Confessions of an Undercover Cop. Ash Cameron

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       Drunk and orderly

      It’s a well-known fact that policemen like to drink. It’s one of those clichés found in crime novels and TV dramas. Like most clichés, it exists because there’s a truth in there somewhere.

      When I joined the Met, I didn’t drink alcohol. I’d had the odd shandy, a couple of lager tops, a rare lager and lime, but nothing else and certainly no hard stuff. My first hangover was at Hendon Police College. It was my twentieth birthday and a true initiation.

      My fellow rookies had taken me out and they’d bought me drink after drink. My poison was Pernod and black and they came thick and fast. I ended up pouring each one into a pint glass. By the end of the night I’d drunk two pints of the vile stuff. I went to bed very merry and very drunk, with a tongue that was warm, wet and black.

      The next day I was ill. Very ill. Some joker suggested I drank milk, a ‘great’ hangover cure. Never having had a hangover before, I did as he suggested. The half-pint of cold semi-skimmed took less than a minute to come back up, curdled and purple. I was truly poisoned. There was no sympathy. To be unfit for duty through drink, or to be drunk on duty, are poor conduct matters that can lead to disciplinary action.

      However, the trainers were forgiving as long as I sat in the classroom and did my work, didn’t fall asleep and didn’t puke.

      It was a lesson that taught me quite early on about policemen and their drinking habits. I was a quick learner and I’ve never drunk Pernod since, but I didn’t learn enough to stop me imbibing other poisons in the future …

      It was customary for probationers to buy a round after their first arrest. And their first dead body. And their first court conviction. And every other opportunity that the ‘old sweats’ demanded. How we didn’t end up bankrupt, I don’t know.

      Back then the shift used to mean working a whole week of night duty, then after finishing work on the Saturday morning, the guys would trot off to the Early House, a pub that opened at six in the morning for night-duty workers, post office workers, and those who worked in the markets like Smithfield and Spitalfields. The previous landlord of the pub had refused women entry, so female officers were exempt. However, a couple of years later he died and his son took over and for the first time the Early House saw women other than the regular Saturday-morning strippers. So of course when the doors opened, I had to go to the Early House. It was another obligatory initiation. Besides, the guys seemed to have so much fun on those Saturday mornings that I wanted to see what I was missing.

      The first round cost me over twenty quid, which was a lot out of my spending money. The landlord took the opportunity those mornings to clean up his bar, so he only served pints and that was it. So I drank pints. Five of them …

      Someone dropped me off home at my flat. I can’t remember who. My parents were coming for a visit that night and as I was on nights they were going to stay over. I’d bought them tickets for the theatre. I don’t remember them calling; my flatmate sorted them out. I woke up with less than two hours before I needed to be back at work for night duty. I was hungover and bleary-eyed and although very glad I wasn’t a police driver, I didn’t relish walking the beat in the cold rain. But, of course, it was obligatory.

      Various stories that follow involve alcohol, and yes, you may assume that by the time I left the force I had been well and truly initiated. I could hold a drink or two. Or twenty. At my leaving do, I raised a glass of champagne and tried not to think of the innocent me of twenty years earlier, and how the alcohol-loving police officers got me in the end. Nor did I wish to remember the worst hangovers!

      Cheers!