Paul Hurley Author of Britain Invaded

Can I Come in now Sarge is my police autobiography. This first book of my autobiography consists of 96.686 words; there is ample scope to increase or decrease the wordage as required.

The day before the Berlin Wall came down I sorted out the offence of kidnapping that had made national headlines on that day. I recovered the kidnapped child.

See below for the first page.
Remember the copyright!

Can I Come in Now Sarge.
104.562 words (Original full MS) Now edited for publishing.
An Autobiography.

Chapter One.

From One Career to another.

'Just so as I know mate, what name did you give?'
The man addressing me in the raw Irish brogue was a rough middle aged Irishman with a complexion like hammered leather and hands like meat plates.
'I gave my own,' I replied meekly looking up as he peered down from the dumper truck, a look of disdain on his face.
'What's that? I can't bloody hear you!'

The rough engine drowned out my words as the smelly blue exhaust smoke enveloped me.
'I said I gave my own name when he asked me,' the last four words were shouted across the site as the trucks engine was suddenly switched off causing a motley mixture of labourers to look across from their digging in the white fossil rich clay.

The distinguished old Irishman was Stan and he had the rank of 'Ganger,' we were on the site of one of the bridges on the new M27 motorway at Fareham in Hampshire. This was my first day as a building site labourer after spending eleven years cosseted from civilisation in the Royal Navy.
'Well you're a prick, what are you! No one gives their own name around here, they'll catch up with you and you'll drop us all in the shit.'

It was February 1974 and I had joined what was then known as 'the lump,' a dedicated band of construction workers who were paid by their company. Later in the week they received a special bonus care of the governments munificent DHSS office when they signed on for unemployment benefit! It was all totally alien to me but accepted by many.

I was brought up in Weaverham Cheshire in a good Liverpool Catholic house, my parents had moved from the Scotland Road area of Liverpool just as I started school. My father had been in the RAF but had never been up in a plane; he was in Burma and Singapore where he had gone by troop ship and ended up with stomach trouble for the rest of his life as a result of his stay.. He was a lovely man in every sense of the word, quiet and unassuming, not particularly religious but highly respected in the neighbourhood. We lived in a council house like our neighbours but when they mentioned my dad he was referred to as 'The Master' as in 'Go and get the master, you're dad's died!' that was the comment made by one of the neighbours when the sad occasion occurred.

In 1972 HMS Devonshire on which I was serving at the time had just left Miami for Philadelphia. I got the telegram to say that he had died suddenly at work of a heart attack, he was 51 years old.

My future, like that of my peers was to be a priest. This was not my wish, but that of my mother! It's what all Catholic mothers aspired to be - mothers of a priest. If they all got their way, we would live in a Father Ted society where the good, the bad and the ugly are all priests. I did however become an alter boy, in this way all of my older female relatives could look proudly at me every Sunday as I wore my black and white vestments to serve Mass. These angelic alter boys, so beloved of the old Eleanor Rigbys had a dark side however. The altar wine was a favourite and the game of trumping on the alter could guarantee a severe glance from the priest especially as the trump only escaped from the voluminous cassock when you moved. Usually to go to the priest for some part of the ceremony.

One day we were volunteered to take part in a fashion show at the local Memorial Hall. A posh shop staged it and we, in our finery, were to lead the models on to the stage. It didn’t take long for one of the angelic altar boys to discover that our room was next to the models changing room. If you climbed up to the open loft, you could creep along and look down at the girls changing. The hormones were doing somersaults at the thought. The first of our number dressed in his black cassock and white surplice climbed up. Got over the dressing room and fell in! Well, not completely in, he managed to grab a steel beam and hang there as the white plaster dust settled gently on the half naked women below, his cassock hem caught on a nail pulling it up to reveal that he wore only Y front's under it, mucky baggy schoolboy Y fronts as well! This is what the good ladies in their flimsy underwear had presented to them for their delectation. The priest was called and our services were dispensed with.

Like almost all of my school friends, I never did become a priest, one got close to it, but was caught having sex with a cleaning lady at the seminary and sent home!
Religious education was an overriding priority in catholic schools in the 50’s and priests were still highly respected.