‘Sorry! It’s just … oh, I’m sure it’s nothing.’
‘Right. Let’s have a look at what we’ve got here,’ said Wooding, arms folded, surveying our various efforts. We must have looked like the walking wounded as we stood there, arms, legs and heads tied up in all that bandage.
‘What’s this?’ he said to Sally as he passed. ‘This won’t do,’ and, as he reached out, the bandage unravelled in a coil and fell at Marge’s feet. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. It needs to be much tighter,’ he said, tutting.
He continued along the line.
‘Ah, now, Marion. This is excellent work. Neat, secure,’ he said, pointing to Ted’s carefully bandaged head.
‘I had to do my dad’s arm once,’ she began. ‘He had an accident with the firewood. The axe slipped and … oh, there was so much blood. And then another time, our neighbour, Mr Quill, his toe came almost clean off when a hammer fell on it and I …’
‘Thank you, Marion,’ Sergeant Wooding said and promptly dismissed the class.
That night, at dinner, Marion and Ted sat on a different table from the rest of us, and poor Sally was completely distracted.
‘I just don’t know what to do. I’ve got my exam at the end of the week and if I fail I’m out. But I can’t think about anything else but Ted. I’m not normally the jealous type but …’
‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ I tried to reassure her. ‘Marion’s like that with everyone.’
‘She’s not his style anyway. He likes blondes,’ said Allan. ‘She’s just got her claws in, that’s all.’
‘He’s probably just too polite to say anything,’ said Marge.
‘Or maybe he’s trying to get your attention?’ I suggested.
‘Maybe,’ Sally said, and she pushed her plate away, the food almost untouched.
When I stood up with my tray to leave, Ted and Marion were nowhere to be seen.
That Wednesday, a few people had gone into town, to the pub, or for a late tea of egg and chips. We quite often had an extra dinner if we were in town, since the food on site was not so good. But Sally and I decided to stay in and revise for the exam on Friday. We looked at definitions and tested each other’s answers, doing a pretty good job of remembering them. I reassured Sally about the exam and said she’d fly through it.
When she left, I sat up in bed and read some of the letters I’d received during the week.
One was from Granny and was written in her beautiful copperplate. It told me how she had left home as a girl at ten and started work. She wrote too about how my dad was the first boy in the area where they lived who had won a scholarship to the Grammar School; then her second and third sons, my uncles, all got in too. What an achievement, I thought, that she had managed to afford to send them all on the five-mile train journey to school.
The other letter was from Mam, the envelope bearing her immaculate tiny handwriting. She always took great care over writing, as if each word was a work of art. She had been given a beautiful ink pen for Christmas from my dad, which she loved and used with great ceremony.
Dear Pamela,
I hope everything is going well for you at Bruche. Do take care in those self-defence classes. I hope it’s not too dangerous. And congratulations in your exams. You seem to be doing very well.
We’re off on our own little adventure next week. We’ve hired a coach and your father has organized the whole thing himself. It’s a pilgrimage to Fatima in Portugal.
The Misses Fairfaxes across the road are coming, and Father Michael, and I have even packed a sun hat!
Peter has met a lovely girl called Tina who works at the theatre as an usherette.
Write back to us and tell us how it goes.
God bless and take care,
Mam
There was another envelope, this time in Jane’s wild handwriting, with little drawings of rabbits all over the back. She said she had met a sailor out dancing one night and she was spending a lot of time with him. He even had a tattoo, but he was very romantic and would pick wild flowers for her and leave them on her doorstep with little love notes.
I thought back to when Jane and I used to go dancing, at a big dance hall on the seafront. I used to leave my dancing shoes hidden in a bush in the garden so my dad wouldn’t know where I was going. He didn’t like me going dancing, so I’d say I was off to the pictures and then skip out, collect the shoes and run all the way there, the sea wind in my hair. It seemed like so much time had passed since I had left that life behind.
I wrote a letter to Jane about seeing the dead body, and the Holger Nielsen technique, and was just starting to feel sleepy when I heard a noise outside our hut. There was scratching and scraping and the sound of stones being thrown, followed by some loud whispering.
I put down my pen and paper, wrapped my dressing gown round me and peeped out of the window. I could just make out Ted, standing beneath Sally’s window. They were talking urgently to one another. Sally looked quite cross and Ted seemed to be pleading. Then she slammed the window shut and I returned to my bed without seeing what happened next.
The next day, we had a lesson with Inspector Merriweather, grandly entitled ‘war duties’. He saw this section of training as his area of ultimate expertise and insisted on taking these lessons himself. He said he was preparing us in case we faced another war. As we shuffled into one of the old Nissen huts, he waved us over to a pile of tatty-looking tin hats and a heap of boiler suits in a corner.
‘Take your pick,’ he said, and we sifted through, jostling for position.
At first, I couldn’t find anything to fit. The hats were all ginormous, and nearly covered my eyes, while the boiler suits were huge too, hanging loosely round the shoulders, obviously originally worn by men. In the end, I found something that almost fitted; on the inside a name was scribbled on the collar: Private Tilsley. I wondered who he was and how his clothes had ended up here.
‘The war may be over,’ said Inspector Merriweather, as we stood in a huddle in our costumes. ‘But the war spirit lives on. Believe me.’ He breathed deeply and put on his own tin hat, patting it firmly on the top. ‘What we learnt in those six long years you couldn’t learn in a lifetime of peace. You lot don’t know you’re born, living in these times.’
With that, he trooped out onto a grassy area, next to a huddle of derelict-looking huts, and we followed, slightly bemused, wondering what was next.
Inspector Merriweather had a young PC with him and they disappeared for a while. They came back carrying a kind of pump, with a handle shaped like a big horse-riding stirrup and a long hosepipe at one end for squirting water out at high pressure.
‘Imagine this is a house, on fire, just hit by an incendiary bomb. The flames are raging like the devil himself! Your entire family is trapped within. Including your grandma and your dog.’
We all looked at the hut, doing our best to imagine Inspector Merriweather’s bizarre scenario; when we looked back, he was carrying a big tin bucket, water sploshing out all over the place.
‘You place the pump here and put your back into it.’ Merriweather pumped away vigorously, his face going redder and redder, before he stopped and bent over, his hand on his back. ‘I’m not as young as I was. Here, lad, you take over,’ he said to the young PC.
‘And you, you take this.’ He handed Allan the long hose, but before he could properly get hold of it the water came gushing out, and it began flinging about wildly everywhere. Allan finally got it under control, though not before getting us all thoroughly soaked.
We all had a go on the stirrup pump and it was quite fun, but I wondered whether it would really put out a fire, and save a whole family, with just one small bucket.
Merriweather, by now getting quite carried away with his role, marched us over to another hut, where there was a pile of gas masks on a table. We had all carried these during the war so they were a familiar sight from our childhoods; although we’d never used them, we’d played many a youthful game wearing them
, their big round eyes and scary noses making us look like extra-terrestrial giant insects.
‘I want you all to enter the building, here, when I do this,’ said Merriweather, lifting his arm. ‘Crawl through the building and exit … here.’ He jogged, panting, to the other side of the hut, where there was a little hatch in the door. ‘In the meantime, I’m going to fill the hut with poisonous gas, and you’re all to escape it.’
I looked at Sally and gasped. ‘Is he serious?’ I whispered.
‘I don’t know. We’ll soon find out! Let’s hope these gas masks work, anyway!’
Still unsure whether he was joking or not, we lined up at the front of the hut in our masks, waiting for the signal. On his command, we ran in one by one and crawled along on our hands and knees, aiming for the exit.
Merriweather called through the window that he was pouring the poisonous gas, so we all ducked down. I could just make out Ted’s head above everyone else’s, he was crawling on all fours towards the exit. I imagined I could see the gas, but then it disappeared. I could hear people shouting with relief when they reached the end, while others banged into table legs and into each other.
‘Where are you?’
‘I don’t know. Can you see the way out?
‘No. Ouch! What was that?
‘My foot!’
‘Sorry, my fault.’
It was chaos and confusion. The gas mask was hot and sticky and my face was dripping with sweat as I felt my way along the floor with my hands. I was starting to panic and get a little breathless; as we were all crammed so tightly into that little hut, one behind the other, it was impossible to see where we were going. At one point I got stuck under a chair but managed to wriggle my way through.
Eventually, after what seemed like eternity, I caught sight of a glimmer of light through the open hatch. I saw Sally’s beaming face; she grabbed me by the arms and pulled me through.
‘Come on, you. You took your time. We’ve all grown beards, we’ve been here for so long.’
‘Got stuck. Under a chair.’ I panted as I rolled onto the grass, exhausted, the remaining few students piling out around me.
We were so relieved to be back in daylight we all started laughing into our gas masks, and stretched out on the grass. Merriweather shouted at the top of his voice.
‘What’s all this? It’s not laughing gas. This is serious! Life and death. Now, on your feet. Quick-march.’
With that, he marched us all the way back to the main building, right round the site, still wearing our gas masks.
I still, to this day, don’t know whether he poured a poisonous gas into that hut or not.
Everyone was in a state of nervous anticipation of the week ahead. We had been told by Baines that most of our lessons would be covering subjects of a somewhat … delicate nature. It was basically the part of the course on which we would learn about all the different sexual crimes, and any other uncomfortable situations we might find ourselves in on the job. It came to be known among us students simply as ‘Dirty Week’.
First lesson of the week was First Aid with Sergeant Wooding, but instead of the usual bandaging up of wounds, putting people in the recovery position and artificial resuscitation, the lesson was, to our horror, entitled ‘Emergency Childbirth’.
‘So, who’s ever seen a baby being born?’ asked Wooding, pacing up and down at the front of the class.
Of course Marion had seen several. Three of her siblings, and a neighbour’s triplets, who she claimed to have actually delivered herself. Not to mention her cat Matilda and its sixteen kittens. ‘We thought it was all over, and then they just kept coming!’
But most of us girls hadn’t seen a live human birth, and certainly none of the lads had.
On the wall in front of us, Wooding had pinned a large scientific diagram of a woman’s uterus with a baby in it, head about to pop out of the exit.
‘The child emerges from …’ he pointed with his pencil, ‘this area here, head first. We hope. The child will emerge in this manner, still connected to the mother here.’ He pointed again.
‘Putting the science aside for a moment,’ he said, stepping towards us and lowering his voice,‘we’re here to talk about real life. When you’re out there, on the streets, it could happen at any moment. You might be strolling along on your beat, checking shop doors, when you see a woman collapse in the street. She’s gone into labour. Or you’re on traffic patrol and you see a broken-down car by the side of a road. A woman inside, about to give birth. What do you do?’
Silence.
‘Well, if you’re near a phone box all’s well, and you can call for a local doctor or midwife. But you might be on a country lane, on a rural beat, with no passers-by for hours … what then?’
‘Deliver the baby?’ suggested Marion.
‘Well … yes and no. First, you find out if there is any way to get the mother to a doctor or to a hospital. Someone with a motor car, a convenient bus route. Is she able to walk to the police station and get a lift there?’
‘But what if we can’t get her to a doctor or a midwife?’ asked Allan, looking quite perplexed.
‘Yes, exactly. What then? Well, if she seems close to birth, you can help the mother deliver the baby. By relaxing her and in a sense “receiving” the baby as it’s born.’
Everyone looked quite shocked at the prospect.
‘Now, the last thing you should do is panic. People have been known to pass out at the sight of a woman in labour. Not to mention what follows. And we can’t have that from our constables. No, indeed. You need to be prepared for every eventuality. Questions?’
‘What … position should the mother be in?’ asked Ted.
‘Ted!’ gasped Sally.
‘Well, you know. There must be a correct … angle.’
‘No, it’s a valid question. You lay the mother on her back, legs open, and make her as comfortable as possible. You may have to ask her to remove her underclothes.’
There was a flurry of stifled laughter from the back.
‘If possible, you should get her indoors. Perhaps there’s a farmhouse on your beat, which might have a telephone. You might be able to walk the mother there. Or a nearby local shop or residence. Flag down a passing vehicle, even.’
‘But what if we have to deliver it right there and then? The baby?’ I asked. I was, by now, quite concerned. ‘How do we know what to do?’
‘In that case, you make the mother as relaxed as possible and just let nature takes its course. Don’t, above all, stress the situation by panicking. You might see some things that will turn you right off your breakfast. It’s a messy business, but we were all born and it’s perfectly natural. It happens every minute of every day, all over the world, and it’s nothing to be shocked by.’
Sergeant Wooding, seemingly quite proud of his openness on the subject, produced some more graphic diagrams, some depicting newborn babies emerging, attached by umbilical cords, and one of a woman, with the baby lying on her stomach. We passed them around the room to a few quiet gasps.
‘I was there for the births of all three of my children,’ Wooding went on. ‘And I can tell you it’s a miracle to behold. Above all, don’t try to rush things, or pull on the baby’s head. And don’t attempt to cut the umbilical cord. That should be left to a doctor or midwife. But you can gently clear out the baby’s mouth of all the muck and …’
‘Eurgh. Really, this is too much,’ whispered Ted to Allan.
‘… blood and so on from the uterus,’ continued Wooding, as though describing how to make an oil change on a motor car. ‘Anyway, I hope you all now feel more capable of facing this situation should it occur. And remember, above all, let nature take its course.’
As one of the few girls in the room, the lesson had been a bit embarrassing to say the least. And it made me more than a little anxious about what the rest of ‘Dirty Week’ might hold. But perhaps the prospect of assisting with childbirth wouldn’t seem quite so daunting, if I was ever to come acro
ss that particular little emergency in my police career.
As it turned out, emergency childbirth was the least shocking of the things we learnt that week. The next few classes included examining the definition of indecency, and how we would recognize it, followed by incest and bigamy. We also learnt about prostitution, rape and sexual offences against minors; other crimes we studied then aren’t offences now, including abortion and homosexuality.
The more Baines revealed in these classes, about what the law was and what we might come across, the more naive and innocent I felt. Even Sally, who always seemed so confident, was quite horrified by details of bestiality, and when it came to crimes committed against minors, I think we were all shocked into silence.
It’s not that we hadn’t heard about some of this stuff before, in the tabloid papers and through local gossip, it’s just that imagining actual cases, and then the thought of having to deal with them ourselves, made it all seem so much more real.
Marge showed a surprising degree of unshockability, and asked some of the questions we were probably all thinking but were too shy to say. When it came to bestiality, she wanted a detailed list of all the animals we might be likely to encounter sexual acts being committed with; and she was the most vociferous in her questioning of how we would recognize the signs of crimes such as indecency, and what they involved.
By the end of ‘Dirty Week’, no one bothered to giggle in class. We were all just a little less shockable or embarrassed by the more ‘delicate’ subjects, and perhaps just a bit more grown-up. However, Baines warned us that we had by no means covered everything, and we should expect plenty more shocks on the job.
We were nearing the end of our thirteen weeks at the training centre. It was blazing hot and we were desperate to be outside enjoying the sun, but before we were free for the weekend we had to sit one of our final exams, and we all wanted to do well.
A big white clock ticked in the corner of a classroom as we sat hunched over exam papers. Allan had already finished; Ted was scratching his chin, looking concerned.
When Sergeant Wooding finally called time and collected our papers, Sally had a big smile on her face. The extra revision had paid off, and we had all managed to remember our definitions. We decided to go for a celebratory egg and chips in town.
Bobby on the Beat Page 8