Yet what astonished me most was the sight of flowers. Their presence made the cobbled yard and the precincts seem almost collegiate. In neatly kept beds about the walls they lifted their heads with a happy gaiety very strange to some of us who had known so human a touch banished from buildings more appropriately given over to the possession of flints and cinders. A few days after we were taken through the work yard behind the main prison. Here in the work hall a canteen was opened on three days in the week for the interned prisoners who now occupied the prison, but here also was the large exercise yard, and it was covered with an abundance of flowers. The familiar asphalt paths could not be seen where they threaded their way amid blossoms. In beds beneath the walls tall flowers lifted their heads, and even the graves of hanged men could not be seen beneath the blooms that covered them.
It was an amazing sight. There were not merely flowers, a sight astonishing enough in itself; there was a prodigality of flowers. Then some of us remembered the cause. One of the graves unlocked the secret. It was marked with the letters C. T. W., and the date, 1896, to whom Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Jail” had been inscribed, and in celebration of whose passing the poem had been penned.
But neither milk-white rose nor red May bloom in prison-air; The shard, the pebble, and the flint Are what they give us there: For flowers have been known to heal A common man’s despair.
So never will wine-red rose or white Petal by petal, fall On that stretch of mud and sand that lies By the hideous prison-wall, To tell the men who tramp the yard That God’s Son died for all.
So Wilde had sung, not in protest, but in bitter acceptance, never dreaming that a poet’s song could change the flint, the pebble, and the shard of the yard he trod. But for us who came after him with the memory of his song in our minds, the miracle had been wrought. Miracle it was, and it had been wrought in no common sort, for the great yard was a lake of leaf and bloom, and the hideous prison wall was transformed by gay figures decked in raiment that not Solomon in all his glory could outvie.
Already in the pebbled entrance yard the hand of this “unacknowledged legislator” was in evidence. We were first taken across to the office, as we arrived in batches, and our money taken from us, and our kit examined. Then we were led back through the door in the blind wall into the female prison, that had been allocated to Irish Prisoners of War. The main prison was occupied by the nations of Europe: Belgians, Germans, French, Rumanians, Russians, and indeed every degree and variety of European to the number of fourteen.