UNDERGROUND

prisoners only allowed out of their cells for scheduled events such as time in the yard. It was a place where hard-core crimi- nals lived. Fortunately, Pad and Gandalf had been placed in the same cell while they waited to be assigned to their final destination.

After ten days inside Brixton Pad and Gandalf were led from their cell, handcuffed and put in a coach heading toward the windy west coast.

During the drive, Pad kept looking down at his hand, locked in shiny steel to Gandalf's hand, then he looked back up again at his fellow hacker. Clearing his throat and turning away from Gandalf's difficult grin - his friend now on the edge of laughing himself - Pad struggled. He tried to hold down the muscles of his face, to pull them back from laughter.

A minimum security prison holding up to 632 prisoners, Kirkham looked vaguely like a World War II RAF base with a large collection of free-standing buildings around the grounds. There were no real walls, just a small wire fence which Pad soon learned prisoners routinely jumped when the place started to get to them.

For a prison, Kirkham was pretty good. There was a duck pond, a bowling green, a sort of mini-cinema which showed films in the early evenings, eight pay phones, a football field, a cricket pavilion and, best of all, lots of fields. Prisoners could have visits on weekday afternoons between 1.10 and 3.40, or on the weekend.

Luck smiled on the two hackers. They were assigned to the same billet and, since none of the other prisoners objected, they became room-mates. Since they were sentenced in May, they would serve their time during summer. If they were 'of good behaviour' and didn't get into trouble with other prisoners, they would be out in three months.

Like any prison, Kirkham had its share of prisoners who didn't get along with each other. Mostly, prisoners wanted to know what you were in for and, more particularly, if you had been convicted of a sex crime. They didn't like sex crime