by Charlie Owen
Whilst still in my teens I saw life and death at its most base and callous and, like every other officer I know who stayed the course, relied on rough and ready gallows humour to deal with it.
I remember walking into a bedroom in a slum flat during the summer of 1976 where a man had died in bed three months earlier and had literally melted into the mattress as he decomposed. My partner that day took a brief look at him and said, 'He's let himself go a bit hasn't he?' It took the horror out of the situation. There were endless occasions when humour took the edge off something deeply unpleasant or difficult. I recall one young probationer (not me!) who was tasked with searching a house by his tutor because the occupant had not been seen for some time. He went upstairs and on returning was asked by his tutor whom he had heard him talking to. He replied that he had located a black bloke on the toilet up there but he wouldn't respond to any of his questions. Puzzled, the tutor had gone to speak to the man only to find the occupier sitting on the toilet, long dead.
Illicit sexual relations occasionally provided some light relief - as always. Officers from my station took a call to reports of a woman screaming for help from the back of a parked car. When they arrived they found an anxious woman whose sexual extravaganza in the car had gone horribly wrong when her boyfriend had sustained a serious back injury and could not be extracted from the vehicle. Eventually they called the fire brigade who cut off the roof of the car to get him out. The woman became hysterical, not as it turned out because of her boyfriend's injury, but because she had no idea how to explain the damage to her husband's car.
The years of Margaret Thatcher were halcyon days for the Police Service. Police officers and their families no longer had to rely on state benefits to get by and we were paid and continue to be paid a reasonable wage. Suddenly men and women began to join the Job to pursue lucrative careers. Despite this,
I regard the period of my career from 1976 to 1979 as the last golden age of true vocational coppering. My book is set in that period. It is a work of fiction and should not by any means be regarded as an historical account.
What I hope comes across in this book is that a career in the Police Service involves long periods of mundane routine punctuated by extremes at both ends of the spectrum. Coppers who choose to remain operational see it all. They cope with a dark, sharp, spontaneous humour, not always to everyone's taste - but it helps.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty