After a further week's training at the force's training academy, Bishopgarth in Wakefield, I duly presented myself at Shipley Police Station in Manor Lane (having sought directions from a postman!) and was assigned to Rota 4, which at that point in its rotating shift pattern was working the early turn, 6am to 2pm. I was allocated a private lodgings and instructed to parade for duty the following morning at 5:50am.

At the appointed hour I waited nervously in the parade room whilst the others on my shift arrived, exchanged greetings and jokes, made themselves a brew and checked the contents of their correspondence trays. They were old hands. This was just another shift to them. Their collar numbers (so called from the days when service numbers were on the collar rather than on the epaulettes as they were now) were mostly three-figure numbers. Mine was a four-figure number. This fact impressed on me that I was in the company of seasoned men with lots of experience. There were very few policewomen at Shipley in 1972. I think there were a total of two and they were both on other rotas.

Presently the shift sergeant arrived, laden with books and papers and smoking a pipe. He was wearing his helmet.  Oh!  he said, looking in my direction.  You must be the boy.  He put the books on one of four long tables that had been pushed together in pairs to form a larger table. Extending his hand he introduced himself and the other eight or so lads and then sat down at the head of the table, removing his helmet and thereby allowing a great lock of black hair to dangle across his face. Everyone drew chairs up around the table and awaited their instructions.

Runners and riders, the sergeant exclaimed.  322   you are the Bail don car. You are also assigned tutor constable to the boy. Points at Coach Road kiosk, eight-thirty and Northgate at 11:30. Meal at ten and meal relief.  321 you are town car and I d like you to pay particular attention to traffic in Commercial Street where they are dismantling the trolley bus wires. There was a lot of congestion yesterday. Make points at eight o'clock at the Arndale Centre and eleven o'clock at Dockfield kiosk. Meal at nine.

The sergeant continued to assign the rest of the shift with their duties and my newly-appointed tutor constable, Roy, sidled round and stood behind me.  Get your pocket book out, he said. I handed him my notebook and he wrote the first of many similar entries at the top of the first page: Saturday 5th August, 1972 followed by  BEAT:   POINTS:   MEAL:  on the following three lines. He then entered the details as assigned by the sergeant.

Right,  the sergeant was saying,  there's been a spate of gulley gratings going missing in Bradford Road and I d like anyone who passes along that road to keep a lookout for these being loaded on to a vehicle. I shall be calling at the scrap yard this morning to check if anyone has weighed them in.

The phone rang. The nearest officer picked it up and said  parade room . Looking across at the sergeant he said, 'sudden death, Wrose Road'.  The sergeant turned to a heavily built man and said,  George that s your area. Take a sudden death report with you and let us know if you need a hand.  George picked up his helmet and selected a form 49 from the cabinet before bidding us farewell.

Eventually, the salient details from the occurrence book, the accident register, the lost and found dog register, the bail register and the warrants register having been expounded, the meeting drew to a close. We all picked up our helmets, staffs and handcuffs and trooped out to face the public.

Over the next six weeks I was to discover that there was much more to policing than I had come to expect even during my training course. Somehow, the theory and the practice were poles apart. I knew enough about the definition of a dual purpose vehicle to fill four sides of A4 paper but throughout my career I never used that information. I did, however, drink numerous cups of tea in various places of work such as the railway station, a transport caf, a security hut for an engineering works, a local garage and a taxi company. Money for old rope, I thought.

Occasionally, the radio would crackle and the office man would send us to a road accident, a burglary, a report of a dangerous dog, a dispute between neighbours or a shopkeeper complaining of a hawker stealing his trade. Eventually it dawned on me that this combination of tea drinking and dealing with situations were allowing me to gain an insight into the way the community functioned. It was the start of my  local knowledge .

Seemingly unrelated snippets of conversation would coalesce into  facts , which along with other  facts  began to form a jigsaw puzzle. Someone would remark on the fact that a well known villain had paid for a meal with twenty-pence pieces. Then someone in a different place would complain that a vending machine had been forced and a large quantity of twenty-pence pieces had been stolen. All fairly basic stuff, you might think, but fascinating when you put it all together. And when the villain was paid a visit and questioned about the theft, it was always amusing to see the jaw drop when he realised he had been caught.

My favourite shift was nights. In those days there were far fewer people around at night than there are nowadays. After the local discotheques  chucked out  at 2 am and the last stragglers had stumbled their way home, you could almost hear a pin drop. You could certainly hear the ticking of the church clock, the flap, flap of a rope against a flagpole and the distant sound of bagpipes as one of the sergeants practised for the force band in the cell area at the police station.

What you really wanted to hear was the sound of breaking glass. And, having heard it, you wanted to know from exactly which direction it had come. Breaking glass is a difficult sound to pinpoint. Fortunately, if the broken glass indicated a burglary, there were usually other sounds that followed it. The old hands among my colleagues warned me never to arrest a burglar on the way in.  Always wait until they are in, and then radio for a dog man and a keyholder,

The warmest item of clothing was the cape. That loose-fitting garment, fastened at the neck, trapped a large volume of warm air inside it, which the macintosh and the Gannex coat never did. And if folded properly across the shoulder when not actually being worn, the thing practically folded itself when you took it off. Another bonus was the cape's absence of buttons. When keeping observations on something suspicious at night, a policeman was practically invisible whilst wearing a cape in a shadowy doorway.

Golden Rule Number Two in such a situation, radio in the fact that you will be off the air for a few minutes and switch the radio off. There s nothing more scary than creeping up on someone, only to have your radio squawk when you re still not close enough to grab them. Of course, nowadays this would be foolhardy advice. Too many villains have guns to go creeping up on them.

In the early seventies, though, villains were a different breed. More like Greengrass in  the TV series,  Heartbeat . There were two  Greengrasses  on my patch, a father and son. The father spent his time sawing people s kitchen waste pipes off and weighing them in for the lead. The son used to get very drunk and threaten to heave a brick through a jeweller's window unless we arrested him and provided a bed for the night. We usually obliged. The father loved his day in court. He would always conduct his own   very complicated - defence and have an absolute ball, cross-examining witnesses and making lengthy speeches. The outcome was always the same though. He expected to lose and he did. Away he would go for another month and the householders could wash-up with confidence.