Police Saga

Hubby and myself with my son lived in a council maisonette in the 1970s which was a house built on top of a bed sitter housing an elderly person.
There were six maisonettes and six bedsitters in each block with three single bedroomed flats at the end. I had to climb two flights of stone steps to get to my front door.

Hubby used to work shifts and it was one evening in the October when I came home from work after calling to get four bags of shopping I walked along the back of the block and I saw through the evening gloom this rod sticking out of the tarmac with an orange flag on it.
I was extremely cross about this because an elderly person who could not see very well could have gone all their length if they had walked into it.
I dropped my shopping and wriggled the rod out and threw it over the council wall in my temper.
When I got to my front door my hubby who was on the early shift and had finished at 2pm opened the door to take the bags off me.
He asked me if I was OK and I said “No I am not I am very cross because I have just pulled a bloody rod out of the tarmac along the path because some boiled a**ehole had banged it in and one of the old folk could fall over it and break their neck.”

The look of utter horror on my hubbys face would have made a darn good picture as he said “Bloody hell Maisie the surveyors have been here since before I came home trying to get the site for the new police station. Its taken them all afternoon to get the right position for the marker.”

This tickled me to death to think I had upset the plans of those who had spent all afternoon marking out where the police station was to go. I was against it being built on a green belt anyway.
I defended myself by saying that I was thinking about the older folk if anyone had bad eyesight and walked into it.

This was the beginning of the police saga although no one ever found out who it was that threw the flag over the council wall.

The work went ahead with building the police station on the green belt that was at the front of the block of maisonettes and the stupid berks who had designed it put up a ten foot wall to stop folk nosing over there.

They had not got the sense to realise that my front door alone was 20 foot off the ground and I could see everything from my kitchen window what was going off and what prisoners they brought in.

When they finally got established I started getting their messages coming over my TV saying “Bravo Bravo” and then where abouts they were heading.

I was hopping mad about this because at that time it was £25 for a colour TV licence and with having my programmes interrupted I was not a happy bunny.

I started copying down the time date and where they were heading for and I intended getting something sorted out.

Hubby was not so riled up about it as I was because he was very often at work till midnight and he never watched TV very much.
I phoned the Chief Constable and I nearly went blue when he said that we could be prosecuted for receiving their call outs.

This got my back up and was like a red rag to a bull because the aerial was nothing to do with us it was put in by the council.
All this sort of thing came under the Post Office at that time and I phoned our main depot and asked for the man in charge. I explained why I had called and he said that something was wrong because I should not be getting police car call outs on my TV. He said he would get in touch with the Home Office and it started the ball rolling.

One dinner time when I got home from work a chap knocked at the door and said that he was from the Home Office and had come about my complaint. As luck would have it Cliff was in and had the TV on.
While the chap was talking to me a police car was called out on a job and the message came over the TV loud and clear. The chappie shot outside on to the veranda and got the number of the car as it came through the police court yard. I showed the chappie the three sheets of data that I had collected since it started and he said to hang on to them because they could be needed.

From then on it was all systems go.

On the following Sunday morning I was still in my housecoat having had my bath when my hubby called up the stairs “Maisie you have a visitor. A Chief Superintendant Barker.”
I came downstairs and asked him what he wanted.
He said that he had been told that I had three sheets of written evidence about the trouble the police cars had caused and could he borrow them to take a photostat copy of them.

I said ‘Yes’ but I wanted them back by noon because we were going out for lunch. He promised they would be brought back by that time so I went and got them for him.

As I handed them to him I said “Don’t forget that they are my property on loan.”

As he looked at the written pages he said very seriously “You should have been a detective.”

He said he couldn’t undstand WHY it was just my TV that was getting the trouble.
I told him that I thought there were more folk having problems BUT they were too scared to take on the police.

He laughed and said “Well you are not are you?” I said “NO I wasn’t because I was damned if I was paying for a colour licence to have the picture spoilt by police messages.”

The pages of evidence were back in my hands at 11-50am the same morning.

A week later I had a letter to say that the Home Office had ordered the police to change their radio frequency and the Chief Constable would like Cliff and myself to go to the station to have tea with him.

Quite a few tales to tell about the police and and some of the neighbours what went off while living in that maisonette.