‘No one denies that,’ Tom interrupted. ‘It’s the divine aspect of things, Belle – what you have called the phylogenic aspect of things. Your charges have but recently evolved from the molecular state of being. Of course they are full of wonder. I’m delighted you give it expression.’
She nodded and continued. She loved her children and was concerned that the best possible teaching might not help them prevail in the rough and tumble of terrestrial life (assuming they ever returned to Earth, as she personally did not intend to do). There had been much discussion about punishment for crime; the right conclusion had been reached – that care and consultation were more effective than punishment. She wanted Crispin to talk for a moment about the bad situation on Earth.
15
Java Joe’s Story
Crispin Barcunda spoke. ‘As Governor of the Seychelles, I was plagued by petty crime. Muggings, theft, aggression against tourists, hot-rodding, break-ins and murder, which sprang from these sometimes rather petty incidents. And we had drug barons and their victims. Often the crimes were drug- or alcohol-related.
‘In short, the Seychelles was a paradigm in small of the rest of the world. Except it was a tropical paradise…
‘Only I didn’t see it as a paradise, I can tell you. Fast as we locked the little buggers up, others sprang to take their place. Our prisons were pretty savage places, sordid, old-fashioned, with frequent floggings of delinquents for deterrent effect.
‘Only we know floggings don’t deter. They just keep the middle classes happy. Of the little buggers they make big buggers with a grudge against society. I will tell you how we changed all that.
‘It says a great deal for the human race that goodness survives even in the worst places of confinement. Among faces that bear the expressions of rats and snakes, cold, merciless, vindictive, you meet faces that beam decency and kindness.
‘Such a good face belonged to a prisoner called Java Joe. Maybe he had another name, but I never heard it. Just an ordinary black man who happened to be released from a jail sentence on the day I made a very popular speech. I had addressed my audience in Victoria town square by our famous clock tower, exhorting them to value themselves and turn from crime. I had called them, I blush to say, the noblest creatures of the universe.
‘As I was resting up from this hypocrisy, this ex-prisoner, Java Joe, was shown into my presence. He was perfectly polite. He even made himself obsequious. Yet he carried himself with pride. He had come, he said, especially from Crome Island to hear me speak. I asked him if prison had reformed him.
‘His answer was simple. Delivered without reproach, it was simply, “Hell’s for punishment, not reformation, isn’t it?”‘
Crispin tugged the ends of his moustache in order to contain a smile.
‘Java Joe had come to me with a suggestion, he said. He told me he had read a remarkable old book when he was held in solitary confinement in prison. Java Joe emphasised that he was not a fussy man, but the state of what he called “the bogs” in the prison was a disgrace, planned and intended to humiliate all who had to use them. He repeated this latter phrase. This made a passage in this old book he was able to read all the more impressive.
‘”What was the book?” I asked him.
‘Joe was uncertain whether it was a history or a fiction. Maybe he did not understand the difference between the two types of writing, which is little enough, I grant you. Part of the book concerned the building of an ideal house, called Crome.
‘The architect of Crome, Joe told me, was concerned with the proper placing of his privies. By which he meant, in plain English, sir, begging my pardon, the bogs. And here Java Joe began to quote verbatim from the book: “His guiding principle in arranging the sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground.”