Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes (22 page)

‘He’s really set his heart on it you know, and I’m sure he’d
be sensible with it. I just thought I ’d check with you though – do we buy it and then get the licence, or do we actually have to get the licence first?’

These people were going to need letting down gently.

‘You would need the certificate first,’ I said.

‘Can we fill the forms in for that now then please? Then I can phone up and order it this afternoon. That’d be good wouldn’t it son?’

‘I don’t have the forms here,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to phone Headquarters Firearms Department for those and they’ll post them out to you. Unfortunately they aren’t open until Monday morning.’

The boy looked crestfallen, and the ‘father’ a little disappointed too. I tried to sound reassuring while holding back phrases involving snowballs and some of the better heated regions of hell.

’It’s a big responsibility, a gun like that. They can’t just let anyone have one you know. Out of interest, what are you going to use it for?’

After all, 14 was a bit young to start on a career as an assassin.

‘We get the odd squirrel in the back garden, and I’m going to put some targets up for him as well,’ said ‘Dad’ cheerfully.

They gave me their address, and I knew the road quite well. With a two mile range on the gun, the child would need to go to the next town to take aim at a target in the back garden, not just hang out of his bedroom window as he probably envisaged, and a direct hit on a squirrel wouldn’t just kill it, it would skin, gut and cook it in one fell swoop.

I gave them the phone number to ring at HQ where they would get the definitive answer and they left. Happy customers, if a little saddened at my inability to give permission to allow the desired purchase.

Fortunately not every caller at the desk was a fledgling homicidal maniac.

Another day an elderly gentleman came to the nick to hand in a wallet he had found somewhere in the town. I booked the property in and gave him a receipt for it, but when I started to explain what would happen if it wasn’t claimed, he finished the sentence for me – ‘I can keep it if it isn’t claimed after 28 days, I know.’

‘You handed stuff in before have you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I used to be a copper myself. Lost property procedure doesn’t change. In fact you’ll find very little has, I’ll bet.’

We spoke for a while, and he told me he had joined in 1935 and retired in 1965. I would have thought that any period of thirty years would see changes, and I put it to him that his period of service must have seen at least its fair share.

‘Not really,’ he said,‘and it won’t alter much in your service either’.

I disagreed, starting to tell him about the newer cars we had, the radios, the computers in the office. Huge changes, technological advances in leaps and bounds.

He shook his head.

‘Those aren’t changes,’ he said. ‘You still do the same job, the tools may alter, but the job is the same as it ever was. I remember my first day on duty – I walked into the Station and
went to the parade room. There were two old sweats in there, moaning like hell.’

It struck me that an ‘old sweat’ in 1935 would almost certainly have joined before the First World War. This was a glimpse into ancient history.

The old man continued. ‘I listened to them for a while and wondered what on earth I’d let myself in for. They said the Sergeants didn’t care for anyone except themselves, the bosses had lost touch, the public didn’t appreciate what the Police did for them, the job was knackered and if anything better came along they’d be off like a shot.’

‘Sounds pretty familiar,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ said the old man. ‘And I’ll tell you something else. I remember my last day on duty too. At this Police Station it was. I walked past the parade room on my way out, and I could hear two Bobbies in there saying almost word for word what the other pair had been saying 30 years earlier – job’s knackered, bosses don’t care – I’ve heard it all before. Stick at it mate, it’ll soon go. But remember – the public really do appreciate what you do. You just don’t think so when you’re actually doing the job.’

He bade me good day, turned and walked out. I picked up the wallet he had handed in and walked down the corridor to the cupboard where found property was stored. On the way back I stuck my head round the parade room door to see who was in there. Colin was sitting at a table in the middle of a pile of paperwork, his hands covered in ink and holding several feet of black and red ribbon as he failed to reassemble the antique typewriter on which he was trying to complete a report. He looked up in despair.

‘I give up,’ he said. ‘This job stinks you know, the Sergeant doesn’t care, he just wants this file finished, he’s on my back all the time, and…’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’

Life as the block ‘office man’ went on steadily and interestingly. The suspiciously anticipated computers were now installed and had a number of advantages and disadvantages. The biggest change was that all incidents requiring attention were electronically logged, and all patrols available were brought up on the screen to be attached as required. Rather than simplifying matters, it meant extra work because instead of a mental note that everyone was tied up, you had to alter their ‘patrol state’ on the machine, otherwise it was difficult to convince the Superintendent that there had been no-one to go to a job when the system showed four pandas ‘doing nothing’. The system also didn’t show how far anyone was from a job – a patrol anywhere in the whole sub-division was a patrol, end of story. When a major road accident came in, the fact that the one available man was off duty in a quarter of an hour and on a bicycle six miles from the scene didn’t bother the powers-that-be. They wanted to know why that patrol hadn’t been allocated – if he’s on the system he can go, was the approach. Nor did it take into account that the cycle patrol was difficult enough to send to a job on his own patch, never mind one that
would see him arrive very late and severely out of breath, no use to man nor beast.

Also we were now ‘on show’ to the rest of the County. That was a bad move. Equally bad was the lack of a big ‘Delete’ button on the computer that would do an electronic version of rewinding the stamp and throwing the message pad in the bin. Once a job was on, then it was fixed and had to be dealt with or explained away accordingly.

The good news was that electronic messages could be sent more easily. Things like the ‘night return’, a 24 hourly summary of any matters of note for the big bosses at HQ to read, had previously been compiled and sent by telex. Now it was simply a matter of putting an electronic tick in a box on the screen, and the job would be automatically highlighted. Messages going to other forces were also easier – just type and send to the Force Control Room who would resend it to wherever it was wanted. With the old telex machines the whole message was spewed out at HQ as a length of ticker tape, a confusion of little holes in a fragile paper ribbon. This had to be taken from the internal machines and fed into another machine to send it out of the County, but to make life difficult we had bought machines which used narrower tapes for within-Force messages than the external sender machine, so the original had to be fed through a ‘translator’ which reproduced the message in a wider format. This gave the operator several chances to feed the tape in upside down, back to front or better still break the tape and have to join it together with sticky tape. This produced a blank section in the message which must at some point have resulted in a crucial word or phrase being missed out, but no-one ever seemed to
mind, and presumably any resultant loss of life was never significant enough to warrant buying a more compatible setup.

From an aesthetic point of view the computerisation of the office was a major bonus – sitting in the office apparently doing nothing could cause friction between us inside and those outside as they hurried past the control room. Sitting in the office staring at a computer screen gave an air of being busy. Busy with what, no-one ever asked, but simply having the prop of a computer monitor in front of you made your job seem more absorbing and complicated. This has kept many a useless clerk in employment long after redundancy should have been considered – compare it with the man sitting on a park bench doing nothing who looks idle, whereas the man sitting on the same bench doing nothing but smoking a cigarette looks thoughtful and absorbed. For ‘bench’ read ‘office’, and for ‘cigarette’ read ‘monitor’.

The monitors were conventional cathode ray tube things, and had a large flat top, very useful for standing coffee mugs on. Amazingly none suffered the anticipated fate of having a half pint of liquid poured down it, though the occasional keyboard did fall victim to drinks. One of our Sergeants also found a use for the monitor top, when he came in to work very much the worse for wear one New Year’s morning. He was renowned as a ‘big drinker’, now known as an ‘alcoholic’, but in those days simply accommodated as best possible, the problem being easier to ignore than confront. His behaviour had been erratic for some months, and it was quite normal for him to wander semi-coherently round the office of a morning like some sort of executive toy while we got on with our duties. At half past
six that particular morning, and feeling a little ‘thirsty’, he had stumbled on a bottle of scotch, still nearly half full, which one of the night shift had left in a cupboard after the previous night’s celebrations. Fifteen minutes later the bottle was empty, and the Sergeant was leaning on the top of the monitor, face down, resting on his forearms. His duty for that day was to supervise the cells, so he would normally be expected to wander off after a while and sleep his excesses off in the doctor’s room. But that last half bottle of scotch had left him a little more refreshed than even his norm, and when the Inspector walked into the office and saw the half-slumped figure he was a bit taken aback. The ignored drink problem had finally become a matter he could no longer ignore.

He tried the jolly approach to start with.

‘Come on Keith, time to get some work done now.’

An unsteady head was lifted off the top of the monitor, and a pair of bloodshot eyes tried hard to focus on the giver of this unwelcome command. Brevity was of the essence.

‘Fugoff,’ he said, curtly, and the head collapsed back onto the forearm.

There was a shocked silence from all present, followed by a slightly sterner approach from the Inspector.

‘Look, stop messing about, you’ve had your fun now let’s all get down to business, you get into the cells and sort things out in case we get any prisoners.’

Again the head lifted, and again the eyes peered in the general direction of the voice.

‘I’ve already told you once – FUGOFF.’

Again the head collapsed, as did the Inspector’s attempts to
get any work out of the Sergeant. He was assisted to the canteen, plied with coffee by one of the other supervisors, and taken home to sleep it off. He was ultimately off for several months, but to his credit managed to kick the drink habit eventually, and a few years later he retired sober and sane. A rare feat!

While (for better or worse) the block was a close little community, this did result in a tendency to feel a bit isolated. When you were on duty you were only really aware of your immediate colleagues being with you, against the world. There was some assistance in the form of dogs or traffic, but that was about it. This produced a self-reliance and confidence, but working in the office I came to understand better how many other departments actually had their own existences alongside us, inside the same service, but parallel, not intertwined, so to speak.

There was an office for the Motorway Section at Newport, and their shifts were staggered, so on early turn some would come on at 6am like we did, but more would start at 7 and 8 o’clock to cater for extra traffic in the rush hour. At the end of each shift, or at the refreshment breaks, you could look out of the office and see the various Bobbies come back in as the back door of the building was right outside the panda control window. It was easy to see what sort of a day these others were having by the looks on their faces, and occasionally they would come into the office for a change of scene and a chat.

Donald (he of the pies) had by now gone onto the motorway, and was quite a regular visitor. One early afternoon
he appeared in the office, but his face as he came down the yard showed that he was having a particularly Bad Time.

He walked in and collapsed in one of the spare chairs, his expression blank and his mouth hanging open.

‘Bad day?’ I offered. It was more an invitation to talk than a question. His whole demeanour had already answered that one for me, but the story that unfolded was surprising and probably unique.

‘Bad?’ he said. ‘Nightmare would be a better description. Coming along to get in here for my refs, I came across a car on fire on the hard shoulder. All perfectly normal, I pulled up behind it and called for County Fire. There was only the driver with the car and he was safely out of it. Should have been so simple. I could see a few flames coming from round the bonnet so I went through the motions and stuck a fire extinguisher under the grille to give it a load of powder. It looks good but never tends to do much so I wasn’t surprised when the flames started to reappear. We just stood there, me and the driver, and waited for the Fire Brigade. It was only an old Sierra so no great loss if it did burn out. I should have left it at that.’

‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.

‘All of a sudden this cement mixer pulled up – it stopped in front of the Sierra, and the driver got out. He said “D’you want me to put some water on it – I’m all washed out, must have 50 gallons of water in the back”. Like a fool I said yes, so he backed up, put the chute down, and pulled a few levers.’

‘That sounds reasonable.’

‘Did to me,’ said Donald. ‘I thought it was a brilliant idea, get the fire out and get on my way, but if I ’d stopped to think I ’d have
realised. A concrete mixer is never really clean, but before I’d worked that one out there was this loud whirring noise and a great shower of water came down the chute, only it wasn’t water, it was runny concrete mixed with gravel, sand, rocks and all sorts of shit from inside the mixer. It hit the bonnet of the Sierra, bounced off the bonnet and straight through the windscreen. Before I could do anything the car was full to the door tops with runny concrete.’