It was usually every six weeks, but they brought it forward two weeks to catch us out for Christmas and catch the predicted poitin run. They were right. Daithi and myself had been running through the wash for 3 days previous to create the required amount of drink for both Christmas Day and St Stephen’s Day, enough drink, both scrumpy and poitin needed for all 3 huts, 72 men in all. We had it brewing weeks in advance.
The brewing started the very afternoon of the last cage search. It was planned to allow for maximum fermentation time. We brewed the batch in 3 huge plastic dustbins, 30 lbs of sugar to each bin, bags of powdered baking yeast and every bit of fruit and surplus dinner vegetables available that you could create alcohol from.
The bins were raised off the floor on wooden planks to allow the required heat to get it to ferment to perfection. Each bin had a sealed plastic pipe sticking out from the bin lid into a jam jar full of water to allow it to vent and expel air but importantly not allow fresh air back to interrupt the brew. The lid of the bin was sealed with bread soaked in milk like a poultice treatment, which when cured and dried out it would form a seal so hard that it was air tight around the lid and body of the bin.
The yeast in each bin was bubbling and gurgling away, changing the fruit and anything else we could muster into pure alcohol. The yeast was smuggled into the cage on the visits weeks ahead and well in advance of the “run”. The Cage Christmas drinks committee had ordered all the prisoners to buy extra sugar from the prison tuck shop to feed the yeast and also to get extra fruit in their weekly family food parcel> the increase of the fruit now appearing in each parcel I’m sure sent out the alarm bells to the prison authorities that drink was on the menu.
Making drink in the cages was a process which was complicated but was also simply enough. It was a well rehearsed practice. In each of the huts there were two toilets at the end of the hut. Immediately outside the toilets was a small single tap handwashing basin, the perfect location and installation for distilling alcohol from the wash (well fermented drink mix) well away from the smell and eye of both the prison screws and the soldiers in the watch tower which was only yards from and towering over our 4 huts.
The process was simple. We used the bins to create the brew and when it was ready we began the “Run'. The timing of the run was so important - it had to be timed to as near to perfection as possible so as not to lose the “brew” in a routine cage search . . . which was a balancing act to try and squeeze as many days out of the fermentation cycle as was possible. Each hut had a huge commercial type electric hot water boiler placed on a table at top of each hut on a large table, The boiler had a large shiny lid with a handle in the middle and a water tap spout on the front and a large numbered dial beside it to boil the water or decrease it in stages as required….the perfect modern day poitin still that they never suspected. The lid's central handle was removed to allow the copper pipe into the boiler to release the boiling steam rising up from the now percolating wash mix. The lid of the boiler was sealed onto the body of the boiler, once again with a mix of milk and bread held on with a strip of homemade bandage made from a bed sheet to create the perfect seal.The toilet plumbing and flushing pipes were stripped out of their housing and rearranged to connect to the boiler lid and fold past and under the hand basin cold water tap to instantly turn the heated steam and vapour in the pipe to pure alcohol… the very finest long kesh poitin.
I didn’t drink so when we ran it through the still Daithi did all the tasting, and by the end of the run he had done enough sampling for the both of us. The other prisoners who entered or left the hut beside the still gave us their hearty greetings, some stood beside us to watch the ever slowly drip drip of the crystal clear liquid as it filled up the jam jar. Once the jar was filled it was transferred into a milk carton or plastic containers to be secreted into one of the hundreds of the huts sheets of tin that we hoped would draw the least attention or be too far up the roof for the trade screws to bother to search.
Anyway, unexpected or not at 7.15 Am the next morning the shout came the middle hut…curdach anois….the hated phrase …a cage search by the screws…the last thing we wanted or needed, a definite strike to kill off the Christmas spirit in more ways than one. The search went on and on for hours on end. We were all locked in the canteen which was the end hut but we could still hear all the banging and thumping of the tins as usual. Later on in the morning we were all taken one by one into the wash room to be humiliated and strip searched.
The cage search was a serious one, all the screw trades men (joiners, plumbers and electricians) were all taken in to ensure a thorough raid and search of each hut to try acquire all our hidden escape or drink contraband. The raid was a success - they found all our poitin hidden behind the tins in two floor cleaning gallon drums. The screws were over the moon and they didn’t hide it - they strutted all around the place displaying the psychological victory of two plastic drums one in each hand. Once the raid was over everyone tidied up their wrecked cells and the now breached tins sticking out all over the place.
That afternoon the cage OC told everyone that we would buy more sugar, that another batch was going down before Christmas. Everything needed to be fast forwarded, and it was. A roof heater was taken down rewired and pointed at the new bins of wash all day. This was to help the mix ferment faster and faster. At last the wash was ready. On Christmas Eve myself and Daithi ran the mix all day long, right up to lock up time. We distributed a share of the run to each of the huts just in the nick of time before lock up.
Christmas was a was hard time for all prisoners but in particular for the married men, their wives and children, but also for young people missing their families and girlfriends. But lo and behold out of the blue at 11pm a drunken screw entered the cage with the 2 plastic containers full of poitin, captured 2 weeks earlier, offering us them back…a sign of Christmas peace…a bit like the football match in no man’s land during World War One….maybe. But the peace was rejected; the OC told him to stuff it, saying we had more than enough of our own. But St Stephen’s Day morning revenge was on its way: a snowfall had taken place during the night and the large cage yard behind the huts was covered with snow and a huge Union Jack now appeared made from a disgruntled screws heavy boots foot prints in the fresh virgin white snow… Merry Christmas everyone from the POW spirit of a Christmas past.
⏩ Brendan Curran, Irish conflict poems 
2020
2020
No comments