It's very unusual for me to take a moment, pause and then sit down to write.
It's even more unusual for me to type, write, scribe, scrawl and then hit delete. My writing is always a literary purge of emotion and the unexplainable for my often broken processing machine of a brain, to lay it all out so that once I've written, I read back and somehow, what I feel, what I felt, make sense and it's all there in black and white.
If my emotionally unstable personality disorder has taught me anything; it's that I like a world of black and white, as grey area's are alien, often unstable and unknown to me.
Many of you won't know this, when you read my work, but whatever words fall upon these pages, these screens, gleaned, are always scattered and thrown out in minutes, I sit, I write, and I don't stop for breath until the final drop of what I feel in that moment has ebbed like ink from a pen, in this now digital format.
It's only ever once I hit "publish" on this blog, that I go back and read what it is I churned, purged, and posted out, to you, dear readers.
After nearly a decade of Fran ramblings, here we are together on a cold December afternoon.
This is not just any cold December afternoon. It's the 10th of December.
I got off the reliably grotesque and dreary 192 bus, where the game of "what's that smell?" can lead you back into Manchester City centre and by the time you depart, and evacuate the double decker of doom, you're still none the wiser but glad of the wet windy whip around the face of Manchester's finest - the rain.
A rain that can wash away any emotion, happy or sad. Pensive or glad. And today it does. It washes over me like a tsunami of everything I've felt for the past 3 years, cascading like a never ending deluge of pain, emanating from every pore.
I step off the bus "next stop, Minshull Street," and my cold hand finds hers, just a little squeeze today, as we are both feeling the grief of a past life, and the ghost of Fran who once walked into that building, but did not walk out.
I have walked past this building a hundred times since I've been home, and it's always an act of defiance, or fuck you, with two fingers firmly up at the system that stole me, that failed me, as much as I failed it. Because for 3 years now, I've been battling with that brand, that notion of self, I'm the pariah of society, and for some bizarre reason, prisoners, ex prisoners and criminals like me are left with the dark mark, that we failed someone, somewhere, ourselves, our families, our victims and at no point do we reflect that back and scream at the grey skies of this city
YOU FAILED US TOO.
This year I submitted a piece of work for my criminology degree - it was a summary piece, "what is crime" - I proposed that crime was a social construct and backed up this summising with a quote from HG Wells "Crime and bad lives are the measure of a state's failures and crime in the end is the crime of the community," - it just so happens, my eclectic mix of references for that piece of work was graded poorly and I was told it was a piece that was "overexercising my intellect," and I will admit, I was affronted and then considered perhaps my propositions and presentations had an air of arrogance to them in my selection of Aristotle, Marx, quotes from The Golden Bough were indeed perhaps a little "let me show you" and then I thought about why I was doing an undergraduate degree in Criminology at the age of 36, and it was because I wanted to use and consolidate all of my learned and lived experience and make use of it in some pragmatic way and pull together a life of education and chaos into something meaningful - let's be honest both you and I - I'm doing it because I need to understand still, that there's more to the choices I've made than just bad character, just qualities that have grown and developed in the wrong way and that I can hang my hat on something that shows me - you are more.
Practice what you preach.
Practice what you teach.
Take today for example. 3 years ago, I wore my finest polyester primark suit with some particularly shiny second hand brogues from Vinted and disappeared into the night, and as I walk through the city with early evening dark skies, I'm aware the Christmas lights I saw in 2020 on a December night, haven't changed much as I see them, walking the pavements outside Minshull Street Crown Court a free woman.
I type, on a rather osetentatious computer, something I dreamt of owning as my own but would only have delved into unhealthy purchasing habits to have called one "mine" once upon a time, and now, in 2023. It's mine, shiny and bright and the light upon which I share my thoughts with you, my university work, my VCSE work, my Coming Home project work. It's my little ray of hope in electronic form, that things do get better and that there is no greater sense of pride in reaching a goal, no matter how silly it may seem. That this computer is the vehicle that will power the changes I'm trying to make. In every area of my life.
She sits beside me, typing away with a frown upon her face, frustrated. The dissertation distinction eludes her within mere marks of effort, dedication, blood, sweat and tears. A dissertation that has been written under duress, stress, death and defiance. She's never had it easy and we're 13 years down the road. But here we sit, side by side, click clacking on our machines, typing to the next step, the next stage of our ambitions. And we do it together. Something that didn't always look like it could happen, as the distance, disintegration and desolate nature of prison took both our freedoms and lives and turned them upside down simultaneously.
Another gross mark upon the criminal justice system's long standing history of crime - the suffering of those we love most. The nay sayers will say, if you don't want to lose what you have, if you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime. It's always a novel notion to me "want" - I don't think I've met a single woman on my journey through the justice system where "want" to do crime has ever been a motivating factor.
It's not.
The "want" is always for other things, failings and vulnerabilities we feel we have, that we plug the gap, the gaping hole of what's missing.
That's what I'm trying to unpick for myself and have been for many years and it's what makes me particularly "low risk" these days I suppose; my breaking of law, breaking of trust came in the fallout of 2016 and thereafter, so in 2023, I'm the furthest away from an act of crime I have ever been and that stands for something, for me. Desistance can be statistical, analytical, measurable, but for me, it's personal. It's my morality measurement, it's my accountability checker; that's not to say I've not been a liar and an arsehole in between, I can change my severity of impact, and I can change my motivating factors, I can address my behaviours, but as I said recently in a BBC and PRA piece, those qualities are within me and always be. The key to me being reformed, changed, is for me to measure and hold. No-one else, and with that, there is true freedom.
Freedom. Taken for granted by the many, treasured by the few. We are all prisoners to something, someone, somewhere, somehow. Never more true in today's society, global or not.
So why then, would someone who cherishes their freedom, take it back inside the prison gates? Go back to the place that it was taken and held for ransom until time ticked down and society "ok, you can have it back,"
- you can have it back BUT, we don't want you back. Remember that as a type and you read along with me.
But go back I did.
A strange thing. Email communications back and forth, with various HMP's across the UK. Cordial, jovial, polite "best wishes" firing into inboxes both mine and theirs.
No longer am I A3039EP, I am, by name, Francesca Barker-Mills, and addresses as such. The key burning anger I came home with on Friday night was this - if you can sit, chat and drink coffee with me as a fellow, an equal, a human - why couldn't we do that 2 years ago when we shared the same address, the same place, same space? Does equality only kick in when we say so?
There's the first odd and unsettling but sweetly welcomed change of pace and change of station.
"Francesca, would you like a coffee? I'll have someone bring you one whilst you're waiting,"
The conversation continues, what kind of coffee would I like, it's brought to me, with thanks and cordial conversations.
I made the coffees in 2021. That coffee machine burnt the living shit out of my right hand as I naively dabbled with cappuccino vs latte milk frothing in a vague attempt at securing a level 2 in barista skills and supporting my friends who were falling apart under the faux Starbucks pressures of prison coffee shop rush hours. Officers with keys, jangling change and coins in their black polyester pockets. Change. It was a strange feeling in my hands back then. Having had my money taken from me upon entry to prison, the feeling and weight of pound coins in my palm was a familiar but alien sensation. The trust of the prisoner, taking the money from the officer, putting it into the till, handing the change and the coffee and going about routine prison process.
The prison coffee shop shares the name of a friend of ours and when I was asked if I wanted to pop in and get some lunch, I smiled, remembering the familiarity of that name used to bring me joy and sadness entwined whilst I was serving my sentence there. I would still enjoy the process of ordering a coffee and drinking it with friends on cheap leather sofas pretending we were anywhere but here.
I talk of this with the people I'm meeting with.
The power of friendship behind bars. I glance out of the window and see the picnic table I spent hours, days, months sitting at with my little safety net of love and family in that place, and as the prison people talk, I'm swept away like some sort of time travel moment in vision - I see us, sitting together, laughing together, crying together, sneaking hugs of raw emotion and love when it's covid and we dash out of sight of the prison cameras so as not to get in trouble for human contact. When there's despair, distraught heartache, heartbreak, family ties, family dies, we hold each other in secret, and we hold each other still.
I would go to work, I would come "home" because home is what it was, and there they'd be, cackling like naughty hyenas, talking filth and fun, and silliness as only women can, stirring cups of coffee that I've never drunk since, and knowing my little pink shirt was due to appear, a little dinner, a picnic packed up of sandwiches or toast, with a hot drink to sit, together and spend time the only way we knew how to - together. That hasn't changed. For the most part.
From flashbacks of fun, family and heartache, I'm back in the coffee shop, talking shop. I feel my power returning, coarsing through my veins, I can hear my heartbreak, in a completely different way to how it used to feel in this place.
Fire, I know my eyes are flashing the brown ring of anger and passion as they tend to do, and often did in these hallways as my politics fought the system even then. Fran the equalities rep tackling hot topics like neurodiversity and equal education within these walls - I laugh, I read the prison report and saw they now have a neurodiversity specific person in place; so some good did filter through the barricade of prisoner vs prison system.
I say that, but it's no reflection on this place in its heart and soul. It was built differently, it merely suffers through the mass suffocation of policy, bureaucracy and politics of what prisons are and are "there to do" but as I saw when imprisoned and now here, free, it tries it's best. And that's all we can ask for when the chokeholds of media, propaganda, a tory government, a crackdown on crime and criminals runs riot through our society, morality and equality.
I wouldn't be here if I thought there was no hope of real change here. I left scarred, marred and traumatised and this place has it's part in that, but for the most part, it gave me space and opportunity to begin healing from what came before, and what came before that.
The mental health support I got here, saved my life. A prison officer, saved my life. When a blade was plucked and letters were written and scattered without care across a room that might as well have been a prison cell like the one's I had begun my journey in; as much as prison broke me, parts of it saved me.
I glance around the estate, the Christmas decorations are out and being putting up - and this is where you see the true reflection of a prison and it's care or lack of.
These are not some shitty old, dusty, knackered, ill-thought, fuck that decorations. They've been cared for. They look good. They're in keeping with the place, the space, it's accessorising the pain of the season, I know that - a Christmas light can make you want to die. If I saw another fairy light through the prison van window 3 years ago to this day, I would have worked harder to find my end than giving up at the lack of decent noose locations.
Forgive me, it's stark and it's harsh but it was never going to be full of the joys of Christmas, because prison isn't, and coming home from prison takes time to recover.
We put our tree up this year, a gigantic, glorious, Spruce, fresh, green, abundant in smell and festive beauty. A pretty penny was spent, but we decorated on December 1st, as is our tradition. And with every bauble we hung, we felt the pain of what is was when we did this together in 2020 and I saw the beauty of our tree and our home for just 9 days of December and then it was no more; but my wife, lived with that Fran tree, and it was an offensive reminder of what was lost. The presents wrapped by me underneath, like I knew I might not come back, she let that tree stand in our home until it's beauty faded and it's needles fell and then in a moment of pain and hurt, she marched through the city to find a saw, and carved it like a lunatic consumed with the pain of a hundred Bronte novels, and piece by piece, it lay and died. Much like it felt we did, day by day. Faded beauty, ebbing and cut into pieces.
So we feel it, when the tree goes up. And up it goes. Because the Christmas I came home, was lost in another life, another wife, another Fran, and whatever went up in 2021, was like holding our breath to see if it would end the way 2020 did, hacked to pieces and left to die.
Pheonix like instead, we set it all on fire, and from the ashes something new grew, reformed, rehabilitation but changed. Marked and scarred, but healing together.
Like wounded animals. But equally as determined to grow.
She was terrified for me, for us, going back there.
She refused to come.
Because whenever she's been there, it's not been me that she's found. It wasn't me that came home in the little red car, playing Taylor Swift, wearing the cardigan I love, eating little doughnut balls of my favourite Canadian kind, a Diet Coke in hand and my best friend riding shotgun. They had waited so long for me to come home, and I didn't.
I stayed.
So I went back, to collect the ghost of me and put it to bed, and whatever phantom existed within the prison faux Fran, died on Friday, and I buried her amongst the picnic benches, where the flowers grew. She's there now and she can stay there. Much like a grave, I can visit, I can mourn, but it's over now.
So from death to life ever after - that's why I went. To breathe life into that place. Because I feel alive, I feel on fire, with passion and purpose and hope.
It's 3 years to the day and if I can sit in a coffee shop, typing on my little laptop of joy, with my wife typing her postgraduate work next to me, with a happy, warm home with christmas tree extrodinare standing loud and proud, cook dinner and talk life, love and futures, fall asleep in her arms and know it's the safest place on earth, wake tomorrow to go to work, to do something I care about, that cares about me, mutual respect and interest, roll into Tuesday to rock up to lectures, listen, learn, write and rewrite the world around me. Then anything is possible.
It's not my privilege that made this life. I did.
I burnt it to the ground a hundred times over and then I rebuilt it better than ever before, with the foundations everyone strives for - love, kindness, trust, hope, hard work, happiness.
I once said in a class back in 2020 before Covid took the world, before prison took me, to a room of students when teaching them about Maslow's hierarchy - that many say nobody reaches self actualisation and in 2020, I felt so close.
It's 2023, and I have lived more lives than most, and I've lived to a point where I could reach 40 and I've never felt that possible for reasons a-plenty.
Fucking Maslow, I eat that hierarchy for breakfast.
Coming Home is the overarching purpose of all that I do, because I want to help as many women who have lived as I have lived, felt as I have felt, hurt as I have hurt, recover and find themselves amongst the noise. It might be for the first time, it might be like meeting an old friend, but they're in there and they deserve to live a life of love, happiness and stability even if the worlds says no, and says you can't, you shouldn't, you couldn't, the suffering must endure - I'll stand in the way of that time and time again with a defiant fuck you to that.
Yes you can.
Forever over, you can. Fuck it up once, twice, thrice, or four. There is no such thing as a closed door.
Coming Home began with the notion of a project I coined "Snakes and Ladders," that was it's original iteration, initiation and that stands to be true - Snakes and Ladders, because that's the life we live and battle and triumph and trial and continue - zoom up that ladder, succeed, smash back down that snake and suffer a setback, a hurt, a hole. But you take it square by square, step by step, ladder, snake, ladder, snake, until you reach the end of the board.
I'm just trying to create something that makes that hop, skip and jump a little easier, so instead of seeing the snakes dead ahead and feeling like they're inevitable, showing you, they're not, take a different route, jump right over. Or face it down if you have to. With power, with support, with purpose.
Coming Home will achieve what The Barker Baker never could, authentic, whole hearted, walk the walk, talk the talk and always, together.
No Fran is an island.
