The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - Crime and redemption at Wandlebury

At Wandlebury, Bill saw different facets of crime and punishment, and redemption as he successfully helped young offenders for the probation service and also encounters brazen thieves.

Photo Kai Stachowiak 

Extracts from podcast readings of 'Route and Branch' by Bill Clark, former warden and nature conservationist at Wandlebury: Full podcast here: https://archive.org/download/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/Ch8c-The-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.mp3

...(The Probation Officer) was more forthcoming than usual when she phoned about the next candidate, ‘He should never have been given community service!’ Then gave me some lurid history. A hard drinking Scot, working on rail-track maintenance, he constantly got into trouble at weekends; on this occasion, and not for the first time, he had punched a policeman. She seemed surprised that I was still willing to take him on, and insisted that at the first hint of trouble, I should dash to the phone.
A couple of days later, a small, thick set man, climbed out of her car to be introduced, and as she drove off, an admonishing finger wagged, ‘Remember. No trouble,’ she called. I instructed him to climb on board the trailer, he must have felt quite at home on seeing a couple of 14 pound sledge hammers, two crowbars – one an extralarge, early ‘plate-layers’ model, and a couple of heavy duty, ‘navvy’s’ digging forks. Hopping off the tractor at the work site, I explained that we were going to dig round the foundation of a long-gone stable, break it into sections, load them into the trailer, for me to tip them in a nearby pit.

We soon had an open trench all round, and it was then just a case of donning our goggles, and thumping and levering, until sections broke off, when we lifted them into the trailer. We got on so well, that we had time to spare, and finished the day splitting logs.

The following morning Wendy called me to the phone, ‘It’s the Probation Officer!’ ‘Good morning Mr Clark, what on earth did you do to poor J**** yesterday? He is with me now, in tears; you should see his hands. He cannot possibly go to his work. He says he has never worked so hard in his life, it is impossible to keep up with you, and he doesn’t want to work at Wandlebury again.’ I asked her to make my apologies for providing such fragile work gloves, and she could assure him that further tasks would be much more reasonable.

A tentative J**** was delivered again the following week, and from then on, he arrived on his bike, on time, every Tuesday, and worked with never a grumble – often unsupervised – until his order was finished. But that weekend, did he celebrate! His antics – including hitting at least two policemen and getting down on all fours to bark at a police dog – earned him another term in Bedford prison.