Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes

by Tom Ratcliffe

  My paperwork tray now empty and my conscience more or less clear, I finished the set of nights, and prepared to go on the course.

  Twenty-Two

  Three years on from my general course I was back at the Driving School.

  There were six of us on the course, and we all went through the same clerical process as before, driving licences were checked for points, eyesight tested and the course introduction given by the Inspector in charge.

  The first two weeks of the course were not strictly ‘advanced’, they were classed as ‘intermediate’, and used 2 litre saloon cars to bridge the gap that would take us from 1200 cc, 85 mile an hour runabouts, to cars up to three litres and capable of over 140 miles an hour on a good day, albeit perhaps with a light following breeze.

  The very sensible theory was that the ‘intermediate’ would polish up the skills from the general course, and get us to do the same as the general course but faster. After all, it was pointed out, if you can’t drive smoothly and safely at 30, what hope do you have at four or five times that speed?

  Each car had three students and an instructor in it. Like many with true skill, Carl, my instructor, was very quiet and understated, but had a confidence in handling a car which brought the theory of Police driving to life. He had no interest in showing off, no desire to prove he was a better driver than any of us (and he was), just a keenness to pass on his knowledge and point out our errors as sympathetically as possible.

  Later in the course, when the stakes and speeds were considerably higher, the potential for total disaster was very real. A debrief after a few miles of driving would see every inch of the route driven pored over and examined for areas of improvement. So reserved was Carl that he would say for example: ‘On that last right hand bend you could have lost just two or three miles an hour, it would have made everything that bit smoother,’ and I would nod sagely.

  Loosely translated into everyday language it meant: ‘You lunatic, you nearly had us all killed’, but the impact of a quiet conversation was far less likely to cause feelings of indignation, and so more likely to end up in a lesson being properly learnt.

  Carl’s credibility was further enhanced by the fact he had spent a good many years on traffic, so was aware of how the theory would be put into practice. One of his worst experiences had been at an accident on a busy main road – at night and during a torrential downpour, a car had left the highway and came to rest upside down in a narrow ditch full of water. The Asian family inside had all escaped apart from an elderly man who was trapped inside, one of his legs broken. With the car acting like a dam the water level in the ditch rose rapidly, and to get to the old man Carl was forced to climb in through the broken back window, battling against a tide of muddy water in pitch darkness. He located the casualty in the front of the car, and with one arm around him he reached round with his free hand to try to get some purchase on any solid object he could in order to remove both of them from near-certain death. Feeling around in the dark, his hand suddenly sank deep into something warm and soggy, with some harder bits in it. His first thought was ‘Oh God, I’ve put my hand into someone’s guts’, such was the feeling. Deciding that whoever it was would be dead anyway, he returned to the task of saving the living, and managed to secure the man’s removal from the car. He returned again with a torch to see if there was a dead body unaccounted for, only to discover that his hand had been immersed in a large bowl of still-warm beef curry.

  The key to the advanced course was discipline, observation and smoothness. A wonderful line from the handbook was to base your driving plan on ‘what you can see, what you can’t see, and what you can reasonably expect to develop.’ The vernacular translation was ‘on the black bits, shiny side up and pointing at nothing’.

  This was not as easy as it sounded in one of the intermediate cars – the venerable Austin Montego – I don’t know whether this one had been specially chosen for its appalling handling, but at anything over 90 miles an hour it was dangerously unstable, and while we were learning to handle cars at the extremes of their performance, we would at least have hoped to have decent tools with which to do the job. So it was a matter of driving within limits, and waiting our respective turns to go in the other car. Despite this, the fortnight’s intermediate passed fairly smoothly, and then it was into the ‘big boys’ toys’, as they were called. There was a selection of cars, a Rover 825 saloon, the slightly larger engined and later Rover 827, a 2.9 litre Ford Granada, and a Vauxhall Senator with a delightful 3 litre straight-six engine.

  We started in the 825 Rover, and were warned about the step up in performance from anything we might have driven previously. The reason for warnings about the performance of the car had come about after a test model was supplied by the factory as a demonstrator and used by one of the traffic units in a rather over-enthusiastic way, culminating in the demolition of a street light, the trashing of the car, and the premature end to the passenger’s career. The driver claimed a tyre had blown out, and the tyre was sent off for examination which revealed a suspiciously penknife-like hole in it, apparently inflicted after the event. A forensic examination of the officer’s own penknife proved that it was not caused by his knife as was suspected. I found out some years later it had been caused by his Inspector’s knife instead.

  The extra caveats were to make sure any unjustifiable over-exuberance was entirely the driver’s responsibility.

  These were the sort of cars that people owned as company cars, and are usually seen either at a crawl in city rush hour traffic, or inches off each others’ bumpers at 95 miles an hour on the motorway. They are seen as fast, powerful cars, but hardly ever used at their full potential for more than a few seconds in the normal course of events. On the advanced course we were able to give them free rein for hours, and it was a fantastic feeling to see the speedometer creep round to 120, then change up into top and be told by the instructor ‘now push the accelerator wide open.’

  There was an inner voice of caution which seemed to make you back off slightly, as if the speed you had reached was enough. The idea of the course was to make you look at everything around – the road surface, traffic, weather et al – and ask yourself ‘Is everything under control and likely to remain so?’ If the answer was ‘yes’, then you would ask yourself ‘is it safe to go a bit faster still?’ The answer was usually ‘yes’ again, but making the conscious decision to speed up further was a surprising effort. The same assessment would apply at lower speeds too, but that was far less exciting.

  Commentary was also asked for regularly, the same as on the general course, but of course at far higher speeds. This meant looking much further ahead and picking only the most essential points to comment on, unless you were in a built up area when 30 miles an hour felt like standing still, and the commentary could degenerate into the trivial, even down to the relative merits of members of the opposite sex walking along the pavement. Shameful.

  The course was everything I had hoped for. For someone who had spent his formative years thrashing the living daylights out of a series of cars generously loaned by my trusting parents, and since joining the Police had often seen the blue lights of a high speed chase disappear away from my screaming underpowered panda car, it was a dream come true. The sweetest music to my ears was to be told that we could lawfully exceed the national speed limit for operational and training purposes. Of course if we had an accident at any speed we would have to account for our actions, but to be able to floor the throttle in every gear in a powerful car without fear of being nicked for it was a revelation. This freedom was combined with a heavy sense of responsibility, as while the driving school cars and occupants could cope with the speeds and had an alert, highly experienced instructor keeping an eye on things, the public were not expecting to have any vehicle appear on them at 120 miles an hour, when throughout their driving careers they had never previously coped with anything doing an average of more than about 50 miles an hour. There must have been several raised heartbeats
up and down the country as motorists would find themselves overtaken at enormous speed by a car they hadn’t even been aware of until it swept by. A discreet sign on the back said ‘Police Training’, it even had the Force name on it, but there were no complaints. Not even from the boy racer who decided one day that he would tag on and pick up a few tips, or perhaps show us a thing or two.

  For several miles he stayed irritatingly close, only speed limits and caution stopped us from losing him, and he must have felt quite confident. Carl the instructor remained very calm, even while we students fumed at the other driver’s annoying proximity. But Carl had a trick up his sleeve, which he revealed when we came up behind an articulated lorry on a long, straight stretch of road.

  We lined up for the overtake, all clear ahead, so down into third gear and away, the boy racer right on our tail.

  As we drew towards the front of the truck Carl quietly said, ‘When you get just ahead of the cab, don’t pull back in and match the truck’s speed.’

  We had learnt to do exactly what he said, and so as our boot was just clear of the front of the truck, we slowed and stayed there, the idiot behind almost bolted to our tail.

  Bit by bit the end of the straight drew nearer, and as it did so a car started to come in the opposite direction. Our closing speed was probably around 100 miles an hour, so it didn’t take long for the situation to become quite threatening.

  ‘Right, now move over to our side of the road,’ said Carl calmly at the last moment.

  And we did just that, pulling in ahead of the truck, and as the Highway Code required we didn’t cause the oncoming driver to have to brake or alter course.

  The lad behind us was less fortunate. He had spent the length of the straight sitting on our back bumper, becoming more and more frustrated by our apparent inability to complete the overtaking manoeuvre, and looking no further ahead than the back of our car. When all of a sudden we moved over he was caught unawares and found himself side by side with a truck, facing an oncoming car, with no acceleration and nowhere to go.

  His lesson from our advanced course was short, not very sweet, but probably lasting. We didn’t see him again.

  Some days would go better than others, and all the time you were aware of the deadline which would either see an advanced ‘ticket’ or an ignominious return to section with even less chance of going on another advanced course than before.

  This pressure would cause some interesting moments in the fifth week as the learning curve flattened out and the feeling of having improved dwindled. The urge to show an improvement every day obscured the more sensible option of just consolidating the skills learned, but finally we made it to the Thursday of the sixth week, and the long-awaited ‘final drive’.

  Out of the six of us, five passed, and the disappointment for the sixth man was enormous. It was more on technicalities – you couldn’t get as far as the final drive without showing enough apparent ability to make the grade, but the standards were very strict, and if you couldn’t produce the goods on test, the worry was you might not do so among the stresses of real life. As is common in such circumstances there was genuine commiseration from the successful ones, but it is always easier to be the one giving the sympathy from a position of success than being the one commiserated with from a position of failure.

  I returned to my division as the proud holder of an advanced authority, and settled down for a long wait for a place on traffic, hoping my newly-learnt skills would not go rusty. But my luck was in, and in less than a month one member of the traffic unit left on temporary promotion, and I was offered his place until such time as he returned. I jumped at the opportunity, and clutching my newly-issued white hat and a dangerously flammable plastic reflective jacket I went to the Traffic Office to start on my first true specialisation.

  Twenty-Three

  Compared to the previous few years where I had settled into a comfortable routine, a period of a few short months had seen rapid change in my career, and the following six months never really settled down. I had to get used to a whole new group of people in the unit, some with only a year or so on traffic, others with up to a quarter of a century of experience. Once again I was back at the bottom of the pile, the new boy.

  The true core of the Police is the people on section, and if parts of the organisation were stripped away one by one, then the last man left standing should be wearing a pointy hat and walking the beat. So anything away from section has to be classed as ‘specialist’, and is normally able to run its existence in a slightly less frantic fashion.

  Central to a more relaxed lifestyle was an office, a kettle, and a door, and we had all three.

  There was a ‘brew fund’, everyone paid in so much a month, and everyone had their own drinking vessel – some just china cups, sole survivors from a long lost or broken ancient posh set, others large mugs with custom made logos glazed on. There was a fierce possessiveness about this, and woe betide you if you used someone else’s cup. On the wall above the table where the brew stuff lived was a whiteboard where messages for general consumption were displayed – details of roadworks to be checked on for congestion, or information about a newly reported drink driver or disqualified driver.

  One of the less dedicated monogamists on the unit found one day that his personal mug was missing. He was in a bad mood at the time, as his latest female conquest had seen the error of her ways and dumped him. This was not the way he liked to run his life, preferring to be the one calling the shots in his extra-marital activities. Denied his accustomed morning brew, he wrote in big letters on the board ‘Where is my mug?’ before stomping off to the gents down the corridor.

  His day took a further downturn when he returned and found written beneath his question an answer.

  It read ‘Gone back to her husband’.

  Some traffic cars on day shifts were single-manned, but generally when numbers allowed they would be doubled up, and I was put in company with one of the older in service as his new traffic partner. There was a lot to learn in the first few weeks, translating my newly-acquired driving skills into the real world, learning how to deal safely and sensibly with accident scenes, and getting to grips with some of the equipment I was to use so much in the future.

  The best piece of kit we had was an unmarked car, but during daytime the Inspector had reserved it for himself. There was some technical reason given for this, but the truth was that if he went to visit his girlfriend during the day in a marked car it might cause problems. Particularly if his wife found out.

  In the normal absence of the plain car, we still had use of the radar guns.

  They were beautiful pieces of equipment, and quite simple to operate. Just switch on, press a button marked ‘32’ and see if the number ‘32’ came up in the display, then press a button marked ‘888’ and see if the number ‘888’ came up. The final test was to hit a tuning fork on the desk, and hold it in front of the gun. The frequency of the fork had to produce a reading of 60, and that meant the gun was ready for use. I had no idea how the things worked, something to do with Doppler effects and reflected beams, but work they most certainly did.

  There were several radar guns in the office, some allocated to specific patrols, others taken at random. We were given carte blanche as to where we operated with them, and had a good effect on keeping the lid on speeders around the area, simply because we could pop up anywhere from one day to the next. A trick I was taught later in my service by a very experienced colleague was to go out in conjunction with another traffic man, each of us with radar, and set up about half a mile apart. The parting words to any speeder after issuing a ticket would always be ‘go carefully – you never know where the next speed trap may be’, followed by a radio call to one’s partner as the annoyed driver set off in defiant and aggressive mood, gathering speed once more.

  Many a motorist was reduced to apoplectic rage by being caught less than a minute further down the road, and when they yelled,‘I’ve just had a ticket from another rada
r trap’ would get the calm reply,‘well weren’t you warned that you never know where the next trap might be?’

  There was plenty of scope for dealing with accidents. As a panda driver I tended to arrive late and wished I had been there sooner. As a traffic man I tended to arrive first and hope someone else got there soon, preferably the ambulance. I once said to an ambulance man how glad I was to see them as I usually spent several minutes trying to remember my first aid and waiting impatiently for them to arrive and show some expert knowledge. It was not reassuring when he told me that they felt exactly the same until they could unload their patients at hospital and let the doctors get to work.

  I wondered how the doctors felt…

  Life on traffic wasn’t restricted exclusively to road-related matters – we tended to float around and be on hand to back up the section if needed, and my first ‘blue light’ run was to one such job. It wasn’t really an emergency, but my ‘tutor’ called up for us to go to a report of a fatality at a container base, so if there was death in the title we thought it fair to make haste.

  It was night, so even with the street lights the blue beacon on the Rover stood out well and for the first time I became aware of the odd effect of driving with a rotating light on top of the car – it was like sitting in the top of a lighthouse and then moving at high speed. Most disconcerting initially, but something you got used to and came to ignore.

  Even though the roads were deserted I put the two tone horns on as well, just to get a feel of driving with son et lumière as it were. The whole process felt very conspicuous, but reassuringly so as the speeds went higher. As it was I stayed around 65 to 70 miles an hour in the 30 limit, getting used to this very high profile mode of travel. After a minute or so of travel with ‘blues and twos’ I saw a car come up to a junction ahead on my left, and there it stopped. I instinctively lifted off the throttle, but as I got closer I saw the man at the wheel look in my direction, and felt I had made eye contact. Reassured by this I reapplied throttle, at the same time as he pulled out into my path.