For two very special people in my life, Kerry and Tez.
And here’s the happy bounding flea –
You cannot tell the he from she.
The sexes look alike, you see;
But she can tell, and so can he.
ROLAND YOUNG, ‘The Flea’
CONTENTS
1 TITLE PAGE
2 DEDICATION
3 EPIGRAPH
4 1 LORD OF THE FLEAS
5 2 WHEN I WERE A LAD
6 3 THE ELECTROPHANATOR AND ME
7 4 AN INSPECTOR BOILS
8 5 SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR
9 6 HAPPY CHRISTMAS, YOUR LORDSHIP
10 7 PERCY THE ELUSIVE PORPOISE
11 8 THE SECRET LIFE OF SERGEANT WAINWRIGHT
12 9 THE WAR NOBODY WINS
13 10 HOW TO MAKE A FIREMAN LAUGH
14 11 MY LIFE WITH BADGERS
15 12 HOLIDAYS OF A LIFETIME
16 13 RESCUING THE RESCUER
17 14 WHERE FERRETS FEAR TO TREAD
18 15 GOING OVER THE EDGE
19 16 ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
20 17 MY ZOO AND OTHER ANIMALS
21 18 HOW TO DROWN A SWAN
22 19 MAKING A (VERY) BAD IMPRESSION
23 20 A PRIMATE THAT PREFERRED CORNFLAKES TO PORRIDGE
24 21 A CALL NOT MEANT FOR ME
25 COPYRIGHT
The British police will cheerfully deal with a drugged up loony waving a samurai sword, or a gang of football hooligans fighting with knives and broken bottles. They’ll persuade a man to put the gun down and the Saturday-night drunks to go home, yet – in my time anyway – if they find a barking dog in front of them, they back away and call in the RSPCA to arrest it.
During my years of battling for animal welfare in Yorkshire, I had several encounters with pit bull terriers, one with a tosa inu (a huge red Japanese mastiff fighting dog) and others of breeds favoured by those persons in whom the police tend to have an interest. But that was always in town. Out in the countryside, I always thought I had a right to expect more animal sense from the local fuzz. Country boys, surely, sculpted from limestone and granite, men of the moors, hills and dales – they wouldn’t bother me over a dog.
I don’t know why I thought that, because my disillusionment came very early in my career, just qualified, new posting, keen as keen could be, a week into my dream job.
I was at home when the phone rang. In fact, I was in bed asleep. It was the desk sergeant at Scorswick police station, to say that several of his finest were being obstructed in the execution of their duties by a dog asserting its territorial rights. They’d been making a forced entry into a house and the animal didn’t like it.
The story was that a lady had rung in, saying she was concerned about the old chap who lived opposite, alone with the aforesaid dog. This man was something of a recluse so not much was seen of him anyway, but there’d been no signs of life from the house for a few days now. So, said the sergeant, as it was all happening in a village not far from my house, would I kindly pop round to this address pronto and deal with the canine in question, thus allowing the constabulary to resolve the matter?
Yes, all right, so I rolled out of bed, put on my RSPCA official-issue weatherproofs – it was mid-January as well as two in the morning – and found my hat and van keys. Setting off on a ten- or fifteen-minute drive, my consoling thought was that I’d soon be back in bed. Carol, as yet neither inured to, nor scarred by, long experience as an RSPCA inspector’s wife, was a quick learner and so hadn’t bothered to wake up when I went. On autosnooze, she wouldn’t even know I’d been out on a nocturnal call and so could continue to believe that our new life could only get better.
It’s a tiny village where I was headed. Not on the way to anywhere, it’s a no-through-road and, with nothing more than a church, a phone box and some houses lining an L-shaped street, plus a small manor to the side, it’s about as quiet as a community can be. It used to be a station on the old railway line but not even the ghost-trains stop there any more.
I arrived to find two policemen and a WPC by the front door of one of the standard council semi-detacheds. This must have been the greatest assembly of law enforcers witnessed in that village since the Norman Conquest. In some of the other houses’ bedrooms, the curtains were pulled aside for a better view of the unfolding Heartbeat-type drama.
‘Where’s Derek?’ said the senior cop, miserably. He was a gaunt, elongated type, a nightmare for police-uniform suppliers and off-the-peg tailors everywhere, who tend to expect men of six-foot-three to weigh more than eight stone.
‘He’s retired,’ said I brightly. ‘I’m the new boy. Inspector Langdale. Carter Langdale.’
‘Good man, Derek was,’ continued PC Grim. ‘No dog ever got the better of him. Mind you, he had the experience.’
‘We’re all fully trained,’ I said. ‘Six months’ hard labour.’ The grim one remained unimpressed. His nickname, I later learned, was Minnie, derived by evolution from Laugh a Minute.
The three coppers, repulsed by the proprietorial hound, had taken instead to looking through a small gap in the ancient army blankets which did for curtains in the sitting-room window of this fairly bedraggled-looking house. They had formed the suspicion that the old man, called Alf, was dead in his armchair. This meant they couldn’t enter the house after all. They would have to wait for whichever doctor was on the roster that night as police surgeon.
We stood around in the freezing cold, wondering where doctors could be at this hour if they weren’t in bed, waiting to be got up. The neighbour who had started the whole thing, a woman of considerable substance in a heavy overcoat, came out with cups of tea and told us that she did the old fellow’s shopping for him. He would put a list and some money in a milk bottle, and she’d leave the goodies on the step.
Although the list often specified Knight’s Castile soap and Omo detergent, it was believed that these items were for storage rather than use, saved against the Day of Judgement.
‘And he has fifteen cats,’ said the lady.
‘Fifteen?’ This was not a world record for a council house but it was still a fair number.
‘Fifteen. I don’t know why he stopped at fifteen but he did. Wouldn’t have no more. Maybe it’s the Jellymeat Whiskas,’ she said to me as the animal representative. I nodded, as if I knew what she was talking about. ‘And the Go-Cat,’ she added. ‘It all comes in a van once a month. Boxes and boxes. Must cost