"My best friend is on remand. This came completely out of the blue. I'd been trying to call him for about 3 days. Then someone he knows phoned me and asked if I'd seen the paper. I was absolutely devastated.
I live in a small community where everybody knows everyone else and because this guy is my best friend, it's assumed that I'm something to do with the crime he's been accused of and am guilty by association. I'm being blanked in the village by certain people and I'm not even the guy's wife or girlfriend, he's just my best friend. God knows how the wives of other prisoners cope - there must be thousands of people in the same situation and lots of them in small communities. He's only on remand and hasn't even been convicted. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Good friends of mine have been incredibly supportive. They've picked up my children from school and looked after them until I come back from visiting at the prison. I explained to my children that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time ... think there's an awful lot of people who have been extremely lucky not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I get to visit him quite often and I'm also writing to him as often as I can, and I speak to him on the phone most days... When I saw him in prison for the first time I said, 'you just did this to get out of helping me do the garden...' I had to say something like that because otherwise I would have cried. The last thing he needed was for me to be sitting in a visiting room blubbing. I just have to think he's going to come out and everything's going to be OK so we just get through this time."
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