Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  ANNUAL LEAVE

  I drove to Gatwick airport in my 2CV with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and their song Two Tribes frequently on the radio. I was beside myself with excitement at returning to my Shangri-La beneath the summer moon, Kibbutz Be’eri. I boarded the EL Al Israel Airlines Boeing 747 and couldn’t believe I’d escaped the nightmare that was Hyson Green for a peaceful few weeks near Gaza.

  Two elderly Jewish ladies were seated next to me on the aircraft and started playing backgammon. They spoke to one another in short bursts with a mix of Yiddish, English and Hebrew. An Orthodox Jewish man sat across the aisle from me, dressed in black with his peyot, ringlets of hair hanging over each ear. I remember noting in my diary at the time that I quite envied people who had faith, any faith. If there was a God it would indeed be nice to know that he cared, but sadly I think we are all alone in the universe.

  I remembered my way around Israel with reassuring familiarity. I caught an El Al bus from the airport to the legendary Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv and found the right place to stand for the Beer Sheva bus, via Sa’ad Junction near Gaza. It was mid-afternoon on 14th October 1984 and still very warm in Israel. As the bus rolled southwards the countryside became increasingly sparse as we headed towards the desert. Astonishingly I don’t recall that I warned the kibbutz I was due to arrive, or even whether I asked permission to stay, I just turned up. There were volunteers there that I knew, Paul from South Shields, Chris from Canada, and Hans from Switzerland, so I just slotted back in as though I’d never left.

  I made myself known to Jacko and Hezzie, two of the kibbutzniks (resident Israelis) I had known well, and I was accepted again. I’d spent two six-month stays at Kibbutz Be’eri and was known to be a good worker. If my reputation had been different then my welcome would no doubt have matched it. I moved into room thirteen in the ghetto (Be’eri’s slightly ironic nickname for where the non-Jewish volunteers lived), and put the kettle on. I had little unpacking to do, just a change of clothing, a sketch pad and my diary. I also had a Sony Walkman and a dozen cassette tapes, so I sat in the late afternoon sun outside room thirteen with a cup of tea listening to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet. I was home, and I felt a huge sense of relief.

  There were twenty-five volunteers living and working on Be’eri at that time. There were quite a few Swedes and Danes of both sexes, and almost all of them were gorgeous. Some occupied room three where Paul and I had once lived. They bought beer by the crate from the kibbutz shop, and played Roger Waters’ The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking very loudly across the ghetto every afternoon. I remembered my drives around Hyson Green listening to the same music and I felt as though I was on another planet.

  As the sun set on my first day back in the Negev Desert, I turned on the radio to hear The Voice of Peace and Twilight Time, sung by The Platters, followed by John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance. The same nightly songs and the same twilight routine I heard in 1978 on my first stay in Israel at Kibbutz Dafna on the northern border.

  After a wonderful breakfast of eggs and toast in the huge communal dining room I borrowed some shorts and went for a run around the kibbutz perimeter. I ran into the desert through the wadis and onto the track leading to the old kibbutz. When Be’eri was first built it was constantly shot at from Gaza so the Israelis dismantled it and moved it out of range. The sky was cloudless, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. The desert looked spectacular and the many small wadis combined to give an illusion I was looking across the hills of Judea in miniature.

  I spent the afternoons reading and listening to music while everyone else was working. I was formally Jacko’s guest, so I wasn’t obliged to work, but this changed after a few days. On my fourth day I was asked how long I was thinking of staying. It would be at least another couple of weeks, so I was politely informed that I needed to work, to earn my keep. I fully understood this, so I volunteered to operate the huge dishwashing machine in the dining room, a job I was familiar with. The pardes season (citrus fruit picking) was about to start but there was a problem with my status as a guest, and whether I was insured to work outdoors, so I worked the dishwasher and actually enjoyed it.

  It seems odd now that for a few weeks in 1984 through my activities at Be’eri, Nottinghamshire Constabulary effectively subsidised the State of Israel.

  On my first Friday night at Be’eri there was a party in the volunteers’ club, the moadon. A lot of people drank to excess and I spent some time smooching with a German girl called Ulli. I know this because my diary says so, though I have absolutely no recollection of it.

  I went for long runs in the desert with my Walkman, listening to Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. I ran as far as the Anzac Memorial, a large, incongruous concrete monument four kilometres outside the kibbutz near Gaza, marking the sacrifice of Australian and New Zealand troops in 1917. I gazed across the fence marking the edge of the Gaza Strip, but didn’t dare venture inside as I had on dozens of previous occasions. The fence and barbed wire appeared better maintained than before. Maybe the prerequisite level of naivety just wasn’t there anymore.

  I enjoyed my few hours a day operating the dishwasher and felt relieved that I was making a contribution to the kibbutz, even in a modest way. I remember I spent those few weeks laughing out loud constantly, dumping huge blocks of stress all across the Israeli desert.

  Kibbutz life lends itself to deep introspection, so after two weeks I began to ponder what I had back in England. In those days once a cop had passed the first two probationary years, it was highly likely the entire service would be completed. It seemed unlikely that I’d even get through the first year so yet again I had to think about what I wanted to do with my life. Maybe I would return to the kibbutz permanently? I felt very happy living abroad, so perhaps that was the answer, unless something unexpected came along to keep me in the UK.

  FOOT PATROL

  ON MY OWN

  In November I returned to the beautiful surroundings of Epperstone Manor, on a Progress & Monitoring Course. My exam results were improving, and I even gained 99% in a definitions test. There was now a practical application to it all of course, so this clearly helped. The miners’ dispute ended with a slow whimper rather than a bang, and cops gradually began returning from the front. We were briefing on sixteen or seventeen uniformed constables at the start of every shift, and finding enough chairs for everyone was a common problem. Something that is particularly noteworthy was the wide cross-section of age and experience on the shift; there were newcomers like myself, but many older veterans still in uniform and enjoying the job. This was to drastically change later when so many different plain-clothes squads were set up to deal with specific problems. These ‘squads’ sourced the majority of their staff from the uniform front line, which was seen as a bottomless pit of staff. It is still seen as this today, even though the pit is now frighteningly empty most of the time.

  With all these cops around there was no longer any excuse to merely ‘knock stuff on the head’. Suddenly crimes were something we had to investigate rather than simply file away and forget. I hadn’t been shown how to do this properly so it came as a shock. My tutorship, for what it was worth, was now over, so I became a foot beat officer, as I should have been at the start. I walked the streets of Hyson Green and Forest Fields in my smart new uniform feeling like Jacques Clouseau, Peter Sellers’ character in the Pink Panther films, clueless and naïve. I hadn’t really grasped what I was supposed to do. Of course I would attend incidents if I was sent to them via my radio, but other than that I thought my job was to simply wander about looking smart all day long, and sometimes all night.

  Due to the vast number of uniformed officers I wasn’t sent to many jobs in my early days on foot. At that time each police station of any size had a control room which was usually staffed by members of the same shift and so you were personally known to the call-takers and despatchers. Consequently the experienced response cops were sent to the urgent jobs, leaving the lesser incidents to people like me: jobs
such as old ladies reporting a window broken or kids kicking footballs in the street.

  Each uniformed shift or ‘section’ was split into two, and each half had a uniformed sergeant. Each section was governed by its own uniformed inspector. There were five ‘sections’ of uniformed cops providing twenty-four-hour cover, and a sixth extra section to deal with miscellaneous tasks. In the ‘80s any plain clothes duties required by uniformed officers were dealt with by the ‘six section’. These could be anything from football matches to undercover work, and it was staffed entirely by uniformed cops each taking a turn of a few months on the section. It was a great way to gain experience in other aspects of policing.

  Your own inspector knew you very well, both personally and professionally, and he (because in those days it would not be a female) would fight for and support his own section. Other inspectors tried to poach staff from other sections to perform unpleasant or difficult tasks their own staff were reluctant to do, so your inspector was there to protect you, and it worked very well. Each sergeant kept a hand-written work book, like a large ledger, where his staff recorded their daily work. Arrests and summary offences were recorded in neat columns drawn with an ink pen and a ruler. Even verbal warnings issued to members of the public were recorded. There was no quota system, and no minimum amount of work required. You simply made an entry in the book whenever you prosecuted anyone. There should therefore be a steady flow of work from each officer, enough to prove you were earning your pay. There wasn’t a lot in the book from me because I was still knocking stuff on the head, and this was where I had my first problem.

  My first sergeant, Dave, was ex-CID. His face was creased and leathery from a lifetime of chain smoking. Sometimes when on early shifts he would arrive late and you could find him in the gent’s toilets shaving, a damp cigarette balanced precariously on the edge of the sink. His early morning smoker’s cough was clearly audible across the whole station. He was very thin and I thought he was extremely old, but he couldn’t have been more than fifty.

  The other sergeant on three section was Mick and he was the complete opposite to Dave. Mick had glass-shiny shoes, was always prompt, quietly spoken and approachable. He was very smart, didn’t smoke and had a fresh, healthy complexion, even if he was a ginger. I wished he was my sergeant. I should have asked, but in those days it was unheard of for anyone to ask for a move.

  I’d made a few entries in the work book during my first weeks of solo foot patrol but I wasn’t making much of an impression. Apparently you had to impress and work very hard in your first two years and I was doing neither. I’d spoken to a few members of the public and entered ‘Verbal Warning’ in the work book several times for various things. Other than that I had nothing to show for several months’ patrolling, apart from a few reports for undetectable minor crime. I didn’t realise that in order to prosecute someone, it was inevitable that you would hurt their feelings, but I was reluctant to do this. I just wanted to be nice to people and not get anyone into trouble. I hadn’t yet learnt that as a cop you can still do the job and be nice at the same time.

  I’ve no doubt on reflection Dave was making strong hints but I wasn’t listening, until finally one afternoon when he was probably overcome by sheer exasperation he called me into the sergeant’s office. I could tell there was something wrong when he shut the door behind me.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he said to me, his deep brown eyes becoming huge in their dark sockets.

  “What do you mean?” I said, rather pathetically, wondering where this was going.

  “What are you doing? You’re not doing anything, are you?” he said, answering his own question. The whites of his eyes were veined and slightly yellow from drinking and heavy smoking. I stood motionless, staring ahead, like an errant schoolboy in the headmaster’s office. I fiddled with my black leather gloves and began to feel extremely uncomfortable. Dave stepped closer and was only a couple of feet away when he began in earnest:

  “You come to work with that gormless fucking expression on your face and you just ponce around doing fuck all!” His voice began to rise in pitch and volume as he spoke. “Well?” I couldn’t say anything. Words wouldn’t form in my mouth because I didn’t know what to say. He was right of course. I wasn’t doing anything.

  “If you don’t get out there and do some work you can take off that uniform and fuck off home!” He continued in this manner for several minutes but after the first few memorable lines my mind began to shut down. I pictured myself back in the Negev desert. They’d be harvesting the citrus fruit now, and the swimming pool would have been closed for winter. This drifting off easily happens when you hear things that you don’t want to. Your mind begins to wander. My first thoughts were that Dave’s admonishments were clearly loud enough for the whole station to hear. I felt an inch tall by the time he finally ended his tirade with:

  “Now fuck off out my sight!”

  I don’t remember what I did for the rest of the shift. I do know that no-one offered any help or advice of any sort, even though they must have heard everything. I felt incredibly alone. That night after work I sat in my flat with my police epaulettes in my hands, the shiny metal numbers catching the light, and I wept. It was all over.

  A few days later I was summoned to see the Divisional Chief Superintendent at B-Division Headquarters in Hucknall. I was formally told that my career was in jeopardy, mainly because I was crap. I stood in my best uniform holding my helmet and white gloves while a redfaced old bloke behind his desk repeated what Dave had said to me, but much more politely.

  “Not everyone can be a copper you know. It’s a difficult job, and there’s no shame in admitting it’s not for you. It’s certainly not right for everyone.”

  I had some serious thinking to do. When I finally had the nerve to discuss it with a couple of colleagues, they suggested I get an HO/RT1 book, stop a few vehicles, and issue the drivers with ‘producers’, in order to generate some work. It was at this time that on reflection I’d reached the point of no return. I thought that maybe I should resign and flee. I had nothing to keep me in England, no ties whatsoever, apart from my parents.

  It seemed I’d made a decision overnight while asleep. I’d give it another try. On the next early shift I walked down Radford Road into Basford about a mile from the station, armed with a book of HO/RT 1 forms. These are the Home Office Road Traffic form Number One, issued to drivers in order to produce their documents.

  Reigate Road was a short ‘rat-run’ and it was easy to stand in the road and stop vehicles. A police officer in uniform can demand to see the driving licence of anyone driving a motor vehicle on a road, for no other reason than to check it. This is how drink drivers are sometimes caught; random breath testing already exists using this power. If you stick your head inside the vehicle and smell intoxicants, then a police officer in uniform has the power to demand a specimen of breath. Notice it says ‘in uniform’. So I stood in the road, shaking with nervous anticipation.

  My first customer was a Ford Transit van driven by a young man a little younger than myself. Two older men were in the cab with him, and all three looked worried. The driver appeared as nervous as I felt and stated he didn’t have any documents with him, so I issued him an HO/RT 1. I noted on the tick box form that the vehicle wasn’t displaying L-plates.

  I stopped other vehicles and realised as I spoke to the drivers that they had no idea how nervous I was. Clearly the whole thing was a bluff, and I was acting when dealing with the public. I learnt the police speak that cops use; a kind of brusque manner that is polite but succinct. There is no other way to conduct yourself; it’s all part of the act. You can’t ask someone for their licence in a Kenneth Williams ‘ooer, matron...’ kind of manner, it simply wouldn’t work. Neither can you give orders as though you are a sergeant major on a parade ground. It has to be somewhere in the middle, and with a professional dispassionate slant to it.

  As I issued the tickets I gained in confidence and my shaky ha
ndwriting on the forms gradually improved. It was still only 9am when I resumed from my static traffic duty having issued ten tickets. I remember feeling quite elated as I walked back towards the police station reverently clutching my HO/RT1 book in my gloved hands. I’d forcibly changed something in myself, and I was never the same again.

  I repeated the process for the next few days, perfecting my attitude and routine. As I did so that particular rat-run became very quiet during rush hour! After a week the HO/RT1s started to flutter into the station like migrating starlings. Half of them were all in order but the others had offences on them. The drivers had produced their documents at the police station of their choice, and staff at the enquiry counters had written down on the corresponding Form HO/RT2 any offences disclosed and reported the person for summons.

  The first one, the young man driving the Transit van, hadn’t yet passed his driving test. There weren’t any learner plates on the vehicle so he’d therefore committed the offence of driving without a full licence, or failing to comply with the conditions of a Provisional Driving Licence, as it is correctly known. I wondered if his employers knew he didn’t have a full licence. I checked the number of the van on the PNC and then rang the company. After some initial reticence the manager stated he was shocked and wasn’t aware the lad had been driving the van let alone whether he had a licence. I’ll never know if he was telling me the truth, but in this instance it didn’t really matter. It seemed the other two men in the van had allowed him to drive without authority. I visited the company and took a witness statement from the management. The young driver was then also reported for the offences of TWOC, Taking Without Consent, and no insurance. All this originated from a random stop in the street.

  The traffic offences didn’t really grab me, but I found the investigation side of it very interesting. There was real satisfaction in this. The foot patrol aspect of my job was pleasant enough, and I really didn’t mind it, but in a very modest way and for the first time I’d been introduced to the rewarding world of investigative policing.