by Glenn Wood
Nothing says ‘I love you’ like ammunition.
Law & Disorder
Three very important events were looming. The Fleetwood Mac concert, our first leave weekend and first-term exams.
The reason I was excited about Fleetwood Mac had nothing to do with the band. I thought they were cack and musically they represented everything I detested (although Stevie Nicks was quite cute). But, Carey liked them and a group of teachers’ college students were coming down from Palmerston North for the concert. Conveniently the event was on a Friday night and our only leave weekend of the term fell on the Saturday and Sunday. This meant I could go to the concert with Carey then grab a lift to Palmerston North for the next two days. Only one thing stood in my way. I was sitting on two bookings. One more and I’d be confined to barracks for the weekend.
The crimes I’d committed to put me in this sad position were particularly heinous. I was given my first booking because the windows on my side of the room were dirtier than Rob’s.
My second offence was leaving my togs neatly rolled up on my bed instead of put away in my drawers. I regarded this as particularly stink booking as the only reason I hadn’t put them away was because I was rushing to my next class, so I wouldn’t be booked for lateness. Miserable gits.
I was very worried as the leave weekend was only two weeks away and it was extremely unlikely I’d last a fortnight without being booked.
There was only one thing to do. I was going to have to get myself booked immediately and sacrifice the weekend before the leave weekend. It should be easy enough - at this stage of the course we’d get booked for breathing funny. I decided not to blot my copybook too badly - I would get caught for the minor, but highly bookable, offence of walking around with my hands in my pockets. This was a sure-fire winner. Every instructor in the camp kept an eagle eye out for such lapses and had their pen out before you could say, “I was just scratching my testicles, sir.”
I walked around every inch of Trentham for two whole days with my hands stuffed so far into my trousers that I should have been arrested for obscene behaviour, but do you think I could get booked? No way. It was as if every instructor had suddenly gone blind. The other cadets knew my scheme and they couldn’t believe what was happening. The booking blitz continued as usual, but no matter how blatantly I flaunted this most basic breech of the dress code, I could not get punished. Then one day the chief inspector (God himself) spotted me slouching around outside the classroom, pointed at me and yelled ‘You, Cadet, come over here.’
This is it, I thought, I’m booked for sure. But no, he just wanted to send me on a pointless errand. Unbelievable!
To cap it off, when one of the instructors did finally notice my transgression, he let me off with a warning. No one got let off with a warning; it was unheard of. he other cadets were gobsmacked. I instantly became the luckiest, unlucky bastard in the camp.
In the end I gave up and booked myself. I made up some offence then reported that I now had three bookings. It never occurred to the instructors that a cadet would purposely book himself so they didn’t check the entries and I was confined to barracks for the weekend before leave.
It was horrible. I spent the entire time ironing, spit shining, reporting for inspection and cleaning various things that didn’t need cleaning. It was boring in the extreme and to rub salt in the wound I got booked again for having railway tracks (two crease marks instead of one) on my shirt sleeve.
At least I had company in the barracks. One of my mates was on his third confinement in a row. His nickname was Pig Pen and it doesn’t take a genius to work out what he kept getting confined for. He was one of those guys who is just naturally messy whereas his room-mate, Wayne, was a compulsive cleaner. They were the police’s version of ‘the odd couple’. Pig Pen’s half of the room looked like a bomb site but you could’ve eaten off the furniture on Wayne’s side. Quite often you’d enter their room to find PP lying amongst a pile of dirty laundry reading a Penthouse while Wayne was on his side spit polishing his already gleaming shoes. Yet despite this, or maybe because of it, they got on well and their room was a popular port of call for me and my mates.
I got through the rest of the weekend without any further bookings and faced a nervous week sitting on one booking but knowing it wouldn’t be hard to pick up two more.
Fortunately, come Friday night, I had survived the week and was free to spend the evening with Carey and (unfortunately) Fleetwood Mac. From there I was off to Palmerston North for a weekend of sleeping on the floor of Quentin’s flat and dodging the Matron at Blair Tennent Hall, where Carey was in residence.
Blair Tennent was the home to 78 girls aged between 17 and 19, all of whom were away from home for the first time. I’d discovered its joys the year before while visiting friends. Quite simply it was paradise. My friend was going out with a girl who lived there and we went round to visit her. It was 8pm and already a number of the girls were in their night attire and those that weren’t were still, well, women.
It was too much for me, a shy young boy from Taranaki who had never seen more than 12 women in one place, and that was the Girls’ High school choir. The whole experience was quite surreal, it was like the scene from the Monty Python movie The Quest For the Holy Grail in which Sir Galahad the Pure had entered the castle Anthrax to be confronted by a bevy of young virgins wanting to be spanked. Admittedly, not many of the residents of Blair Tennent looked interested in a spanking and I don’t think the virgin count was very high, but I stand by my analogy.
I blushed from head to toe the moment I entered the hall, then completely lost the ability to speak. Instead I sat around making pathetic mewing sounds until I was thrown out by the matron.
Being matron was probably the worst job in the world. Her role was to chaperone the girls, all 78 of them, keeping them away from boys and alcohol. And what are the two things the majority of 18 year old girls want? That’s right, a hot cup of Milo and a good book.
Obviously the only option open to this poor woman was to run Blair Tennent like a Russian Gulag. She was forever throwing boys out onto the street and banning them from ever darkening her doorways again. I was biffed out a few times during the year for not sticking to visiting hours (who would have thought 3am wasn’t acceptable?), but managed to avoid actually being banned. Which was fortunate as Blair Tennent was Carey’s home for the whole of my year at Trentham.
The Fleetwood Mac concert, despite my misgivings, turned out to be extremely cool. The band had a massive argument on stage and stuffed up playing their instruments because they were all so mad with each other. I thought it improved their songs immensely. In the end they stormed off stage and didn’t return until their manager said if they didn’t finish the set they wouldn’t get paid.
This was good because it gave Carey and me a bit of unexpected cuddling and snogging time, much to the disgust of her assorted friends and work-mates. I don’t normally go in for public displays of affection, but we had to make every moment count as we’d be separated again soon. We were in that sickly, ‘first couple of months of the relationship’ stage where common sense is overtaken by infatuation and our behaviour was truly vomit-inducing. Still, we were probably the only two who enjoyed the Fleetwood Mac concert, so what the hell.
The show ended on a high note too: I saw my first sucking chest wound.
It happened as we were leaving the venue. Just outside the gate we came across a guy who had been stabbed in a fight and he was lying on the ground doing a lot of bleeding. The St John’s Ambulance people had arrived first and were trying to keep the guy alive until the hospital ambulance arrived. I wandered over to see if I could help.
They had everything under control but I got a good look at the guy’s injury. He had a 3cm horizontal cut on the right side of his chest. The knife had gone in deep and punctured a lung, which was causing the wound to suck. It made a whistling sound and the blood was pink and frothy. I was fascinated as we’d just studied this in First Aid, and
there it was happening right in front of me. The guy who had been stabbed didn’t seem to share my excitement and the St Johns people suggested I’d be more useful doing crowd control. I didn’t get a chance to do much because the ‘real’ police arrived and told me that what I thought was crowd control was just me getting in the way. I can take a hint so I made a graceful exit and rushed back to the girls to describe the guy’s stab wound in minute detail. When one of them asked me to stop because she felt sick I realised that, amazingly, I didn’t. This was great news.It seemed Sergeant Edwards was right: I’d been so focused on trying to help that the sight of blood hadn’t fazed me at all. I was so pleased I decided to relate the story over again. I walked back to the car by myself.
The rest of the weekend was spent testing Carey’s moral fortitude and I’m sorry to say she passed with flying colours. Apparently it was best if we took things slowly. This was a blow to me, as my plans were to take things as fast as possible, but she was in the driver’s seat and clearly we weren’t going to take the car out of first gear.
Still, we were going in the right direction and I figured it was just a matter of time before her foot came off the brake. I didn’t really mind as I was just as happy (well, almost as happy) simply enjoying female company for a change. The only women at Trentham either outranked me, fed me medicine, or were attempting to teach me to type, so our conversations were somewhat limited.
The weekend went way too fast and before I knew it I was back at Trentham. Not everyone made it back, though. One guy decided enough was enough and hadn’t returned from leave. I’m sure he wasn’t the only one who considered it. The leave weekend served to remind us what we were missing and the thought of another nine months of snap inspections, extreme physical and mental pressure, and oppressive discipline, was enough to cause even the most determined cadet to waver.
The pressure was on in the classroom too. Our first-term exams were only a month away and we were told if we failed we were out. There was no pussyfooting around with wimpy 50 per cent pass rates either. The police required a 70 per cent minimum mark to pass.
I was doing quite well on the weekly tests, with good results in most subjects. So far I had received 78 for General Orders, 72 for Beats, 71 for Statements, 77 for the Coroners Act, 83 for our second test on Statements, 87 for the Children and Young Persons Act, 80 for the Mental Health Act. And I scored 73 in a general first term-test which was a warm up for the big exam.
I was pleasantly surprised by my marks as my school work had always been average. I only just squeaked through School Certificate, failing maths badly (having to take Taranaki Certificate Maths, or ‘thickie maths’ as my classmates unkindly called it) and had to spend two years in the Sixth Form before I got University Entrance. Mind you, Quentin was in all my classes for the first year, which didn’t help. To say we didn’t really apply ourselves is an understatement. Quentin should have flown through UE but only made it by the skin of his teeth and I missed out by ten marks (that 32 for Biology didn’t help). So, to be getting marks in the seventies and eighties was a novelty for me.
My interest in the subject matter made a big difference. At school I didn’t really give a stuff what crop the farmers of the mid-west of America planted in their fields. Perhaps if the answer had been opium I might have paid attention. But it wasn’t, it was corn, and I fell asleep.
Now I was learning about cool stuff, like this gem from the statutes related to death.
It is not an offence to attempt to commit suicide. The law is only broken if you succeed and then you can be charged.
(Okay Mr Dead Guy, you’ve really done it this time. Boy, are you in trouble.)
I also found legal definitions most interesting. For example, the definition of domestic violence is as follows;
“Violence is conduct, verbal or non verbal, which will damage the recipient, physically, socially, intellectually or emotionally. Damage means to hinder normal growth or development or to divert it into deviant behaviour.”
Actually the lecture on domestic violence was both fascinating and frightening. Of all the incidents a police officer attends, the most dangerous by far is a domestic dispute. That’s because you never know what is going to happen next. If you are attending an armed robbery you are at least aware that the offender has a weapon and have prepared yourself accordingly. In a domestic situation anything can and does happen.
This was driven home in the most chilling fashion when our instructor told us the first rule for attending a domestic dispute. Never park your patrol car in front of the house or property concerned. This became standard procedure after two constables pulled up outside a house that had been subject to a domestic dispute call. The guy inside the house had just killed his wife and he shot both cops before they even opened the patrol car doors. They died instantly.
Law was fine but sometimes theory got beyond us. Fortunately Jacko was always there to translate. Here is a segment from a thesis we were supposed to read on the Children and Young Person’s Act;
‘West (1965) groups these theories under the general rubric of “social protest” theories: that juvenile offending is a protest or reaction to existing inequalities within society. The results produced in this report are entirely consistent with this interpretation in that rates of juvenile offending reflect what would appear to be lines of stratification in New Zealand society with those groups in the most advantaged position displaying a low rate of juvenile offending and those groups in the most deprived positions displaying a high rate of offending.’
There were 22 pages of this stuff, which Jacko would sum up by saying;
‘Poor kids get locked up more than rich kids. It ain’t fair but it’s the way it is.’
He would then elaborate with a colourful story from his time on the beat in Wairoa and we wouldn’t have to read all the dull guff.
I did have a few problems on the academic front.
My biggest area of difficulty was spelling. I am slightly dyslexic and have never been able to grasp the fundamentals of technical English. I scored 26 out of 50 in my first-term spelling test. Hot on the heels of my appalling spelling was my abysmal typing. I was by far the worst in my class. I have quite big hands and they are not suited to a typewriter keyboard. Several other cadets had similar problems but none shared my complete lack of co-ordination. It was bad enough when I was looking at the keyboard but my over-eager typing teacher was always trying to get me to type with my eyes fixed straight ahead. I ended up with sentences like this: ‘The wuick browm nox bumoed ocer the jazi sog.’
I just couldn’t get the hang of using all 10 fingers to type. I’d get all fumbled up and my speed would drop from 20 words a minute to 6. In the end she gave up and let me look at the keyboard and type with whatever fingers I liked. Then she failed me.
Before our main exams we had to sit first-aid exams. I was heartened by the sucking chest wound incident and was sure I’d manage to stay conscious long enough to pass. Happily I was right and got good marks. I even managed to save the life of the plastic CPR dummy with the paper-bag lungs. Back then we were taught to use a pre-cardial thump on patients who had stopped breathing. This involved whacking your fist in the patient’s chest area before starting mouth to mouth resuscitation. Later in the year, while on station duty, one of the cadets used this method on a guy who had stopped breathing. He got the guy’s heart going again, thanks to CPR, but broke two of his ribs with the pre-cardial thump. That particular practice is no longer considered effective (i.e. do not try this at home.)
Dad was particularly pleased I passed first aid, as he was a qualified medical officer at the wharf and had been trying to show me the basics for ages. Normally I was the patient. He spent most of my teenage years strapping up strained ankles, icing bruises and stopping me from bleeding to death. I guess some of the things he showed me must have stuck.
The first-term exams were split into four sections: law, general studies, Practical and typing (uh oh). The law exam covered poli
ce powers involved in dealing with the mentally ill, the Children and Young Persons Act, deaths, prisoners’ rights and the Coroners Act.
General Studies covered the rights of suspects and offenders, the causes of domestic disputes, police procedures in these areas and communications skills.
The practical part of the exam took us out of the classroom and onto the streets of Trentham. We would be placed in a series of mock situations and marked on how we handled them. Our instructors or fellow cadets would play offenders or victims and we would do our best to bring the situation to a satisfactory conclusion. From there we were expected to complete the appropriate paperwork and hand it in for marking.
I really enjoyed the practicals because they were a chance to apply what we’d learnt in the classroom in ‘real’ situations, except, as I found out later, these ‘real’ situations were a long way from real ‘real’ situations. It was unlikely your fellow cadet or instructor would punch you in the nose if you took the wrong approach.
I hated the paperwork, though. There were so many forms to fill out and they all had to be completed to strictly controlled formats. The wording had to be exactly the same every time and there was no room for creative interpretation. I found this very frustrating as I love playing with words and thought the existing police reports could do with a bit of livening up. I was not, however, foolish enough to try to improve the existing formats during the exams.
We sat our examinations on the 21st and 22nd of April 1980 and had to wait three whole days before we found out our results.
You’ll Never Take Me Alive
My marks were 88 for law, 78 for general studies, 72 for my practical and 48 for typing. I was taken aside and spoken to about my typing result. I was informed I had to get my results above 50 per cent for the next exam. Sergeant Edwards didn’t make a big deal out of it though. He said no cadet had ever been thrown out of Trentham for being a crap typist. That was a relief.