Constable on the Hill (5 page)

“Alone, Dick?”

“Aye, alone.”

Blaketon gave me the nod and I went into Dick’s tidy home. In the lounge, he looked at me, licked his lips and said, “It was me, Mr Rhea.”

“I know it was, Dick, but why? Why make a bloody stupid call like that?”

“Aye, it was stupid. They got me tipsy, you see. They dared me to do it.”

“Who did?”

“Them in the Brewer’s Arms.” That was a pub in Aidensfield.

“I’ll have to book you, Dick,” I told him and explained all about the fuss and the visits by other police officers.

“It’ll get it off my chest,” he sighed, and I thought I detected relief in his voice.

On his own admission, I reported him for summons and eventually he appeared at Eltering Magistrates’ Court, charged with making an annoying telephone call. He was fined £5.

A few days later, I dropped into the bar of the Brewer’s Arms where the place was alive with local men, still chuckling over Dick’s dilemma. Dick was there, suffering them in a broody silence. As I walked in, the expected hush descended upon the assembly, as it always did when a uniformed bobby entered. Looking around the bunch of rosy, rural faces, I adopted a serious expression and said, “Well, gentlemen, Dick’s been fined. Five pounds. It’s not a lot, but it’s a big amount for a chap with eight kids and no job. You’ve had your fun, all of you. I know you put him up to that joke,” and I then adopted an even more serious tone. “It is an offence to aid, abet, counsel or procure the commission of an offence by any person. You’re all guilty of that, each and every one of you.”

They did not utter a word, but all looked at me steadily, wondering what was their fate.

“But,” I continued, “I will not summon you if you do one small thing for me. I reckon you ought to contribute to Dick’s fine, all of you,” I had a quick count of heads and there were fifteen in the bar. “I reckon ten bob apiece would be about right, eh?”

No one moved. No one said a thing. “It could be a fiver each,” I reminded them, “and your names in police files.” I removed my notebook from the pocket of my tunic and opened it, as if to take names.

“We’ve had our fun, lads,” said one farmer, as he dug into his pocket and produced some cash. “Ten bob’s nowt.”

He passed a ten shilling note to me and his action prompted the others into passing me a similar amount. I soon had £7 10s, 0d. (£7.50) in my hand. I passed this to Dick.

“There you are, Dick. You’re in pocket and your fine’s been paid.”

“You’ll have a drink on me, Mr Rhea?” he asked, smiling.

“Aye, I will,” I said, for it’s not often a Scotsman buys a Yorkshireman a drink.

But that’s how the Dicks of this world exist without the need to work. Somehow, they always win.

Another character I shall never forget is a nameless youth in a distant village. Soon after my arrival in Aidensfield, I found myself performing what we called ‘routes’. In the early days of policing, these were undertaken either on foot or by pedal-cycle, and they were allocated to each rural policeman by a superior officer. Some routes were late at night and others very early in the morning, even starting at 4 am. Each route lasted about three or four hours and we had to follow a predetermined route around our area of
responsibility
. In the days before personal radios for policemen, we had to arrive at specified telephone kiosks at certain times, so that the office could contact us if our presence was required at an incident. The ‘points’, as we called them, enabled our superiors to find us and to check upon our whereabouts. Those points were used both as a method of communication and for supervisory purposes. The sergeant, the inspector or even the superintendent would get out of bed at the crack of dawn to drive out to one of our lonely points, hoping to find the duty policeman. A short conference would be held, and the superior would sign the constable’s notebook to record the fact of that meeting. We nicknamed this curious little procedure as a ‘chalk’, probably from the days when the supervisory rank carried a little slate and chalked up the time of the meeting. If the visit was before 6 am or after midnight, the entry would be in red. It was considered quite an achievement to acquire two or three red chalks during a month.

The arrival of radio-equipped police motor-cycles suggested
that this ancient and mainly useless activity could be dispensed with. But it wasn’t. Old habits die hard and we had to drive around those routes on our motor-cycles, continuing to make points at telephone kiosks. This was insisted upon, even though we had radio sets. Although modern equipment was coming to the police, modern ideas were a long way behind. I am reminded of a sergeant at a local station who, upon receiving the first consignment of personal radio sets worth around £100 each, refused to let the men use them. “They’re too valuable for you lads to mess about with,” he said, locking them in a cupboard.

As a result of this rigid thinking, therefore, I regularly found myself motor-cycling about my beat either at the crack of dawn or during the depths of night. The sound of the little Francis Barnett two-stroke must have woken the populace, caused dogs to bark, cattle to low and hens to cackle. Little else was achieved by these patrols, simply because any
self-respecting
burglar or poacher would hear the distinctive sound of the bike long before the constabulary hove to. But authority said we had to perform them, and so we did. I often thought they were designed for supervisory officers to acquire lots of red chalks, like a gunman of the wild west notching up kills on his rifle butt. I wondered if some of our supervisors ran competitions to see who could acquire the most red chalks within a given time, with a prize at the end of the year. Like a length of red chalk, maybe?

One evening, I performed a late route, working from 7 pm until 11 pm, and then the following morning, I was allocated another one beginning at 6 am. This was before the days when we could demand eight hours off duty between shifts, and so, at six o’clock that morning, I leapt aboard my little Francis Barnett, kicked it into life and began a long, cold and dark tour of lonely moorland and twisting lanes. This particular route took me away from Aidensfield because a neighbouring bobby was on leave. I had to cover his beat.

I was rather concerned because my petrol was low. Because I had to obtain my official petrol from a specified local garage, I could not purchase any elsewhere; besides, garages weren’t open at that early hour. I knew I would have to be
careful, at least until eight-thirty when my local garage was able to supply me.

At my seven o’clock point, I received a phone call asking me to deliver a ‘request message’. It meant a long detour to a lonely farm – it was to inform a farmer that Uncle Frank had died in Middlesbrough General Hospital and would he contact the sister on Ward 9. Having delivered this message (a task we often had to undertake before the increasing popularity of telephones in these remote places), I returned to my route, noting that my eight o’clock point was the hamlet of Whemmelby, at the telephone kiosk.

Whemmelby lies deep in the North Yorkshire moors at the top of a long glacial valley etched deep into the hills. In the spring-time, it is glorious with daffodils and bluebells which coat its nine miles of riverside, and in the autumn, the moors above glow with a rich, deep purple. It is a robust area, with long and low farm houses built snug into the hillsides. Its centre of population is a cluster of houses at the foot of a hill with a gradient of 1-in-3. There are several hills of this gradient in the North Yorkshire moors, and while they hold no terrors for the locals who use them daily, they do terrify town drivers and others from the flat regions of Britain who regard 1-in-12 as precipitous.

It was down one of these hills that I guided my Francis Barnett to make that eight o’clock point. Half way down, the engine stopped. I knew immediately what had happened, so I coasted into the hamlet and pulled up outside the kiosk. I inspected my petrol tank and, sure enough, it was bone dry. My fears had been confirmed and I was seventeen miles from my usual garage.

My radio would not function because of my location deep in the valley, so I went into the kiosk to ring Divisional Headquarters. I hoped they might arrange a car to fetch some petrol, but the phone was out of order. There was a small notice stuck to a window pane, but I tried the instrument just in case it had been repaired at the exchange end. It hadn’t. It was stone dead.

What now? I knew Whemmelby from the past, and there was nothing here, not even a shop. There was a village hall with a small parking area in front, Methodist chapel, three
farms and one or two cottages, all surrounded by steep hills and forbidding moorland. I looked at each building in the hope of seeing a tell-tale telephone cable running to it, but not one of them possessed a telephone. I could not push the bike up that incline and the nearest garage would be about eight miles away. I couldn’t obtain my official petrol there, but I might be able to buy some at my own expense,
hopefully
just enough to get me home.

Another problem was the performance of my duty.
Suppose
that phone accepted incoming calls? Suppose Sergeant Blaketon rang me and instructed me to visit some house which had been burgled, or to attend a traffic accident or other calamity? I dreaded to think what his reaction might be when I said I’d run out of petrol, and I concluded that the only solution was to walk up the hill in the hope that a friendly motorist picked me up and transported me to a petrol filling station.

That course of action meant parking the machine in a safe place, not that anyone here would harm it but because Sergeant Blaketon might accuse me of carelessness with county property. I returned to the bike, sat astride it and began to propel it with my feet towards a parking place in front of the village hall.

It was then that I heard an approaching vehicle. As I manoeuvred my lifeless noddy bike across the narrow road, a tractor and trailer appeared from behind a farm house and moved towards me. It was driven by a roughly dressed youngster with long, straggly hair and a cheeky grin on his face. A large, square five-gallon can stood alone in the centre of the trailer. He stopped the tractor, jumped down from it and came over to me.

“What’s up?” he asked with a friendly smile.

“Petrol,” I said, feeling very foolish. “My bike’s run out of petrol.”

He looked at my crash helmet with POLICE across the front, examined the Francis Barnett with its radio set where the pillion should be, and peered at my uniform numerals.

“Thoo’s nut our local chap?” he said by way of a question.

“No, he’s on leave. I was working late last night, and I had to come out here early …”

“Thoo’ll be wanting some juice then?” He didn’t wait to hear my tale of sorrow and despair.

“I was going to walk up to Brantsford …”

“Neea need,” he said, leaping onto the trailer. “Thoo can ’ave some of this,” and he lifted the big can down. “Tak thy filler cap off.”

“It needs two-stroke mixture,” I said.

“This is two-stroke. Cap.”

I obeyed, removing the cap from the petrol tank; he did likewise with the large red can and began to pour the precious stuff into my machine.

“Whoa!” I called. “That’ll do. I just need enough to get me to a garage.”

“I’ll fill her up,” he laughed. “Two-gallon tank, eh?”

“Yes, but there’s no need …”

“This ’un’s full, mister,” and he kept on pouring. He filled my tank almost to overflowing, smiled and said, “There. That’ll see thoo all right for a mile or two.”

“I’ll pay,” I offered, starting to unbutton my motor-cycle gear. It took a long time to reach my wallet, tucked inside my inner tunic, but in the meantime, the cheerful lad had returned the can to the trailer and was sitting on the tractor seat, ready to move off.

“How much?” I shouted, still fiddling with buttons and press-studs.

“Nowt,” he called back. “Thoo can have it for nowt. It’s not mine, anyway.”

“Not yours?” I cried, but he was moving away. I had a tank full of petrol, so I gave chase but he simply waved me away and shouted above the noise of our engines. “Have it on us, mister.” He turned into a farm yard, leapt from the tractor and vanished indoors, waving me on.

I do not know who he was and I never saw him again. It was months before I made a return visit to Whemmelby, and I asked after him, but no one seemed to know who I was talking about. I never did know the true owner of that petrol.

But my petrol problems were far from over. Every month, we had to complete a mileage return which showed the places we had visited, the mileage covered and the petrol consumed. The return would be rigidly checked, as indeed it was,
because
of the milometer readings and the garage accounts. This system meant I could not show the extra two gallons on my return, for it was not part of the official intake. But my mileage had to be shown correctly – the milometer ensured that.

The result was that my motor-cycle that month registered a somewhat staggering petrol consumption, having apparently covered over 100 miles to the gallon instead of the usual 80. I pleaded total ignorance for the cause of this astounding feat of motoring and swore blind that I had never coasted downhill in my own economy drive. The next thing that happened was that my machine was taken to Headquarters for a thorough check by the county mechanics, and the garage from whom I purchased my official petrol was asked to carefully check its accounts. There were no discrepancies. Officially, my motor-cycle had done remarkably well that month, and all supervisory officers showed great interest in its next performance. I had to disappoint them, because things returned to normal.

Later, when I had time to reflect upon the incident, I did wonder if a friendly farmer had sent that life-saving can on the trailer. Was it coincidence that a tractor and trailer carrying a five-gallon can of two-stroke fuel arrived just in time to save me from a long, perspiring walk? Or had it been neatly arranged by a friendly farmer who had witnessed my dilemma from his breakfast table?