Bobby on the Beat

by Pamela Rhodes

  ‘You’re a great little dancer,’ said the soldier who had swept me up.

  ‘Thanks. We used to have dancing lessons back home in Scarborough. But what about you? You’re not so bad yourself!’

  ‘My sisters taught me. Four of them, all absolutely barking mad for dancing. We used to practise for hours in the front room. And being the only boy among all those girls, I was everyone’s favourite dance partner.’

  ‘Well, they certainly taught you well.’

  ‘I’m Jim, by the way,’ said the young soldier, holding out his hand. He had the short-cropped hair of someone on National Service, but I could see it was thick and a reddish colour. He had a wide, beaming face, a bit like a kindly, giant frog.

  We chatted for a while about where we were from, and he told me he grew up in Luton, down south, near Bedford.

  ‘Bit of a grim old place,’ he said. ‘I was relieved when they posted me up here, despite the training. See a bit more of the country, I suppose.’

  ‘Have you been anywhere? On duty or something?’

  ‘We haven’t yet but we’re going to Germany in a few months. There’s still a lot to do there. Some of the lads I know, who’ve been there already, they had to do all sorts. Dig up bodies even. Not nice. But enough of that. Another dance?’

  This time it was a waltz, so we twirled along the floor and Jim put his arm round my waist. As we whizzed along we passed Gertie, who was dancing with another soldier. She flashed me a smile and then disappeared. Just then, another pair of dancers came hurtling towards us, and I wasn’t quick enough on my feet to stop. They crashed into us, and I managed to half hang on to Jim, before we both went toppling over in a heap on the floor.

  There was much tutting from other couples who whizzed on past us as we scrambled to our feet.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Jim, as he stood up. He was bending down and looking at his ankle, which he had twisted in the fall.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘That looked painful. I’m so sorry. I think that may have been my fault.’

  ‘They came from nowhere, didn’t they? The brutes.’

  We got up, but Jim winced when he put his foot down. I put my arm in his arm, and we walked to the edge of the dance floor.

  ‘Who thought dancing was such a dangerous sport?’ he said, laughing, as we sat on the wooden chairs along the wall and got our breath back.

  ‘Get something cold on that when you can,’ I said, remembering my first-aid course.

  Next to us, a young couple were arguing in strained tones under their breath. The lad, who couldn’t have been much older than eighteen, had his hands on the girl’s shoulders. She looked up at him, and I could see the make-up had run down her face and a thin strand of hair was covering her eyes.

  ‘I did write to you. I don’t know what the problem is. This place … they read our letters. I lose track of time. You can’t stay here, anyway. How did you get here?’

  ‘I told you. Bus. But you said you’d write every day. It’s been weeks. I’m not going.’

  ‘You’ll get me into big trouble, you will, Jen.’

  ‘And who was that woman you were talking to? You’re always ignoring me. I might as well be a ghost. I feel like a dead, pointless ghost.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what I can say. Whatever I say is wrong with you. I didn’t ask to be sent to this blasted place.’

  They paused for a while and stared ahead. Then the young lad took a parcel out from inside his pocket.

  ‘Anyway. I bought you this.’

  He stood up, threw the small package down into her lap, and walked away. The young girl, who did look very young to be out dancing, opened the paper and took out a thin blue box. Inside, there was a delicate, silver bracelet. She ran it through her fingers for a while, sadly, then put it back in the box and wrapped it in the paper. She stared ahead, and the music thumped away in the background, as tears dripped down her cheeks and onto her dress.

  ‘I hope she’s OK,’ I said, then looked back at Jim. ‘How’s your ankle?’

  ‘Not too bad, but I don’t think there’ll be any more dancing for me tonight.’

  ‘I’d better get going anyway. All this excitement has worn me out,’ I said.

  ‘Are you getting the bus into town? I’ll come with you. I could do with some fresh air.’

  We found Gertie and Eleanor, who were at the bar with a group of lads who had already been on active service. They were describing how they’d all nearly been killed in a motor accident in the desert. We left them to it.

  After saying our goodbyes, Jim and I stepped outside into the dark November evening. As we stood by the side of the road, I could hear two foxes wailing in the fields behind the garrison and a motor car humming in the distance. A young lad was striding up the road towards us. I soon realized it was the one who had walked away from the girl in the dance hall. He was smoking a cigarette vigorously and kicking at some stones on the pavement. A few minutes later, the girl came running out of the gate too, and called after him.

  ‘Robert! Robert! Stop.’

  ‘What?’ He didn’t turn round but just kept walking up the road past us as she chased after him.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said quietly. ‘The bracelet. I love it.’

  They stopped and stood for a while, not speaking. Then the bus came up the hill and stopped right in front of them, blocking my view. As we stepped on, I could see them out of the window as they hugged under the light of the lamppost. As the bus drove off they were walking back towards the camp, arm in arm and laughing.

  ‘Young love,’ said Jim, staring out of the window.

  I wondered whether he was speaking from experience.

  ‘What do your parents do? In Luton?’ I asked after a while, as we bumped along the dark country lane, branches from overhanging trees scraping along the windows.

  ‘My father works at a car factory. My mother … she died when I was eleven.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Peritonitis. Appendix. We called the nurse and she said it was nothing. She refused to come out. The dragon! Mother died in the night. I nearly bit her finger off.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘The nurse. She was also the dentist’s assistant in town. She had two jobs, see. I was there having something done a year or so later. I gave it a good chomp too. I never forgave her for what she did.’

  He looked out of the window for a while into the darkness.

  ‘My dad wanted to give us up. Said he couldn’t cope with all five. So my eldest sister, Margaret, left school aged fourteen to look after all of us younger ones. Anna was only five.’

  He stopped talking, realizing perhaps he’d already revealed too much of himself to a complete stranger on a bus.

  ‘How long have you been up here then?’ I asked, quickly changing the subject.

  ‘Oh, a few weeks. We train here and then we’re off to Germany. Beer and women. That’s what they say to expect, anyway.’

  I found it very easy to talk to Jim after that, and we compared notes about training, me in the police and him in the army. We talked about the parade ground and marching practice and some of his sadistic officers, who he thought seemed to enjoy seeing new recruits suffer. It turned out Jim hadn’t wanted to join up, but he had failed at failing his medical, which was really the only way out of National Service.

  ‘We wanted to fail, a whole bunch of us from school. We had a plan, to raise up our temperatures by lying in a hot bath. We had this woman doctor come in and ask us all to drop our trousers and cough. She was having none of it. Just too healthy, I suppose. We come here human and we’ll all leave machines. Can’t tell one from the other after a while. Still, it’s only two years, I suppose.’

  ‘What’ll you do after, do you think?’

  ‘When I was younger I had this idea about being an inventor, or an engineer. But before I came here I was working with my Uncle Brian in a car showroom. So when I get back who knows …’


  ‘This is my stop,’ I said, surprised at how quickly the journey had gone.

  ‘I’ll walk you to your digs, if you like.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s kind. But I’ll be fine.’

  But as I stepped off the bus, to my horror, I caught sight of Sergeant Hardcastle on duty with PC Carter, right at the bus stop. They were standing about six yards away and looked as though they were checking the passengers, perhaps looking for someone.

  ‘Oh my goodness! Quick. It’s my boss,’ I said, putting my head down and walking up the road as quickly as I could, trying to hide behind Jim who had got off after all. ‘Do you think he saw us?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why? Is he funny about that stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just feels a bit strange. It’s such a small town. Like he’ll be keeping an eye on me or something. Silly really.’

  The town was quiet, just the odd group of soldiers from Catterick coming in and out of the pubs, a few couples out for an evening walk and a collection of town cats prowling about, stalking their territories.

  ‘Here we are,’ I whispered, trying not to wake the children as we approached the house. Jim had ended up walking me back after all.

  The light was on in the front room, so Janet would still be up, darning and chatting with her husband in front of the wireless.

  ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite. That’s what my sisters always used to say.’

  ‘You too. How’s your leg, by the way? I forgot all about it.’

  ‘So did I. So it can’t be that bad.’

  He leant forward for a moment and I thought he was going to try to kiss me, but in the end we just shook hands. I felt a flutter of excitement, though, as I was hit by his overwhelming smell of cleanness and coal tar soap. I stood for a while, swaying a bit, then, without another word, Jim turned back down the hill towards the bus stop and disappeared.

  As I lay in bed that night I should have been happy but I found I was nervous. I could hear a pair of crows on a rooftop, perhaps calling out to one another. A dog barked in the distance. Even the wind seemed to be saying something as it whipped up the trees. All of nature, it seemed, was engaged in some incomprehensible conversation from which I had been completely excluded.

  ‘Rhodes. Do you have a minute?’

  I was startled out of a reverie by the piercing tones of Sergeant Hardcastle, calling round the door of the Super’s office. I was standing on tiptoe, dusting down one of his particularly difficult to reach light fittings, and thinking about the events of Friday night.

  ‘I wanted to have a quick word with you about a small something.’

  I turned round to look at him and could feel my face flushing bright red.

  ‘I know you know I saw you with a young gentleman in town. From the garrison, I presume? On Friday night? Coming off the bus.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant. I had been to the dance with my friends and he offered to …’

  ‘I’m only looking out for your best interests. Those young men up there – we see all sorts, of an evening. Drinking and fights and things not fit for young ladies’ eyes. You have to be careful, is all I’m saying. Do you know where he’s from? Anything about him? You walked off up the road together, I saw, and …’

  As Hardcastle was about to try to extract more information, the Super came in. We both stopped. I stood to attention and put down the feather duster.

  ‘Morning, sir,’ said Hardcastle.

  ‘Ah. Just the man.’ The Super put down some papers on his desk, and raised his eyebrows at us, perhaps wondering whether he had interrupted something suspicious he ought to know about. ‘I need to talk to you about this … business with the Taylor woman. Thank you, Miss Rhodes.’

  I practically ran out of there, relieved to have escaped the third degree. I knew Hardcastle was only being protective, but sometimes I got the feeling that he felt the need to look after me in some way more than he did the lads, just because I was a woman.

  On my way out I passed a young girl, aged about sixteen, sat in the parade room, eating a plate of sandwiches. I thought she looked familiar and then realized I knew her from the Catterick dance on Friday, the girl who’d been arguing with her boyfriend. She looked different, quite tired and wearing a plain cotton dress, no make-up on, her long black hair tied back in a ponytail. She had with her a small green canvas bag and sat hunched up quietly on the bench.

  Having finished his business with the Super, Sergeant Hardcastle came out of the office.

  ‘Ah yes. This young lady, Jennifer, isn’t it?’ he said and she nodded. ‘She was picked up at Catterick. You know the place,’ he said knowingly to me.

  ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ I answered, relieved that his previous cross-examination of me seemed to be over.

  ‘Well, she’s going home. Aren’t you, my girl? Parents on the phone to us, sick with worry. But they thought as much what was going on. She’d come down to see some lad up there.’

  Jennifer looked down and fiddled with the string on the canvas bag without saying a word.

  ‘Take her to the station and see she gets on that train home, will you?’

  It was a bright autumn day, crisp and sunny, and perfectly still. Chestnut shells crunched under our feet.

  ‘I forgot to ask where you’re getting the train to,’ I said to Jennifer, as we walked down Newbiggin towards Market Place.

  ‘York,’ she said quietly.

  I looked up at the clock tower. ‘Well, in that case we’ve got nearly an hour to the next train. Fancy a cup of tea first? I know I could do with one.’

  I took her to my favourite café, Philpot’s Tea Rooms. Mrs Philpot had run a teahouse here for ever, or so it seemed. My landlady’s husband, Don, said he remembered her when he was a young boy, and that was at least forty years ago. She’d had a husband once but he had died long ago. My landlady had a theory that she had taken some elixir of immortality and was actually about 200 years old. Mrs Philpot was remarkably vital, at any rate, with a pile of bright white hair, which apparently used to be jet black. She wore a green pinny and was only about four foot tall, and was a bundle of ceaseless energy. Every day, she got up at five a.m. on the dot and baked all the cakes in the shop, then laid them out on a collection of silver cake tiers she said she had mysteriously ‘inherited’ as a young girl. She seemed to have had a kind of mythical, glamorous past that we could find out little about but that involved the Russians. She was a master at piping and cake decorating.

  ‘Morning, Pam,’ she said as I came in, ‘and who’s this pretty little thing?’

  ‘She’s on her way home to York. But first how about one of your finest fairy cakes? And a nice cup of tea?’

  I sat down in the corner by the window with Jennifer, who hadn’t said a word all the way. I decided not to mention seeing her at the Catterick dance, but I noticed she was wearing the bracelet that the young lad had bought her.

  ‘So what brought you up to Catterick, then?’

  ‘Robert. He never wrote to me,’ she said glumly, and took a huge slurp of tea. ‘He said he would write every day. But then I didn’t hear a word for weeks. So I got on the bus. I had it all planned. I knew they had a dance and I even brought my dress and everything.’ She held up the green bag. ‘It’s in here. I made it myself,’ she said, and smiled a little at the memory of her adventure.

  After a little while her face dropped again.

  ‘It was supposed to be a surprise. But when I got in, he was talking to this other girl. Really tall, and they were laughing. Anyway. He saw me and … I thought he’d be happy.’

  She looked down at the bracelet, and for a moment I wondered whether it had been meant for her at all.

  ‘I hid for a while. Would have got away with it too, but that other man, he came and got me. Brought me to the station. And now I have to go back to that house, like a prisoner. While he’s out with other …’

  ‘It’s a cruel world,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure he’ll come back and it’ll all be fine. Or you’ll m
eet another lad who’s just as nice. If not nicer.’

  But I wasn’t sure of course.

  When we had finished the tea, we walked down towards the train station, past the river, where a group of cormorants had come inland and were diving for fish, their slick, oily backs disappearing into the water. In the distance, I heard the level crossing and knew we only had a few minutes left before the train arrived, so we ran the rest of the way and got there just as it pulled in.

  As Jennifer walked up the steps, clouds of steam puffing around her, she turned round and waved back at me sadly. I had a feeling this wouldn’t be the last time I’d be putting a reluctant young ‘camp follower’ back on the train for home.

  6

  In 1951 there was only one female sergeant in the whole of the North Riding Constabulary. Sergeant Maureen Freeman was in charge of the nine WPCs located across the region, and though I’d never met her, I reckoned she must be a force of nature to have got that far in this male-dominated world. I knew she would come and check periodically that the female officers were doing OK and conduct a kit inspection.

  After a few months at Richmond, Inspector Armstrong informed me that Sergeant Freeman would be visiting me. She would go to the station first and have a chat about my progress, while I was to prepare for inspection at my digs.

  It was early December, and a drizzly damp Saturday. My landlady’s children were playing dressing up in the next room and kept creeping in, dressed in all kinds of different costumes. First they came in dressed as a shepherd and a sheep, though the sheep costume consisted of a pair of grey shorts on Michael’s head, while Fiona wore a straw hat and a stripy dressing gown to be the shepherd. Then, a while later, they came back in dressed as a cowboy and cowgirl, and kept attempting to lasso things in my room.

  ‘What’s it like being a police lady?’ asked Fiona, when they had tired of that game. ‘Do you arrest people and find … burglars and things? What if they run away or attack you?’

  ‘Not much like that happens in Richmond,’ I said, as I straightened a row of clothes out on the bed. ‘But I did once see a man stealing some daffodils on Gallowgate. That was funny. He ran away when he saw me and disappeared over a wall. I thought about chasing him for a while, but I would probably never have caught him, he was gone that quickly. I suppose he wanted the daffodils for his garden, maybe.’