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Breadcrumbs and a Spy-Hole
Edith Bone
From Conscience be my Guide: An anthology of prison writings
Edited by Geoffrey Bould, Published by Zed Books Ltd and Weaver Press
March 2006

A medical doctor, Edith Bone (1889 - 1975) was born in Hungary but became a British subject in the 1930s when she was living in England. She returned to Hungary after World War II and was arrested by the communist government in 1949 and falsely accused of being an English spy. She was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment, but was released during the 1956 uprising. For the entire seven of her incarceration, she was held in solitary confinement and for five months in total darkness. She was not given her spectacles, books or newspapers for three years.

I was deprived of books and writing materials. But I had continued to make up doggerels, which I repeated carefully three times a day, so as not to forget them. They were growing so numerous, however, that repeating them daily began to take up too much time.

It was the bread that again helped me. By this time, being an accomplished breadcrumb technologist, I decided to make myself a printing set out of bread. It must be admitted that, however little I thought of the quality of my verses, I did feel I should like to see them with my bodily eyes and not only carry them in my memory.

I began to shape letters out of long very thin rolls of breadcrumb specially processed for the purpose. When a letter was formed I gave it a little bang with my fist so that it was flattened and all the joints pressed together.

The hardest part was to make letters of the same size. This was difficult because, of course, I could not make them all at the same time. I had to wait until no one was about.

In the end I had four thousand letters and a compositor's case with twenty-six separate little pigeon-holes, and could lay out on my table not less than sixteen lines of verse, doggerel or poetry, at a time. This was great fun.

One of the things the staff made every effort to enforce was preventing me from knowing what was going on outside my cell. Why this should have been so is still a mystery to me, but they were certainly very much concerned about it. The natural result was that although I was only very mildly interested in what was going on outside my cell, I made up my mind to beat them at this game if possible. One of the amusements in prison is to make fools of the screws.

I decided I would try to contrive a spy-hole in my door through which I could look out, just as they could look in through the regulation spy-hole which is a feature of every prison door. The door was made of two-inch solid oak, but of course its surface was not flush. It was built up of several beams and there were points where three of these joined; obviously these joints were weak spots, which could be attacked.

I had noticed long before that a nail, or rather the large head of a nail, projected from the door close to the floor. It stood to reason that it must be a large nail. I decided that the first thing to do was to pull it out and see whether it could be made into a bradawl. It only projected about an eighth of an inch, but that was enough to get a purchase on it with a cord, and then pull. This is not, of course, the most efficient way of pulling out nails, but I had no other. From this a second problem arose. I needed a cord, a strong cord. Where could I get one? The jailers were sensitive about the smallest piece of string, presumably because of their inexplicable, unreasonable and inconsistent fear of suicides among the prisoners.

I decided that the best possible cord could be made of threads pulled out of the course linen towels which we were given. These linen threads were thick and strong. Of course, I could not tear strings from my towel - that would have been noticed and my cell would have been searched and my precious cord discovered. But the towel had some length wise red stripes in it, two on each side, and I decided to draw threads on each side of these red stripes, since the absence of thread would be much less noticeable there. This I did, with precautions, and that it was not at all easy, because the guard looked in every now and then through the spy-hole, and one never knew when he was peeping in. One had to be careful not to be caught in the act of pulling threads out of the towel. These were only changed once a fortnight and so it took me about two months to get the required thirty-two threads from which to plait my cord.

Fortunately for myself, I had always been a fanatical lover of knots, and possessed that most remarkable publication, The Ashley Book of Knots, which I had studied assiduously and which, in addition to knots, also contained a number of sinnets. I plaited a beautiful sinnet - a round one, the sort known as coach-whipping - out of thirty-two threads in groups of eight.

This cord was strong enough to carry even my own weight, so there was no fear of it breaking. I put a strangler knot (this, too, out of the Ashley book) round the nail head, and, with my foot against the door, pulled for all I was worth, but the nail still resisted all my efforts. I realised that mere pulling was not enough. The nail would have to be loosened by joggling it up and down and right and left. For a long time I seemed to be making no headway, but I persevered until I felt a slight wobble. I loosened and pulled day after day, for many weeks, whenever I could be sure that none of the guards was loitering near my door, and in the end I got that nail out. This was triumph.

The nail was about an eighth of an inch thick and three inches long. I put an edge on the end of it instead of the existing point by the simple expedient of rubbing it on the concrete floor, which was exactly like a carborundum whetstone, especially noticeable in its effects on the soles of one's shoes or boots. The result was a bradawl. With it I succeeded in boring a hole in my door at a point where three members of solid oak met. It was only a pinhole, of course, and it had to be very carefully concealed. It would not have done, for instance, for any wood-dust to have fallen outside, so I used my mouth as a pump and sucked out the little splinters of wood as my bradawl removed them.

By a dispensation of providence, the oak had been so blackened by age that it was exactly the colour of my black convict bread. Thus, the little hole could be stopped up by a tiny plug which matched the wood so perfectly that my spy-hole was never discovered. The plug was a necessity, as otherwise my little pin-point spy-hole would have showed up like a bright star whenever there was a light in the cell and none outside. I never took out the plug without taking care to block the light.

Until I was transferred to another prison I had the constant use of this spy-hole and it gave me more information on the routine of the prison than my jailers intended.

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