Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes (9 page)

But the decisions were all way over my head now. I was advised by others on the block to get my resignation typed out, because (the feeling went) if I didn’t have it to hand when I was given the official ‘chop’, then the Chief would sack me, so any reference would read ‘dismissed’ rather than ‘resigned’, and who wants to employ a sacked copper?

I took their advice and on the appointed day put on my best uniform, pointy hat and white ceremonial gloves. I picked up the two identical A5 size pieces of typewritten paper (everything had to be in duplicate) which read ‘After 19 months’ service I find myself in a position where I have no alternative but to resign from this Force’. I stopped short of actually signing them, as I wanted to leave that final act as late as possible. Surely the Chief would grant me a few seconds to sign before throwing me out?

I went in the lift to the sixth floor. As a serving officer you only came here if you were a hero or in trouble, and I was no hero. His secretary smiled at me and asked me to wait in an ante-room until the Chief was ready to see me. I wondered if I could wait another 28 years and collect my pension…but there
was no chance of that. A few minutes later she put her head round the door and said,‘The Chief Constable will see you now.’

The Chief’s office seemed huge, and I was ushered in to stand in the middle of a large, lonely carpet. On the far side of a very big oak desk sat the man himself. As required I saluted, and waited for him to speak. This was the same office where I had been interviewed just over two years previously for the job which I was now on the verge of leaving. At that interview I had been on the outside looking in, not really sure if I wanted to enter. How very different it seemed to be now on the inside looking back at the outside, and desperately wanting to stay.

‘Pull up a chair,’ said the Chief.

That was nice – my knees were once again doing a good impression of Elvis Presley’s leg during one of his more active shows, so to take the weight off my feet was welcome.

He began to talk – ‘I pay close attention to my Force.’

(Oh great, I’m not just getting kicked out, I’m getting a lecture first.)

‘I have seen who has written what about you, and it is clear that your Inspector doesn’t think you should continue as a Constable.’

(Go on – tell me something I don’t know.)

‘I may be six floors up, but I’m not as far away as a lot of people like to think. I didn’t get to be Chief Constable without being able to judge people for myself.’

(Oh great, you thought I was rubbish all along – can I borrow your pen, there’s something here I need to sign…)

‘Give me that resignation,’ he nodded at my left hand.

‘I haven’t signed it yet Sir.’

‘I didn’t ask you to sign it, I asked you to hand it over.’

I complied.

He said nothing, read it and then tore it up. I must have got the wrong form. There must be a specific form with wording admitting one’s feebleness or something.

Then he spoke again – ‘There may be some in this building who don’t want you here, but I’m happy with your progress and I am going to confirm you in the rank of Constable here and now.’

My brain struggled to accept what I had heard. This man didn’t owe me anything, I was just a small cog in a very big machine, but in my wildest dreams of the past few weeks’ agony I hadn’t expected anything like this.

‘However, I am not so naïve to think that just because I want to keep you means everyone else will automatically agree with me, so I am moving you to Newport. You start there on Monday.’

Newport was the other half of the Division, and very much the poor neighbour. Horror tales emanated from the place, it was seen as a sort of punishment posting, but this move was not something I felt I should argue about. I had done well enough out of this encounter, and being anywhere in a job was better than being somewhere out of one.

Still wondering if the whole meeting was actually just a dream, I thanked him profusely and returned to the ground floor.

I changed into my everyday uniform and made my way to the parade room. The door was part open and I could hear the
Sergeant saying ‘…he won’t be coming back. The Chief was accepting his resignation this morning.’

I walked in and sat down, feeling a bit like Banquo’s ghost must have done.

For someone to return from a full-uniform visit to the sixth floor was unheard of.

It was like someone turning up in Moscow after 10 years in a Gulag.

‘We heard you’d gone,’ said the Sergeant.

‘Well I have, in a way. I’m being kept on but sent to Newport.’

‘Oh. Congratulations. I think.’

Interestingly the Inspector who started this horrible affair went for his promotion board – without success. To my satisfaction he never did make the next rank up.

So ended my time at my first posting. I tidied up or handed over any outstanding paperwork, and within the week I was pulling up at Newport Police station.

Back to the bottom of the pile again, I thought. But then it wasn’t really. I had completed almost two years’ service by this time, so although the area was new to me, the work would just be more of the same. It was the inside of the station that would be different. And of course nothing is a secret for long in the Police. My new block knew I was coming from the moment I did.

I walked into the parade room. Coincidentally, like my first day of active duty had been, it was an early shift again.

Considering the two towns were only six miles apart I was surprised and a little disappointed that I knew none of the nine faces there.

There was a mild air of anticipation, like any group when a new member arrives.

Colin Pickering, one of the older in service, spoke first.

‘Morning.’

‘Morning,’ I replied, partly to him and partly to the room. There was a pause.

The air of anticipation surged as he asked the question they were obviously all wondering, and he didn’t mince his words – ‘What were you in the shit for then?’

‘Who says I was in the shit?’ I countered defensively.

I was intrigued by what story might have arrived ahead of me, because a good rumour is always believed before the truth.

‘You wouldn’t be moved here if you weren’t in the shit. All we want know is what for. Whose block were you on?’

I told him the name of the Inspector who had so nearly secured my demise.

‘That explains a lot,’ he said. He poured a mug of tea from a vast aluminium teapot, stirred in some sugar and passed it to me. He gave me a cigarette and said – ‘Welcome to arse end of the County.’

A curious feeling came over me – I was going to like it here. I felt at home.

The whole atmosphere at Newport was different. Maybe it was because we didn’t have the Headquarters on our back, perhaps there were less frills, I don’t know. Over the next five years I was to see colleagues leave Newport to move in the opposite direction and who far preferred it, so maybe it was down to individual tastes. Perhaps it was because I had arrived with some experience and could hit the ground running, as they say. The biggest hurdle was that I had to learn the layout of a whole new area, but the next five years were to be some of the happiest and most fulfilling in my service.

The town was typical of many up and down the country. Originally an industrial town with canal, dock and rail links, it
had a heart of brick-built terraced houses but had spread into its suburbs with council estates in the sixties and seventies, along with large areas of modern private housing. Its wealth derived from a number of large industrial firms involved in heavy engineering, chemicals, and other bulk manufacturing processes.

These companies produced all manner of harmful material, but enjoyed huge local support because every time pressure was brought to bear to be more environmentally responsible all they had to do was threaten to close down and move to the Far East. This would prompt demonstrations of support from all the families who would be out of jobs and homes if they did. They didn’t need a publicity machine, the employees did it for them.

The town centre was fairly drab, and every few years there would be an ‘initiative’ to revitalise the area. There would be press releases, photographs of some local dignitary like the mayor (who usually had a day job as a taxi driver) shaking hands with the boss of a building company at the announcement of a major project almost guaranteed to solve every social and economic problem you could think of. This was followed by many months of traffic chaos as roads were dug up, rebuilt or re-routed, dozens of calls to the Police to deal with kids on the building site, damage to equipment, theft of tools and building materials, and eventually a grand opening of whatever the new building was – normally something with lots of shops and a few flats. The flats would house a variety of unemployable dead-legs who settled in quickly to a routine of drinking and fighting with each other, and the shops opened in a blaze of well-stocked glamour before starting a steady decline into a mixture of
discount bargain stores and off licences. The ‘revitalising’ theory worked on the lines that more retail establishments would create more jobs, and thus create wealth. The calculations must have worked on the assumption that everyone who worked there would spend their wages in the same place, a theoretical cycle of wealth which was about as likely to succeed as going flying by sitting in a basket and lifting yourself up by the handles.

Eventually the area would simply become somewhere dry for the local unwashed to gather when the pubs were shut, and meant the high street became a dismal line of charity shops, pawnbrokers and solicitors’ premises, interspersed with the occasional fast-food restaurant and taxi offices.

Some years later another bright idea for ‘regeneration’ would be proposed, and the whole depressing circle would begin again.

At my previous posting I had been in a prosperous town centre with plenty of tourists and visiting shoppers, and it was only now I began to notice that a conspicuous proportion of the locals were what one colleague called ‘pond life’. These were the ones who would go to great lengths to avoid anything approaching work, but would milk the welfare system for everything they could, even to the extent of having a couple more children in order to be given a bigger house by the Local Authority. They referred to ‘getting paid’ meaning the day they were given their benefits. They all smoked, were usually drunk to some degree most evenings, and especially so on a Friday and Saturday night, and travelled everywhere by taxi if at all possible. It was annoying to be summoned to some whinging call for help by one of these people one day, and then perhaps
to go another day to a pensioner living honestly and frugally, who rather than demanding to travel by taxi would wait in the rain for a bus and make do with their lot, not wanting to apply for benefits or allowances as it didn’t seem right to get something for nothing.

Away from the immediate vicinity of the town centre were large residential developments from the 1970s onwards, privately owned, and reasonably well kept. The bulk of inhabitants in these areas were employed, though many had their roots in the nearby large cities, they or their families having come to Newport to work in the industrial plants as the demand for labour had grown. This meant they had an ingrained work ethic, but retained the inner-city distrust of the Police and a large minority would defend their own or their offspring’s actions to the last, irrespective of any evidence of guilt, however overwhelming.

For the first few shifts I was put in company with Colin who drove me round the place. He was hardly elaborate in his description of this area of society.

‘Looks OK here’ I said. ‘Are the people all right then?’

He was quiet for a few moments, then just said, ‘Shit with a mortgage.’

It seemed a bit harsh, but when I look back it wasn’t a bad description – If you work hard and enjoy success to any degree, then I believe you are entitled to enjoy the fruits of your own labours. But somehow many of these folk had a tastelessly ostentatious way of manifesting their material possessions. Success meant an extra garden gnome in the front garden, and respectability meant ringing the Police just as much as their
benefit-subsidised brethren on the Council estates, but expecting faster service and everything their own way because (as they never stopped reminding us) ‘I pay my taxes so I pay your wages’ – a bizarre logic used by ungrateful people the world over. I would usually suggest that they stop paying their taxes and see how long it was before I was laid off work through lack of funds. They were also the sort of people who would have little tolerance for any local nuisance caused by children in the street, but if any member of their own family were ever accused of some misdemeanour it was invariably a malicious and unjustified complaint – the child had always been falsely accused or was ‘easily led’. If the evidence was overwhelming then the tack would change and the offence would be trivialised – ‘Is that all? Haven’t you got something better to do? There are rapists and murderers out there and you’re picking on my lad for stealing/fighting/drinking.’

Any comment from us along the lines that we would have more time to hunt the imaginary wandering hordes of murderous sex offenders if their malevolent teenager had been better brought up in the first place, were never well received.

As we drove round I felt very much the new boy in the new posting, like I had done on that first morning on patrol with Gus. But I quickly realised just how much those two eventful years had changed me. I didn’t look at cars and wonder how I would go about stopping them, how I would make contact with the driver; I looked at cars and wondered whether the driver had insurance, I looked at the tyres to see if they were bald, the bodywork to see what condition it was in. I was looking at society and its contents from a very different angle.

I tried to build a basic mental picture of the layout of the town. The first thing to do was divide the place up into the various estates or areas, and to know which were good, bad or ugly. (Or a combination of at least two of those labels more often than not). I tried hard to memorise things like pub names, major roads, group names of areas, that sort of thing. I knew that whoever was responsible for naming roads on housing estates always seemed to allocate the road names by a theme, for example bird names, place names, flowers, trees and so on. This means that when you are unfamiliar with an area but trying to find (let’s say) Birch Road, then if you find Elm Drive you are probably not far away. This went slightly awry on one of the Council estates as each area within it had street names from towns in different counties of England. This meant that unless you had a sound knowledge of which towns were in which exact county you could easily end up miles from your chosen address as you drifted from Cornwall to Northumbria to Kent. Additionally the houses had been built back to front, or named from the backs, depending how you looked at it. Driving down what you thought was one road, you would see that on the left was Droitwich Drive, numbers 34 to 68, while on the right was Dudley Avenue, numbers 1 to 29. Only if you walked round the end of the block onto a path between the backs of the houses would you find yourself with Droitwich Drive odds on one side and evens on the other. Actual vehicle access to the two sides of the ‘road’ could be several hundreds of yards apart, and getting to a ‘hurry up’ call at a precise address was often significantly delayed thanks to some ‘creative’ town planner and his bizarre imagination.