The sergeant warned me not to put holiday leave in. ‘Just do it, Ash. And keep out of trouble.’
‘Me, sarge? I don’t know what you mean.’ Like a truculent child, I knew exactly what he meant. Keep my eyes and ears focused on the job. No running off after someone, no nabbing shoplifters who just happened to run out of a shop and into my path, no being sidetracked …
‘If you see anything, or get involved in anything, call for assistance for someone else to deal with it. You’re not getting out of clamping,’ he warned.
Clamps were huge things, all fangled metal and heavy, and I hated them. The objective was thirty a day but sometimes you did a few less, sometimes more. If you consistently did less, you’d get a bollocking. I tried to make sure I did what I had to do, but I didn’t like it.
There was an art to fixing a clamp and some of the clampers had it down to nth seconds. They had a competition to see who did it the fastest. The officer posted with them had to write out the ticket as quickly as possible, slap it onto the car windscreen and then leg it. It pleased me to be posted with a fast clamper. I hated lingering. Once the clamp was on, the only way for it to come off was for the driver to pay the fine and then the de-clamping van would turn up and take it off. We couldn’t. Or at least that’s what they always told me.
If the driver of the car appeared before we left there was often a showdown. I had sympathy but, ultimately, they shouldn’t have parked there. And they should have looked out for the clamping van. We took a lot of verbal abuse. Sometimes it was physical.
Like all cities, parking in London is very difficult and very expensive. If you find a space it’s easy to overrun your meter by a few minutes. Some people took liberties and constantly parked where they shouldn’t and they deserved to be clamped. Some folk, usually the yuppies, would deal with it as an occupational hazard. If they got clamped early in the day, they wouldn’t phone up and pay the fine until much later. They’d treat it as a parking cost and put it on expenses.
If a vehicle was parked in such a way as to cause an obstruction, we would call the towing lorry who would turn up and cart the offending vehicle off somewhere deep in south London. I had less sympathy with them. It was difficult enough to drive in London, especially driving emergency vehicles through the packed streets. If you caused an obstruction, you were fair game to be towed. A few people reported their car as stolen only to discover it had been towed off. A sharp and harsh lesson.
Some clampers took great delight in finding expensive top-of-the-range cars to clamp, and those with exclusive private registrations. If they nabbed someone famous they’d lord about it for ever. The same with fancy cars. I hated being posted with that type of clamper. We’d spend most of the time in Mayfair and the posh streets of Westminster looking for the best and biggest cars. It drove me mad and those shifts were the longest.
Every clamp van had an hour for lunch. Police officers’ breaks were constantly interrupted; you always had to be ready to drop-and-go in an instant and you frequently didn’t get a break. It was different on the clamp van. They always had a full hour. You’d either get 12–1 or 1–2 for lunch, varying it to fit in with the second van. Except for Fridays.
Every Friday lunchtime the clamp van would travel to Lambeth, pull up outside a grotty little pub and park alongside the clamp vans of other local authorities, builders’ vans and other assorted lunchtime drinkers. I suspect some CID from nearby police stations may have imbibed too, back in the day when lunchtime drinking was almost a convention.
I’d buy a takeaway coffee from the tiny café opposite the pub and sit in the clamp van with my sandwich, bag of crisps and an apple while my clamper would enjoy his hour with colleagues. I’d read the tabloid newspaper bought by the clamper that morning and I’d skip over the pages of bare-breasted ladies. I’d get ahead on the paperwork while he’d be in the pub watching the strippers.
I hated my time clamping and was so glad when I never, ever had to do it again.
It’s cold on night duty. Freezing on occasion. I suggest thermals. Or thick tights. But being cold was not the reason I was knitting at four in the morning when posted as station officer.
I was station officer because I was biding my time, waiting for my posting to Surveillance and trying to keep out of trouble. I’d already had a month on the dreaded clamp van and now it was my turn on the front desk. This included fielding the drunks, redirecting the lost, and taking reports from those wishing to make complaints of thefts or lost property. After midnight it usually fell quiet.
My case files were up to date and the correspondence in my tray had been dealt with, as much as it can ever be. I’d read the daily bulletins and made regular cups of tea for the custody office and CAD room, the hub of the station where all messages were received and allocated, hence Computer Aided Despatch. I’d checked the missing persons binder and the lost dogs, of which there were none; the kennels were empty. My thumbs had been twiddled until they were sore.
As night duty was a week long, it became boring. By Wednesday I decided to take in some knitting. If I followed the pattern, I found it was one of the few craft-like things I could do without winding myself into a knot. I was knitting baby clothes for a friend of mine who was pregnant. Little mittens, socks and baby cardigans are small, easy to do and quick to make, an ideal filler during the night once the city had settled down.
At 2.30 a.m. a call came out about a disturbance in the upstairs room of an exclusive restaurant in the St James area. It was a private party that had ended with a family at war – drunken, argumentative and causing a breach of the peace. Five men and one woman were arrested. The rest of the party turned up at the front desk, irate, drunk and demanding solicitors. They insisted their loved ones had to be released, now, this instant.
My attempts at calming them down failed. The sergeant in the CAD room heard the raucous carry-on and came to my assistance. Two of them ended up arrested for causing a disturbance and swearing at the sergeant and me. One of the remaining crowd tried to reason that his family had been falsely arrested. I listened, nodded and asked him to take a seat while I made tea and coffee for them while they waited for news. Feeling generous, I threw half a packet of digestives onto the tray too.
By 4 a.m., those in the cells were sleeping, as were some of the rabble loitering in the lobby.
One of the arresting officers, Joe Fenelli, stopped by the front office for a coffee and a chat. I was busy – knit one, purl one, knit one, knit two together – working on the sleeve of a baby cardi.
‘That’s them settled down,’ he said. ‘All over a bit of posh totty.’
I laughed.
‘What you knitting, Ash? Willy warmers?’ he asked, pulling a thread of wool.
‘Hey, get off!’ I tugged it back. ‘Yeah, I got white, lemon and baby blue,’ I joked, knit knitting away.
The following morning some of the prisoners went to court for breach of the peace and the others were kicked out, sheepish and hungover.
A couple of weeks later I was issued with a Regulation 9, a form 163, that the Complaints Department (now Professional Standards) issue to give notice that someone has made a complaint about you. Everyone on duty when the Hooray Henrys were arrested was served with a 163. The whole shift had been subject to complaints from the wealthy and influential family. The allegations comprised a variety of things including unlawful arrest, insubordination and abuse of force. Mine was for ‘performance of duty’ issues.
It was alleged that while on duty I was knitting willy warmers, neglecting my post when I should have been conscientious and diligent. What nonsense. I couldn’t believe it. And to think I’d been kept inside the station to keep me out of trouble!
An independent panel was convened to interview every one of us.
‘Officer,