PoliceNotPoliticsPlease

Tomorrow is my birthday, I shall be approaching the status of an ancient but I still feel like a boy. How did this happen, where did the years go?

Aren’t I that little wide eyed boy pressing every button to ride the elevators up and down the tower blocks at the end of my street with my friends, hoping not to get caught, but confident that I could outrun anyone if we were. Where did the innocence of that first drink, cigarette, kiss or “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” all go?

Perhaps it’s that part of us that form the bedrock of our personalities, the thing that makes us behave a certain way in our later lives. Because along with all the mischief we perpetrated on our neighbors we also learned the rudiments of how to properly behave, what the rules were, and what would happen to you if you disobeyed them.

My first major lesson in this regard came when my friend, Francis Monk, who I shall always blame for leading me astray, and I decided to find out what girls in bathing suits looked like. We were neighbors in West Acton, a quiet suburb of London, in small homes with no pretensions. We were about six years old and the back end of my garden had a heavily wooded area that overlooked the big swimming pool belonging to Haberdasher’s School for Girls. It was the Girls bit that grabbed our boyish attention. The older girls would walk shivering to the poolside, wrapped in large towels, and then, just before they jumped in, they removed their towels. We could see that they had bumps where we had no bumps, and no bumps where we did have bumps. Both of us had done our best to investigate this phenomenon by trying to accidentally enter our bathrooms when our sisters went about their ablutions, but no luck!

We had to take drastic action if we were to find out the secrets of the female form. We didn’t know why, but we knew this was an important part of our quest for knowledge. We consulted with each other and came up with a plan. We would throw a bunch of rocks from the garden into the pool and when the girls jumped in they would hurt their feet and in their astonishment would be forced to jump out of the pool and this would cause them to expose their bumpy bits to our more leisurely inspection.

The night before the appointed day Frances and I climbed the garden shed, quite a feat in itself, something akin to the ascent of the North face of Everest, and, without breaking cover, managed to lob a large arsenal of rocks into the pool. Satisfied with our efforts we went to sleep excited. The next morning arrived, nice and shiny, the warm sun coating our backs as we lay on top of the shed and waited for the girls. Right on schedule they arrived, and clearly these were the big girls, and this was beyond our wildest expectations. They went through their normal ritual of giggling and standing by the pool and dipping their toes in to test the temperature and then finally, there was the brief flash of blue swimming costume as the young ladies jumped into the water.

Within moments there was a great deal of thrashing around, shouting and complaining as their feet found our pointy objects. As planned they all started to jump out of the pool in a mild outbreak of mass hysteria. We forgot all about our covert reconnaissance as we burst into a fit of giggle. As in one of those Vampire movies there was a terrible moment as all the girls and their teacher turned in our direction. The game was up; they clearly knew that we were the guilty parties. We ran without looking back, jumping from our elevated perch, not wanting to hear the accusing voices.

We thought we were safe as there was a major fence between the school and ourselves and were too naïve to understand that it was perhaps foolish to undertake a crime from my own back garden. But nothing happened that day, and being young boys we compared notes about the bumpy bits and decided we needed to do a bit more thorough research.

The next day dawned and there was a ring on our doorbell. I answered it and standing there was the biggest police officer I had ever seen. He was wearing Sergeant’s stripes and was not happy. “Is your mother in? “ He asked, I knew the game was up, and I could feel a dreadful knot in my stomach as I estimated how many years they would lock me up for. I trudged up to my mother, and told her that there was a policeman downstairs for her. “What have you been up to? “ she asked me, on her way downstairs. I intuitively knew it was best not to volunteer an admission of guilt, after all the police man might only be there to arrest someone else she knew so didn’t answer. I would admit nothing under any circumstances; let them provide evidence of my throwing the stones. How could they? I thought hopefully.

I heard a muffled conversation from the front door and my mother, who until then I had loved without reservation came back up the stairs. She looked at me and shook her head, “Get downstairs and talk to the Sergeant.” She instructed. I went, my head bowed, to meet my executioner. When I got to the door he seemed to have grown a bit, he was so big that he was now blocking out the light and all I could see was a giant blue silhouette.

Very calmly the policeman questioned me about what had happened at the swimming pool. I broke down in terror after about ten seconds, and admitted everything. “Your mother has asked me to deal with your punishment,” he intoned, and with that he gave me a belt around my ear. I can still feel the sting, imaging the reddest ear in England, and that was my ear, it was also ringing so badly that I think I can still hear it reverberate if I try hard enough. The policeman continued, “And if I have to come and talk to you about this again I shall lock you up and it will be for a very long time, understood?” I swore I understood perfectly and I did. I have never thrown anything in anyone’s swimming pool ever since, in fact I have had that small boy’s healthy fear and respect of the law ever since.

It’s what I would call common sense policing and perhaps London’s new Metropolitan Commissioner of Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, appointed today, could learn something from such common sense. It is long past time that the men doing this job thought a little less about politics and a bit more about being a police officer.