Planes, Passports and Porkie Pies - Slice One

Clarke Mike

Description

Mike Clarke worked for 18 years in Immigration Control in London's larger airports, the last 9 as a Chief Immigration Officer. In his time there, he encountered every scenario you could imagine - and some you'd never dream of! Planes, Passports and Porkie Pies - Slice One details the ups and downs of his working life: queues and crises, joy and despair, cock-ups, punchups, forgers, robbers, liars, lovers, thugs, drugs and always the poorest of the poor. Join Mike as he recounts just some of his more memorable moments, from a man wearing a suit filled with 00 cash to his part in the truly shocking sudden death of the Russian Atomic Clock.Planes, Passports and Porkie Pies is a hilarious memoir that will particularly appeal to those familiar with the immigration sector, as well as anyone who has ever suffered at the hands of mindless bureaucracy.

Sujets

• Memoir
• Humour

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785895937
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

About the Author
After a disastrous (but character-forming) spell at university, then some aimless swanning around, Mike Clarke worked for 38 years in Immigration Control, finally becoming the first Inspector of the elite, discreet and now defunct IS Anti-Terrorist Liaison Unit. He has now, thankfully, retired.







Copyright © 2018 Mike Clarke

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador®
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 978 1785895 937

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
This book is written for all those men and women, of every rank 1 and some now dead, who laboured wholly unsung, often abused and largely in vain, in the United Kingdom’s old Immigration Service to maintain the country’s border controls; but mostly for the IOs themselves, the Immigration Officers who formed the latest thin red line, and to whom I offer my own deepest thanks and admiration. (Well, let’s face it: you’ll get fuck-all of either, ever, from anyone or anywhere officially, now will you?)

Mike Clarke, ex-IO LGW 2 and TN3 LHR, CIO TN2 LHR, Stansted, and Becket House, and HMI (but only t/p) NCU and ATLU. (Oh, and I almost forgot: B.A. failed).
SLICE ONE
Which covers: Gatwick 1970 to 1977, when the going was still comparatively good; and Heathrow 1977 to 1988, when we kept going, somehow. But only just.
Contents
PREFACE
Cashing Out , 1971

1. In

2. Gatwick
First Blood
Iceflight
Frontier Games
A Cunning Linguist
Personation
Tears for Fears
Bad Medicine
Shelter
Supplicant
An Uncommon Complaint
Kraut Control
Change of Heart
Christmas Box
The Branch Bunch
Brief Encounter
Goodnight, Vietnam
Egg and Double Chips
Stretcher Party
Light Relief
Lords of the Ring
Sound of Fate

3. Three
First Impressions
Simply Read
Riot
Fingered
TB or not TB
Barbarians
Result

4. Two
Quick Work
Remember, Remember
Suffer the Children
Out of the Blue
Two Excursions
The RAC
Desk Top
National Interest
Goal!!
Nothing in Writing
Satellites
Clash
Each to his Own
Out
Want more?

Appendices
NOTES
PREFACE
What follows is an episodic and spasmodic if not downright erratic account of a career in Great Britain’s border control, the first thirty years spent at three so-called London airports – Gatwick, Heathrow and Stansted – deciding which foreigners (almost all) could enter the country, and which (a paltry, unhappy, few) could not: and the last eight on the teeming streets of the great metropolis itself, deciding which of those already (somehow) here could stay, and which (of those we could find), had (at least in theory) to go. Well, someone had to do it. Or try to.
It is also an affectionate requiem, but not so much for the job itself – a necessary evil if you like, and with ever-dwindling effect anyway – as for my erstwhile colleagues, who contrived, God knows how, to form a more or less single, focussed and collective entity out of as disparate a bunch of extroverts, introverts, romantics, pedantics, scholars, general layabouts and devoted alcoholics (not one your average nine- to five-er) as you’ll find anywhere this side of Chipping Sodbury.
So then: Immigration UK, a matter of perennial interest if not quite yet fatal fascination to Joe Public, and over the years called many things; bad joke, abject failure, total shambles – all undeniably and ever-increasingly true if you weren’t a politician, and even then you could always blame the other side, and usually did – and a subject where polarisation was and remains instant, and visceral, and no-one sat on the fence. And who were the few poor sods trapped neatly in the middle, pips (or maybe nuts) squeaking, between the howling fascist thugs and the wailing bleeding hearts? Why, us of course, the IS, the Immigration Service, and British to the very core; though now I can say them , can’t I, because I’m well out of it, and besides, the old Service is long gone.
But don’t despair – not yet, anyway. For these two books aren’t about the Big Picture (well, not directly and not much), about the colossal and now-irretrievable Kafka-esque cock-up the Control with a big C, still risibly so-titled, had drip by drip and year by year and weak by weaker government become, even decades before the West’s more recent ventures into the Middle East have left us, and it, with oil on our collective blood-red face.
No, they are just story books, or meant to be, and the stories are those of individuals, mostly the ordinary, the little people, Thomas and Leon and the rest, the poor players on the stage who came and went and then were heard no more (especially, if they had any sense, those who hadn’t gone). They tell too of the eternal battle between the so-called Keepers of the Kingdom’s Keys ( us , if only we still were) on the one side; and of the on-entry refusals and later, internal offenders – rich and poor but mainly, inevitably, poor – on the other: and with just a touch, here and there, of domestics.
But “Wait,” I hear you ask in probable shocked disbelief if/when you’ve read on a bit, “can these stories really be true?” Well, all I can say is that every tale – barring a number of minor changes (like most names, and some nationalities) to protect both the innocent and the part-guilty, not least myself – is as accurate as my fallible memory allows. None need any dressing up anyway and unless I state otherwise, each didn’t just really happen , it just really happened to me . Most are funny – some out-farcing Feydeau, even if the alternative joke had to be cruelly prised from the jaws of some poor devil’s personal tragedy with that same black humour which imbues all such tasks. Most, but not all. Because whilst the job was often one to enjoy, it was always one sometimes to regret.
And forget the TV documentaries – expunge them wholly from your seething minds. You don’t expect people in them to behave as they would and did normally (and doubtless off-camera do still, staff especially included), now do you?
No, this is how it truly was, day in day out, a mere time capsule perhaps, corroded and corrosive, of a temps long perdu and a now-dead Service, but no less real for that – which also means I’d better warn you again (but directly this time) that it’s just about as gently non -PC as these days, it seems, you can semi-safely get, or at least I hope so. In other words if you’re a fervent ‘ ism ’ or even ‘ phobe ’ -ist, don’t read on because you’ll only get upset – unless of course you attack me instead, and where better for malicious, cowardly, internet spiders – though I rather like real spiders – to hide, anonymously, than in a world-wide web? And if you do , despite it all (read on, I mean), and if by the end you’ve spotted more Grouchos or even more Ernies than Clints , who am I to argue?
And one last thing, in case it doesn’t hit you from the off, right between the eyes. I’m as proud as Punch to be English. But prouder still to be British.
Cashing Out , 1971
So as a brief foretaste if you’re still undecided, where better to begin – and only a tad out of order – than with the aforesaid Thomas (who proved in the end to be well out himself – of order, I mean). Black, short, slight, soft-spoken but loudly be-suited and widely be-smiling off the B/Cal 1 Lagos, he copped my recent mentor Paul, sitting right beside me. No hand-baggage at all, which was rare; nothing but that suit, which to the eye was already rarer still, though as yet we didn’t know the half of it.
“Hello there, Jimmy,” said Paul (so now you’ve sussed his nationality, too). “How long will you be staying?”
“Me, sir?” Thomas replied, laudably politely. “Oh, just one week, two weeks, for a trip, a short business trip,” and Paul was about to roll 2 him, no more questions asked and his landing-stamp actually poised, when for some reason never explained, maybe simple, honest joie de vivre but more likely a premature, wholly understandable but fatally treacherous surge of pure relief at his so-far trouble-free passage, Thomas thrust out his hand – OK, not exactly your average response, but still a welcome change from some of the more common alternatives, verbal and physical.
And the only trouble as they shook was that even I heard his suit rustle, a sound so incongruous that it took a moment to engage your senses; and then I looked sideways and saw Paul (who as you’ve now also sussed was left-handed) slowly lower his stamp.
“Hey. Jimmy . What’s the matter with yer sewt there? What’s in it? What the fuck’s that noise ?” he demanded in a rare but fitting variation from the standard interrogative line. And Thomas, twitching a bit now but smiling wider still, said, “Nothing, sir, oh nothing, no, not at