We suffered greatly from lack of exercise, and the closeness of our confinement began to tell upon us as the autumn approached. We had given up going out to the work-yard for our morning exercise, and kept to the little yard. This yard was beset on three sides by the buildings of the jail, and on the fourth side, beyond the high wall, Huntley & Palmer’s chimneys belched black smoke that blotted the sky. In a corner of this yard we made a hand-ball alley. No stranger alley was ever devised. Two windows, a drain-pipe, a railing across steps leading to the basement, and a ventilator grating, gave opportunity for chance and skill. And the exercise saved us.
Nevertheless, with the coming of winter the effects of our confinement could be seen on most of us. The food, also, had become bad. The margarine was often rancid. On two occasions the meat made several of us ill; and for three months I lived only on bread and porridge, both of which were, at least, clean and wholesome. Prisons are not built as health resorts, yet precautions are supposed to be taken that a mean of temperature is maintained. During a week of frost, however, the temperature in my room was 46° to 48° Fahrenheit. This was inside the cells: outside, the passage was full of draughts. Yet the prison was never ventilated, for the only place where air could come or go was the door. The result was that when one of the warders came in once with influenza, every man in the prison in time fell to it.
Yet we kept our backs straight. P. J. D. was informed by the Governor, on the authority of the Home Office, that if he would sign an undertaking to be of good behaviour for the future he would at once be liberated. He replied that the offer was adding insult to injury, and he declared that if his liberation depended on his signature of any manner of undertaking, he was destined to remain long in prison. The Chief Warder approached others of us, thinking to try the ground before any other offers were made; but he left matters as he found them.
In Frongoch at this time the same attitude was being taken. Matters there were also complicated by the attempt of the military to search out Irishmen who had returned home from England on the passage of the Military Service Act—to search them out, not for the Army, but for the pleasure of thrusting them into jails. And the result of the ensuing resistance was that seven of the leaders there were brought to Reading and put into the reception-cells, making our number thirty-five once again.