David McMillan

And Sten managed to climb up on the window there and grab this bar and wrench it up with his hands grasping this bar and pulling it up like it was strangling everybody that ever cast some slight on his perfidy.

And I managed to squeeze through virtually naked with just the things I'd need.

I couldn't even put a toe on that.

It would have crumbled away and alerted the loathsome trustees who slept in the second-best cell in the building underneath.

And it was just as well that I insisted on going that night and got out at that time because everything was slower.

I timed it during the day, but the footsteps you take are not as quick as during the day as you're walking through it.

The sound everything makes, as I've said, is there was some place that was meant to factory I needed to visit.

They'd been repaired and I had to take one nail out.

And that made a real protest at coming out of the plywood as I tore it out with some pen supplies I'd stolen from somewhere.

And all good prison escapes need a ladder, and especially this one, because there's those internal walls.

I knew not how many...

It was made out of long bamboo poles and picture frames.

Sten had tended to take an interest in oil painting the last six months and had made very solid picture frames, which when I got into the factory that had a reason

too long to go into to have long bamboo poles.

I laid two of those down, put the picture frames in between them, used gaffer tape to tie it all up.

That gave me two very long ladders, probably about, what, four, four and a half meters each, and kind of heavy with all those picture frames in it.

I told him not to make them so heavy.

I don't weigh much.

But anyway, there they were.

I mean, I'd been running and doing all of that as much as I could to build up some stamina, but