Having completed stage one successfully, Alex, Steve and I were keen to get on with stage two, but the others were concerned for our safety. Before proceeding, a meeting of the escape group was held to discuss the strategy to be adopted. Denis was unhappy with the plans as they stood but said he would not stand in our way. He was still worried about the guard on the pos and felt that our current plans might lead to disaster. He was still of the opinion that the guard would eventually be withdrawn, despite the fact that there was no evidence of a crisis situation which he believed had been the cause of the guard being put there in the first place. Dave K was for proceeding but Dave R only agreed in principle that we should proceed: he preferred deferment.
Stage two was to be different from stage one in that its object was not to test one door but all doors beyond number six. This meant that we would need much longer than the few minutes afforded by the 8 p.m. inspection round. If we went down immediately after lockup we could give ourselves about three hours to work on the doors. But how could we get past the warder in his office without being seen?
The plan that finally emerged was for Alex and me to go down to the film cupboard as soon after lockup as possible. Someone would open their lamp cover (with the lamp spanner we’d made from a bent nail), break the bulb or replace it with a burnt out one and call Vermeulen up with his lamp spanner. Vermeulen would have to wait around in the section while the bulb was replaced because he had to turn off and on the light from the outside, get a new bulb from Dave K – who kept a supply in his cell – and finally collect the spanner and old bulb. While he was doing this the two of us would come out of the cupboard, pass through door four, press the button for door eight in the warder’s office, open five and six and then close them behind us.
Beyond door six we would be cut off from view and would have until the eight o’clock inspection to attempt to open the remaining doors on the way to the front door.
Stage two would also involve our attempting to find out if there was a way of seeing out into the street to ascertain what time the sentries came on duty at the gate, where they stood and how they operated. It was also agreed that if there was time we should attempt to enter the Captain’s office, which was the first office in the administrative section as you came in the front door, so that a window could be opened to see the position of the pos-guard.
Shortly before eight o’clock the doors beyond six would be relocked and we would wait next to door six for Vermeulen to go upstairs on his round. Door six would then be opened and we would proceed back to the cupboard, closing all doors behind us. After Sergeant Vermeulen had returned to his office we would return to our cells in the same manner as we’d done on stage one.
Theoretically, after completing stage two we would have all the keys needed to get to and open the front door and be in a position to leave, provided the existing security arrangements prevailed.
The planning for stage two was in fact the planning for the actual breakout and the attempt was in effect a practice escape run. The plan had come a long way from the first one and even from
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the last one that was current before stage one took place. Knowing that it was now possible to penetrate beyond door six without having to have the contingency route through the visiting- room, there was no longer any need to accost the warder. It was also now entirely feasible to make our way out of the prison right under the warder’s nose. This offered the most tremendous advantage in that it would give us thirteen and a half hours to get away before our absence was discovered, assuming they only discovered it at open-up the next morning.
All those remaining in the escape group accepted in principle the plan for stage two. But when it came to the crucial question of who would break their light bulb, the question of their security from incrimination was raised. Objectively speaking, Dave R was in the best position because his cell was at the far end of our section and thus furthest from door three which Vermeulen would leave open when he came in with the lamp key. It would take Vermeulen some time to walk the length of the passage and back, giving us more time to get through door six and place him in a better position should we happen to make any noise while doing our business downstairs.
Stephen, who had offered to break his bulb in lieu of Dave, was in the worst position because his cell was nearest to door three and opposite the pos-warder’s alcove. The pos-warder would easily see Stephen standing on top of his cupboard, fiddling with his lamp and the light going out, but when in his alcove Dave’s cell was out of his sight. Dave R could not be included in this plan because if we got caught he would automatically be implicated.
To reduce suspicion being pinned on him it could be arranged that he replace his bulb with a burnt out one we’d acquired from burnouts in the rooms downstairs. Afterwards he could smash the good one and flush it down his toilet, together with our lamp spanner. If we were caught, his burnt out bulb could in no way be linked to the fact that we were wandering around the prison.
But this was too problematical.
The following weekend a long and heated meeting of the escape group took place. Stephen expressed the view that all should share the risks, but this was not accepted. Although he had not contributed much in a material sense to the escape preparations, he had always been firmly behind Alex and me in all our thinking, had voted with us on practically every occasion and had never hesitated to assist in whatever way he could. He was prepared to break or replace his bulb if no one else would do it but he was in the worst position to do so. He felt that if he could do it so could others because the risks were the same for all.
After hearing our views Dave replied that he had given the matter his most intense thought and believed that the plan would only end in disaster. He saw no reason why everyone should share risks because in any organisation those best at performing certain tasks should specialise in those tasks.
Alex, Steve and I listened silently to all this, for we knew that what he was saying was the collective statement of all those who were not involved in the escape project. When he had finished we did not counter arguments but asked him whether he was prepared to continue to assist in the carrying out of stage two. But he felt he could not and that it was best for him to withdraw from the escape group so long as the existing strategy and conditions existed. He was not opposed to escaping but wanted outside assistance, the guard on the pos to disappear in the evening and the plan of execution changed so that there would be no unnecessary risks. Since these were matters over which we had no control, the three of us considered him to be expressing his resignation from the escape group. This entailed his losing the vote and no longer being informed of developments. As a disciplined comrade, he accepted this and withdrew from the group.
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Denis had never formally refused to assist in the stage two attempt, but it was obvious that there was not much advantage in him breaking his bulb instead of Stephen.
Dave K, when pressurised, agreed to assist by replacing his bulb with a burnt out one. Finally a plan was worked out which involved both Stephen and Dave – one which eliminated any risk for Dave. This required Stephen breaking his bulb but Dave being responsible for delaying Vermeulen.
Immediately after lockup Alex and I would make our way down to the film cupboard. Denis would call Vermeulen to tell him to bring up the lamp spanner. (This was normal practice as Denis was responsible for calling the warder for whatever reason when we were locked in our cells. Dave K was permitted to keep a supply of new bulbs in his cell, because in the past when bulbs had burnt out after hours the night-warders had not had access to the spare ones locked in the store.) When Vermeulen came upstairs with the spanner Denis would direct him to Stephen’s cell. Stephen would unscrew his lamp cover as slowly as possible and perhaps drop the spanner a few times to cause a delay. He would extract the broken glass with great care so as ‘not to cut his hands’. Then he would tell Vermeulen to go to Dave K to fetch the new bulb, thereby moving him further down the passage. Dave K would be ‘unable to find’ the bulbs in the box under his bed, so as to delay him even further. Stephen would find it difficult to install the new bulb and
‘lose’ the screws for the lamp cover by dropping them under his bed while trying to replace the lamp cover. In that time Alex and I would hopefully have advanced from the film cupboard to a position beyond door six.
Stage two was finally carried out in early November. The tension that Alex and I experienced before the event was even greater than that we’d endured before the stage ones. This was because stage two was a much more involved expedition, amounting in effect to a dress rehearsal for the actual breakout. We had been out of our cells for almost as long before, but somehow the thought of placing ourselves on the freedom side of the warder’s office was far more frightening.
The stage ones had been hit and run guerrilla operations; this time we were placing ourselves right in the middle of enemy territory – over the enemy’s lines as it were.
We had no idea what went on beyond door six. No one had ever seen a light on in any of the windows beyond the warder’s office so we assumed the area was sealed off and dark at night.
But we did not know for certain: maybe someone popped in every now and then to shout to Vermeulen through door six; maybe the front door was left open for the sentries on gate duty to use the toilet; maybe the lights would be on in the passage. Would we be able to turn them on if they weren’t? Would turning them on arouse the guards in the street or the guard on the pos?
In much the same way as before Alex and I placed dummies in our beds, released ourselves from our cells, took from the cache all that we needed for the adventure and made our way down to the film cupboard. The major difference this time was that we went down much earlier:
immediately after lockup. This in itself was a much more risky venture as we could not tell what Vermeulen would be doing so soon after lockup. We knew though that he was alone because when the day-warders left they did so with much loud banging of doors.
Stephen broke his bulb by loosening his lamp cover with the spanner we’d made for the purpose and by squirting water inside with a syringe (bulbs would often burst when moisture condensed inside and dripped onto them). Denis shouted for Vermeulen and as the sleepy old screw entered our section the two of us leapt out of the cupboard and made our way beyond door six, after first pressing the button for door eight in the office. If door six had not yielded to our forward thrust we would have implemented our contingency plan of ducking into the warders’
toilet to wait until Vermeulen had returned.
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We found ourselves in the ‘cage’ between doors six and seven. Unexpectedly the passage light was on, allowing us to see all the way to door nine across the far end of the passage. We’d expected the light to be off and had brought along a piece of cloth to place along the bottom of door six to prevent it shining through when we turned it on. The light was a great relief because not only did it allow us to see what we were doing, we’d worried that if it had been off and we’d turned it on it would have lit up the doorless visitors’ toilet and been seen by the pos-warder.
Before getting to work on seven we waited for Vermeulen to return: we wanted to be sure that he had not smelt a rat and that he was going to settle down in his office and get on with what he usually did in there. To prevent him seeing anything in case he had a habit of opening five and peeping through six’s keyhole, we taped a little flap over it on our side. After waiting about ten minutes we could hear him closing the section door and door four. Watching him through the keyhole as he walked down the passage towards us was a peculiar sensation that was both frightening and exciting. He appeared to be looking directly at me but at the last moment he turned into his office and banged his keys down on the table.
I had made several roughly cut keys for lock seven based on the very infrequent glimpses we’d had of its key. As expected, none of them worked. This did not worry us in the slightest as we’d expected to have to dismantle the lock to open the door. For the purpose we’d made two special spanners to loosen the bolts holding it together. One of them was a kind of ring-spanner that Alex had made from an old tin-opener (he never gave up!) and the other a sort of box spanner I had made from wood. Yes, wood, or ‘arborium’ as we preferred to call it. The idea was that the metal spanner would be used to do the initial loosening and then the wooden spanner the final loosening. The wooden spanner was really a piece of dowelling jammed into a metal pipe with the shape of the nut chiselled in one end. Although we had brought along a shifting spanner from the workshop in case ours were not the right size, we had made the spanners because we had thought the shifting spanner would be too noisy to use.
The lock was bolted to the bars by four bolts that had to be very quietly and carefully loosened.
Fortunately the ends of the bolts had not been hammered over as they were in our cells, but just in case we’d brought along a triangular file to clean the threads. Vermeulen was sitting a mere three or four metres away so the nuts had to be turned very slowly to make sure the spanner did not slip and bang against the lock or drop on the floor.
After what seemed like an eternity we were able to extract the bolts and loosen the screws holding the face of the lock with a screwdriver we’d also brought from the workshop. Once the face was removed the levers and bolt were exposed. We carefully removed the levers and stacked them on the floor so that they could be replaced in the correct order. Then we pushed the bolt back and opened the door. Door eight was already off its bolt and only had to be swung back and hooked against the wall.
While Alex attempted to open the Captain’s door with a piece of plastic card (it had a Yale- type latch) I tried out our various small keys on door nine. As luck had it the key for the visiting- room worked and I opened the door. We both crawled through on hands and knees into the small vestibule between doors nine and ten and surveyed the last door between us and freedom. From the ground it appeared tall and robust but from the kind of lock we knew it had we did not expect it to be much of a problem to breach.
It had taken us longer than expected to reach the front door and when we looked up at the windows it was already quite dark. We could hear voices coming from close by in the street. The window panes in the vestibule were of frosted glass but we dared not stand up for fear that our
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shadows would fall on them, allowing those outside to see our movements. I was dying to try out our keys on door ten but Alex would not allow it. He was right, it was too risky.
We retreated into the passage and relocked nine. I felt annoyed and frustrated at not having had a chance to get my hands on, or at least my keys and picks into, ten’s lock. It was an admission of defeat and forebode another stage two attempt if we were going to get it to give up its secrets.
We had also not figured out the nature of the security outside.
We took the parts of lock seven into the visitors’ toilet, which was half way between doors seven and eight and out of Vermeulen’s hearing, so that we could examine them and take their measurements. I made careful tracings of the levers onto a piece of paper so that I could later cut a key to the correct dimensions without having to test it in the actual lock. To make sure the key I would be making would definitely work, I rounded and widened the gates in the levers with a file so that virtually any key would work in the lock. We knew enough about keys to know that this would not impair the functioning of the lock when the correct key was used.
This little task was carried out with great satisfaction because we were in effect sabotaging the lock and rendering it almost ineffectual as a lock. But suddenly it struck us that the whole operation had taken a long time and that we’d been too lax about the time. Hurriedly we pushed the levers back into position, replaced the cover, tightened the screws and began to fasten the bolts. It was a slow and tedious business so we took turns to do the tightening. On one of my turns the spanner slipped and made a loud clang against the grille. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Alex shouted, ‘Vermeulen must have heard that’. In a state of panic I went to door six, lifted the flap and peeked through the keyhole. There Vermeulen was, standing directly in front of the door with his hands on his hips and looking at it. My heart stopped cold and in an irrational fit of panic I took one of the number two keys out of my pocket, pushed it into the keyhole and turned the lock its second turn (we’d left it unmastered). Why I did this I can’t explain. Perhaps I imagined Vermeulen would test the lock. A guilty conscience makes you do strange things in a moment of fear. As I withdrew the key I realised what I’d done: I’d exposed the end of it through the keyhole and made a noise turning the lock.
Both of us thought this was the end of the road and dived into the visiting-room, closing the door behind us. We huddled together in fear waiting for the inevitable. Alex cursed in my ear:
‘You stupid bastard. What did you do that for?’ I had no reply. We both agreed: ‘When he comes in we’ll use the “pea”. We’ll tie him up. We’ll get out somehow’.
We waited for a siren, for frantic shouts, for voices on his walkie-talkie, for Vermeulen to unlock six to find out what was going on. But after a few excruciating minutes we realised that nothing was happening: Vermeulen had not shouted ‘Who’s there?’ or ‘What’s going on?’; he had not attempted to open the door to find out what had caused the noise; no sirens were blaring.
The silence was scaring.
We emerged gingerly from our hiding place and took another peek through the keyhole. There was no one there. ‘Perhaps he’s radioed or phoned for help?’, Alex suggested. The only sound we could hear was the plaintive wail of music coming from his radio.
Realising suddenly that eight o’clock was very close we continued to reassemble the lock.
While Alex tightened the bolts I removed all traces of our activities and wiped down the grille with my handkerchief to remove fingerprints. Almost as Alex tightened the last nut its last turn the eight o’clock bell rang.
Through the keyhole I watched Vermeulen come out of his office and turn the corner at the end of the passage. Door four clanged as he went through it and we could hear him making his way up the stairs to the stokkies’ section. As soon as we heard the clang of their section door we