On a Saturday night in their prime, however, these men were known as ‘carpet carriers’, swaggering self-importantly down the High Street, arms held out to their sides as if an invisible rolled up carpet were inserted under each one. They were in their element, lords of what little they surveyed, their lives full of beer and curry until the money ran out and they returned to their miserable homes to beat their wife or girlfriend of the moment.
Visiting almost any house in the area you were met by the same sight – small children, large women, blurred generations, very few men, and inevitably an enormous television and a big mongrel dog. Regular newspaper headlines would highlight various local crises, showing how the area led or was in the top few towns in any national league table of everything from teenage pregnancy to premature death from a range of diseases, most of which could be traced to excessive alcohol consumption, smoking and bad diet. All manner of campaigns were launched to promote healthier lifestyles, but the fast food shops and discount off licences flourished along the High Street, interspersed with solicitors’ offices and ‘pound shops’. Being a salaried professional I had to restrict myself to intermittent takeaways, I gave up smoking on economic grounds and drank in moderation. I must have been getting something wrong somewhere.
It was interesting if predictable to note that the designers of this modern Utopia had not shown any interest in actually setting up home there themselves, presumably leaving at high speed as soon as the consultancy fees hit their bank accounts.
Worst of all, this not-very-brave New World was now a fixture. What man had joined together, no god could put asunder, it seemed. Colloquially known as ‘giro valley’ or ‘incest gulch’, it was as welcoming to me as the Antarctic to Scott.
My only hope of salvation was to climb onto the life raft of a traffic unit, but to do that I had to retain my advanced driving authority. This meant no accidents, at least none that were my fault, and all went according to plan until one night when I came horribly close to this nightmare becoming a reality.
Pending a space on the Traffic Unit proper, I had been posted to work an ‘area car’. This was attached to the block, and in reality was no more than a fast panda, but at least I was driving the same car as used by the traffic unit, so my credibility as an aspirant to traffic was retained.
I was usually assigned an ‘observer’, in theory someone to create a double manned car such as might be required at a quick response job. In reality the observer acted as a navigator, all the estates being joined by a maze of winding anonymous lanes and overlaid with a grotesque system of dual carriageways. It was widely supposed that the designer of the road layout had accidentally spilled a bowl of spaghetti on his plans, but neglected to clean it all off when he submitted them to the road builders. It was probably over three months before I even grasped the basic layout of the area.
Late one night I was with a probationer observer. We had been sent to the usual run of domestics and petty crime, and had spent about half an hour at one dingy house listening to a tale of woe from a mother of several grimy, unappealing kids. We gave copious amounts of advice which probably sounded good but boiled down to ‘get a grip of your own life and stop bothering us’, and fled into the night. I decided we would try to hunt a drunk driver as some form of relief, and after a mile or so were cruising round when a battered car with four lads in it went the opposite way at speed. The road was too narrow to allow a three-point turn, but I knew there was an entrance to some offices a few yards ahead. I stopped just beyond the entrance, threw the car into reverse, and started to back in. There was a horrible crunching noise and the car stopped. I got out to investigate, and discovered to my horror that while the entrance was wide open during the day, at night it was sealed off with a long low chain, which had neatly smashed the corner-mounted rearlight on my car. This must mean the end of my driving authority – damage to a car, entirely my fault, so welcome back to the world of panda driving which I thought I had escaped.
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and she came to me in an unexpected and devious flash. I examined the Rover more carefully, and found there was no damage to any of the bodywork at all, purely the plastic light lens. In a fit of inspiration I picked up as many of the pieces as I could recover and put them in my coat pocket. Praying that we would not get a call for a few minutes, I drove back to the scene of our previous job and scattered the fragments at the corner of one of the parking spaces near to the address and drove off. About half an hour later we went to some other nondescript incident on the other side of town, and a discreet few moments after booking off there I called up over the radio, ‘Can you tell the patrol Sergeant I’ve got some damage to the car – looks like someone’s kicked the back light in.’
The Sergeant came back over the air ‘Where were you parked up last?’
I gave the address and sure enough after a few minutes he came back on the air again.
‘Whereabouts in the close was the car unattended?’
‘In the far corner, outside number 32,’ I lied.
His reply sounded almost triumphant, and I felt a few pangs of guilt, but managed easily to suppress them.
‘Yes, there’s a pile of bits from your back light. Someone’s obviously taken a dislike to the car while you were there. No problem.’
I regarded this as justified by the fact I hadn’t wanted or deserved to be in the town in the first place. Put me among criminals and some of it was bound to rub off.
So by extreme means I was able to remain qualified and a few months later I was summoned to the traffic Inspector’s office to be welcomed as the unit’s newest member.
The unit had a reputation as hard working and being a good team, but this was despite rather than because of the Inspector. A surprisingly short man, he was known as ‘double A’. He knew this and thought it was a form of accreditation. In reality it was a reference to bra sizes, conveying the description of him as a tit, and a small one at that.
My previous time on traffic at Newport was immediately put to good use, and while still unfamiliar with the area I was able to get back into the routine of dealing with accidents, radar, chases and all the other things that made this area of life as a Policeman appeal to me. I was ‘in company’ for a while, but after buying some Ordnance Survey maps and an A to Z book of the area I felt reasonably happy to patrol alone, and managed to build up a decent if rough idea of which roads led from where to where and the various road numbers attached to them.
One morning I was told to go and deal with an abnormal load. These could be anything from perhaps a lorry-load of roof trusses which was just wider than regulations allowed, to some huge and unwieldy pieces of engineering. On this occasion it was the latter. It consisted of two low loaders, each with large sections of an accommodation block destined for a North Sea oil platform, each trailer some sixty feet long, eighteen feet high and fourteen feet wide. They had parked up overnight by a motorway junction, but were too big to use the motorway and my job was to escort them through the next town and lay them up again for someone off the next division to meet up with them later in the day. The men who crewed these loads were always relaxed and industrious, belying the fact that the loads were worth vast amounts of money, and they were working to a strict deadline for delivery. They staked their reputation on meeting their deadlines. My job was to see that their passage across my ‘patch’ was as smooth and trouble-free as possible. Because of their size, the haulage company would notify a route to each police area they travelled through, and I in turn would read it when I picked them up. In reality they would know the way and simply called out the road number when I met them and I would lead them along it, and so it was this day. The rush hour had subsided, and it was all so easy as I drove confidently a couple of hundred yards ahead of the enormous loads. Headlights blazing and blue lights flashing, I would accelerate ahead to any bend or junction, and stop any oncoming traffic while watching in the mirrors for the trucks to catch up with me. This was real �
�big kid’ territory, until after one bend they failed to appear. I waited a while, then wondering what might have gone wrong I turned round and headed back to them, round the bend and under the railway bridge.
The railway bridge with its 13 foot height restriction.
There was no way these trucks would fit, and I realised I was entirely responsible for bringing them along the wrong road.
This was an abject lesson in reading the route and double checking everything, and when I did read their route I remembered that the two main roads into town had similar numbers, but not identical ones, and I had confused the two. I had taken the shorter more obvious route, as opposed to the high-level one carefully worked out by someone less impetuous than I.
It took perhaps half an hour to turn them round, and I was amazed at the way these two massive vehicles managed to turn in what looked to be an impossibly narrow side road, inching their way in with hairsbreadths to spare, but not so much as a flake of paint dislodged by the time I breathed a huge sigh of relief and got them back to their start point, and routed onto the correct road. The crews were very nice about it all, the foreman breezily saying how easy it was to make mistakes, but I crossed them off my list of potential future employers if I ever fancied a change of career.
Twenty-Five
The new traffic area covered not just ‘giro valley’, but two other, larger towns. This gave a big area to play in, but it was more built up than the rural space I had enjoyed prior to my enforced move. On reflection it was good to work different areas of the County – I got to know more people, to gain more experience, and to see different ways of dealing with situations, because although jobs may fall under the same umbrella, each one will have its own peculiar hallmarks needing a particular way of it being handled. Equally, although people rang for ‘the Police’, they usually got a different individual each time, and each had their own style. To see the different styles enacted was to broaden one’s own experience.
Of all the different officers I have met in my service, one with a most memorable style was a wonderful woman by the name of Jennifer Ireland.
Fiercely independent and individual, she was in some ways a female George Upton, if such a thing could be envisaged. Like George she was large, highly sexed and grossly outspoken, a champion of the victim and took the fight against crime very personally. She possessed many attributes, two of which ensured she could be clearly identified as a mammal.
On one occasion she had been asked to work with a number of other officers to try and catch a local pervert. This as yet untraced man had taken to ringing one of a number of phone boxes in the town centre, and if a young female voice answered and was willing to talk, would find itself subject to all manner of questions of a most personal nature.
An operation had been put together whereby the four most likely phone boxes were watched, and if any were to receive an incoming call, mechanisms would start to trace the call. A pair of officers was at each location, a female to take the call and a male with a radio to pass on a signal from the call-taker if it was the correct pervert on the line, and in turn to relay back to the call-taker when the offender’s number had been traced. Until that point the conversation had to be maintained.
As fate would have it, it was Jenny’s phone box that the pervert picked that day.
‘Hello,’ she said, trying to sound as young and naïve as possible.
‘Hello,’ said the voice. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twelve,’ said Jenny as she gave a ‘thumbs up’ sign to her colleague outside, who radioed to start the call trace.
She kept the man talking as he went through his usual pattern of questions – which school did she go to, what were her favourite subjects, what shops had she gone to today and so on.
After the small talk it moved onto the questions the pervert had really wanted to ask.
‘What are your tits like?’ he asked bluntly.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Jenny, playing for time. There was still no response from the efforts to trace the man.
‘Have you got big tits?’ came the clarifying question.
She paused, looking down at her enormous chest. She pondered what the man would think if he knew the truth.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re quite small.’
‘Do you know what a penis is?’
‘Yes,’ Jenny replied. She was pleased to give at least one honest answer.
‘I’m holding my penis in my hand,’ said the perv. ‘Would you like to see it?’
At this precise moment from outside the phone box came the welcome ‘thumbs up’ which indicated the call had been traced. A wave of anger welled up inside Jenny. She was furious at the effect the call would have had on a real child. As an adult, however, she answered the question with total honesty.
‘If I can fit it all in one hand I’m not interested.’
At this she slammed the phone down, her job done.
The man was arrested, interviewed and charged. But to Jenny’s surprise and annoyance however, the matter did not end there. At Court he pleaded ‘not guilty’, and before long Jenny found herself in the witness box at Crown Court. Two barristers, one prosecution and one defence, battled it out from their respective corners. A bewigged judge presided, and the twelve jury members listened to the evidence which was, in all fairness, overwhelming.
Jenny gave her account of how the operation to trap the man had come about, and detailed her actions within it.
Eventually they got to the bit in the phone box, and the prosecution barrister produced a few sheets of paper.
‘This is a transcript of the conversation you had with the defendant,’ he said, and went on to lead Jenny through the evidence. He covered the preamble, and Jenny knew what was coming. She tried hard to compose herself.
‘Did the defendant say “Have you got big tits”?’
She looked down at her bosom, more ample than ever, fighting its usual battle with her uniform tunic.
‘Yes,’ she managed to reply. A flicker of a smile passed over the judge’s face, and a couple of the men on the jury raised their eyebrows.
‘And did you say “No, they’re quite small”?’
‘Yes,’ said Jenny. There was a cough from the judge as he looked down at the papers in front of him.
‘And he then said he was holding his penis in his hand. Is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did he ask you if you’d like to see it?’
‘Yes,’ said Jenny, her voice rising as she tried not to burst out laughing in a mixture of embarrassment and fear at the next question.
Retaining a fantastic calm in the increasingly charged atmosphere, the prosecutor continued.
‘And you said,’ he looked down at the papers and paused. ‘You said “if I can fit it all in one hand I’m not interested”, is that right?’
Jenny glanced round the courtroom. The various jury members were a mixture of surprised looks and suppressed sniggers, the defence barrister was grinning from ear to ear and staring at the floor. Jenny bit the inside of her cheeks and made a muffled squeak, which was the nearest to a ‘Yes’ she was capable of without collapsing in hysterical laughter, and then her eye fell on the judge. He was quite silent, but his shoulders were shaking, his wig was half off his head, and tears rolled down his cheeks onto his notes.
There was no cross-examination.
With memories like this, sometimes being a Police officer has to be the best job in the world.
Other times, unfortunately, it is quite the opposite.
After the reorganised divisions were reorganised again, I found myself on a much smaller traffic unit, far more at the whim of supervisors who saw us as simply an extra hand to fend off the rising workload on section, and worst of all I was back in Benbridge.
Traffic expertise was ignored, and we were expected to deal with the domestics, pub fights and other dross as it arose. We were told that we were all part of the same organisation and not to be elitist,
but if this was true and universally applied, I wondered, how come we could never get the CID to come and help out with a simple shoplifter?
Odd though it may sound, a serious accident was almost a relief at times. At least it meant I could put my training and experience to good use. After all, someone had to deal, and in these circumstances I was happy to be that someone.
So when a call came to a ‘serious’ a few miles outside the town, it was the usual blue lights and sirens, foot to the boards and make haste, already making mental plans of how to deal with whatever we found.
I was in company with Lou Reynolds, a man of exceptional drive and confidence, and we made the best working duo I have ever known. I could talk, he could punch. I could offer alternatives, he could make decisions. We both learnt so much from each other, and we could deal with a scene of total carnage without having to ask each other what needed doing, we just had an ability to get a job done between us.
When we got to the scene of this latest one there were a couple of cars stopped, and two ambulances. In the middle of the area was a bicycle on its side, and a number of people standing about, none apparently injured. A second traffic car arrived a few moments later, followed by the area traffic Sergeant in another car.
It didn’t take long to find out what had happened. It wasn’t strictly an accident under the legal definition – it was simply a woman who had fallen off her bike. She had been cycling along with her 18 month old son on a child seat behind her, when something just went wrong, she lost her balance, and fell sideways onto the kerb.
Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes Page 22
