Nicola Barker - Burley Cross Postbox Theft

A remarkable man, and greatly missed (but I do seem to be getting slightly drawn off the subject here) …

Baxter’s other notable campaign — against speeding in the village — has likewise had a pretty positive impact. Not so much in preventing the aforementioned traffic from taking this slightly shorter route (BC is favoured by ‘boy racers’ — and more sober folk who really should know better — as a short cut), but in giving people a sense of empowerment, a feeling that they are taking action themselves rather than just sitting back and letting standards slip.

My most significant involvement with Baxter, to date, has, of course, been with the BCPTW — his campaign to ‘clean up’ the local public toilets (which are located just at the end of Fitzwilliam St).

Given that these facilities are the only public lavatories for many miles around, they are naturally considered a vital resource for tourists, ramblers and local tradesmen alike, but they have also become the backdrop for what I shall simply call ‘more nefarious’ pursuits.

I must confess that I hadn’t even really registered this unsavoury underground activity until Baxter first drew it to my attention (during a National RSPB-sponsored Big Garden Birdwatch Campaign at the end of January; we were part of an elite team of volunteers tabulating the number of wild birds in a small area of common ground directly behind the toilets at the time), but since he did, I have become increasingly preoccupied by the amount of undesirable ‘traffic’ these toilets seem to attract.

Sometimes I drive my car up there (it’s only a distance of thirty or so yards from our cottage, in actual fact) and park it in the designated zone to try and get a proper sense of how bad the problem really is. I have started taking notes — writing down the car registration details of the men who enter the facilities and then seem to be taking a suspiciously long time to reappear.

I showed this information to Baxter and he was very pleased and impressed by my levels of diligence, and promptly set up a BCPTW website on the back of it (another example of that boundless energy I keep harping on about!)! He even went so far as to appoint me ‘chair’ of the committee (a kind gesture, but an empty one, given that there are currently only three members, all told!).

As a part of our overall strategy, Baxter then suggested that we might start taking surreptitious photographs of the worst of the offenders in order to establish some kind of a formal, visual record of the main participants in these degenerate activities. I was initially a little slow to warm to the idea, but after he invested some committee funds in a digital camera, and acquainted me with the fundamentals of how to use it in the most effective way, I must confess that I’ve become quite the ‘secret snapper’ (taking some pretty impressive shots — even if I say so myself!)!

Of course the police refuse, point-blank, to consider amateur photographic evidence as a sufficient incentive to take these vermin to court. It’s deeply frustrating, but Baxter still feels it may serve a purpose (could be a useful resource to use as a ‘bargaining counter’, for example, and to show the police — and the perpetrators — that we are deadly serious in our concerns about the matter).

My experiences at the toilets have certainly proved to be quite an eye-opener. I’ve been astonished by how many local men are frequenting these facilities on a regular basis. Many of them bring their dogs along — as a kind of ‘cover’. I’m presuming that a good proportion of these gentlemen are married and pretending to their ignorant spouses that they are out on the moor, exercising their benighted (and patently neglected) animals, while what they are actually doing is driving them over to the toilets, ‘parking up’ and then leaving the poor, confused creatures mouldering away inside the car for hours!

I made the mistake of mentioning this gruesome scenario to Joanna (who had hitherto remained determinedly disinterested in the matter, being very much of the ‘well, if they’re not hurting anybody…’ frame of mind) and she quite literally went ballistic (proving — if proof were needed — that while people are perfectly welcome to do pretty much what they like to each other in Jo’s book — however sick or perverse it might be — once a dumb animal gets tangled up in the equation… Well, you’d better watch out!).

I suppose it was partly as a consequence of Jo’s avowed militancy on the issue that I felt compelled (almost against my better instincts) to take some direct action in this regard during an especially bad instance of what I perceived as ‘serious neglect’ a few weeks ago.

I had observed a man — youthful, brown-haired, quite fit and handsome, dressed for hiking — entering the toilets at approximately 14.00 hrs on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. He was driving a dark, metallic-green hatchback (some kind of Hyundai, I think). When he initially pulled up I noticed that he had a very beautiful, large and finely bred Red Setter accompanying him.

I ducked down in my seat upon his arrival (so as not to be observed) and took a couple of preliminary shots (he definitely looked familiar to me — I presumed I’d probably seen him loitering in the vicinity before), then kept my eyes firmly trained on the toilets for the next fifteen or so minutes, patiently waiting for him to re-emerge.

After he had been gone for five minutes (tops), I noticed that his dog was growing increasingly distressed (I was busily scribbling down his registration number at the time; I have a very handy ‘single binocular’ — a ‘mono-ocular’, I suppose you’d call it — a tiny black telescope which I bought at Millets for specifically this purpose). The dog was shifting around, frantically, in the back of the car and pawing at the window. Eventually it began barking, mutedly (but emphatically) through the glass.

As the minutes gradually ticked by, the dog became more and more hysterical, leaving slicks of foam on the window, even hurling itself against the car’s interior bodywork (principally the wire mesh that separated the poor deranged beast from the rest of the car’s interior).

Enough was enough! Disturbed and infuriated, I climbed out of my car and walked over to the Hyundai to try and calm the Setter down. It clawed at the window, still more frantically, upon my arrival. I tried to talk to it through the glass, but it simply ignored me (far too agitated). I cursed under my breath, impotently, and was about to turn towards the toilets (intent on heading in there and confronting the owner directly), when I noticed — with some astonishment — that the car was actually unlocked!

At this point (and don’t ask me why — I can’t really say why) I found myself applying some slight pressure to the back handle, twisting at it, gingerly, and feeling the mechanism of the lock unlatching itself with a smooth, satisfying clunk .

I suppose (in retrospect) that my instinctive aim was to open up the door by a couple of inches simply to try and give the dog a bit of fresh air, or perhaps to talk to it, soothingly, through the gap, and — if it didn’t seem unduly snappy or aggressive — to pat it or stroke it to try and ease its distress.

No sooner had the mechanism sounded, however, than the dog (a large animal — larger, even, than you might imagine) had thrown its entire body-weight against the door and had violently burst its way out — sending me flying (I landed flat on my back)!

Before I could so much as draw breath — let alone clamber to my feet again — it had bolted off, at speed, into the undergrowth (following a route I presume it knew all too well, down a nearby moorland path and then up on to the moor itself). I remained seated on the ground for a few seconds, somewhat dazed and confused, then quickly scrambled to my feet, breathless and slightly flustered.