This Much Is True

I was taken to Bow Street police station and led to the holding area. I was still so angry, I wasn’t even frightened. The arresting officer took me to the station sergeant’s desk, told him the nature of my offence and the sergeant took down my name and address and booked me in. Then the officer said, ‘We’re going to empty your handbag.’ He opened it, turned it upside down, gave it a shake, and the contents fell out onto the custody desk. Item by item, he picked everything up and inspected it; then he picked up something wrapped in silver paper. ‘Aha! Well, well, well. What have we got here, Miss Margolyes?’ he said, triumphantly. Clearly, suspecting drugs.

‘Well, officer, if you open it and look closely, you’ll see it’s a packet of Trebor peppermints.’ The police officer looked a little deflated. My middle-class confidence needled him. He thought, ‘I’ll show that cocky bitch.’ (Yes, I am imagining that’s what he thought, because of his next words.) ‘Well, nevertheless, you will have to be examined.’ I looked at him. ‘Oh, really, why is that?’ ‘Well, we don’t know who you are,’ came the reply. ‘But I told you my name.’ ‘Yeah, but you can’t prove it, can you?’ ‘What are you talking about? I’m an actress on television!’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen you.’

There was nothing much I could say to that. My suggestion that we call my agent, who would gladly verify my identity, was met with: ‘I don’t have time for that, love, sorry. We’re very busy. This is a busy station.’

The station sergeant took me into a private examination room and told me to wait as he was going to call ‘the matron’, and locked the door behind him. I guessed that the matron would give me an intimate physical examination to look for drugs so, while I was waiting, I took off all my clothes. I was completely naked. When the matron walked in, she took one look at me, and said, ‘You been here before?’ ‘I most certainly have not!’ I retorted. ‘Well, how did you know to take your clothes off?’ ‘Because I knew very well that you were going to give me an examination. And I’m not going to be examined in my clothes,’ I told her. ‘I’m an actress. I’m used to taking off my clothes.’

She asked me to lie on an examination table, and proceeded to carry out a vaginal examination. And she also poked up my arse. Obviously, she came away empty-handed. I put my clothes back on.

They thought being fingered in the vagina would distress me. How wrong they were! I thought all my Christmases had come at once.

When the station sergeant returned, I asked again to make my telephone call, but I was told that I couldn’t. I said, ‘I know my rights: I’m allowed to make a telephone call.’ ‘Oh, no, you’re not,’ he said. ‘We’re very busy. We can’t give you a telephone at the moment, so I’m putting you in a remand cell.’

I asked him how long he was going to hold me. He said, ‘I don’t know. Could be quite a long time… it might be overnight.’ ‘You can’t be serious!’ ‘I’m sorry about that, miss, but that’s the way it is. Anyway, you better come with me, and we’ll pop you in a cell.’

The prison officers were on strike which meant the remand cells were full, because those on remand couldn’t be processed into the jail. There was a three-week backlog. Despite this, as I followed him down a long corridor of occupied cells, he eventually located an empty one, and locked me up. In the cell there was a high, small, single-barred window, a long, narrow bench from wall to wall topped with a dirty mattress, and a lavatory with no seat in the corner.

I thought, ‘I’ve got to keep calm, I’ve got to stay sensible and not get scared.’ I could hear people talking in the cells down the corridor. To steady myself, I started to recite Wordsworth’s poem, ‘On Westminster Bridge’:

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, […]

Then I heard someone say, ‘Blimey, there’s a woman in there.’

I put my head to the bars. I couldn’t see anything, but I said, ‘Hello, is somebody there?’ A man’s voice replied, ‘Yeah, what are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I was caught parking on a double yellow line.’ He then said, ‘Blimey, I didn’t know they could put you in for that.’ I asked him what he was in for, and he said, ‘Burglary.’

‘Did you do it?’ I asked.

There was a long pause and he said, ‘No comment.’