It’s publication day! It brings me great joy to get How the Wired Weep to you. Although it’s set with a background of crime it explores family, fatherhood and relationships and what that means to different people.
Click on the book image if you wish to purchase the book.
For those of you that use Twitter you may have seen the # (#policefamily). When I joined the police they really did become my family and they looked after me throughout my career, picking me up when I needed it and helped me to grow as an adult as well as a police officer.
I joined the police at nineteen having
grown up in a rural village in Nottingham. I wasn’t street wise in any way shape or form. At eighteen I became a Special Constable for a year in my village to see how I’d get on. My only arrest was a swan that had landed on the A46! It wasn’t pretty and it’s fair to say the swan was so exhausted it didn’t resist arrest. That all changed later but that’s another story! (Swan came to no harm – I can’t say the same for the police car it was transported in to the RSPCA.)
I joined the Met police at nineteen and moved to London. I was accommodated in a police section house in Highgate where I had my own room with a sink and paid £5 a month rent! https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/elizabethhouse.html It’s now called Greenview Court.
I don’t think anything could have prepared me for the streets. Not even the twenty weeks I spent at training school could do that. It was a baptism of fire and I surprised myself that I survived the early years I did.
The reason I completed my probation wasn’t entirely down to my own tenacity and determination to succeed, it was the people I had around me that pulled me through. Times were different then and as a probationer you listened, learned and kept your opinions to yourself. You were the scribe for reports and to deal with whatever the senior PC decided would develop your education in the role as constable. I’m not saying that approach would work now or that it’s the best approach but it did me no harm in the long run. I had faith in the colleagues on my relief (as it was called then). I learned policing at street level from some amazing people and without their knowledge, handed down through generations of officers, I could’ve come unstuck many a time by rushing into situations rather than taking a step back, listening and observing, first.
There were people on the other side of the law too that taught me so much about life and what it means to struggle. It’s very easy to judge those less fortunate than yourself but when you separate actions from the person you begin to see things differently. Not all the time, but that’s what I found. My path in life is what it is and I’ve been very fortunate in that respect despite my incurable muscle condition.
When I wrote How the Wired Weep, I was thinking about these aspects of people’s personalities and challenges in life and what family meant to them. I hope I’ve transferred some of the mental aspects to the page. I loved writing this book and I hope you enjoy it too. Best wishes, IP.
