Bonnie Riggs

The print room girl, Doreen, retires on Thursday after a long career shuffling papers. We will all miss her and those neatly collated binders, mind you, there’s already been a memo sent around telling the workers which Stepford wife will be Stepping into her size elevens.

Doreen was short, but by golly did she have big feet.

My exceptionally long career of staring vacantly at a computer screen still has a few years to run, I fill my days with thoughts of escape, visits to my Scottish pal, Graeme in hut 13, with the subject predominantly being the plans of the escape route, how we’ll hide the soil and the wooden planks we use to move the wood stove while we’re digging.

All the while keeping our eyes out for the little men.

It would be nice if I had a nickname like Digger or The Tunnel Man, but that would arouse suspicion with my coworkers and others in the dormitory. They say that careless talk costs lives and that’s exactly what would happen because if we found out that anyone knew what we were up to, then we’d have to silence them. I have a sharp compass in my drawer and I know how to use it.

There are spies everywhere.

It has come as a great surprise that one of the inmates has actually negotiated a stay of execution, it’s a guy we’ve nicknamed “Busy Ronny” mainly because he’s constantly busy and his name is Ron.

Ron must have been talking to the guards, or the Colonel, because he’s negotiated POW status for the rest of his natural life, and he appears to be rather chuffed about the whole thing. He’ll be staying in the camp long past his sell by date and it seems that as we’re planning our escape, Ron is planning to have new double glazing and shelves put in his hut.

As the resident fence, Mat the Drat, says, “Well me old china, it’s all horses for courses and if the old Bonnie Riggs wants to be a merchant banker and spend his birdy lime in his working kippers to earn some Nelson Eddy’s then we should let the old blighter be, jump in our tea, two and a bloater and do a Naval gunner”

What the hell he means by that, no one actually knows.