Who'd Be a Copper? Read online

  Malcolm stepped into the room and handed me the papers.

  “Just fill it in and see how you go. If you get in, you wouldn’t have to stay. Try it. If you don’t like it, you could always leave. You wouldn’t be tied in, not like the forces.”

  I was still lying on the floor listening to music. I knew Malcolm was trying to help, so I nodded, probably too casually, and smiled. I sat up and leaned against the bed. Malcolm was a special constable at the time, a volunteer police officer, and he’d picked up the form from the local police station. He disappeared away into the kitchen. I heard him talk to my mother. I sensed that I was the topic of conversation because they glanced in my direction, talking in hushed conspiratorial tones. I heard my mother’s voice.

  “Is he up yet?” But I didn’t hear Malcolm’s reply. I’d been home a few months and I still didn’t feel right. I took solace in a friend’s company and we smoked hash occasionally, but I knew this was the wrong thing to do. I was evading the truth and I couldn’t hide forever. The Genesis song Mama was high in the charts at the time, and even now it reminds me of those days, with the guilt of it all tearing me apart.

  I think everyone in the family, including myself, were disappointed that my great wanderings hadn’t amounted to much. I’d returned from years of travelling abroad to absolutely nothing, apart from a stack of sun-bleached and very tattered travel diaries. But what good were these? I didn’t have any money, and I wasn’t any further qualified in anything than when I left. But I’d experienced hardship in many forms, not infrequent and lengthy spells of hunger, some danger, and times of heartache and desperation. I hadn’t realised that when you experience real hunger your teeth begin to feel quite erroneous in the mouth, and actually start to hurt, very gradually along with everything else. I’d been very hungry in Athens, and again ten thousand miles away in Darwin. I’d loved and lost; I’d seen some amazing things and had a great adventure. Perhaps more than anything else I had gained a quiet determination to succeed and a self-reliance that would remain with me for the rest of my life.

  I scanned the very comprehensive application form. There were twenty or more pages, and it appeared to be a research paper for an edition of This is your Life, with me being the subject matter. Starting from birth to the present day I was asked to supply details of every address I’d ever lived at, every job, and all incidents which I thought my prospective employers might need to know about. How honest should I be? I’d lived in Australia for a year as an illegal immigrant when my tourist visa expired. I’d shared a flat in Brisbane with a chap whose brother was a drug dealer on the Gold Coast, and we were two of his best customers. Should I tell them? Would they find out?

  Should I tell them about the many occasions I sneaked under the fence into Gaza city in 1980 avoiding the Israeli checkpoints to smoke hash with Palestinians on the beach? What about my time in Germany as a labourer when I shared a damp tenement with some Irish and Polish guys? There were times the German police visited us in their smart green uniforms after reports of drunkenness in our slum house, clearly evident to our complaining neighbours. What, if anything, should I tell them about that?

  I decided I’d merely list the addresses, and leave it to them as to how far they would check my past activities. If they found out everything and turned me down as a result, then so be it. Thankfully I’d never been arrested anywhere in the world, and never came to police notice, apart from a few minor encounters. On one occasion two Australian cops checked me out when I was hitch-hiking. I was standing alone by a melting road which stretched to the end of the earth, hoping for a lift out of Katherine, south of Darwin. A small group of Aborigines were gathered together in the scant shade of a ghost gum tree near the road and I was contemplating joining them. As usual I was broke, hungry and thirsty. The cops spoke to me in a very business-like, if slightly racist manner, checking my identity and my intentions, before telling me to: “Stay away from the Abbos, mate!”

  Another occurred when I was almost caught climbing the Storey Bridge high above the Brisbane River. Almost. The rotten Greek police once ripped open my toothpaste and my last bit of soap at Athens airport, just because I had long hair down my back, a filthy unkempt beard, tatty clothes, and a generally malodorous whiff about me.

  I was later to find out that during my application process there had been some extensive background checks made on my activities. In the UK, police forces in Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and South Yorkshire were consulted. The Australian police in Queensland visited at least one address I had given on the application form. Two of Joe Bjelke-Petersen’s finest male uniformed cops called in at an address in Coorparoo, a suburb of Brisbane where I’d lived for a while. An old friend remembered me and confirmed I’d lived there. It was a good job the cops didn’t attend a few weeks later, when the address was raided and my friend was busted for growing a ton of weed in the back garden. Police were also consulted in Jerusalem, but luckily, like all the other places I’d lived in, I’d never been tangled up with the local law.

  For much of the time when I was travelling my hair and beard were very long, so I have to admit I probably did appear to look like precisely what I was: a scruffy, unwashed vagrant, similar to the tattered soul scrambling up the beach at the start of every Monty Python TV show. I had become quite wary of authority, and viewed the police – all police – with a mixture of suspicion, fear and, at the very least, indifference. Overall, they were to be avoided.

  A POLICEMAN CALLS

  I filled in the application form in the early summer of 1983 with a degree of casual indifference and sent it off. I hoped it would be the last such repetitive police paperwork I would ever have to spend time on. Sadly of course, it was a sign of things to come.

  I heard nothing for quite some time. Then I received a letter briefly acknowledging my application and stating someone would phone in order to arrange a convenient time to visit me at home. Sure enough, a few days later, on a typically blustery June afternoon the doorbell rang and a very tall male officer in his late twenties stood at the door to my parents’ bungalow in full uniform. He had a thin, angular face, and he was wearing a long black greatcoat, unbuttoned, but no headgear. I assumed he’d parked a vehicle nearby. A blue Burndept radio was slung around his neck inside his tunic, and faint electronic voices chattered occasionally. He introduced himself and I ushered him in. He moved slowly and deliberately like a young Jimmy Stewart and sat rather stiffly on the edge of the sofa. His immaculate black boots looked incongruous on the carpet, and the toe caps shone like glass as though he’d just been on parade. He looked around the room as he spoke, scanning the house and décor.

  “So, you want to join the police then?” he said, rather obviously, smiling at me. He then scowled a little, as if making an assessment of me and looking for some reaction. I guessed I should make some form of positive reply so I offered:

  “Yes. I think so. It’s a good job, isn’t it?” I said, feeling rather stupid. He seemed very polite; unlike the officious German, rude Greek, and brusque, business-like Australian police I’d encountered in the past. I could only half believe I was trying to become one of them, a member of the establishment, having lived on the other side for years.

  “Yes, it is. It’s not all excitement though. There’s a lot of other stuff, boring stuff, things you don’t see on the telly.” He looked serious and distracted. His radio seemed to be a constant source of irritation, and he tilted his head slightly to one side as though trying to listen to it, like a bird seeking a worm, while talking to me at the same time.

  “Yes, I know. It’s not all like The Sweeney, is it?” and I laughed a little, trying to lighten the encounter. He didn’t seem impressed. I remembered the first inklings I’d had of possibly wanting to join the police, years before, sitting in the churchy gloom of a packed television room at Kibbutz Dafna in northern Israel, crowding in with everyone else to watch The Sweeney in grainy black and white.

  “No. We deal with the same families
time and again. It runs in the generations.”

  I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. What runs in the generations? He fiddled with his radio, adjusting the volume slightly, turning a knob at the side without looking at it. I wondered how he knew which way it was turned. He spoke into it briefly, pressing the small yellow transmit button on the top, as though in response to a request, which I didn’t hear, then turned his attention to me.

  “How did you know they wanted you, just then?” I asked, genuinely curious. I could hardly hear anything legible from the walkie-talkie around his neck, let alone a name of any sort.

  “They just shouted my collar number, see?” and he touched the series of shiny metallic numbers on his right shoulder. He smiled at me. “You get used to it.”

  I made us both a cup of tea and he gulped his incredibly quickly as though his throat was lined with asbestos. I spoke about my vague knowledge of the police, which amounted to information gained from watching TV shows such as The Sweeney, Starsky and Hutch, Kojak and so on. I even had recollections of much older programmes like Z-Cars and Softly Softly. I remember Bert Lynch, the sergeant in Z-Cars standing at a sink shaving in the afternoon. As a child I remember thinking how unusual this seemed because my dad always shaved early in the morning.

  I told the policeman about my Uncle Alan who at the time was a detective sergeant in West Yorkshire police. Alan always had a world-weary rudeness about him; a tired knowingness that I now understand had grown from years of repeatedly dealing with society’s worst human detritus. I’d heard him speaking to my dad using words like ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ in conversation, which clearly embarrassed my father. I’d never once heard my own father use such language.

  This was the only direct connection I had with the job at the time, apart from the fact that my dad actually seemed more than a little anti-police. He’d based his poor opinions of police officers on some dreadful experiences in South Africa in the 1950s, hardly relevant to modern Britain.

  I briefly mentioned some of my travels to the young cop, but he couldn’t have seemed less interested, so I didn’t raise it again. I remember he told me he’d been to France on a school trip, which was the sum total of his travel experience. I am always slightly bemused when people tell me they’ve never been abroad, or have never owned a passport. Travel has been such a formative part of my life. Even so, I don’t readily discuss my experiences so the absence of them in someone else’s life is not a huge issue for me.

  I heard a barely audible but peremptory female voice on the cop’s radio and he responded.

  “Yes. Ten four. I’m not far away. I’ll attend that now.” He sounded as though he worked for the LAPD rather than a British police force. Nottinghamshire still used ‘Ten Codes’ radio abbreviations at the time.

  “I’ll have to go. Thanks for the tea. You should hear from us soon.” He stood up and handed me his empty mug. He thrust his right hand at me and I instinctively took it. We shook hands firmly for a few moments. He smiled at me in a manner that I couldn’t help thinking was as though he felt sorry for me. I showed him the door; he stepped out and disappeared down the driveway, his long black coat flapping behind him like a cape. It had just started raining heavily. I had no idea as to the real purpose of his visit. He didn’t write anything down. It has occurred to me now as I write this, that my visitor has probably long since retired, now a big fat bloke who spends all his spare time tending to his pigeons and supping ale at his local pub. Good on him I say; I’ve reached that point myself, except for the pigeons. Other than that he’s probably dead, poor chap. One of the least desirable police traditions is that many cops die quite soon after retirement.

  More time passed. Weeks in fact. I occupied myself as I had the previous few months; reading and writing in my diary. I have always kept a diary, and always will. If you’ve ever met me – even briefly – then I’m afraid I’ve probably written reams about you. I write in it every day, even if it’s just a few lines. I read Graham Chapman’s hilarious book A Liar’s Autobiography. I read George Orwell’s Down and out in Paris and London, which I could thoroughly relate to, and his book about the English, The Lion and the Unicorn. He stated in this book that the British would never allow fascists to march the goose step on British streets, because we would just laugh at them. I’m not sure this applies any more. I read Miles Kington’s book Miles and Miles, and Creator by Jeremy Leven. An interesting read, even though a lot of it was just pornographic twoddle. Such similar twoddle that now sells millions of copies.

  I also read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, which I found incredibly claustrophobic and disturbing, but brilliant nonetheless. The total distortion of truth by Big Brother, in a world where cameras watch our every move and the government tells us what we can and can’t say. I remember lying on my bedroom floor reading it in one day, only venturing out to use the toilet every few hours, the rain still lashing down heavily against the window. The movie version starring John Hurt and Richard Burton in his last film role before his untimely death was also superb.

  Finally in early August I was summoned to attend a huge building in the centre of Nottingham adjacent to the main fire station, known as Central Police Station. It was only the second time in my life I’d been to Nottingham.

  Central Police Station was a purpose-built grey brick building with wide staircases and carved stone lions sitting proudly atop sweeping curved bannisters. It was an imposing building constructed in the 1930s and it was in one of the front ground floor offices that I sat the standard entrance exam. This was a straightforward arithmetic and English test which I was relieved to find was quite easy. Various out-of-date recruitment posters hung limply on the walls, clinging on with faded sticky tape, as though placed there years before as a perfunctory gesture. The rooms were dark and smelt of polished wood, layers of dust and stale tobacco, like a cheap Spanish hotel.

  I was subjected to a very basic medical examination, with the usual coughing and holding of testicles routine conducted by a man who I presumed was a doctor, though I don’t remember him telling me who he was. There aren’t many men who’ve had my balls in their hands, and luckily his were very warm. I was weighed while just wearing underpants (eleven stone twelve pounds) and my height checked. I’d put on quite a bit of weight since my travels came to an end. I was an emaciated ten stone (a hundred and forty pounds) when I returned from travelling a few months before. Food was never a priority for me, and I would frequently substitute a few fags for a meal, in common with many ardent smokers. I was just short of six feet tall, without shoes.

  I was interviewed briefly by a red-faced and corpulent uniformed sergeant who had an easy-going manner. I sensed by his age and demeanour that he was probably close to retirement and as such didn’t really care anymore. I was told before I left that I’d passed the day’s proceedings and I was on to the next stage.

  In September I was visited by another cop from the local station in Retford. The sergeant was approaching middle age, probably late forties, and he looked weary and distracted. He seemed relieved when I offered him a cup of tea, and he fell heavily onto the sofa in the lounge as though he planned to stay for the rest of his life. He sighed, smiled and then asked questions about my family. He took out a yellow Bic biro and a sheet of A4 paper which he folded over twice and rested on one knee. I didn’t know it at the time but his job was to complete a ‘Home Surroundings Report’, something the young constable had apparently initiated weeks before. He seemed more interested in my dad’s greenhouse, visible from the window and now packed with ripe tomatoes in final flourish. He asked me if I undertook any of the gardening, and he was clearly disappointed when I said no. He didn’t seem to allow his radio to bother him to the extent the constable did.

  He finally left after two large mugs of sweet tea, half a packet of digestive biscuits and a tour of my parents’ garden. As he walked away I noticed the leaves on the trees above the nearby lane had just started to curl a little at the edges. What little summer
we had that year was in full retreat and I noticed a cool autumnal chill in the air. My first winter in years was rapidly approaching.

  WAITING

  For the purposes of researching this book, I took a formal look at my official personal record several times. I say ‘official’ because there is clearly an official and an unofficial personal record kept of every police officer, though this is denied. I was once at Central Police Station years ago and blundered almost by chance into the Personnel Office. There were neat rows of files on open shelves and I clearly saw my own collar number amongst the others in numerical order. I reached up to take hold of it but just before I did so, and with my hand barely a few inches away I was shouted at by a female from across the room:

  “No! No! You can’t! You need an appointment!” she screeched at me in a loud panic, to which I turned and replied in all innocence: “I’m here now; this is my file, surely...” The woman who was the owner of the peremptory shrieking sprang to her feet from behind a desk and quickly forced herself between me and the file, still on the shelf. She calmed down very quickly, probably aware of just how erratic she was behaving and still breathless said to me again:

  “You need to give us half an hour, at least. We’ll have it ready for you then, okay?”

  I looked on, bemused, but returned thirty minutes later to find it laid out across a desk, neatly opened at page one and the date I had joined. I asked to see it again, just prior to retirement, and the same thing happened then too. If they have nothing to hide, as they claim, then I ask you, why would they behave in such a manner? They forget they are dealing with cops, suspicious people who deal with duplicity on a daily basis.

  I managed to take a look at all the initial comments made about me on my typed application form. Someone had written on the front of the form by hand: ‘Male, 23yrs, single. Much travelled – please see attached list – Jewish faith possibly.’ This observation was no doubt made as a result of some time I’d spent working on a kibbutz in Israel. It always amazes me that there is an automatic assumption of Jewishness about this. If you visit the Vatican City in Rome does this make you a Roman Catholic? Well, yes, I suppose it might, but a summer spent working in Germany didn’t arouse a comment such as: ‘Loves Germany – must be a Nazi – possibly’. I usually keep people guessing, as I decided early on that my religion – like my sexual preference – was my business and no-one else’s. However, my religion was listed on the comprehensive form in the bit where it says: ‘Religion: C of E’, so this person was clearly making an inaccurate presumption. The visiting sergeant had written: