Braver Men Walk Away by Peter Gurney

Author:Peter Gurney [Gurney, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2016-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

6

The Bungalow

‘Well,’ said Geoffrey Biddle, ‘Egypt it isn’t, but it can still get pretty hot.’

My mind went back seventeen years to the explosive wave propagation test that had sent us sprinting across the sand to Geoffrey’s jeep. Now, in February 1973, we were colleagues again, this time at the top of five flights of stairs in a building with no lift: Cannon Row Police Station. Outside, a cold drizzle fell; a gunmetal-grey Thames flowed sluggishly under Westminster Bridge.

I had come back from Northern Ireland in December and said goodbye to the army. After twenty-three years I needed a change. During my time at Hounslow I’d heard about the Met’s Explosives Office: with only a desk job looming if I stayed in the army, it offered job satisfaction and an opportunity to display ingenuity, logic and independence unconstrained by army regulations. The Black September and Angry Brigade campaigns had shown London that the Improvised Explosive Device had arrived; the bomb-disposal man could now pit himself against bombs far more complex and challenging than those unearthed in Conventional Munitions Disposal work.

Geoffrey hadn’t changed much over the years; he was still tall and ramrod straight with white hair, patrician features and clerical manner. He had been one of the founding members of the Met’s Explosives Office, back in the days when safe-breaking had been all the rage. He had joined with Don Henderson, another ex-officer I’d known from my time in the army. Since then Ronnie Wilson and Andy Clarke had joined, so now there were five of us.

We were not policemen but civil servants, part of the Met’s C7 support service. We were accommodated within the top floor of Cannon Row Police Station because it was close enough to the river crossing to facilitate south and north London operations and also because of its proximity to the seat of government.

In 1974 the powers that be decided we would be better placed in a home of our own – after all, being stuck on the fifth floor of a building without a lift wasn’t ideal. We’d taken to waiting outside in the patrol cars during major alert periods: charging up and down five flights of stairs was not only tiring and time-consuming, it posed an unacceptable injury risk.

We were allocated an adjacent single-storey building which, imaginatively, became known as the Bungalow. It had originally been built as an Army Recruitment Office during the First World War. It took several months to get the accommodation into shape, during which time the Explosives Office was relocated on the ground floor of the police station.

By the time we moved into the Bungalow our numbers had swelled to eleven Expos. Amongst the new arrivals were two old friends: Ken Howorth, who joined in 1974 while we were still based in the police station, and Roger Goad, who was appointed early in 1975. Memories of our times together at Feltham flooded back; we even found ourselves playing the same jokes we’d pulled years ago, such as lightly filling in Roger’s crossword puzzle when he wasn’t looking.

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