No 11-year-old child should have to see his parent treated like a criminal for no reason whatsoever. And no Englishman enjoying a ramble with his son should face examination by police at the roadside on suspicion of being a sexual predator.
Astonishingly – and I find it difficult, some days after the event, to comprehend that I am writing this now – this is what has just happened to my son and me.
(...) Dressed in full rambling gear and boots and with my boy carrying his special walking staff, we’d left in the teeth of the heatwave and headed up the Lee Valley, then through Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire to Huntingdon, then on to Peterborough.
(...) All went well until in the late afternoon we reached Bishop Burton near Beverley, and, looking at the map I saw that we might save ourselves a half mile or so – and a weary trudge along a main road – if we cut through the grounds of the agricultural college.
We approached the security guard on the main gate, and while my 11-year-old hung back – the rain had cleared by now, it was a hot afternoon and he was understandably tired – I explained the situation.
The guard was entirely unsympathetic. He said it was private property and there was no public right of way.
I said this was fair enough, but I could see from the map that there was a track leading right across the grounds, it would help us a lot, and obviously we weren’t the sort of people – being long-distance walkers – to bother any livestock. But the guard stuck to his guns, and staring me straight in the face said that it was out of the question: There were under 18-year-olds at the college. The insinuation that I might pose some sort of threat to young people – in a word, that I might be a paedophile – was underscored by his eyes then sliding to my drooping son. He was being absurd and offensive.
I began to remonstrate, saying I was with my own child, and moreover I also teach at a university. But when I saw another guard coming over to back up his beleaguered colleague I thought: life’s too short to argue with jobsworths in high-vis jackets. And so my son and I went on.
Two hours later, we were toiling along the verge of the B1248 about five miles north when we were passed by a police car and police van in convoy. They did a U-turn and swept up beside us. The male officer got out and asked me to step into his vehicle and answer a few questions. Shocked, I told him I’d rather not. I said we were walking all the way from London to Whitby and that stepping into his car would rather ruin the purity of the experience.
He said he understood, but that he still had to ask me some questions because they had been called by a ‘concerned member of the public’, who had said that he was ‘worried’ about the child that was accompanying me.
It immediately occurred to me that the security guard at Bishop Burton College was responsible for this, for here it was again: the insinuation that a man out walking with an 11-year-old must have abducted him.
I soon finessed from the officer the information that yes, indeed, it was the Bishop Burton jobsworth who had put in the call, an alert that necessitated the calling out of a woman officer from over 30 miles away in order to attend, since there was a presumption that a child might have to be taken into custody. The officer took my photo ID – a press card, as it happens – and phoned my details into the Police National Computer. He had already recognised me from the television: he’d seen me on Shooting Stars, and he saw the absurdity of the idea that I would deliberately approach a security guard, in full walking equipment, while abducting a child.
(...) As if to underscore this, his radio squawked at that moment. He listened for a moment then said that there was a man armed with a knife threatening people in a pub a few miles away. The woman officer in the van had already left, and understanding fully where his real priority lay, the male officer bid us good evening and departed.
We went on, and in due course we reached North Dalton – but the half-hour we spent thanks to the security guard’s call had cost my child his supper, while his refusal to let us walk through the college grounds (I noted as we passed that the northern entrance was completely unguarded), had meant exposing the child to the real danger in the countryside: not rambling paedophiles, but speeding cars.
Far from acting as some sort of local hero, the guard had abused a child himself, in particular by exposing my son to the spectacle of his father – who was guilty of nothing – being grilled by the police on the roadside as if he were engaged in a perverse activity.