by Glenn Wood
After mopping up the blood from the many mortally wounded Cadets lying moaning around the gymnasium the instructors got ready to send another lamb to the slaughter. This lamb, however, had had five years of tai kwon do experience behind him, and as the wolf with the knife approached he whipped into a spinning back kick and booted the weapon clean out of the other guy’s hand. It was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen. I always thought martial arts were a load of old hokum, with little or no practical application, but after seeing that display I was converted. Not to the extent of actually learning any of the stuff (I still laugh heartily at a mate of mine who practices tai chi), but next time I attack someone with a knife I want written confirmation that he is not a deft exponent of kung fu.
To compensate for the regular beatings we were receiving in the gymnasium we were given more leave weekends and discipline wasn’t quite so strict. Bookings were still handed out regularly but not with the gay abandon of the first term. One concession the instructors did grant us was we no longer had to march to meals. I was well pleased as I hated marching and lining up, especially as several of the cadets used the occasion to have a laugh at my expense.
I have a big nose. There, I’ve said it. I think it’s in proportion to the rest of my body but there is no getting past the fact that from side on it’s a whopper.
One favourite barrack’s joke was that when I lay down I looked like a two car garage. Another claimed that I would always be able to tell the time if I lost my watch as all I had to do was lie on my back and use my nose as a sundial. Ha ha ha.
I was standing at the front of the queue one day when a cadet further down the line called my name. When I turned around the next six cadets in line ducked simultaneously as if to avoid being knocked over by my nose. Everyone found this most amusing. Almost as amusing as my continual efforts to perfect an incendiary device to devastate all opposition should the need arise.
I was still stinging from my public humiliation over the beer-can bazooka and felt I needed a pyrotechnical success to restore my credibility as an explosives expert. It was not to be. A series of projects went with a phut rather than a bang and the one device that did burst spectacularly into flames almost burnt the barracks down.
I had conducted the experiment in the rubbish tin in my room but the bomb exploded with such unexpected ferocity it caused a fire. The metal bin quickly got too hot to handle and the flames fierce enough to stop me getting close. Worst of all, the mat the bin was sitting on had started smoking. Fortunately Phil had the presence of mind to grab his bin and fill it full of water, dowsing the fire (and my mat) before the room went up. This was long before smoke detectors so my gross negligence wasn’t immediately discovered. I was planning for it never to be, but there was the little detail of a soggy and burnt mat which we had to get past the people who used white gloves to detect dust particles in our room. Hiding a large burn mark in the rug that, according to regulations, had to sit conspicuously on the floor beside the bed, would be tricky. I wasn’t sure but I seemed to remember arson being frowned upon by the constabulary. Losing the mat was my only option - but how? Phil had an idea. He suggested swapping it with his room-mate’s mat. I loved the thought but, spaggot though the guy was; he wasn’t dim enough not to notice a mat switch.
In the end I decided to stick roughly to the truth by confessing to a fire in my bin but revising how the fire started. Even this was fraught with difficulties as there was no smoking allowed in the barracks (I don’t smoke anyway), so the careless cigarette butt excuse was out. In the end I went for a dubious tale of trying to melt two broken bits of plastic together with a match which wasn’t out properly when I threw it in the bin. I received a booking for my actions, saved only from a stricter sentence because my Gonzo reputation gave my stupid story some credibility. It was one of the few times in my life that being an accident-prone jinx worked in my favour.
Our first leave weekend of the second term arrived with me on two bookings again but this time I threw caution to the wind and tried not to get a third. Much to my astonishment this daring plan worked and I took off really early on Saturday morning for Palmerston North. I arrived at 7am, the morning half gone for a police cadet, but still the middle of the night for a teachers’ college student.
Blair Tennent was dark and silent. The only light shone from the Matron’s window. I had to get in, Carey’s willpower had been sorely tested by my last visit and I was hoping to breech her defences this weekend. Besides, I was bloody cold and wanted to get into her warm room to be fussed over and cuddled. In a tough policeman sort of way, of course.
The problem was getting in undetected. I needed help from the inside, preferably from Carey. I decided to use the tried and true method of throwing small stones at her window. But which window was hers? I knew the way to her room from the inside but from where I was standing all the rooms looked the same. There was nothing else for it so I picked a window and biffed a handful of stones at it. After all, what was the worst thing that could happen if I got the wrong room? I could frighten one of the girls, who could mistake me for a prowler and alert the Hell Matron who would ban me from Blair Tennent forever.
Fortunately this didn’t happen. I did get the wrong room but my luck was in because the girl I awoke was a friend of Carey’s and she recognised me. Before long I was smuggled inside and being cuddled unmercifully. Naturally I fought against it, but what’s a guy to do?
The weekend was great, but the trip back to Trentham was a sorry saga. It was the first of many trips that ended with me trudging into a mate’s room in the barracks and saying “That was the worst trip I have ever had.”
This particular mate’s name was Mark, he had a dry sense of humour and we got on well. His room was just down the hall from Aqua’s and after several hell trips in Floyd, Aqua and Phil would wait in Mark’s room for my return, so they’d be first to hear the latest tale of woe. Floyd had been immortalised by the ‘falling-out window’ incident, plus Jacko’s highly exaggerated stories told after admitting he’d borrowed my car. Jacko decided the mileage he could get from colourful Death Mini tales far outweighed the shame of having borrowed Floyd in the first place. Good old Jacko.
There had also been a couple of ignition problems and one ‘brakes failing and colliding with the barracks fence’ occurrence that fuelled the legend. But the incident which did the most damage was an innocent drive around Trentham one Sunday afternoon. I’d enlisted Fozzie as passenger, hoping for a good report to counter all the bad ones. He was reluctant to set foot inside the mini, but being called a wuss in front of his peers changed his mind. Besides, it was becoming a status symbol to have travelled in Floyd and lived to tell the tale.
We had been driving around for about 20 minutes and Fozzie was just starting to relax, when we hit a pothole. Fozzie let out a terrified yell. ‘Chill out!’ I told him, it hadn’t been much of a bump. He replied that it wasn’t the bump so much as the fact that the floor had fallen out of the car.
Yeah, sure. I glanced over to see the passenger-side floor had indeed disappeared, giving Fozzie a fine view of the road rushing by, but no-where to put his feet. This was hard to come back from, so I laughed pathetically and told him with some Minis the floor was optional.
He demanded I take him back to the barracks immediately and wasted no time blabbing to anyone who would listen (the entire cadet force and most of the instructors). Needless to say, my every journey was now eagerly awaited, especially the long ones to Palmerston North.
I had the floor fixed at a local garage before my next trip to see Carey. The mechanic was reluctant to have anything to do with the car but money changed his mind and he welded a solid plate onto the passenger-side floor. When he had finished, he clonked it with a large spanner and proclaimed that nothing was going to get through that sucker. How right he was.
I returned to Trentham on a wet and windy Sunday night. It had been pouring all day and there were big puddles of water all over the place. Th
is didn’t slow me down as much as it should have because I was in a hurry to get back before curfew. About halfway through my journey I noticed a ‘Flooding Ahead’ sign on the brow of a hill. I ignored it and carried on down the other side until I saw a mass of water before me. ‘Right,’ I thought, ‘the best thing to do here is accelerate.’
I should probably mention that I don’t have the greatest driving history. I failed my licence the first two times and only passed the test a week before I got into Trentham. Dad had given up trying to teach me after I drove into the side of the house while practicing reversing in the back of our section. He said he could have understood me finding the width of the vehicle hard to judge if I’d been driving his Falcon 500, but as I was in Mum’s Hillman Elf, one of the smallest cars in the world, it was beyond him. In the end he paid for me to have driving lessons and I finally managed to squeak through the test.
Anyway, my six months of driving experience told me that planting boot was the right thing to do when approaching a small lake in a lightweight Mini, in pitch-black, wet conditions. As soon as I hit the water I began reassessing my plan but by then it was too late. A huge gush of water exploded through the gear stick, absolutely soaking me and flooding the interior. This was the least of my worries as the steering wheel had been wrenched out of my hands and the car had spun around 180 degrees, literally floating. As I wiped water from my eyes I was surprised to see I was now facing the way I had just come, on the wrong side of the road, in a stalled, waterlogged car.
My brain, tuned to react in milliseconds in a crisis, immediately assessed the situation and told me something was wrong. Taking this on board, I leapt from the car and pushed/floated Floyd to a less death-inducing part of the road. I was bloody lucky there was no traffic. I was also extremely fortunate that Floyd spun around on roughly the same spot and didn’t careen off the road or into a bank.
Once my heart had made its way back from my mouth to its rightful place in my chest I took a look at the damage. On the plus side Floyd was very clean. Conversely we were both dripping wet and there was 30 centimetres of water sloshing around on the newly welded floor, now sealed tighter than a vacuum-packed condom. It took half an hour for Floyd’s electrics to dry out and then, by some miracle, he started and I drove, very carefully back to Trentham. I’d bailed out some of the water but there was still a small river sloshing around every time I turned a corner. I arrived at Trentham just before lights out, slumped down on a chair in Mark’s room and said “That was the worst trip I have ever had.”
Gassed
Later that week I was sent to a mental institution. As part of our studies on mental health we were required to spend time doing community service at public medical facilities around the Wellington area. Some cadets spent a week at the accident and emergency wards; I got the loony bin.
This was familiar ground for me as Mum and Dad had been heavily involved with the Intellectually Handicapped Society for many years. My younger brother was handicapped at birth when the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and cut off oxygen to his brain. He was so seriously disabled that he had to be institutionalised for life. After this, Mum started working with intellectually handicapped people and has been helping them ever since. My brother died at the age of 17 and though we visited him at least twice a year he never showed any signs that he recognised us.
My background should have prepared me for the experience but it didn’t. The people Mum and Dad dealt with usually suffered from Downs Syndrome or were of below-average intelligence. Few were dangerous. They were more like big kids - quite loving but incapable of looking after themselves. Most were quite happy, not really able to comprehend life being any different.
The people in the secure unit at the institution I visited were completely different. At first sight they looked normal enough but after spending some time with them I discovered they were definitely playing scrabble without any vowels.
I spent a few days with the male patients first and was taken into the secure unit. And very secure it was. I had to go through three solidly locked doors to get into the area where the patients were. By the second door I was beginning to have grave reservations about this particular assignment and was ready to do a runner. But, it was too late.
I found myself in a spacious room with a sunny glass frontage that looked over a small park. It seemed quite restful. This was the day room, where the patients would come and read books or play table tennis or watch television. Several large orderlies in white coats walked around the room and kept an eye on things. I was told to sit in a chair and observe what was going on. The patients had been told I was a police cadet and was visiting the facility as part of my training. They looked quite impressed for a few minutes and then ignored me completely. I sat in a chair at the back of the room and watched a couple of guys playing table tennis. After 10 minutes a young, perfectly sane looking bloke came and sat next to me.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I replied.
“I’m here on assignment too,” he said.
“Oh,” said I, relieved to find a kindred spirit. “What are you studying?”
“I’m not studying anything,” he whispered conspiratorially. “I’m a spy.”
“Oh shit,” I thought, then I said. “That’s nice.”
At this point I wished he would go away but no, he insisted on telling me all his spying plans. I mentioned I didn’t think it was very good spy procedure to tell me all his secret stuff but was informed he’d been lying anyway so it didn’t really matter. He wasn’t a spy after all; he was an undercover Policeman.
I tried desperately to catch the eye of one of the orderlies but they seemed to be looking the other way with strange smiles on their faces.
My new friend, the undercover policeman, was in the middle of a fascinating story about a drugs bust that went wrong when he suddenly stood up and pointed at me, screaming “You’ve blown my cover!” Then before I could say anything he turned around and ran flat out at the plate-glass window.
It all happened in slow motion. I was standing now, watching in horror and yelling to the orderlies, one of whom turned but didn’t react quickly enough. The maniac (medical term) hit the glass with a sickening thud, then, to my amazement, bounced back into the room and fell on the floor. A couple of orderlies picked him up and carted him off to his room. As I stood there, mouth agape, another orderly came over and led me to the huge window. He tapped the glass, grinned, and told me it was reinforced safety glass, practically unbreakable. Apparently my spy/policemen friend wasn’t the first inmate to try and smash through it.
‘They do that occasionally, said the orderly, as if describing someone sipping tea from the wrong side of the cup. I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing and retreated to my chair then tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.
The next person to strike up a conversation with me was a guy in his mid fifties. He was a very polite and gentle man who had a fascination for Alsatian dogs. Being a dog lover myself I enjoyed my chat with him and when he asked if I’d like to see his collection of dog sketches I said I’d love too. The orderlies gave me permission to go to his room to look at his paintings, as long as a doctor went with us. I thought they were being over-cautious - he was a harmless old coot, a bit of a talker but actually quite shy.
His pencil drawings were amazing. This guy could really draw. He had several beautiful pictures of German Shepherds and had done some very nice water colours as well. Once he had shown me his collection he thanked me for my interest and bid me good day as he was getting tired and wanted a rest. When we had left his room the doctor asked me to follow him. He took me into his office and showed me the old guy’s file.
Six months ago my friend the Alsatian-lover had been walking down a main street in Wellington when a voice in his head told him the man across the street was laughing at him. He picked up a vegetable knife from a stall in a fruit shop, crossed the road and stabbed the innocent man in the throat,
killing him instantly.
I felt physically sick when I read his file: it was full of madness and delusion. To me he had seemed like someone’s sad old grandad. It scared me to think that I hadn’t even an inkling that something was terribly wrong with him. The doctor made me feel better by telling me his patient was completely normal 90 per cent of the time, and then he’d become delusional and snap. I’d heard about people like this but had never met one. It had been a truly frightening day.
The next day was worse. I was off to the women’s top security unit. One of the doctors told me the women patients were generally more dangerous than the men because they were less predictable. I hadn’t noticed a lot of predictability in the men so could hardly wait to see the girls. I’d only been in the secure unit for 2 minutes when one of the women came up to me and said, ‘I’m a snake - do you like my scales?’
Being the well bought-up guy I am, I replied that I thought her scales were lovely. This can’t have been the right answer because she hissed at me and slithered away.
Shortly after this initiation I witnessed one of the snake’s friends attack the female orderlies. The patient was standing quietly in the corner one minute then the next thing I knew she was screaming like a banshee and attacking anyone in her immediate vicinity. She was quickly grabbed by the orderlies and I was asked to help get her into a secure room. The woman was still howling and screaming and even though her arms were pinned she was kicking and biting like she was possessed (maybe she was). When we got her to the examination room, I, for one, was exhausted. She had fought us every inch of the way and hadn’t calmed down until we pinned her to the bed. One of the nurses decided the patient should be sedated. She went away and returned a few minutes later with a large syringe on a tray. As she approached the bed I felt the patient relax, so I loosened my hold on her. It was a rookie mistake because, quick as a flash, she jerked herself out of my grip, grabbed the syringe and swung the needle at my forehead. I moved back just in time to avoid getting a hypodermic in the eye. Fortunately, one of the orderlies had managed to get a hand on her swinging arm, which had slowed her down.