room.

The sound of cooking came from the kitchen as I realised that Bella was a seasoned toker..

“Wow this is wicked!” Bella exclaimed.

“Yeah, I scored it from a friend of mine,” I said laughing.

“I’ll see if I can help Sara” Bella said standing up.

I smiled in agreement and watched her buttocks swaying from side to side underneath the tight skirt, her slim ankles, high heel shoes with the ankle straps, dark wavy hair cut to the nape of her neck, she was sexy  that was for sure and I felt the familiar tingle in the tip of my penis. I wanted to fuck her. I was used to having sex with other girls because I was a rich filmmaker and girls were always around, highly sexed girls who wanted me to fuck them. But now I was poor!

We had a pleasant meal together and drank some wine followed by Jasmine tea and more hash.

Sara came over and sat on my lap. “Do you want to fuck Bella?” she whispered an impish grin on her face.

I could see Bella knew what Sara was asking and she gave me a hot sexy look. “Of course she is beautiful,” I replied.

Sara pulled me to my feet and Bella walked over and embraced me. I kissed her lips and she pushed her hot tongue into my mouth. Then Sara pulled me over to the bed and she and Bella stripped off my clothes.

Sara sat down on the  bed and took my now stiffly erect penis into her hands and grasping the base she began waving it up and down, a manipulation tat felt extremely pleasurable together with the wide eyes gaze of Bella who was removing her top and bra to reveal a well formed pair of breasts with swollen puffy nipples.

“You said it was huge, and wow it's enormous” laughed Bella.

Sara began to lick around the top of my penis making the helmet wet and shiny and I bent down and lifted her turning her around I pushed my cock into her and began fucking her from behind. Bella took off her skirt to reveal a vagina covered with fine black hair. I bent forward and kissed. Images were flashing through my mind of scenes Sara and I had in the past. I wanted her to suck Bella’s cunt while I fucked her. “Sara suck Bella’s cunt” I ordered slapping her buttocks.

“Yes, Master,” she said.

I knew that she loved being my sex slave and I pushed her head in between Bella’s thighs and she began sucking.

“Fuck me please Mike” Bella gasped her hand closing around my penis and guiding me into the soft, warm wetness of her vagina.

As my penis thrust in and out Bella Sara grasped it then I felt her tongue flicking along my shaft as it went in and out. I looked down and Sara turned her head sideways to look up at me, her smiling face full of sexual excitement. It was a beautiful image to look at the physical sensations intensified by the visually erotic.

 Sara got underneath my thighs and began to suck and lick both Bella’s and my genitalia as I fucked her.

I looked down on Bella’s face and she smiled at me signalling that she was enjoying every moment of our threesome.

From then on it was a “ménage a trois” with Bella coming around to our flat in Earls Court Road. We ate together, cooked together and slept together getting high every night and indulging in really hot threesomes with Bella and I dominating Sara who became our willing sex slave.

Once Sara suggested that they dominate me instead. I knew that Bella had probably suggested it.

“Okay I swing both ways dom or sub” I replied.

 That night they spanked my bum hard until it was tingling and I experienced what the sub experienced. Then they put a dog collar around forced me to suck their cunts. I quite enjoyed being dominated. The next day as I was dressing Sara noticed some bruising on my buttocks.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Last night spanking me remember?”

“Sorry I didn’t realise...” she apologised.

“You don’t have to apologise... I enjoyed the game tremendously” I assured her.

That night Sara and Bella inspected my spanking marks and began kissing my buttocks, their mouths gradually nearing my genitalia until they were licking and sucking me. The pleasure was intense as I felt their tongues worshipping my phallus and gliding down over my testicles and sucking my balls into their mouths.

“Spank me please Master I have been very disobedient” Sara said.

“Then show me how you suck your Mistresses cunt” I ordered.

Sara bent over and turning sideways so that I could see her mouth and tongue. She sucked and licked Bella’s vagina.

I spanked Sara’s buttocks until they were crimson and she wriggled her bum from side to side exciting me further begging me to “fuck her hard” until I slid my massively engorged cock into her and began fucking her. Finally she collapse writhing in a powerful orgasm and I began fucking Bella.

Both girls came easily and orgasms were loud and frequent in that big old Victorian front room on the third floor in Earls Court Road.

One day Sara persuaded me to go with Bella to her flat because she wanted to fuck me alone. I agreed and we walked to her spacious flat practically opposite ours. Inside was luxurious furnished but although I tried to have sex with her but I could not maintain an erection.

 “I can’t be unfaithful to Sara” I said, voicing my thoughts and realising what the problem was. When I explained to Sara she laughed and we had a hot threesome.

A Gift From The Gods

Chapter 18

I was having more kinky sex now than when I was making films and one day Bella and Sara arrived home with another girl, Rita. Was this joke being played on me by the gods? Sara, Bella and Rita the names had a certain synchronicity.

I heard voices coming up the stairs Sara and Bella and then a new one, a different girl, another girl. I was really high when Sara came in with a girl I remained in my armchair.

“Mike, this is a friend of Bella’s who is dying to meet you” Sara said enthusiastically.

I looked at the beautiful petite, white girl with dark long straight hair. Rita had applied dark eyeliner and rouged her lips and her brown mischievous eyes were giving me a hot look. I felt the familiar tingling response in the tip of my penis. “Please to meet you, won’t you sit down Rita” I said.

“Thanks I have heard so much about you Mike” Rita said, giving me that naughty girl look again, an inquiring look that required an answer of a sexual nature.

“My reputation precedes me” I said and the three girls laughed.”Does anyone want a puff?”

Bella and Rita nodded but Sara who only puffed now and again stood up.

“I’m going to start cooking” she announced going into the kitchen...

“I don’t know about pipes. I have smoked a joint before though” Rita said, uncrossing her legs with a swishing noise as nylon brushed against nylon.

I caught a glimpse of bare flesh above stocking tops and wondered why so many women were flashers, or was it just the ones I knew?

“I will put a little bit of this Moroccan in the pipe and just before the hash is finished take your finger off the little hole in the end” I said, demonstrating and handing Rita the pipe. I’ll light it for you and you just inhale, but try to hold it in” I instructed.

I knelt down by the settee and held the pipe to Rita’s lips and applied the flame of the lighter, holding my finger over the hole in the pipe, I watched her red lips around the phallic end of the pipe and gazed into her hot brown eyes whose pupils had dilated widely until her eyes looked almost black. As she inhaled I waited until the little cinder had almost turned a light grey before it died and took my finger off the hole in the end and the smoke whooshed down into her lungs. “Hold it in,” I said looking into her eyes desire written plain.

She held in the smoke for quite a long time before exhaling through her lips, blowing the blue smoke up towards the light where it lingered around the old Victorian lampshade...

“You’re a toker, a midnight joker, I can see that” I said wanting to kiss Rita.

Bella laughed and gave me a knowing look that she knew that I wanted to fuck Rita even though we had only just met.

“Wow, it's strong!” she exclaimed.

I walked back to my big brown leather armchair and sat back down to feast my eyes on Rita and smile and chat. Suddenly Rita was telling a dirty joke, something about “sucking it through a Polo” and I knew that she was a horny girl who knew that I was fucking Sara and Bella and who I would soon be joining in our games.

We all sat down in the little kitchen and feasted off bean sprouts, spicy chicken, special egg fried rice and praised Sara’s cooking as we ate out of bowls with chopsticks. I was happy and in Paradise. Rita had bought this meal and Bella regularly bought lots of expensive food so life was getting better every day. I realised that I could get attractive, even beautiful girls without being a porno director. I studied Bella as the two girls chatted animatedly about food.

Bella looked Indian, definitely Asian and the more I got to know her the more I thought that her American accent was phoney.

Gaining Space

Chapter 19

I looked at the half open door of Jimmy’s room and it looked deserted and if they had left in a hurry. I pushed open the door and spied a plastic bag full of fiver deals.  I picked up the bag and carried it into my flat and hid it. I would give it back if Jimmy returned which I very much doubted now. I knew dealers led a dangerous life even though they just supplied a public demand. There was an analogy with porn and that massive corruption and its illegality made it so. “We will legalise it soon after the revolution” I thought. I held it up smiling at Sara as though I had just found some treasure.``Where did you get all that? Sara asked.

“I think Jimmy and his boyfriend have done a bunk” I informed Sara.“Dave, he was sweet. Why?”“I don’t know, probably something to do with the illegal drugs trade” I replied, taking her hand and going into the front room. It was a large Victorian room and the sun was streaming in through the windows and we both walked over to the window sill and looked out of the half open window. Rich people had owned this whole house at one time before it was sold and converted into flats and bedsitters with shared kitchens. “It's beautiful,” Sara exclaimed.

I looked down upon the fifty yard long garden that still had perennials in bloom although unattended for a long time. There was an apple and a pear tree ripe with small fruit with branches spreading out outside the window.

“It’s so lovely here in the morning when the sun comes through,” Sara observed.  

“I’m going to go down and see the landlord about it and ask if we can move in” I announced.

“Oh goody!” Sara exclaimed, rubbing her hands together in glee and jumping up and down with excitement.

“I will pay for the other room cash” I promised.

“Of course you can have the room,” the landlord assured me.

We spent a few hours moving in and after Sara had applied the feminine touch the room looked very comfortable and when one closed the door of our front room and the kitchen door it was peacefully quiet in the other room the only sound was the faint noise of cars floating over the roofs.

Friends started to visit and a couple of the Outsiders Club were the first. I remember carrying a guy who was deformed by thalidomide and had a small body weighing about sixty pounds but had a normal size head up to my flat on the third floor. He was an actor and I had seen him in an arts review in one of the broadsheets. He had a degree in philosophy and that’s what we spoke about the times he came to visit. Once he turned up with a straight girl friend and she was quite sexually attractive and she described how she and Ian were shagging in his in invalid carriage and a beat copper shone his torch on the copulating couple.

“You dirty fucking bitch, you dirty pervert he called me and dragged me out of the invalid carriage by my hair” she explained angrily.

I was getting to know how the disabled suffered in a country of self righteous people and how many people were extremely cruel to them.

Tina the girl without a face arrived with her ten year old daughter and popped out with Sara leaving me alone with the girl. Christina was a beautiful little girl of eight with blonde hair and blue eyes and a favourite among all Tuppy’s friends and acquaintances.

Christina suddenly jumped up on my knee. “I like you because you remind me of Father Christmas,” she said.

I laughed and kissed her on the cheek and this is when Stocker walked in.

His face bore a shocked expression and I knew that he expected me of being a paedophile who liked very young girls and I flashed back to when I had a little girl, whose name I could not remember, as the guest of honour at my show at Battersea Arts Centre in 1980 called Muldoon and Others and he had been shocked.

“Who is she?” Alan inquired.

“Christina,” I answered, kissing her again.

“Where is her mother?” Stocker asked in an accusing tone, a disapproving expression on his face.  

“She is out shopping with her mother and will be back soon” I replied.

A couple of days later I visited Alan and Jean in their flat near the Slade. Jean greeted me with a smile. “Mike we know you like young girls but eight or nine is far too young” she exclaimed an indignant expression.

I laughed and did nothing to deny her implications. “I wouldn’t dream of touching a hair on their little innocent heads” I replied in an ambiguous way. “What did I care?” I thought.

Hardcore

Chapter 20      

The payphone was ringing in the hallway...I rushed down the three flights and took the phone off the hook.“Hello”

“Yes” I replied laconically and immediately recognized the voice immediately, it was someone who knew what was happening inside the Obscene Publications Squad. He had phoned me now and again since I had come out of prison and started making films.

“You know who this is?”

I knew that I had a licence for refusing to testify against Commander “Bill” Moody and Chief Inspector Alton even though I had been offered a Queen’s Pardon.

He had first phoned me soon after Videx Ltd was born at Currey’s bungalow in Wandle Road, Morden.  I had made two lesbian films and told me to “keep it soft, stay like you are now and you will be all right” and another time “Keep a low profile.”

I remembered putting the phone down and gushing out the news to John Currey “We got a license John” I had told him.

 “Yes” I answered tersely wondering what he wanted now because I always ignored his advice. I knew that he was just obeying orders to find out what I was doing and I hated the way he always found out where I was living.

“Don’t make any films while you are on bail, or you will be straight back. Here, you know Kenny’s brown bread, he married Frankie’s niece and started abusing her.

 Then the phone clicked and went dead.

“Kenny dead!” Was it true or maybe he had just disappeared, gone back to Australia. But I knew Frankie would have killed Ken if he had found out that he was beating up his niece, he believed in carrying out his own justice. I thought of Frankie as walking up the stairs, not of Kenny who I had done a life sentence for. No that was not true there was no end to this fucking life sentence because I had no civil liberties now and I was easy meat for the authorities As I reached the top of the stairs I thought how important that it was that every freeman should have civil liberties and once “at liberty” having been set free no-one should e allowed to be transported away by the police and returned to prison without trial.

I sat down and had a toke and the anger welled up in me “Right, fuck them, I will make another film” I decided, picking up a document setting out my terms of bail. “Michael Freeman is not allowed to own any filming equipment while on bail” and my eyes immediately seized on the word “own.” They didn’t say that I was not allowed to make any more films but it meant the same thing. I knew that it was a flaw in the terms of bail because one had to breach it exactly as the terms were set out. I had to purchase and actually own filming equipment.

“Nick, can I use your flat to make another film?”

“But I thought that you told me that you can’t make any films while on bail? Nick said a worried look on his face.

Sara was hugging Mars who was now staying with him as we were not allowed pets in the flat. “It says own, Nick and if I hire equipment I will not be in breach of the terms of bail” I said confidently.

“How do you know that Mike”

“I only have O Level English Law but I know that they have to stick closely to the meaning of own in legal terms” I said enunciating the word “own.”

“If you are sure?” Nick replied.

“It’s going to be a film about police corruption,” I said.

“Actors wanted, hard men, bent coppers” I wrote in the ad and sent it off to the Stage. Within a few days of publication I was running up and down the stairs to answer the payphone.

“Hello I saw your ad in the Stage and I can be a bent copper or a gangster. “Know what I mean like” the actor said in a gruff Cockney voice reminding me of hard men and gangsters I had met over the years.

“Look, you sound the part and I will write you a scene as a bent copper in the Porn Squad. If I can use the inside of your house or the outside of any house, you know what I mean, I need a location.”

“Yeah I know what you mean. You can use this place” said the voice.

“Hey what’s your name?” I asked.

“Jimmy Boyle,” he answered.

“I’m Mike Freeman and I am putting the script in the post to you...”

I sat down and started to write a script called “Hardcore” . It would be about corrupt Porn Squad detectives and how they made pornographers and the porn shops pay for a “license.”

I started to write the opening scene:

HARDCORE

Jimmy Boyle as Chief Inspector Fox.

Scene 1

Fox picks up the phone and dials a number.

Fox:  You know who this is?

Pornographer (P): Yes.

Fox: Meet me in the Fox and Hounds, tomorrow afternoon at one, all right?

P: Yes all right

I was going to do the voiceover of the pornographer and was going to get lots of publicity before my second trial that was becoming uncomfortably near now. I would send out copies to all the media. My mind raced and my heart beat in excitement at producing a film that they would not be able to nick me for; a blow at the corrupt establishment, the truth.

Jimmy Boyle smiled. He was dressed like a gangster or a bent copper: dark smart suit, white shirt and school tie. Some units like the Porn Squad known as the Dirty  Dozen had a tie designed that was only available to squad members  and I had acquired one year ago.

“Ready for action Jimmy” I asked, looking at the monitor where I had zoomed ín to frame a picture of Jimmy in Close-up.

Sara had a pair of earphones attached to the telephone receiver that would record both sides to the conversation.

“Action” I shouted, giving the term importance as here I was making a film against censorship and police corruption in the high places of “those above.”

Fox picks up the phone and dials a number.

 “You know who this is?

“Yes” I answered the phone watching my image on the monitor. I was high and it was trippy watching myself speaking and acting at the same time.

“Meet me in the Fox and Hounds, tomorrow afternoon at one, all right?”

“Yes all right” I spoke into the phone.

“Cut” I said in a loud voice. “Right Jimmy let’s go out to that old urinal now and shoot scene two” I said.

Jimmy drove to a public urinal in the main road in the East End, I set up the tripod and Sara took over the camera while I held the microphone and stood next to Jimmy. “Right get ready for action” I said and Jimmy started to have a piss that trickled down the green and yellow stained walls of the urinal. “Action” said knowing that Sara was zooming out to get me in the frame taking care to avoid the microphone. I reached into my back pocket and my hand came out holding a brown paper envelope that I handed to Jimmy Boyle. “Here we are guv” I said.

“Right cut” I said. “How did that go, Sara?” I asked.

“Oh absolutely fine; I got everything and it looked so convincing” she answered.

See you at Earls Court on Saturday afternoon for the next shoot Jimmy” I said.

“It’s got to be pay on publication, Jimmy,” I informed him. I owe you two days at Equity rates so far.

“Just put my name on the credits man, Jimmy Boyle as Chief Inspector Fox. I’m all right” Jimmy said grinning.

Raided

Chapter 21

Sara and I assembled all the equipment on Saturday afternoon. I had hired two redhead 800 watt lamps, microphones, monitor, fluid head tripod and the latest Sony High Band U Matic deck. I was shooting broadcast quality.

Nick was out until ten in the evening and we would be finished shooting by then.

Jimmy Boyle arrived and I am ready to shoot. I liked to be really high when shooting and I had filled the little Japanese ultramarine, porcelain pipe with some of the golden Moroccan that Jimmy the dealer had left behind.

 I couldn’t afford as much hash as I would have liked then a bag falls out of the sky! I knew that the synchronous events were not pure coincidence; they had been far too frequent during my creative life. Like now I had found a brilliant actor in Jimmy Boyle who sat there watching while drinking a glass of whisky on the rocks.

“Ready for action Sara?” I asked.

“Yes, ready for action Mike,” Sara said, swinging the boom.

“Ready for action Jimmy?” I asked picking up the script and looking at the first scene.

“Ready Mike,” Jimmy   replied.

“Right action” I said in a sharp urgent voice then tension in my stomach suddenly disappearing.

Jimmy looked at the camera. “The guv’nor has said that you can’t sell anymore pictures where women are tied up and have those ball gags in their mouth and all that pissing has to stop.”

“But who says so?” I asked.

“The order came from above,” Jimmy replied.

I realized that I had another brilliant scene and that Jimmy Boyle was a very good actor who did not even want to be paid.

“Okay cut” I said looking at Jimmy. “Excellent Jimmy, very convincing” I praised him.

“Can I have a copy when it’s finished Mike?” Jimmy asked.

“Sure no problem” I replied.

“I can use it as a show reel,” Jimmy informed me.

“Well that’s great, I’m writing the next scene but I need a gangster. Letters are still coming in and there are a couple of hard looking bastards like you” I said laughing.

I always got to know actors before I wrote the script. Hardcore was going to be a mind blower that would rip the lid off a generation of bent coppers and those above.

“Okay let’s get the equipment out we have to take it back”

Outside Wetherby Mansions we started to load the equipment.

Suddenly everything was lit by a blinding light and two policemen grabbed me and handcuffed my hands behind my back. A third approached. “Michael Freeman we are arresting you for breaking the conditions of your bail, namely owning filming equipment” the copper’s voice intoned.  

“Let him go” Sara screamed and a woman police officer forced her arms behind her back and secured them.

“Sara don’t say anything from now on” I warned her.”But I don’t own any equipment” I said wondering whether my knowledge of the law would work.

“What did you say?”

“I said that I do not own this equipment” I reiterated.

“Who the bloody well owns it then?”

“Stanley’s in Wardour Street, I hired it out and have to get it back soon or they will charge me for another day” I explained.

A detective standing listening to our conversation radioed Scotland Yard. “Freeman is saying that he doesn’t own any equipment but he hired this lot Sir. All right Sir you will call back.”

The detective looked over at me and I managed a grin standing there outside Wetherby Mansions, the scene lit by the headlights of three police cars.

“Mike, will they take you away?” Sara asked a sad look in her liquid filled eyes.

“No because I have not breached my bail conditions” I answered confidently but not feeling sure myself. I knew that my fate was being decided now by some police lawyer.

The police radio crackled into life. The detective listened to the message then looked at me a look of disgust on his face. “Let him go,” he said.

My handcuffs were unlocked and the police left as quickly as they had appeared leaving us standing there in the street. A few people were looking out of the windows wondering what was happening.

I hugged Sara, it's okay they are not coming back” I said a broad grin on my face delighted at having outwitted the authorities.

Unrequited Desire

Chapter 22

Rita sat on the settee and Sara and Bella were in the kitchen. The flat was much nicer now and we kept the door open between the flats and life was good now, in fact I was living the life of a king with three wives. I hadn’t fucked Rita yet and as I looked her skirt rucked up showing a glimpse of white gusset and I knew that she was deliberately teasing me.

 Rita was petite with small pointed breasts that I could see pushing against the material of her top, the electric light dimmed and made yellow by the old Victorian lampshades gleamed golden outlining the unblemished whiteness of her skin and making her long straight dark hair shine. I looked into her brown eyes that sparkled as she laughed in a little tinkling voice. Oh how I wanted to fuck her and I felt the familiar tingle in the end of my penis.                   Rita would often come straight to the flat when she finished work at Earls Court Tube Station as it was barely fifty yards from our flat. She would also bring shopping as did Bella. I could live like this for the rest of my life I thought with three women. But I hadn’t fucked her yet and I was fantasising what we would do together, she acted submissive and I thought of scenes where Bella and I dominated Rita and Sara together.

Rita smiled at me “It’s much nicer now that you have got the other flat that looks out on the garden and the big tree” she said.

“Yes, it’s great now and I love it here in Earl’s Court” I replied.

“Yes I would like to get a flat down this end instead of on the Cromwell Road and the Motorway; I mean it’s like a motorway” Rita observed wrinkling her nose as she did.

“Yes, we never jog up there, often through the old cemetery” I said.

“You jog?”

“Yes Sara and I love to keep fit and active” I replied.

“Yes very active so Bella and Sara tell me” Rita said giggling a horny look in her eyes.

“Why don’t I just go over there and start kissing her?” I thought laughing at her innuendo and trying to tell her with my eyes that I wanted to fuck her right now on the settee. Sara and Bella would not say anything as I made no secret of my desire for Rita. I preferred for Sara to organize my love life and I was certain that I would soon introduce Rita into the pleasures of group sex...

We all ate together with chopsticks eating out of bowls and I found that the hot spicy food accompanied by noodles and rice tasted much better than when eaten with a knife and fork.

Later we accompanied Rita home and the four of us drew glances as we walked through the still crowded midnight pavements. Three pairs of high heels clicked along the pavements, short, tight skirts and low tops enticed the many males on the street to feast on this delicious eye food. They were three highly attractive females, one Indian, one Malaysian and one English. I exhibited my power over them by the way I held their bodies, caressing them as we walked.

“Rita’s going away for two weeks” Sara informed me knowing that I was aware that she would only return only when I would be on trial again at the Old Bailey.

“Yes, I am going to visit my mother. She has a place in Spain” Rita explained.

“Is one of your parents Spanish then?” I asked, looking at her long black hair that flew out behind her in the slight breeze.

“No, they are both English but my father works in Spain,” Rita explained.

I was disappointed remembering another beautiful model that I was going to fuck but was locked up before I could do so. Lindsay Honey used her in a film called Rock n’ Roll Ransom and he had told me that he had “fucked the arse off her.” Expectation and desire played a big part in sexual excitement imagining what one could do sexually with the desired lover. Unrequited desire never went away and I often visualized the girl’s face and perhaps the gods were going to punish me again. It had been happening all my life since the Sixties when I had first stared at a desirable girl through my camera. Extreme pleasure and fucking lots of different girls then meeting a really desirable and beautiful one like Rita only to find myself suddenly incarcerated in a prison cell where after a while without women I would start to draw my erotic fantasies on paper and masturbate every night thinking of the moment when I would next again feel the flesh of a woman.  

“Would you like to fuck Rita” Sara whispered in my ear as we walked along the pavement of the Cromwell Road. She looked at me a serious expression on her face waiting for an answer as if I might say no!

“Of course I would,” I replied with alacrity.

Rita threw her arms around me and kissed me fully on the lips pushing her hot agile tongue into my mouth. I looked down at her beautiful face and she had her eyes closed. Sara and Bella embraced me as well and I heard the horns of passing cars approving our public display of affection.

“Goodbye Rita” I said, releasing her from my embrace. “I’ll see you soon” I said, tearing myself away and turning around as Rita ran up the steps of a big Victorian house where she had a flat.

As we walked back through Earls Court I noticed a man lurking in a doorway who gave me a strange look and as I returned his stare I noticed a serpent’s tail protruding from him at the back. I shivered and I heard Bella and Sara gasp in horror.

“Did you see his tail?” Sara asked.

“Yes he looked like the Devil” Bella said in a frightened tone as we neared our flat in the Earls Court Road.

A pang of illogical fear went through me. “It was probably a pet python, some people have them as pets” I replied trying to laugh but thinking that it was a bad omen and I would soon be back in hell.

Perverting the Course of Pubic Justice

Chapter 23

I read up on “perverting the course of public justice knowing it had been done” in an old copy of Archbold that I had studied way back in 1969 in preparing for an appeal. The examples given were about a customs officer on a ship and bore no relation to destroying evidence. I had bought an erasing machine, an industrial one that supposed to completely erase a video cassette in seconds. David Offenbach had warned me not to have any copies of any explicitly sexual videos in my office but an Italian film director had sent me the ones in question as examples of his work with a co-production in mind. There was one other, a tape that an amateur filmmaker had sent into a competition to win a thousand pounds

I liked to keep all my stuff on my desk in my office so instead of not keeping it there I bought the eraser and kept that on my desk. I had been pleased thinking of the joke I would play on the Dirty Dozen and their rage at finding labelled porn videos that were blank! I remembered laughing at my ingenuity and boasting that I could erase all the tapes in 2 seconds while the OPS are knocking on the door. Now I was due at the Old Bailey again charged with an offence that was ironically used against corrupt police or officials accepting bribes. The eraser did not work properly and I had never bothered to test it out. Where was I supposed to keep these dangerous tapes of images that I had to hide under pain of imprisonment?

 In my house was no good because if the Obscene Publications Squad raided my home and found them I would be charged. I was the managing director of a film company, a film director who had created over twenty contentious films that he could not possess even in the house or place of business.

I thought of those who gained from the illegality of pornography, the corrupt police, members of the legal profession and those above who “farmed” all prohibited goods and services. Drugs, porn and prostitution were the big earners. I always started to think of all these things when planning my defence. If I started to talk about corruption I would still be found guilty. I had to concentrate on the fact that the film’s name on the warrant had been the Videx Video Show and it had been found by a jury recently not to be obscene and despite this the fact that Videx Ltd had been forced into liquidation.

My agreement to go into voluntary liquidation was because of threats of longer imprisonment, four years to be exact and recall on my life sentence for associating with criminal Mr Bigs like John E Currey who had funded Videx Ltd as a “sleeping partner.”

Suddenly the day of the second trial arrived and I found myself collecting my legal books, notes and pipe and stashing some hash under my foreskin.

“Ready to go?” I asked Sara, standing there in our cosy little flat, living in an environment with three girls and living a pleasurable life that I had enjoyed every day. I was happy except for the negative vibes that were invading my brain as the day of the Old Bailey trial approached and now the day of judgement had arrived.

“Yes Mike I’m ready to go” Sara replied.

As we went down the stairs and out onto the busy Earls Court Road and turned left and walked up to Earls Court Underground Station I wondered how many times I would continue to make this journey before I was found guilty and never returned to my little flat with Sara. I was the victim of a conspiracy and because I had been acquitted of all charges concerning the Videx Video Show and I was released again they knew that I would quickly start up in business again with the old masters. All those pirated American hardcore films that were sold on the black market would not sell because the British preferred British films that they could identify with and I was a good and prolific filmmaker who would supply them.  

“You will be acquitted again Mike” Sara remarked as we walked through the imposing doors of that historic building the Old Bailey once again.

“I will get you acquitted and if I get off you will too. I have a good explanation as to why you helped destroy the mailing lists, to protect our customers from police harassment” I assured her.

“Good morning Sir” the official on the scanning machine greeted me as I placed my keys in a tray and my attaché case on the rollers.

Into the huge hall and finding the court, yes there it was: THE QUEEN AGAINST MICHAEL FREEMAN and SARA BHASKARAN, Perverting the course of public justice knowing that it had been done. “This is it Sara” I said.

The judge looked at me in court as I took out a drawing pad and pen to start sketching him. I looked at him, fixing him with my eyes while my hand created an image of him. He couldn’t stop me drawing. I knew that.

He tried to stare me out by fixing my gaze but I stared right back while I sketched him and he looked away.

The rigmarole of the court, the theatre of it all, the cloaks, silks that QCs wore, the wigs, the ceremony of it all, the judge sitting on his throne in a 17th century costume. I just tranced-out above it, really high making images.

The jury were being sworn in and as they took their seats I just carried on drawing looking at a representative of the ruling classes who would judge me. His name Judge Underhill reminded me of death. “He is under the hill” I thought as I finished one sketch and started another.

“Do you plead guilty or not guilty to the charge that you perverted the course of public justice knowing it had been done?” the question floated in the air in that ancient room which first heard an obscenity trial in the reign of Queen Victoria.

“No, not guilty” my voice rang clear and strong around the courtroom.  I scanned the jury looking for a sympathetic face but found no sympathy there and a sense of foreboding filled my heart.

I noticed that there was a woman dressed in a business suit in the front row who took notes every time the judge spoke or made a point. I guessed that she could be the foreman or a plant who would be a very persuasive speaker who would talk the jury into finding me guilty even playing on the unanimous verdict by delaying jury members, who just wanted to go home, a professional jury member. Then there was the police tactic of following jury members into a pub and persuading them that you were guilty. It would be easy in my case by just letting slip that I was a convicted murderer and a hardcore pornographer and so on. It was simple if you were a corrupt detective who just happened to bump into a jury member when you had a few beers and started to drop information about previous convictions and so on.

The judge had to read out a letter from Sir Lawrence Gowing saying that “Freeman is a genius of a painter but I can’t say the same for films.”

I smiled at the jury when they heard the word genius...

I knew that Lawrence did like my films and I was in the editing suite at the Slade as a visiting artist invited by Alan Stocker editing Lady Victoria’s Training, a satire on the upper classes with its theme of the dominant women. I had the cans on and as I played a scene where Lady Victoria is filmed against the background of the Thames at Oxford and her veils floats out in the breeze his voice came over the headphones: “I am the tree you are the branch” and I took off the headphones in surprise.

“Did you hear that Sara?” I asked.

“Yes it was Lawrence” she had stated without surprise.

I had my first collector, a barrister who asked blatantly for a drawing.

 “I’d love a sketch of the judge, old chap.”

I tore a page out of my sketchbook and handed it to him.

“Oh thank you, but please sign it,” he asked.

I had several requests in all and did signed sketches of the judge while he looked on as his court was turned into a circus and I began to feel like Picasso.

I remembered Lawrence, his tall lanky frame and his stutter, his red lips and his kind eyes. In his studio flat near the Slade we chatted together like equals and we spoke about our work. He used to squeeze my paintings that I had done in impasto to tell how long ago that they had been made.

“Your paintings look like they have all been made in one piece” he had remarked to me once and I realised that his observation was true. I had said that the trees that he had painted in a little landscape hanging on his wall were anthropomorphic and were figures.

“Do you know what Michael you are the first person that ever has noticed that” Lawrence had said.

The thoughts of becoming a famous and influential artist filled my mind as I sat in the Old Bailey and if I were too be acquitted here today then that’s what would happen. One of the world’s greatest authorities, a Slade professor, an artist, a writer of influential art history books had put pen to paper and called me a  genius.

I flashed back to the London University Square talking to Lawrence with Stocker and Jean Matthieu standing at a respectable distance. “Would you like to go to Quaglino’s for lunch Lawrence?” I had invited him. I had heard that he went there sometimes.

Later Stocker said to me in awe:”I could never have asked Lawrence out to lunch like that” he said.

“Well students don’t do they? I replied grinning.

The judge’s gavel interrupted my musings: “I think that this is a good time to adjourn the court for lunch and we will return at two o’clock.

I was brought out of the picture of him that I was creating...

The jury was filling out now and Sara and I started to gather our things together.

The judge was speaking now, looking directly at me over the top of his spectacles...

“Michael Freeman you will remain in custody until two o’clock” Underhill said.

Then two police officers stepped into the dock and I clasped Sara’s hand.

“But my Lord, I have come willingly to this court today and swear that I will come every day until the verdict. A friend of mine, Dr Nick Berry is a surety for twenty five thousand pounds and I would not let him down you may be assured” I protested.

The judge gave me a condescending look. “Nevertheless you will stay in the cells over lunch” he replied.

Screw’s hands started to grasp me and if I had resisted I would have been dragged down to the cells by force.

“See you after lunch” I said quickly to Sara.

She smiled wanly as I was led down the stairs to the cells

The screw locked me in a cell with a wooden door for those defendants who were appearing in one of the courts.  After a while I heard the rattle of keys and a screw unlocked the door and a trustee prisoner entered the cell and deposited a tray with some take-away aluminium food boxes on the small table and a half bottle of red wine.

“Enjoy mate” the trustee prisoner said in a friendly way as he left.

“Thank mate” I replied as the screw banged the door shut. I took the lids off the boxes and tucked into a prawn curry, nans and special fried rice with a plastic fork washed down with half a bottle of wine pleased that Sara had sent in a meal.

 I wanted to be high for the afternoon’s court appearance but  these cells were not the high security cells but had wooden doors with wire mesh on the ceiling and if I had a toke in here it would stink the place out. There was no window to blow the smoke out of and no ventilation vent that I could blow the pungent smoke into so I smoked anyway, blowing the smoke up into the air out through the wire where it floated up to the high ceilings...

As I started my case to the jury I looked up to see Bella looking down at me with a tortured expression on her face. I pressed my hands together in a praying gesture and tried to smile and turned back to the jury and saw the judge giving me a disapproving look that I ignored.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury when the Obscene Publications Squad raided the registered offices of Videx Limited they carried a warrant. On that warrant was the name of one of my Videx titles namely the Videx Video Show. Three months ago I was unanimously acquitted here in the Central Criminal Court by a jury like you. I would not be here at all today if that police raid had not taken place for a film that the police had deemed obscene but was found not to be. The charges of perverting the course of public justice knowing it had been made against me arose simply because I blanked some trade videos that I kept on my desk for business reasons. I had an ongoing deal for a co-production with an Italian film producer and I had been viewing his work in the office. The other tape was sent in by an amateur filmmaker who had sent in his film for consideration in a contest for which Videx was offering a thousand pounds for any film that it published on the next Videx Video Show which incidentally was the first video show for adults” I explained.

The women in the front row of the jury never picked up her pen and rest looked unsympathetic. I looked up in the public gallery and Bella was gone.

 “The implication, ladies and gentleman, is that I destroyed evidence of Videx Ltd publishing the film on the warrant that day at the Videx Video Show. However that assumption would be false because the Videx Video Show was a professionally made and edited film with titles and credits. One of those credits said, written, produced and directed by Mike Freeman, which is my name. To erase the films on my desk was a useless enterprise if it was to destroy evidence that I had made the Videx Video Show. The credits also proudly presented Videx Ltd as the publishers of the Videx Video Show. This brings me to the question of why I erased those videotapes and the answer is simply that I was told not to have videos of any kind in my office by the company solicitor David Offenbach” I said making my point looking at the jury.

The judge was banging his gavel. I looked at the clock and saw that it was time to go home. The time had moved so quickly that it seemed that life was speeding up for me.

“You were marvellous and I can’t see how they can find you guilty now” Sara said as we walked out of the Old Bailey...

“Sometimes the innocent are found guilty in English courts because the truth is distorted and then there is interfering with the jury. That woman who takes notes when the judge speaks but none of my defence. The police have these professional jury members who once on a jury can persuade the other to find you guilty” I explained.

“But how can they do that?” Sara asked, her eyes wide with astonishment.

“I don’t know but I have been told about it by a very reliable source, Then another technique is accidentally meeting a member of the jury in the pub and letting some destructive comments about the defendant be heard” I said.

“Do you think that is what they are doing to you?”

“I think that they will try every trick in the book to pervert the course of public justice knowing that it had been done” I said laughing ironically as we went down the Underground.

Confessions

Chapter 24

“I couldn’t stay in the witness box because I would have started crying and bawling. We have become good friends and there is something that I want to tell you. I was born in a little village in India and I have never been to America” Bella said.

I knew then that she thought that she might not ever see me again and that she was confessing her sins.

 “We knew all the time silly and know people like to romanticise but I’m glad that you have told me” I said smiling and giving her a big hug.

“Well I’m going to confess too, my name is not Sara but Saraswady” Sara said blushing and looking down at the floor.

I laughed and Bella joined in. “In English law one can call oneself by any name and even change one’s name officially by deed poll. I have to confess too that I changed my birth name from Muldoon to Freeman by deed poll” I admitted laughing at the surprise on Bella’s face.

I filled my pipe and took a deep inhalation of the Moroccan hash and felt my brain fire up. “The world is but a stage and we all play our parts upon it” I uttered the words of the bard, “and sometimes we take the centre of the stage in a black drama like today...”  I said with an intonation of impending doom.

I leafed through documents and looked through a list of “Witnesses to be called Roger Atkinson, Peter Kruger P. Supt., Bryan Murray P.C., Phylis Turvil Dr.” To be called by the prosecution QC. I read quickly through the statements. Atkinson I thought was a photographer who developed his own and I remembered Denis Lemon of Gay News saying we will be sending a photographer. I imagined him looking through the big black and white bromides taken during what the press had dubbed The Wimbledon Siege. I came to a document that described Superintendent Peter Kruger charging Currey and Lindsay at Wimbledon Police Station. Kruger told Lindsay when charging him that he had found that he appeared as an “artist” in the Videx Video Show. When Currey had been charged and asked if he wanted to make a comment he had replied “No Sir, not at present Sir.” He was thinking of his statement being heard by a future jury I knew.

The second trial continues

“I would like to call my first witness Superintendent Peter James Kruger” the Crown Prosecutor said.

Kruger entered the witness box and the prosecution started to speak.

“Are you Superintendent Peter James Kruger of Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publication Squad?”

“Yes I am.”

“Did you charge John Edward Currey and Simon Lindsay James Honey at Wimbledon police station where you had arranged to meet them?”

As the prosecutor spoke I wrote down notes thinking that if Kruger had arranged to meet me I might have taken the first plane with Sara to Amsterdam if Nick had agreed. I remembered sitting in the police van with Kruger, spending the night in the cells and him refusing bail. “The dirty lying bastard” I thought.

“Michael J Freeman was charged at Wimbledon Magistrates Court and refused bail. Is this correct Superintendent?

“Yes Sir.” Kruger replied.

I looked at Kruger in the witness box where I had placed him. “Are you Superintendent Peter James Kruger of the Obscene Publications Squad at Scotland Yard?

“Yes I am”

“Are you a person who is in the habit of charging defendants with crimes that they clearly did not commit?

“No I am not”

“When you arrested me for charges related to Videx Video Show refuse bail on the grounds that I had squirted acid at you during the raid? I spat the accusation at him.  I would reveal the evil lies that he had told in order to keep me in custody and destroy Videx back at him in revenge.

Those above knew that Videx could not run without me and the other staff would not realise that the Obscene Publications Squad ‘s occupation of the Videx offices was illegal and that I could have continued to run Videx if I  had been granted bail.

“Detective Inspector Kruger may I suggest to you that when you refused bail at Wimbledon Magistrates Court on the grounds that I had committed a crime of violence and had squirted acid at you knew that this was false and that it was part of a plan to deprive Videx of its director and frighten other Videx employees from attending work and thus stopping Videx Video trading?”

“I honestly believed that you were squirting acid and when I sniffed the plastic shampoo bottle it smelt acidic” Kruger lied as he had been told to lie.

“The violence charges were later dropped when the so-called acid turned out to be water no stronger than that found in swimming pools. Is this correct?

“Yes the charge was dropped when an analysis showed the result that you just referred to” Kruger replied.

Thank you Superintendent I have finished with you, I said, fixing the foreman of the jury firmly in the eyes. “Liar’’ I mouthed the words and the juryman nodded imperceptibly in reply.

The judge banged his gavel “Michael Freeman please note that lip reading is not allowed and all communications should be by the spoken word.”

“Yes my Lord” I replied.

The prosecution jumped up to cross examine. “Do the police usually refuse bail in cases where the defendant is charged with a crime of violence?”

“Yes Sir this is common practice” Kruger replied.

“Why is that Superintendent?”

“In order to protect the public Sir.”

“And in this case you believed that the defendant had squirted acid?

“Yes Sir.”

“This was not part of any plan but what was common practice among the police?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Thank you, Superintendent, I am finished questioning you,” the Prosecutor said.

The public schoolboy game of adversary law saw the trial purely as a game where one QC outwits another and the theatrical show of justice went on farcical.

The QC for Sara was speaking: “Sara Bhaskaran came to this country when she was ten and secured a place at Banbury School of Art when she was fourteen...”

I picked up my pen and resumed sketching as her QC stabbed me metaphorically in the back running a defence of duress on behalf of Sara.

“She was a naive virgin when she met Freeman and fell madly in love with him and she ran away from her parent’s home in Bicester at the tender age of seventeen to live with him. Later she was employed by Freeman in a minor capacity answering the phone. The charge today refers to the destruction of names and addresses and she only took part in this act because Freeman was the boss and she was  obeying his orders” he said.

“I never told him to say that” Sara whispered a tearful note in her voice.

“I know they find out everything from the police and say anything that they want” I assured her absolving her from guilt.

The trial was adjourned for lunch and I was escorted down to the cells again. This time not to a cell but to a large room full of prisoners on trial here today; I looked around the room scanning faces for someone I knew from previous times in prison but there was no-one. The screw opened the door and my take away meal was brought in and I ate it being stared at by fifty or so defendants or those convicted awaiting sentence. After my meal I decided to take a toke in front of everyone and I suddenly walked into a corner of the big cell and faced the wall. After getting out my pipe I took a big hit, then another until I was high. I stuck the phallic shaped pipe up my anus and a piece of hash under my foreskin. I expected there to be a grass among this motley crowd and that I would probably get a strip search tonight. I suspected that the jury was nobbled and that the judge would sum up against me. I had this intuitive feeling that I would be in a cell in Wormwood Scrubs tonight.  

“Ladies and gentlemen when the Obscene Publications Squad raided the registered offices of Videx Ltd there was one name on the warrant and it was the Videx Video Show and on the credits was my name as writer, producer and director and the name of Videx Ltd. Videx was a limited company registered at companies house, a producer of over twenty one hour videos plus the two hour Videx Video Show. We were very successful on the European market and earning foreign exchange for this country and the future looked bright. Videx Ltd paid all its taxes and employed five people.  It was not guilty of publishing obscene or indecent images but the company has now been forced into liquidation.” I looked angrily at the judge because he was guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of public justice by letting it be known to me that I would get four years imprisonment if I did not and I knew from the fleeting look of guilt that crossed his face that he was party to a wider conspiracy to take out Videx and me along with it. My greatest fear at this time was that my life license would be revoked and that’s really why I agreed to the voluntary liquidation of Videx Ltd, a thriving business supplying the public with what they wanted for their private entertainment.   “The OPS took the tools of my trade, my cameras, lights, microphones and other equipment worth a total twenty thousand pounds. However, that did not destroy Videx Ltd because it was able to spend another twenty thousand pounds to purchase new professional equipment. Videx went into liquidation with debts of just seven thousand pounds which I say was an artificial debt created by the OPS raid under the warrant, namely exclusively the Videx Video Show. My company has been taken out without a judge or jury. I only blanked a few tapes of potential business partners’ work and made no effort to deny making the Videx Video Show because I am proud of having created the first adult video show in history. When I asked the police, through my solicitor why they were holding my equipment their excuse was that they were testing it to prove that I had made the Videx Video Show, but as my name and the company’s name on the credits proves that the holding of my equipment was an effort to prevent me making more films and to take out Videx Ltd which is what is what happened in spite of being acquitted of all the charges made against myself and the company” I said but noticing that no-one on the jury were smiling or appeared sympathetic.

The prosecuting QC swept back his silk robe and placed his hand upon his hips. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury Freeman has made much of the Videx Video Show was openly published with his and the company credits on it. But let us look at   those video films that he tried to destroy but failed because the brilliant work of forensic scientists at New Scotland Yard managed to recover enough images of a contentiously obscene or indecent nature and further charges could have arisen from the evidence that Freeman tried to destroy. He also ordered Sara Bhaskaran to destroy evidence that was contentiously obscene or indecent and had been published by Videx Ltd and by Freeman. I suggest to you ladies and gentlemen that Freeman set out deliberately and wilfully to pervert the course of public justice knowing that it had been done and from the time that he refused to let in officers from the Obscene Publications Squad he carried out a systematic destruction of evidence that could have resulted in convictions at a future trial. I ask you to go out and find Michael Freeman guilty of perverting the course of public justice knowing that it had been done” he said with a smile of triumph on his face.

As the Prosecutor stated his case I knew that I would be going to prison tonight and that I would be sleeping in a cell. He was good. I had to admit that he was doing his job under the rules of English Law, the adversarial system to find me guilty but on the other hand he knew that the judge was not impartial and that would sum-up to find me guilty. As I saw the women in the front row taking notes on why I should be found guilty I had a sick feeling in my stomach because I knew that I would be once again incarcerated in a small twelve by eight concrete cell with a massive wood and iron door and with oxygen coming in through two small frames of glass in a steel window with more horizontal bars on the outside. I would sleep on a hard coyer mattress on a rigid iron bed six inches off the floor.  I would be serving ten out of fifteen months but would they recall me that was the question preying on my mind.

The judge began his summing up and immediately I knew that he was biased and I was going down.

“Freeman has made much of his equipment being taken by Scotland Yard but then this is normal procedure on all police raids carried out under the obscenity laws of this country. Also he has maintained that his intentions were not to destroy evidence and that the films were not his or the companies but one can believe that he was conspiring to publish contentious obscene or indecent videos. The obscenity law is ongoing and officers from Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad were quite right to decide that the videos that Freeman partially erased were evidence for use in another obscenity trial against Freeman and Videx Ltd...”

Underhill’s words went on and on as I sketched him fixing his image forever on a two dimensional surface.  The last image I drew of him was of him burning in hell and truly I wished him there with all my power...

 “How do you find Michael Freeman   guilty or not guilty of perverting the course of public justice knowing that it had been done?”

“Guilty.”

“How do you find Sara Bhaskaran, guilty or not guilty of perverting the course of public justice knowing that it had been done?”

“Guilty”

An OPS officer approached the judge carrying a copy of Hardcore a film about police corruption and containing so sex scenes at all.

“My Lord, I would apply for an order to destroy this video Hardcore” he addressed the judge holding up the box that showed Kent Boulton spanking Poarn and her cowering away from him.

They had destroyed the documentary on censorship that they had taken on the first raid and destroyed it and now they were going to destroy my first political crime thriller Hardcore. I felt sick like they were killing another of my children...

The judge Underhill looked at the box in disgust as though it was an example of the evil that I created. “Of course I will sign a destruction order detective,” he said.

“But it is not a sex film of any sort, it’s about police corruption” I shouted.

The judge looked at me with a self righteous expression on his face. “Silence: I sentence Michael Freeman to fifteen months imprisonment for perverting the course of public justice knowing that it had  been done. The charge of possessing eight grams of cannabis resin, a class C drug will lie on file. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in nineteen sixty nine for murder and is on life licence...”

As Underhill mentioned the word “murder” , jury members looked at me in a self righteous manner assuming that their verdict was right and that I was an evil man. I stared back a look of contempt on my face knowing that several of them had probably masturbated over pornography in the past and felt ashamed of it.

“This conviction for murder enables me to make a recommendation for recall but I make none at this time because the guilty verdict in this case is for a nonviolent crime and Freeman appears to be no physical danger to the public...” Underhill said, looking over at me as though he had done me a favour.

I wondered why he had done me this favour in not recommending my recall. Was it that a small amount of the desire for honour, truth and justice remained in his heart or was it part of an evil plan to recall me quietly with no publicity when I  had finished the fifteen month sentence? It must be the latter I decided.

“Have you anything to say before they take you down?”

“Goodbye Mike, I’ll visit you” she whispered.

“Only that I am innocent and had no intention of perverting the course of public justice” I replied staunchly.

“Take him down”  

Once again I stood condemned for the same crime in a Kafkaesque world; corrupting  the youth.

A Convict Again

Chapter 25

Transportation in a prison coach, handcuffed to another convict.

“Got a three, how long did you get mate?”’

“Fifteen months”

“What for? Mine’s for burglary, just do rich people’s drums, know what I mean like?”

“Oh, mine’s for destroying police evidence in a raid” I replied.

“What’s that all about then?”

“I make blue films,” I explained.

“That’s all right as long as there are no kiddies involved; do you know what I mean like?”

“Yeah I know what you mean; performers were required to show two photo documents to show age verification and all our girls were all over eighteen” I replied wondering why I was letting myself be questioned by a burglar. “You say that you only rob rich people? How do you know they are rich” I asked.

“Easy mate you get this mag called Country Life and others as well out of Smith’s then they have pictures and names and addresses of all their big mansions” he replied laughing.

 I laughed along with him, noticing that he was dressed like a country squire with the clothes, hat and everything.

“‘Ere what’s your name mine’s Eric?”

“Pleased to meet you Eric, I’m Mike Freeman” I replied, reaching over my right hand which was unchained and shaking his left.

“You done bird before then mate?”

“Yeah done time for violence” I replied giving him a hard look suggesting that he could be my next victim.

Eric the burglar became silent and stared out of the window into the dark rainy night, the rain soaked windows reflecting bright neon red on this coach of the damned on its way to hell.

The coach turned off the motorway and passed White City Underground Station before turning up Du Cane Road. My stomach turned as the coach turned off Du Cane Road and entered the big courtyard, passed the hostel where I had been released in 1979 and into the big open gates of Wormwood Scrubs Prison.

In Reception we shed our civilian clothes and dressed in the grey uniform that denotes a convicted prisoner, then were all stripped searched and had to squat over a mirror.

“Squat over the mirror lad”   the screw ordered.

 I squatted down over the mirror glancing down to see the reflection of my genitalia. I had some cannabis resin, some of the Moroccan that I had moulded to the shape of my penis and pulled the foreskin down over it. After a while the mucous membranes of the penis would start to absorb the THC and like now I was high. As I squatted I knew that my sphincter muscles would show nothing.

 Issued with a prison kit and bed sheets we made our way across an expanse of black tarmac, a cold wind blowing the rain against our faces and soaking our blanket-like clothes over to the convicted prisoner’s wing.

The escorting screw unlocked the door at the end and once again I smelt that peculiar smell that I could never get out of my nostrils; the smell of boiled cabbage, urine and excreta mixed with the odour of tortured bodies.

“Three bodies on Sir” the escorting screw announced.

“Thank you Sir” he replied. Then he turned to us three unfortunates. Give me your reception cards” he asked.

I handed him mine and he looked up at me “Freeman your cell number is 4/48” he informed me.

“Thank you Sir” I replied politely not wanting to lose any of my ten months remission for good behaviour.

“Right Freeman up to your cell, get your water and bang up your door.”

“Yes Sir, I replied, grasping my bedroll and kit. I climbed the creaking iron staircase up to the fourth landing, the metal groaning, my hard leather black clumpy, prison shoes clattering on the stairs. As I reached the Fours announced by a big figure four painted on the wall I looked to see which way the numbers went. My cell was down on the left and I walked along to 48 to find the cell door open and on the bolt. I went inside and the cell reminded me of a painting I had done in the Seventies, the cream coloured painted walls with the bricks showing starting half way down from a white washed wall and ceiling, the plain wooden floor from which mice would emerge at night, the thick wooden furniture. I picked up the jug and looked inside the plastic chamber pot that luckily was fairly clean and made my way down to the recess.

“Put your slippers on cunt” a shout muffled by stone, wood and iron remonstrated.

The recess had the red tiled floors, the walls the same colour scheme as in the cells that I was always reminded of in my paintings and drawings, a world that I had never really expected to return to again. In the past looking at those terrible images reminded me of the awful environment that English prisons have and were meant to be a reminder but now I was back again and the nightmare had become true. I filled my jug with water and made my way back to my cell treading as softly as I could. I pushed open the door of my cell and went inside, then gathering my resolve I took the bolt off by sliding it back onto the door and banged it shut, hearing the automatic lock shoot home.

 I sat on the hard six inch high bed my head in my hands. After a while I unrolled my bed-pack and made up the bed and later I was half asleep in my narrow celibate bed when I heard the night screw coming around the landings switching off everyone’s light.

Back Inside

Chapter 26

I awoke in the morning the prison bell ringing in my ears and as I opened my eyes and looked up at the bar windows the awful reality of my predicament hit me

This was day one of ten months of incarceration and I would serve it with certain advantages that I knew the system. I folded my blanket and sheets and arranged them in a box on the mattress. I could hear the screw unlocking the doors and working his way towards me. The door was unlocked and put on the bolt without seeing the screw. I bent down and got my over full chamber pot and water jug and made my way along the slate landing towards the recess to join the slopping out queue, holding my breath from the stench as I emptied my pot down the big sluice and pressed the button that flushed it down. Then I queued for water from a tap on the wall and made my way back to my cell.

A screw standing on interconnecting bridge in between both sides of the landing was shouting at the top of his voice.

“Only two trips to the recess and then bang yourself up.”

I walked along the landing to where the screws were taking applications and asked for two forms, one for education, the other for newspapers and magazines.

“Finished slopping out, back to your cells and bang-up. Don’t hang about on the landings yapping” the screw’s stentorian voice echoed around the old Victorian prison wing and mixed with the sound of other shouting screws on other landings, the banging of doors, the rattling of keys and the sound of the breakfast cans and trays being unloaded and put on the hotplate below. I put my hand on the door, took off the bolt and closed the door making the lock shoot home.

The landing screws would unlock a landing at a time and I sat on the wooden chair by the door at the little table set in the wall waiting for the screw to unlock for breakfast.

“Never wait stop tension” the old prison survival mantra flashed through my brain and I got down on the wooden cell floor and started to do press-ups

I could hear him unlocking now, working his way down towards my cell number forty eight. He had to do both sides of the landing and he had started at the beginning of the Fours, number one cell and then he would unlock every door passing from one side to the other by way of a landing bridge.

I realised that I was hungry. The door opened and I exited the cell onto the landing joining the procession of grey uniformed men down to the hotplate, rattling my way down the swaying stairs, so narrow that only a single file of prisoners could go down it. I joined the queue making its way along the cans and trays of food. I took a plastic tray and took a cob of bread from the basket.

“Where’s the Mother’s Pride? A prisoner behind me in the queue quipped and even the screw supervising the hotplate smiled.

“Porridge?” a prisoner hotplate worker wearing a white jacket asked dipping a ladle into a big aluminium thermo canister.

“Yes Please” I replied, catching his eye and grinning.

The prison grapevine would have already known if Mickey Muldoon was in the prison as everyone had heard of him. Now I was Freeman and no-one knew that name...

I held out my tray and a square of hot potato and cheese, Cheese Goulash was put into one of the compartments.

“Jam?”

I held my tray towards the white jacketed prisoner and he put a spoonful of watered down prison jam, supposedly made at Holloway in one of the compartments.

“Thanks” I said.

“Diesel?” the orderly stood at a big urn of hot tea operating the tap and I held my cup underneath.

“Marge?

“Yes please.”

The orderly took one of the small circles of margarine from a tray and popped it onto my tray

“Thanks," I said passing in front of an orderly who had a little copper measure with a handle, made in the prison workshops. He dipped it in the tray of white sugar, filling it up.

“On your porridge or in your tea mate?”

“On my porridge” I replied.

I climbed up the staircase and walked along the Fours landing to my cell, opened the big heavy door, that was wood reinforced with steel and with the heads of big bolts going right through the door and remembered doing a painting of one. I used to look at my prison paintings sometimes but I never hung any on the wall because they were too psychologically heavy. I put my tray on the table and pushed the door shut and sat down to eat. I cut open the bread cob that I knew the prison kitchen had baked and put the margarine one half of it, spreading it out then I put the slice of cheese goulash on, sprinkled it with salt and ten bit into it. As I did so my memory evoked the taste of years of eating this dish and actually it was quite tasty. I knew that the kitchen used Cheddar cheese. I put the watery jam on the other half, took a bite and sipped at my pint white plastic mug of prison tea and it was insipid and contained a modicum of milk that made it appear grey in the dull light of the cell. I would buy some tea-bags in the canteen today as “receptions” always got paid the first day to prevent tobacco addicts lending from “tobacco barons”.

I finished my breakfast eating everything. Soon I would get into the prison routine and keep a low profile, get into my drawing and possibly obtain a set of acrylics or watercolors...I was starting to write things now as well. I had to keep working and creating and then my ten months would pass quickly.

I entered the canteen and surveyed the shelves as I made my way along the queue. I would buy Pilchards, sardines, tin of Marvel milk powder and T-Bags.

“Ounce and half of black, papers and matches” the hard looking con with the tattooed shaved head demanded in front of me.

Most cons bought tobacco with their meagre prison wages that they earned in the prison sweatshops and I was glad that the authorities had to give enough money to allow prisoners to buy enough tobacco to supply their habit in order to maintain discipline. Since being interested in politics I had learnt that a prison is a model of an authoritarian state and that it was interesting to study

Doing Bird

Chapter 27

I got into the prison routine and obtained writing material, notebooks and most of all drawing books. I then carried on my chosen vocation of making forbidden images of legal sexual behaviour. I always thought if it was legal to do then it should be legal to depict.

I blew the perfumed talcum powder around the doorframe then squatting over my chamber pot I excreted the phallic Japanese porcelain pipe. Then I rolled back my foreskin and took out the piece of cannabis resin.  I felt slightly high all the time I carried it there unwrapped in cling film because I was afraid of the plastic’s carcinogenic properties. I took off a small piece and listening intently for the sound of a screw or the Judas peephole slowly being slid open. All I could hear when pressing my ear against the door jamb was the sound of prison radios. It was just after breakfast on a Sunday morning and the screws would not be unlocking until dinnertime at midday. We would be given an hour’s exercise in clement weather walking around the concrete circles to nowhere this afternoon. I placed a small ball of cannabis into the pipe and lit it with a gas lighter, holding the flame on it until it turned into a small grey fragment of ash. Then I picked up my little hand mirror and climbed up on the heating pipe at the back and holding it out of the window, checked to see if any screws were about and blew the smoke out of the window.

When I was high I sat down on the bed and started to draw. First a girl’s eye, then the other until the face image looked back at me, and then I introduced a muscular male into the picture, a vision of myself. I drew the girl’s hand around the enormous penis and then started to draw a third figure, a large breasted woman. By dinner time I had produced three erotic drawings. I would draw every day and I would publish them when I was released. I would continue to produce images until my dying day no matter what I vowed.

I opened the Guardian and begun to read the letters section to which I had contributed in the past then read an article where Thatcher went on about the corruption of our youth and culture by the tide of pornography that was flooding into Britain. I could have penned a riposte straight away and posted to the Guardian as I had letters published from prison in the past but now Freeman had to keep a low profile. I had this faint hope that the Parole Board would heed the judge’s word and conclude that “pornography” was not a factor in what they called “reoffending while on license.” The members of the Parole Board had to decide whether a parolee sentenced to “life” could re-offend and kill someone again. I knew that in my case that this was not remotely possible now that I was not paying corrupt police officers but instead fronting up the Obscene Publications Act and publishing my erotic pornography openly. I decided to accept the label “pornographer” even though I considered it a gross generalisation and call my work “erotic pornography” that I would start as a new genre.

I walked into the Visiting Room and sat down at a table in a large room filled with tubular leaf green furniture that had been recorded traumatically in my memory and that had been the subject of many prison paintings in the Seventies. I kept my eyes focused on the door through which the visitors would enter by, then Sara came in with several other visitors looking around and when she saw me waving her face lit up in a smile and she walked up to my table.

I stood up and grasped her small slender body in my arms and embraced her, kissing her passionately on the lips. “She is so beautiful” I thought.

“I have brought you something,” she added, pushing her tongue into my mouth.

I felt a ball of cling film wrapped substance in my mouth and grinned.

“Will visitors and inmates sit down please” a screw’s voice filtered into my brain. I took her hand and pulled out her seat and we sat down not taking our eyes off each other’s faces as we did so.

Mike, are you all right?” she asked her face a picture of concern, her brown liquid eyes filling with tears and transmitting unequivocal love.

“Of course I am, I’m fit as a fiddle working out every day, the food is not bad and now you are here to see me I feel  great” I said smiling and grasping her hands. I looked into her eyes. “I have missed you so much,” I told her.

“Oh Mike I have missed you terribly...” Sara said in her little girl’s voice frowning.

 “I need a cup of tea,” I replied, moving the ball around my mouth.

“Oh yes of course; I’ll go and get some tea,” she said, getting up and walking over to where the lady volunteers of the WRVS served cups of  tea, coffee, soft drinks, biscuits, sweets and chocolate bars.

I watched her as she walked very gracefully, her long black hair flowing down her back until it reached past her waist. She was dressed in a long Malaysian orange and yellow dress with the Monsoon jacket that I liked and wearing sandals. I thought of the many nights of threesome passion we had enjoyed together and hoped that I would get out at the end of my fifteen month sentence. If I were recalled then I would never know when I was getting out again. Prison I knew was a great relationship destroyer...

Sara returned with a tray full of biscuits, Kit e Kats and two cups of tea. “I got you chocolate Digestives” she exclaimed smiling and showing a row of perfect white teeth.

I picked up a can of Coke and drank down the small package that slipped down my oesophagus.

“I know that you don’t like Coke Mike,” she explained unnecessarily.

“Here you are, I have finished with it now” I said, picking up a Kit e Kat and started to eat it with my tea. I ate lots of sweets and chocolate on the visit while we chatted, something I always resisted doing outside.

“Lindsay has started to make films again Mike” Sara informed me.

I was surprised at this piece of news because I had imagined that he would be too afraid of going to prison” Oh really I’m so happy to hear that because he is carrying on” I replied.

“He promised to come and visit you soon,” Sara told me.

“I thought that he would too scared,” I said, voicing my thoughts.

“I would because I am on probation and they have warned me not to be involved in the making of pornographic films and I have to get a job” Sara informed me.

“They are the soft police and restrict people’s civil liberties by threatening them. Actually there is no law against pornography as such...” I replied, stopping myself going off on some big argument against censorship.

Time is relative; an intellectual construction in a world that worked on perpetual motion, no beginning, no end and in a prison visits room visited by a loved one I could see the clock moving.

“Visit over for Freeman” a screw said.

I stood up immediately and embracing Sara. I kissed her. “Goodbye and don’t worry about me, I’m fine” I told her.

In the search room I squatted over a mirror the climbed on a box for a body search

The screws were searching for drugs but the prison was full of them with dealers inside and outside supplying the hundreds of customers with substances that would make life bearable and even pleasurable.

Tripping Again

Chapter 28

It was getting cold now in December and I had done four months of my sentence. I had secured a place on the cleaners and I now kept the toilets and slopping out areas and the landings clean. The rest of the day I spent drawing and writing.

I had started to masturbate again after Sara’s last visit when she had sent me in sexy magazines and Janus a spanking magazine. The latter featuring pictures of Meadows, Evelyn Simmonds, Jane Griffiths and as I looked at the pictures my penis became erect. I smiled thinking about Sara going into the newsagents in Du Cane Road and ordering kinky magazines for Freeman then I got in bed and masturbated over the pictures of Evelyn Simmonds ejaculating profusely into a paper tissue that the prison supplied each week. Soon I was masturbating every night before going to sleep and sometimes at dinner time. I would get really high and start to draw an erotic fantasy or recreate one of the scenes that I had with Sara and Bella... and after a while I would enter the vision and become sexually excited. Then I would close my eyes lay on my back thinking replaying the imagery and sounds in the visual cortex. I needed some acid to actually re-experience the feel and touch of flesh.

Did I dare to go on a trip again where I could experience past events, create new ones and make images come to life in three dimensional reality?  I wanted to escape from this terrible incarceration and journey into inner space.

“Dear Derek, Sara needs a grant for a place at The London Film School” I wrote knowing that with a letter of recommendation from a famous film critic would secure her a place.

Soon after I received a letter from Sara saying that she had secured a place at film school and that her probation officer was upset and warned her again about the perils of making pornography and gave her a lecture about the “social harm” it caused.

I would spend my time writing back and as one was allowed to write on prison notepaper that was an A4 sheet of lined paper with Wormwood Scrubs, Du Cane Road, London taking up a quarter of the page. I wrote in small letters and filled in every inch with text and small drawings. I could buy stamps from the canteen and apply for an extra letter. Needless to say I wrote all I could...

One day Sara brought me up a tab of acid and I dissolved it in my coffee while on the visit.

“Nigel said that it’s pure from Sandoz, 400 micrograms he told me to tell you” Sara said and as she spoke her face seemed to morph. I looked at the visiting room clock and saw the hour hand move. We were getting a long visit probably because the screws knew that I was polite and intelligent. When they searched my cell they would look through my erotic porn collection of several drawing books and magazines and talk about it in the screw’s mess. Screws like most working class guys loved porn and I would see them reading porn books in the glass-paned office on the landing. The prisoners were no different and one would hear them openly saying “Got any porn” before being banged up for the night      

 “Wow! This stuff is strong” I said, feeling the trip coming on.

“Visit over for Freeman” the screw said.

I looked at his large beer gut pressing against his blue shirt straining to escape, his fat buttocks with a strap of a truncheon sticking out a side pocket and stood up.

I kissed Sara and felt my penis immediately erect and I pressed it into her slender warm body.

“Okay visit over Freeman” the screw said a hint of menace in his voice and could see by the way he looked at Sara that did not like Asians. “Were they trying to push me?” I thought.  No, I was getting paranoid and I had better stop it now before the trip became too heavy. “Goodbye Sara see you again soon, I’ll write tonight” I promised, pushing her away the gods looking down on this dramatic parting of two lovers...

I cleaned the cell, got a bucket of water and a scrubbing brush and I scrubbed every inch of my cell. I always did this since having a bad trip caused by small particles of dirt being magnified. As I returned from the visit going up the metal staircase to the Fours it started to warp and ripple and I could see the stress movement of the atomic structure. I realised that I had just ingested some extremely powerful lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate.

 I had to keep my cool even though the features of the convicts around me started to become distorted, some serene, some angry, promising violence, then the wicked, the devious and the mentally ill. The men about forty per white working class recidivists the rest of all different races including about twenty percent of Afro-Caribbean ancestry.  What Marx would have called the under-class or the sub-proletariat? I knew that most of them were victims of a system that had brutalised them as children and then made them into old lags who could not function in society.

 I walked into my cell and banged the door, the vibrations being to me. The screws were banging everyone up now before issuing “Tea” they could have left them to chat but the routine was a constant locking and unlocking and the noise became enormous morphing the walls of the building and rippling through the cell. I knew that I had to keep a normal appearance, even though the visual world was dissolving, until I had drawn my evening meal and was banged up for the night.  

The rattling of keys, the steps of a screw making his way around the landing, checking every cell and taking the roll call spy hole flicked up and a screw’s eye looked through, the eye was enormously magnified and then the metal flap dropped down over the Judas hole, swinging backwards and forwards until it reached equilibrium making a clicking sound that I would never forget. I wondered why this landing screw and some of the other screws looked through the spy hole even though they had just locked you in your cell.

“Ninety Two on the Fours Sir” I heard the landing screw “Mr Howard” was calling down to the P.O in the wing office.

The cell doors were opening now for the last meal of the day and all I had to do was get down to the hotplate, draw my food acting “normally” as if I was straight and then come back up. I felt the butterflies of fear start in my stomach and I thought of the breath coming through my nostrils and inhaled deeply drawing the air right down into the bottom of my lungs until they were full, then releasing the air slowly gaining control of my breathing.

The door was unlocked and the bolt put on by the screw to stop it closing and shooting the lock. I took a deep breath and taking my plastic mug I stepped out onto the grey slate landing that I had cleaned this morning, noticing as I walked towards the stairs how clean the white edges were of my landing.

I joined the queues of convicts descending the stairs all holding their plastic mugs and their morphed features reminded me of a Breugel painting. I made my way along the hotplate. The portions of food that were being put on my tray seemed enormous.

As I mounted the up going single file staircase one con was coming down illegally against the one way flow. He pushed past and jumped down onto the landing below to rush along on a journey that, if noticed by a screw, would probably result on him being charged with committing an offence against the good order and discipline of the prison. I reached the Fours and made my way along it.

“Got any porn?” a convict asked, brushing past me on the landing.

“No sorry mate” I said knowing from experience that one could only lend a precious glossy porn magazine to trusted prisoner friends because some ripped out the pages or stuck them together with semen and then returned them.

 “Porn magazines, I was going to fuck Jane Griffiths and Catherine Simmonds tonight” I thought entering my cell and banging myself up. Screws loved you to lock your own door because it made life easier for them. I sat down at  the table and looked at the “veggie pie” and the huge roll of bread and sat at the table waiting for Mr Howard the landing screw to shoot the bolt on the outside of the huge security door and look through the spy hole.

I could smell the food strongly and it was quite wholesome, smelling of carrots and potatoes, dried peas and beans but I wasn’t hungry and knew that I would soon purge my body. I could feel myself wanting to vomit but I had to control it until the screw went past. The banging of the bolts grew louder approaching my cell, my bolt was shot and the screw’s enormous eye appeared in the little round circle of glass and I pretended to eat, reminding myself as I chewed on nothing like an actor in a film. “Yes I’m playing a part in the huge exciting drama of life. I have smashed the Obscene Publications Act” I thought of transferring the meal into a couple of plastic soup bowl covering them with dish cloths and putting them in the little wooden cupboard. I will eat the food tomorrow when I come down off the trip.

Smelling the food suddenly made me feel sick and I rushed over to my plastic chamber pot and vomited the entire contents of my stomach into it purging myself until only mucus came out. I filled the plastic wash bowl with water and rinsed my face and stripped off washing my whole body until it was clean.

 If a screw looked through the spy hole I would be drawing but hardly any bothered to spy on prisoners until lights out at nine. I got my drawing book and a pen with an eraser on the end and then my porn collection from under the bed and placed them on a chair with my clothes draped strategically over the back so that the screw could not see what was on the chair. I turned the pages of Janus knowing that the editor was Paula Meadows who appeared in some of the photos. I looked at a black and white photo of her full pouting lips, large eyes and then I saw her lips move.

“I’m sorry that I told all those lies about you but the police threatened me; Spank me hard Master” Paula was saying.

I wondered about the nature of reality and the brain’s ability to conjure up three dimensional images from peoples photos and I thought of the African tribesmen who would not let the white men take their photos because they would steal their spirits. I thought that somehow the essence or vibrations of a person was innate in an image.

I turned to a photograph of Evelyn Simmonds dressed as a schoolgirl, her navy blue regulation knickers pulled down to her knees, her buttocks bearing red cane marks. Her face bore an ambiguous look of pain pleasure and I remembered the time she had asked Sara to punish her, that Sara had caned her really hard and that she had an orgasm.  I found a picture of Sara that she had sent me in and began to stare at the face and suddenly it became alive and she stood before me.  

“Mistress, I want you to beat me hard. I have been a very bad girl and I want you to punish me” Evelyn said.

“If I punish you it will be really hard. '' Sara replied her hands on her hips of her black leather riding breeches that she wore with knee high laced leather boots.

“Punish me really hard Mistress' ' Evelyn replied.  I was back in my bedroom in my first Surrey house. I looked out of the window seeing the suburban road outside and lights glowing in the dark. What was going on in those houses, what strange sexual scenarios were being played out? I looked at Sara’s face at the intense expression of anger, the wide, high cheek bones and I wondered if she had any Japanese blood after the Japanese rape of Singapore.

“Can I come, Mistress?” Evelyn asked permission, her face roseate with sexual pleasure.

“First you must make your Mistress come slave” I interjected.

“Yes Master” Evelyn replied sinking to her knees and burying her head in between Sara’s thighs

 I walked over to Sara and my lips found her lips and our tongues flickered in and out each other’s mouths. The sensations were real; as real as Sara’s petite body that was pressed against mine. At the same time I knew that I was tripping and that it was happening on a screen in my mind. I was replaying visual, audio, tactile and olfactory images in my mind and creating a fictional scene that I was experiencing as if it were real. My penis had become really hard and was beginning to ooze lubrication in anticipation of sexual intercourse.

“Let’s go and see Bella at Earl’s Court” I said, taking her hand. I propped a photo of Bella up beside hers on the back of the chair and concentrated on her face  until  it suddenly became animated, the eyes looking at my eyes, her face grinning like she usually did when she started to get sexually excited.

She was bending over on the  bed “Come on Mike fuck me in the ass” she invited looking at me over her shoulder an inviting look on her face.

Suddenly flashes of me dying of E Coli flashed through my mind. “No” I screamed realising that I was shouting out loud as the word echoed around the cell reverberating in my brain.  Bella knew that I never buggered Sara and that she wanted to let me and also that she was used to anal sex. I felt a bad trip coming on and visions of the disease ravaging my body made me re-experience the intense itching that I had felt in my urethra.

“All you have to do is piss Mike” the words of Nick Berry entered my mind  and I felt like a piss I got up wanting to cleanse my urethra of the ordure that I had entered my urethra from Jane Griffith’s anus.

“Go on fuck her arse hard Mike” Bill said.

The cameras were not even running but as I looked at Bill and at Jane’s come-on fuck-me-face Lindsay inserted his massive penis into Evelyn’s Simmonds anus.

“Come on Mike let’s give these bitches a real fucking” he said smiling the diamond on his ear started glittering  and as I looked at its sparkle it started to flash with power and I flew into its light by my side were Bella and Sara entities as we flew over London looking down at the river Thames shining serpentine. Earls Court and Olympia appeared and we all flew down to the lighted window back through time to our little flat. Then we lay entwined together on the bed.

I kissed Bella fiercely, my tongue going down into her throat as I pushed my stiffly erect penis into her. I felt the soft warm, wetness of her vagina and my finger found the small smooth round bud of her clitoris.

Suddenly the spy hole slid up and the night screw’s enormous eye appeared then he gently and soundlessly guided the flap of the spy hole down to the bottom.

I stared through the wall and I saw that he was wearing soft slippers so that he could creep around and spy on prisoners.

Then I felt the warmth of the manifestations of Sara and Bella wriggling into my small, narrow iron prison bed six inches from the floor and wrapping their arms around me. The bed levitated and rose up into the bright beam of light that shone through the wall of the cell and we went out under the stars rising up in the beam travelling towards the light source...

No Mercy

Chapter 29

Time is an intellectual construction and relative, day and night is the Earth turning on its axis. Light comes from the sun and night is when we are in shadow, seasons and changes of temperature are when the Earth circulates in orbit around the sun getting further or nearer away on its perpetual journey. The sun dial led to the clock and hours and minutes were invented and measured out by a machine.

 I had learnt to move quickly through big chunks of “time” because I was creating constantly, drawing, painting, writing and reading. I found that when I was drawing time moved so quickly. I would look at the clock and realise that I had been drawing or painting for an hour and several hours may have passed.

June 1984 was approaching and one day I awoke and realised I was going out tomorrow. However, I was not filled with joy at my impeding liberty but filled with a sense of deep foreboding that the authorities would find a reason for my recall. I knew that I was public enemy number one to the Thatcher regime and while I had served this sentence there was a constant barrage against what was called the “video nasties” and a new bill called the Video Recordings Act 1984 was being implemented.  I remembered telling the Director of Public Prosecution that I had “smashed” the Obscene Publications Act and I realised that there was a conspiracy after my acquittal in the Videx Video Show trial to invent a new act that would stop me when I was released as the Obscene Publications Act was now useless against me if I defended myself. No British pornography was being made or sold by those who were paying the police, only pirated American hardcore so I knew that the act was being made to stop me.

“Freeman governor’s call up” Howard the landing screw said. “Going out tomorrow,” he said with a grin. He hadn’t been bad to me and as prison officers have absolute power over one life could have been a lot worse but my heart beat in trepidation. I managed a smile “Yes Sir” I answered trying to slow my racing heart.

I stood outside the governor’s office breathing deeply to calm myself.

The door opened and the Chief emerged. “Freeman, look lively lad, right turn and halt on the white line, name and number to the governor.”

“Freeman 19630079 Sir” I replied.

“Freeman it is my duty to inform you that you have been recalled by the Parole Board and that you will be transferred to the Lifers’ Wing tomorrow” the governor informed me.

“Yes Sir” I said and the Sword of Damocles had fell and pierced my body, striking me with a mortal blow...

The End

I hope that you have enjoyed this true story and will read all the other volumes of the I Pornographer series.

When I first started to write there were long gaps in between volumes but now my books are selling well. I am writing every day. I am 73 now and have successfully made a career change in later life from one artistic form of expression filmmaking to another namely writing. I don’t need big budgets any more, just a laptop to write .

My fictional book The Nonce is selling well too and now that I am in full steam and earning a living I will be writing every day. Thank you for becoming one of my readers and patrons and I hope that I have not only entertained you but educated you a bit as well...Michael J Freeman.

Copyright  August 8, 2012