A gentleman in the cage

A few years ago, I ended up inside a police van. We had hired a cottage in north Cornwall for the Easter holidays. On Easter Sunday, after a heavy downpour in the early hours, the weather changed. The sun emerged from behind the clouds warming the wet earth. It held the promise of a long and glorious day. Man, they say, lives by hope.

     At around 7 AM, I decided to go for a walk in the nearby forest with Monty, our chocolate Labrador. Now, I say ‘forest’ to save face. It was just a thicket behind the Kilkhampton post office. The intention was to do an hour’s walk, and be back in time for breakfast. We walked into the woods following the sign-posted footpath. Monty chased after damp squirrels and splashed in the streams. I marvelled at the grand old trees and the verdant foliage. The delightful song of blackbirds welcomed the morning. We were having a smashing time, my dog and I. That was until we strayed off the footpath and got lost.

     My sense of direction is not something I’m proud of. I’m painfully aware that my mental compass has a 180-degree error. I have spatial inversion syndrome, if such a condition exists.  When I’m driving, my gut instinct invariably proves wrong. I turn left when I should have turned right. I go north when my destination is south. Landmarks and other useful information slip off my mental register like water on Teflon. 

     As I searched for the exit, some of the streams and fences were becoming all too familiar. I needed anything but a sense of déjà vu that morning. It felt as if we were trapped in the world’s most complex maze. Monty must have sensed it too, judging by his sideways glances at me. His big brown eyes pleaded, ‘Can we please go home? I’m hungry.’ We walked for a couple of hours. Those who know Cornwall also know that one cannot walk for hours in a north Cornish copse without reaching Devon or the sea; this was not the Amazon. 

     Then it started raining. It was not the usual drip drip of leaking clouds, but a late morning monsoon-like deluge. The rainwater cascaded down through the beech and oak trees. Little rivulets sprang up everywhere. My waterproofs and Gortex lined walking boots completely dishonoured their guarantee. I was soaked, all the way, top to bottom, outside and inside. I had neither phone nor wallet on my person as I had not planned to spend my day walking. Monty’s shiny coat was saturated, and he gave up on shaking himself dry. ‘What’s the point?’ he seemed to ask.

     Eventually, after deliberately executing the opposite of what my gut was instructing, we found an exit. Emerging from the woods, we crossed a water-logged field and knocked on someone’s door. A pipe smoking farmer with an Abraham Lincoln beard and well-worn denim dungarees, opened the door. He was nice and dry and so was his home. The aroma of fresh coffee had never been so appealing. 

     ‘We’re lost’, I said, ‘We need to get back to Kilkhampton’. 

     He pointed at the field I had just crossed. ‘Just go across there, go back into the woods, turn right where you cross the stream. When you see a stile, jump over and Bob’s your uncle. It’s less than half a mile, if that’. 

     I instantly recognised he wasn’t going to drive us to our cottage in his Land Rover, or offer me a nice mug of coffee, or provide us shelter from the incessant rain. Why would he? My place was practically next door.

     ‘Oh no! I am not going back into the woods, no way. Never!’ Having escaped the woods, Monty and I were like sailors off a sinking ship who had swum to an island of refuge. Farmer Abe was advising us to go back to sea. Thanks, but no thanks. 

     ‘You could take the road then,’ he was clearly taken aback by my vehemence bordering on belligerence. ‘It will be a good couple of miles, though,’ he said and shut the door.

     I took him literally. ‘Couple is two, few is three or four, several is five’, I remembered this from my school days. I didn’t realise that in Cornwall ‘a good couple’ was significantly different from the plain couple. My stomach ached from hunger. Monty resisted the tug on his lead and occasionally sat down to rest. We marched on, the regular squelch of my waterlogged footwear sounding like the drum-beat of an army in retreat.

     We walked never ending spaghetti roads for the next hour and a half, finally reaching the A39. This narrow single-carriageway, snaking all the way from Devon in the north to Penzance in the south, has no footway and is not designed for dog walkers. I saw a camp site and asked some people for directions to Kilkhampton. My gut feeling told me it was just around the corner; I was concerned because I knew my gut was clueless.

     ‘It is a long way’, the camper appeared genuinely concerned, ‘quite a long way mate,’ he pointed in the direction of Devon. The trajectory of his pointing hand was quite steep confirming his estimation of the long distance. I was in deep trouble. Caravans, campervans, cars and coaches, spilling with holiday makers chased the mirage of the absent sun. I made some half-hearted attempts at thumbing down the vehicles. No luck. Who would want two wet mammals in their vehicle? We were walking on the wrong side of the road to avoid getting run over from behind. Even if someone had stopped, it wouldn’t have helped. At long last, I saw a police van approach. I dived dangerously in front of it, dragging Monty with me. The van, bless the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, stopped for us.

     ‘Can we help you, sir?’ asked the friendly policeman in the passenger seat.

     ‘Oh, yes please! We got lost in the woods.’ 

     Pointing north, I continued,

     ‘I need to get to Kilkhampton. Could you please give us a lift?’

     ‘We have a job in Bude’, he said indicating south. ‘Tell you what, though. You keep heading that way. We’ll be back shortly. If we see you still walking, we’ll give you a lift. How’s that?’

     After some 45 minutes, several near misses, and repeated premonitions of the next day’s headlines of the Cornwall Times, ‘Man and his dog die in tragic accident on the A39’, I heard a loud honk behind me. The good policeman had kept his promise.

     ‘Hello again, sir!’ the constable smiled, ‘you won’t need the gym today, would you?’ It was still raining; he probably mistook my tears for rain water. His wit was wasted on me. Monty was dog-tired in the true sense of the expression. He just wanted breakfast. Opening the sliding door on the side, my saviour gestured for us to get in.

     It was my first time inside a police van, having kept my nose reasonably clean all my life. The van was divided into three compartments: the front one for the driver and a passenger; the middle one where I sat with Monty; and a cage inside the boot. There was a vertical steel grill separating the cage from the rest of the van. Monty quickly settled down for a snooze on the floor after a few random barks aimed at the cage.

      ‘Oh,’ said the policeman, ‘there is a gentleman in the cage. Don’t mind him’.

     As my eyes got used to the relative darkness of the van, I noticed a young lad in his late teens, black hoodie and all, hunched in a corner of the cage. I managed a weak ‘hello mate’. He didn’t acknowledge me and scowled at his finger nails. 

     The police dropped us at our cottage. I have often wondered what misdemeanour the youth had indulged in to be locked up in the boot of that police van. To this day, I think of the policeman’s sense of propriety with a sense of admiration – the propriety that compelled him to refer to his captive as ‘a gentleman in the cage’.