Bobby on the Beat

by Pamela Rhodes

  It felt like we were on holiday as we sauntered along to the little cafe. Along the road, wild flowers and hedgerows were in full bloom, dripping with insects and birds. All the rain had given everything an extraordinary lushness that filled us with optimism.

  After lunch, we had an ice cream on a little bench outside the church. I had been looking for a chance to ask Sally what all that commotion was about, outside the hut the other night with Ted, but before I could ask she blurted it out.

  ‘He asked me to marry him! I’ve been bursting at the seams to tell you. I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Wow! That was fast work indeed,’ laughed Marge.

  ‘He was a bit drunk, though, I think,’ said Sally. ‘Does that count? He’d been to The Bell and Allan says they drank two whisky and gingers each.’

  ‘I’m sure he meant it,’ I smiled. ‘It’s obvious he’s crazy about you.’

  ‘I said I’d think about it and tell him tonight,’ she continued, then paused, obviously thinking about how much she should tell us. ‘I did ask him why he’s been spending so much time with Marion, though. I had to. He said it was nothing, they’re just friends. But I don’t know …’

  ‘I’m sure it’s true. He’d hardly ask you to marry him if there’s anything else going on.’

  ‘I suppose. But I hardly know him really. I do think he’s the one, though! And I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else … Don’t mention it to anyone. Please! I swore I’d keep it secret but I was just absolutely bursting to tell you.’

  By the time we got up to leave, Sally’s ice cream had melted all down her arm and onto the floor.

  That afternoon, we sat around the Nissen huts in our swimming costumes, pretending to be on holiday on the beach. Sally was in a kind of dreamworld, lying back in the sun with her sunglasses on. Marge and I pretended to be mannequins, walking up and down on an imaginary catwalk, with our beach towels wrapped round us.

  As were we doing a silly trick with our towels, making it look as though we were naked, and taking photographs, some of the lads came walking past. Ted was there, and Neville.

  I had been a bit anxious, as I hadn’t really seen Neville properly since we’d danced together and he’d walked me to my hut that night. But now, when I looked at him, I wasn’t sure he was the one. I certainly wasn’t sure, like Sally and Ted. The other lads all whistled as they walked past, and we carried on up and down with our towels, and Marge and I collapsed into laughter. Neville didn’t look back.

  ‘Give us a twirl,’ said Allan, but just as we dropped our beach towels to reveal that we were, in fact, wearing swimsuits, Inspector Merriweather, with his impeccable nose for impropriety, appeared from nowhere.

  ‘Girls!’ He shielded his eyes in shock. ‘This is not the place for such a display! And as for you,’ he turned to face the lads, whose faces were deadpan as they stood up straight and saluted, ‘have I taught you nothing over these past weeks? Everywhere I look, I see the nation’s morals collapsing at my feet. An unstoppable tide of filth.’

  As he walked away, I could hear Merriweather muttering about broken moral fibres, the world heading for destruction. When I looked back at Sally, she was talking in urgent tones again with Ted, who had his hands clasped round her bare arms.

  Neville was nowhere to be seen.

  I yawned, stretched and looked around my little room. It was the last week, and we were all quite nervous about our final Passing Out parade. At marching practice, Sergeant Thompson was more than ever on the lookout for anyone stepping out of time. Marge had been made a marker, which meant she had to stand out in front of us and lead.

  With the morning’s marching over, the first lesson was Traffic Control with Sergeant Baines. We stayed outside and he came out to show us how to direct traffic. I wondered how on earth we’d learn to direct traffic when there wasn’t a road or a car in sight.

  Eventually, Baines began running up and down the parade ground, allocating us vehicles to enact.

  ‘Carson, Rhodes, you come and stand here. You’re traffic coming this way. Peters, Owen, you’re a bicycle and a bus coming this way. There’s an accident … here.’

  So we all chugged along pretending to be cars, lorries and buses, or acted as pedestrians waiting to cross the road, as he showed us the correct traffic signals. The stance to assume was left arm out to the side at shoulder height, while the right arm was out in front, waving the traffic forward.

  The rest of the week we spent brushing up on all the basics: how to make an arrest, how to take a statement, court procedures, and how to make points at a telephone box in order to communicate with the station. We also did our first-aid and life-saving practical exams, bandaging each other up in slings.

  After thirteen weeks, the final day had almost arrived. First thing in the morning it would be our Passing Out parade. The night before we all made sure we were as smart as possible. I spent hours checking the shine on my shoes, and making sure my hair was regulation length, well above the collar. Sally, Marge and I even practised our marching, up and down the corridor in the Nissen hut.

  At the final parade, there was a real marching band, and all our instructors were standing alongside as we showed off what we’d learnt. When it was over, we trooped into the big hall and were awarded our First Aid certificates. But what we were all really waiting to hear was the news from Inspector Merriweather about where we were going to be posted. In those days you had no choice; you could be sent anywhere in the north of England.

  Merriweather stood at the front and began reading the list of names from a piece of paper.

  ‘Carson, Ted – Liverpool. Peters, Marjorie – Darlington. Rhodes, Pamela – Richmond.’

  Richmond? Where on earth is that, I wondered. I had no idea. I had been waiting all day to find out, and I was still none the wiser.

  ‘I’m going to Darlington!’ whispered Marge. ‘That’s quite close to Richmond.’

  ‘What’s it like then? Richmond?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I know it’s got a castle. And a lovely market. I used to have a great-aunt lived there. I’m sure it’ll be grand.’

  As well as the formalities, at the end of our course there was a little performance too, in the main hall, at which we sang songs from The Student Prince and the boys even did a ballet, dressed up in real ballet costumes, which made us girls all laugh.

  After the festivities were over, we were so excited about the start of our new careers we were hardly sad all about leaving Bruche. There were no long goodbyes, except of course for Ted and Sally; though we now wondered whether Sally would join the police, given that she and Ted had decided to get married that autumn. He’d been posted to Liverpool, and she would most likely join him there as a housewife.

  We certainly wouldn’t miss the food, or the early morning marching, but as I looked around the Nissen hut for the final time, picked up my suitcase from the bed, turned out the light and shut the door behind me, I couldn’t help feeling a little sad that this part of my life, and all the laughs we’d had, were now over. From here on in, there would be no pretend arrests and mock court procedures. It was time now for the real world.

  Everything looked exactly the same on my parents’ road in Scarborough, although the flowers were all in bloom and the trees in full and vibrant leaf.

  It felt like this little town, and everyone in it, had been stuck in a time warp while I was away. There was Mr Murphy, our neighbour, out watering his roses as usual, almost exactly where I had left him, I’m sure. And as I stood outside our front door, I could hear Radio Luxembourg drifting through an open window, just as it had been when I left thirteen weeks earlier.

  I could see the top of Dad’s head over the newspaper he was reading in the front room, and I could hear Mam lightly humming in the kitchen. It was like their lives were exactly the same, but I had grown up. I almost felt scared to go in, in case they didn’t recognize me. Perhaps I had changed beyond all recognition; I felt like I’d seen and learnt so much these
past months.

  When Mam answered the door, of course she did recognize me, and gave me a big hug.

  Over a cup of tea, I was happy to listen to their stories and glad to be home.

  ‘Your father organized the whole thing so well!’ said Mam, as she dunked a custard cream into her tea. They were excited, having just come back from their pilgrimage to Portugal with church-goers and friends. ‘Mrs Crouch came, and even Mr Jolly, who hasn’t left Scarborough in over forty-five years. In one town we saw them do this procession, all in their finery through the streets. But the funniest thing of all was when were got lost one day and the coach broke down on the way. In Spain, wasn’t it, love?’

  She looked at Dad, who was stuffing tobacco firmly into his pipe.

  ‘Yes. None of us spoke a word of Spanish either,’ he said.

  ‘And all the ladies of the village were in these black dresses, sat in chairs by the road, and watching as Mr Ridley, who hasn’t got a mechanical bone in his body, tried to fix the carburetor.’ Mam was getting animated as she told the story. ‘Anyway, eventually Father Parry found their local priest and managed to speak to him. And you’ll never guess what he did. He spoke to him in Latin. To make himself understood that we were lost, and did he know where we could find a local garage? In the end they sent a coach all the way from Madrid.’

  ‘Lord only knows what he said to get that message across. I don’t think the Romans had cars, did they?’ said Dad, laughing.

  ‘But anyway. Enough about us. What about you? Are you a fully-fledged officer of the law now?’

  ‘Not quite,’ I said, kicking off my shoes and curling up on the sofa next to our large German Shepherd dog, Laddy. ‘I’m a probationer now. For two years. Then I’ll become a proper officer.’ Laddy gave my face an enormous lick on the face so I pushed him off.

  ‘Well, we don’t care what the neighbours say about your being a lady police, and everything. We’re proud as punch,’ Mam said.

  When I relayed the story of seeing the corpse, Mam then told me about when she’d seen her first dead body, her great-auntie Kay just after she had died.

  ‘They had an open casket and we all walked past. Quiet, like. She looked … grey. I was a bit nervous at first, you know, expecting blood and gore, I suppose. But it was a kind of … release. Because she wasn’t there. It wasn’t her at all. Just a sort of shell. And after that we all got on with remembering Auntie Kay as she was in life.’

  ‘I kept thinking he was going to smile,’ I said, nuzzling up against Laddy and ruffling his thick fur.

  ‘So where are you off now, then? Did they station you, or whatever you call it?’ asked Dad.

  ‘Yes. Richmond. Do you know it?’

  ‘I think your mother and I stopped by the castle once when we were courting. We had an ice cream. Didn’t we, love?’

  ‘No, that was Bridlington. Ooh, by the way. We’ve been waiting to tell you too. Your brother proposed. It was very romantic, he said. By the seafront. He got down on one knee and everything. He’s so grown up now,’ she paused and looked down into her tea for a moment, as though reading some kind of far-off future in the leaves. ‘So both my little chicks’ll be flying the nest,’ she whispered, almost to herself, as the last of her custard cream dissolved and sank to the bottom of the cup.

  On my final day in Scarborough I wandered into town, taking in the sights. The dance hall on the seafront, the Spa Theatre, where I had performed in plays at the drama festival as a teenager, and the windswept sea crashing in against the shore. I’d arranged to meet Jane, from Marshall & Snelgrove, and a few of her new friends, at the Italian ice-cream shop nearby.

  ‘Pam!’ she called out, as I walked in. For a moment I hadn’t recognized her. She looked all glamorous in a new dress and with short curly hair. ‘It’s so lovely to see you,’ she said. ‘You look, older. In a good way, I mean. Come and meet everyone.’

  Jane was sitting with two other girls and three lads, who were eating knickerbocker glories and smoking cigarettes.

  ‘This is Philip,’ she said, and held onto the arm of a sailor in uniform. He looked a few years older than us; he had a small scar on his left cheek and a tattoo of a swallow on his arm. ‘He’s on leave,’ Jane said, and looked up at him, smiling. ‘And look!’ She showed me a glimmering engagement ring on her left hand.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said as she held up the ring for us all to see.

  ‘This is Pam, a dear friend,’ she said to the others. ‘How many hours we must have spent on that shopfloor I don’t know.’

  We were quiet for a moment as I sat down. I smiled at everyone. There were a couple of new girls from the department store I’d never met, and their boyfriends, two lads in civvies, who were both motor mechanics.

  They had all met at a dance at the Spa Ballroom, and become a bit of a gang, hanging out together, going to dances over the summer. They were excited because they had just been to London on the train, to the Festival of Britain.

  ‘Oh, Pam, you should have seen this thing, they call it “telecinema”. It’s like the pictures, but more real. I don’t know what they did, but it was amazing. Everything looked like real life.’

  ‘I don’t know. Everything I wanted to see was broken. New technology, my foot. You had to queue for hours, we missed half of it and kept going round in circles.’ One of the lads in civvies spoke with a loud Liverpudlian accent. ‘I’ve seen more interesting stuff down at the docks on a Friday night than I saw there. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.’

  ‘Oh, you misery guts,’ said one of the girls. ‘What about the Pleasure Gardens? You can’t deny that. There was a foaming fountain!’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘I did find it quite boring, if I’m honest,’ said the other girl quietly. ‘It was like being back at school again. Trains and engines and stuff my dad likes.’

  ‘Too many steps, not enough chairs, too many people,’ said the lad from Liverpool again, stubbing out a cigarette and lighting another one immediately. ‘And do you know how many houses and workshops they had to clear away to build all that stuff ? People lost their homes, you know.’

  ‘Well, I enjoyed it. But Mrs Preen says it’s all a Labour conspiracy,’ said Jane. ‘So it probably won’t last, now that it’s gone all political. Nothing good ever lasts.’ She looked down at her ring, then up again, and smiled. ‘Almost nothing, anyway. Gosh. All this negativity, all of a sudden. Anyway. How about you? How was your course?’

  As I started to tell them about my time at Bruche, I found it suddenly hard to articulate what I had seen over the past few weeks. How do you explain seeing a dead body, and all the changes which take place in you in such a short space of time when you’re thrown together with other people, learning about the law, sexual crime, emergency childbirth …

  In the end, I just told them about the Holger Nielsen technique, which made them laugh, especially when I demonstrated on poor Jane.

  After the laughter and the milkshakes were finished, and we said our goodbyes, I realized that life had gone on for both of us since we had last met. We had drifted apart a little, and the ties that bound us, our youthful adventures in the department store, our plans to go to New Zealand, these things were all firmly in the past.

  4

  ‘You must be our new policewoman,’ said a tall officer wearing sergeant stripes. I was all done up in my smartest civvies, with a hat and coat. My uniform was in a little leather suitcase.

  I had imagined Richmond police station to be much bigger and grander, after my visits to Northallerton HQ with Dad’s billiard friend. But the two cottages knocked into one did have a certain rustic charm. I stood there nervously, looking around. There was wooden bench seating round the walls and an open fireplace.

  ‘I’m Sergeant Hardcastle,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you. Now, that door there leads to the washrooms and, through there, the cells,’ said the Sergeant, waving around the room proprietorially.

  I’d forgotten the
re’d be cells. I looked along the stone corridor, wondering what they were like and whether there were any villains in there right now. Just then, a young PC came in with another sergeant, helping through a soldier in uniform, who could barely stand up.

  ‘We found him lying in the road, by Castle Street. Fast asleep. Drunk and incapable, blocking the pavement. So we thought we’d better bring him in and let the Red Caps deal with it. Let’s get him through to the cells.’

  I was to encounter a few more of these, soldiers from the nearby Catterick Garrison who were often brought in after a night out in Richmond. They’d drink one too many beers and miss the last bus back. The Red Caps were the army police; they’d come and take them away to dish out their own punishments.

  As the young soldier and the two officers disappeared round the corner, I peered into the next office, where an attractive young woman with dark hair sat at a desk with a typewriter. She was in civvies not uniform, and she was typing very fast, never looking at the keys, just peering over her glasses at what she was copying.

  ‘Come through to the office and meet Doris, our clerk,’ said Sergeant Shaw, the office sergeant. He worked alongside Doris from nine to five. ‘She’s the only other female here, so hopefully you’ll have lots to talk about.’

  Inside the office was a small radio for receiving police messages from HQ, but no computers or photocopiers like you’ll find today. Just some filing cabinets and files, lots of paper and two typewriters.

  ‘That passage there leads into the Inspector’s house. He lives on site. You’ll meet him tomorrow. So don’t be late! But you must be exhausted from your travels. Take Miss Rhodes to her digs, Carter,’ said Sergeant Hardcastle to a young PC who was filling out some notes at a large desk by the door.

  Carter leapt to the task, eager to get out of the office, so I followed him back out onto the street into the bright sunlight. As we walked, PC Ben Carter explained to me who everyone was at the station.