Perfume Stories: Part Four

This is not HMP Hindley.
It’s the HMP Hindley Visitors Car Park. I’m not sure buses stop here.

I was invited back by Novus to run a series of Perfume Stories sessions at HMP Hindley. A Category C Prison, somewhere between Bamfurlong and West Houghton, in the North West. I spent 8 weeks working with two groups of learners in two different parts of the Prison.

The Prisoners always have fish on Fridays at HMP Hindley. If you are lucky enough to have a Chinese money launderer and a prisoner with a hotplate on your wing, you can pool the cold chips, heat them up, add garlic, salt and pepper, Chinese chip shop style.

The first group session ran for 4 weeks in the library, helping me to coordinate the group was the librarian, Sue. She told me the most popular books in the library were about Crime and Criminality. Her easy going professionalism made the workshop environment a really positive one to work in.

One of the learners response to the Perfumes was to return to his mothers bedside at a Palliative Care Ward in Liverpool. Another re experienced the smell of his fathers work van, when they were small and lived a different life. One of the most curious stories was from a learner who was returned to the sensation he experienced at a house in the North of England. It was haunted. This particular Learner was instrumental in shaping and redesigning a large infographic which will eventually map out a timeline for these narratives.

The title Perfume Stories was always a difficult sell to a few of the learners. Most were inquisitive, however the feedback suggested they were put off signing up, because of associations with the word ‘Perfume’.

One of the Prisoners contributions to a new Infographic (work in progress)

In his visceral and searing book about the US Prison system, In The Belly of The Beast (1981)Jack Henry Abbott, talks about memory being arrested in jail, how it changes and begins to tear itself free from facts and reality. Perhaps, that’s why the Prisoners at HMP Liverpool and HMP Hindley have responded so well to Perfume Stories. It can fold back time. They become Time Travellers.