I spent yesterday afternoon and most of the night lying on a bed rocking in a deep swell while a rusting anchor chain was hauled and poured through my temples. I still don’t feel up to real work, so instead scanned in, as I have meant to do for years, the first chapter of my police book, published in 1988 by Hodder and Stoughton. I feel ashamed of lots of it, skimming as I watch the OCR. I was such a respectful (and, I’d now say, racist) young man in those days, though recognisably lazy and cowardly. Anyway, it’s all in the extended entry.
One — Adventures in the Pink Neon Zone
‘We have a saying in the East End’ – the chief superintendent looked at me with large brown eyes behind thick spectacles, anxious to be correctly understood – ‘that if you let a dog through your front door, he’ll shit on the carpet. And to be honest, Andrew, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t have you here. But I have been told to do it, and I will. Besides, I’m interested in people. Now, you wouldn’t quote that, would you?’I said of course I would, because I’m interested in language; but that he’d be anonymous.
‘What would you do if you were out with the lads, and you saw one of them punch a prisoner right in the face? You might misunderstand a thing like that. I mean, perhaps the prisoner had himself swung a punch around the corner where you couldn’t see it . . .’
I dithered for a while. It was not a question I’d expected in that form. Eventually, I told him I’d complain to him first, and then see what would happen. He smiled with real pleasure: ‘There, you see. That was a bit of a trick question. Because I’ve been here two years now, and I’ve never had a single complaint of that sort of thing.’
On the outside of his door was a small, yellowed rectangle of newsprint, curling from under the Sellotape: ‘Never demand as a right what you can ask as a favour’. On the inside, was a poster of a chimpanzee complaining that ‘Every time I find the solution, they change the problem’. His trophy cabinet – something that all senior officers seem to acquire – was surmounted by two carved wooden hands, one with a finger raised at the world, one with two. In such surroundings it seemed foolish to look for the uniform one expects policemen to wear beneath the skin. Not until I met ‘the puggy man’ later and stood like a policeman in his blood-stained living room did I realise that a uniform can mean only what other people want it to.
One of the press officers involved in the preliminary negotiations had been very keen that I should start by doing night shifts in an Area Car: one of the big Rovers which zoom around answering 999 calls. He was anxious that I should see the glamorous side of police work. In the event, I found instead how chaotic things can be. This was a more useful lesson.
On my first night I arrived at Ilford at around 5.30, to find normal confusion. A new black cop was on duty at the desk, a young one named Norman Clarke. He kept me waiting at the counter, having forgotten that there was meant to be an author around. He was very polite about this but, as a probationer, anxious to do the right thing and unsure what this might be when it involved dealing with the public. His manner in the canteen, where I awaited the crew of Juliet 3, was anxious and ingratiating; but it was to be very self-assured on the job, as will emerge.
Juliet 3 was a large Rover, white, with a blue lamp on top, but without the adornments of traffic cars or pandas: it had no stop sign, and the police flashes were reasonably discreet. These cars are unpopular with most of their drivers: the best people will say of them is that they look the part, and that they are fast once they get going. But their size makes them unwieldy in city streets, and their acceleration is not tremendous.
The driver was John Miller, a moustachioed Geordie with eleven years’ service; the navigator, Paul Murphy, known as ‘Murph’, an undernourished haystack.
By 6.30, after a meal in the canteen, we were ready to go. As we pulled out of the station a message came through – an IC1 (white male), wearing a black jacket and carrying a white bag, had been seen leaping over a wall to escape from a church.
Immediately, we start moving faster than I would have thought possible. Except at roundabouts, the siren noise was left behind us, and even these were taken at thirty miles an hour in short four-wheel drifts. At one stage we hit 90 m.p.h in a thirty-mile limit.
Arriving at the church, we scrambled clumsily but quickly over a stone wall, ignoring the locked gate, and started moving through the yard. There was no point in running, since we didn’t know what we were after, but this quiet motion, listening to the scuff of boots on asphalt, was much more exciting than the noisy whirlwind drive, since we did not know who was in there, nor what would happen if we found them.
There was no one. Nothing happened; the church windows were unbroken, and though we found the man who had rung in the call, who confirmed all the essential details, all he saw was a bloke vaulting over a wall. There was a perfectly ordinary and very much simpler alleyway available, but there was no evidence of any crime having been committed.
So that they can respond to 999 calls the main radios of the Area Cars are tuned to Scotland Yard, where a ‘despatcher’ is handed incoherent messages from the public and converts them to a standardised form, read out in tones of infinite weariness. Frequently, these are directed to particular cars. The driver also carries a personal radio, which is tuned into the station frequency, and carries less urgent messages.
As we cruised round, looking for stolen cars or ‘pollack’ – young ladies going about their lawful business in a decorative manner – we had a call to return to the station, to deliver Norman Clarke to the mortuary. This is not what Area Cars ought really to do, but it would take little time, and perhaps the car crew were trying, slightly, to wind me up. A woman had died in West Ham, but had been taken to the mortuary here, so both police stations were involved in dealing with the death.
She had been old – about seventy-five perhaps. Her skin was not waxy but had the dull, off-right colour of cheap plastic flowers; the eyelids had crumpled to expose lustreless eyeballs. One sensible white woollen sock had been rolled down from her knee over a sensible black shoe; ‘Delaforce’ had been written up one short white calf in black felt-pen – sensibly enough, Norman took notes. The rest of us were silent in the cold, sweetish mortuary smell.
We left him there, and in the car lit cigarettes. Policing is 90 per cent common sense. Around us the Victorian tombstones stretched like dirty white teeth into the darkness beyond the headlights. Thomas Surety’, one said, like a promise.
‘That’s one of the worst parts of the job.’ John Miller said, ‘specially when they’ve been dead for a few weeks, and the maggots have got at them . . . Then we have to send the fishermen, and they take the tobacco tins . . .’
I laughed and said foolishly that nurses cultivated the same sense of humour, for the same reasons. Foolishly, because nurses are women, and because only policemen have the most important job in the world.
By now it was fully dark. John drove us slowly round the monied streets of Wanstead, looking for burglars.
‘Look at that drum: it’s like something out of the bloody Addams family.’
Seeing nothing, we pulled off on to a dirt track across the park to bump along, trying to catch sex maniacs, or, failing that, to trap rabbits in the headlights. The conversation wandered to Broadwater Farm. Like any policeman who had read WPS Meynell’s report, John felt that the working police had been betrayed by their superior officers. He’d learnt of PC Blakelock’s death from a journalist, after the police radio had explicitly denied that there had been any serious injuries. ‘It’s a pity they didn’t finish what they were doing, and cut his head right off, and parade it round on a pole. I know it sounds dreadful. But that’s what they were going to do; and if they’d done it, then everyone would know what they were like. But they only got half-way through the neck . . . people still don’t realise what we’re up against.’
Then at half-past eight we were called to a drugs case in a pub, over the local radio. We parked around the corner, by a panda car, from which two young men in civilian clothes emerged, I looked for their escorts, but one of them came over to the car, and I realised they were themselves police. He leant in and spoke urgently: the landlord had phoned to say that ‘two Herberts’ were ‘standing by the cigarette machine and joshing out drugs of some description’.
The plain-clothes men hurried away to investigate; one returned after a quarter of an hour. While we waited, the radio asked if we knew what it was all about. John said yes, but it was nice of them to ask. He grumbled quietly about the job. ‘Morale is lower now than it’s ever been since I joined the force . . . it’s not the same job as the one I joined, and it’s not so good. Since they brought in Pace [the Police and Criminal Evidence Act – in his Geordie accent, the word sounded like ‘piss’] we’re moving towards something like the Miranda system in the States, which is dreadful . . . the Commissioner in his infinite wisdom has decided that everything should be decent. Then they shift you around every five years. It’s really difficult for someone like Murph to specialise . . .
But the unpredictability of this job is the best thing. You can do what you like within limits.’
Murph walked to the off-licence and bought a tube of peppermints while we waited, and shared them around. He spoke little in Miller’s presence – after all, he had nine years’ less service – but now he, too, felt emboldened to grumble:
‘You’re a policeman on the streets. You’re not a policeman in an office. ‘ It was clearly a ritual incantation.
‘For a bloke with my service,’ said John, ‘I’m still fairly keen; and I like to think that I’m fairly good.’ Just then, the plain-clothes man walked silently to his door, and rapped on the window.
He’d started to speak before he saw me, and had to be quickly reassured about my presence. ‘They’re talking about sulphate a lot,’ he said, ‘But I can’t see them dealing anything. The landlord says they were passing white packets around half an hour ago. I don’t know whether to do them now, or to wait for evidence of supply. It would be better for everybody if we could do that. But I want to do them before the pub gets too crowded.’
He returned: I waited five more minutes, then followed him.
From Edmonton to Dagenham, smart pubs are all the same. Pink neon signs in curling script, with green neon decorative flourishes crowning their extensions, which are made from concrete slabs. They all sell food – chile con carne, variously spelt, but made from the same gritty mince and served on slabs of tepid rice – and cocktails with plastic decorations standing in thick pastel liqueurs. The drinkers enjoy themselves hugely; they have come to be smart and successful, and later to fight.
Within the bar, the two cops stood by a mirrored pillar, looking like any East End youths on a Friday night. One wore a grey-brown bomber jacket with a tweed lining,
open to reveal a pastel-striped shirt over bleached jeans and white trainers; the other had pressed grey slacks and a chrome-yellow pullover.
The suspects lounged and laughed in chairs, having a fairly quiet, and to all appearances enjoyable, night out. Two would call themselves black, being the colour of coffee made with condensed milk; the other three were white. All were male, and none looked particularly druggy.
At 9.04 the dark-haired policeman slipped out to brief the reinforcements he had summoned. Within four minutes he returned and trotted up the stairs to the dais on which the young men sat. He leant over their table like a solicitous waiter, holding his warrant card. By the time I could hear him speaking, four uniformed policemen were trotting up the stairs in line. There was a very brief altercation, and everyone filed out again. The first suspect was outside the pub before anyone realised what had happened. Just as I left the bar after the last policeman the sound of conversation changed, like the noise of a brook when a stone is pulled from its bed.
Outside, the suspects had been lined up against the wall of the pub. Voices sounded loud and hard beneath the concrete overhang. The tall, pale black – taller than any policeman – was found to have a small chunk of hash in a pocket. The others were all clean. The short black became aggressive, and considered himself harassed. An older policeman with a mottled red nose like a traffic cone, one of the reinforcements, told him to shut up or he would be arrested too.
‘What for? I ain’t done nothing.’
‘Drunk and disorderly.’
‘Come on, man, you can’t do that. I’ve only had a couple of drinks.’
‘Yes I can. Come on over here.’
He pulled away from the action, and they argued out of
earshot by one of the cars. There was some further hassle between John and the arrested black about an anorak: John reluctant to let go of his arm to allow him to put it on. Eventually they moved in an uncomfortable shuffle to the panda car, telling the friend, by now released, that they were taking him to Ilford.
‘Think you’re doing a good job, do you?’ said the friend to me, with something between a sneer and a tease. I did not.
Yet back at the station, all was cool and almost jokey with the release of tension. The piece of dope, in a little polythene bag, was smaller than my fingernail, though about an eighth of an inch thick.
‘How much d’you pay for that?’ asked the charging sergeant.
‘A fiver.’
She looked genuinely shocked.
‘Yeah, but I smoked some.’ He smiled. By now there was some sense of people joshing each other.
‘Who was in there? You and him?’
‘Yeah. We didn’t see you all.’
‘We were really close to you. We heard you talking about sulphate and all that.’ The prisoner smiled reminis-cently.
‘We thought you had about two kilos of heroin on you.’ When the fair-haired plain-clothes man smiled he looked suddenly like Tintin.
‘How d’you spell hashish?’ asked the dark one as we entered the interview room, which was uncomfortably hot, and painted an even pastel green that still seemed lavatorial. High on the wall behind him was a window of small panes of frosted glass which looked like those skylights which separate a basement from the street. Two tables had been pushed together against one wall with an office typewriter in the middle. The dark plain-clothes man had a heap of interview forms in front of him; the prisoner sat opposite, beyond the typewriter; the fair policeman lounged, facing the terrible machine.
I had read typed interview transcripts before. At times they seemed to have come from an unpublished draft of The Waste Land: the answers were demotic, rendered accurately and without punctuation, in short lines corresponding to the handwritten originals; the questions plodding and careful. What the transcripts omitted were the pauses after each answer when the only sound was the quick rustle of the interviewer’s hand moving across the paper between the words that he was writing down with a cheap biro. In fact it was this writing that supplied the only sinister note in the interview. It is done to safeguard the prisoner’s rights: when all is over he must sign every single reply and every alteration to confirm that it is what he said. But, as any journalist knows, the act of writing down anyone’s speech makes them very uneasy. It may be ludicrous to worry about words when in trouble for deeds, but people do. There was far more apprehension on the prisoner’s face as the last long question was being written down as it was asked than when he was being arrested.
On the other hand, any journalist would envy a policeman’s painstaking freedom to get it right, without worrying about boring his victim:
bq. Can you tell me where you bought that from?Yeah, Sandringham Road. Is that in Hackney?
Yeah. Whereabouts in Sandringham Road did you buy it?
A caff, Ossies. Who did you buy it from?
Yellowman. What was that?
Yellowman they call him. Who calls him that?
Everybody. Why?
‘Cause he’s yellow. What is he? Chinese, or Japanese, or what?
No, he’s half-caste. But he’s really very light-skinned.
Do you know his real name?
No. How long ago did you buy it?
Tuesday. Do you remember what time of day?
Evening, nighttime.
Does Yellowman sell any other types of drugs that you know about?
Just hash and cannabis weed. D’you drink in the Xxxx pub often? No. This was the first time. What made you decide to go there tonight?
‘Cause we were meeting to go up to Camden Palace.
How well do you know the boys you were drinking with tonight?
I went to school with two of them. Which ones? You don’t . . . We’ve got their names anyway.
Bert and Simon. Which school?
[illegible] Did any of them have any drugs tonight?
No. Are you sure about that?
Yeah.
Was the piece of hash that you had tonight for your own use?
Yeah.
So: had any of you been dealing drugs in the pub before we got there?
No. Do you know anyone in that pub who sells drugs?
No.
The interviewer looked up and asked his colleague: ‘Can you think of any more questions?’ The fair-haired policeman, who had been sitting with a finger under his ear, stroking his chin, said no, he thought that covered everything. There was a silence that seemed very long while the final question was written out. When all was signed, the dark-haired policeman grinned, and said at a normal pace: ‘Magic! Well done, mate.’
It’s curious, but when the police address you by your Christian name, this is a sign that they mistrust you. One of the first things done during any arrest is to ask the suspect what he wants to be called, or what his mates call him. This gets a little contact going immediately. But once the police relax, they go back to more general terms, like ‘mate’.
While the last arrangements were being made for Michael to return in six weeks’ time to hear the result of the analysis and to learn if he would be charged, I brooded on the prejudices involved. Arresting blacks for the possession of trivial amounts of dope is meant to be one of the classic forms of police harassment. But who had shown prejudice in this episode?
The policemen had been told these people were dealing in drugs. Their informant was the landlord, and, coming from such a source, the information could not have been discounted. They had heard enough to decide – quite rightly – that the suspects all used illegal drugs, even if they weren’t ‘joshing them out’ in public. So they had a duty to do something. They were also expecting trouble, and afraid of it.
Perhaps it was prejudiced of them to expect trouble – in other words, violent resistance – at the arrest; but the expectation of trouble is founded on a judgement about the suspect’s respect for the authority of the police. After Broadwater Farm, there is no predisposition to suppose that black, drug-dealing youths are burdened with such respect.
But these suspects were not in fact dealing. They hardly had anything on them; and once this became apparent the whole situation calmed down. The black who was not arrested expected the police to be hostile: that was a form of prejudice, though the policeman who threatened him with arrest for drunk and disorderly was both hostile and expecting hostility. But he did not make the arrest; everyone managed to stick to the rules. This was just as well for me, since I could never have testified that the short black man was anything like drunk.
Everyone in fact behaved according to their expectations, which were all, to start off with, false: the police thought they were arresting dealers; the suspects that they were having a quiet night out. These expectations were founded on a specific item of information: the landlord’s report that the two blacks had been handing out white packets by the cigarette machine (Michael had only