As a group of us arrived on Tuesday evening at the hall attached to our medieval parish church for a meeting of the church council, a rather shifty-looking teenage boy shuffled round from the back of the hall, which is not visible from the road. When greeted, he ran away. Moments later, we heard footsteps on a wooden platform on scaffolding – well protected by a locked corrugated iron barrier – installed temporarily to enable the church roof to be repaired. Suddenly a bag was thrown down over the scaffolding.
We picked it up, and while deciding what action to take, we were confronted by another lad, who said the bag was his. He refused to give his name, and so we said we had no proof of ownership. A third youth arrived, and as the initial “claimant” ran off, said the bag belonged to his friend. We said we would hand the bag to the police.
Call for help
In response to our call, a police constable soon arrived, listened to the story, and took away the bag. He asked us to check, on the following morning, when the roofers arrived, whether any damage had been done to the roof.
Our meeting finished, we decided to move a long and heavy steel pole which was lying on the grass into the hall, just in case the youths returned and used it to damage the windows, by way of vengeance for being spotted – and deprived of the bag.
Early next morning I walked round to meet the roofers. “No damage”, they reassured me “but someone has stolen the pole, and the police – a different constable, and a community support officer - are doing a house to house search to try to find it”. I explained what had happened. We moved the pole back from the hall – and at that moment the two police officers returned, and looked quizzically at it. “I'm your criminal”, I declared, and there was some hilarity as I explained what had happened.
In the following conversation it emerged that the constable was a Ugandan Asian (whose family had originally come from Mumbai – or rather, from Bombay, since we are going back many years). In the early 1970s his father and whole family were among the many Asians who had been thrown out of Uganda by the dictator, Idi Amin. When I mentioned that I had interviewed Amin's predecessor, Milton Obote, in 1963, the constable said: “I was a young child in that year”.
We were keen to continue the conversation, and I invited the two officers back to our house, which is close by, for coffee.
We quickly discovered that the support officer was from Albania, where he still owns a restaurant. (I was glad to learn that he approved of our coffee.) Inevitably the conversation became even more international in its range. Among other things, we learnt that the Ugandan officer was actively involved in the local race relations committee, and the regional faiths council – and that I knew some colleagues of his on both bodies.
We could have continued the conversation indefinitely, but I had an appointment in Cambridge and had to leave. The officers declined my wife's suggestion that they should arrest me for wasting police time!
Apart from its intrinsic interest, the whole incident provided yet another vivid reminder of the extent to which the United Kingdom has become multi-cultural. In my Cambridge Letter on March 14 I wrote about the existence of an Indian and a Chinese restaurant in our village, commenting that this could not have been predicted when we arrived forty years ago.
Local issue
It would have been even more difficult to predict that police officers originating in Uganda and Albania would be providing, as a matter of routine, policing for a village community. We might have envisaged an international background for some of those involved in dealing with international crime, but surely not for the policing of relatively low level anti-social behaviour in a village.
When we grumble that “life isn't like it used to be in the good old days” (and being British, we are of course inveterate grumblers) it is extremely reassuring to find that changes can occur without leading to the end of civilisation as we know it – and that a Ugandan and an Albanian are perfectly well able to deal with a village issue. The incident was also a good reminder of the contribution made to British life by the Uganda Asians expelled by Amin.
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, U.K. Email him at: bill.kirkman@gmail.com
