The Branch Is Broken

By Tim Stocke

If you are looking for something that is well-balanced and politically correct, then this book is not for you. If, however, you are looking for something light and amusing, with an explanation why the UK Border Agency is currently a shambles, then this may answer your questions. But be warned, there is a sad ending, for this is my story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491879313

Tim Stocke

Tim Stocke is the pen name of someone who entered the UK Immigration Service at Heathrow Airport in January 1971 and remained in it through all its identity changes. He took an enhanced early retirement package and has travelled extensively around the world but still has a trace of his Glasgow accent. This is an account of his memories during his time working for the Home Office. Due to the fact that we live in litigious times, this novel comes under the genre of fiction, and names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent. The author lives in happy retirement and can be found early most mornings, weather and tides permitting, walking along his local sandy beach in the South East of England.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

You could practically smell the place before you saw it. My colleague and I stepped out of the car as we surveyed the grey concrete jungle before us. In the ‘50s, it would have been called an example of the new future living environment. But to us here in the ‘70s, it was just a group of decaying apartment blocks. We had driven into the estate and located the building we needed to visit.

This was a low-key, let’s-clear-a-file visit. Somebody up in our main office had sat on the file too long. The whole situation had blowout written all over it, so there was no need for a police presence. We just had to establish that our man was not there and get ourselves away. We had driven back out of the estate and parked the car where we thought it would be safe from vandalism.

It was about three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, and we were just two suits walking about a housing estate in South London. Who could possibly notice us? Half the world and their grandmother, that’s who! We made our way towards one of the buildings. A group of women stood in a corner watching us pick our way through the filth and rubbish lying on the ground. As we came within earshot, one of them gave a stage whisper to her companions worthy of a thespian reciting Hamlet.

I can smell pigs.

My companion turned around and glared at them and, in his broad Glaswegian accent, informed them that he was surprised they could smell anything in this shithole. I was too busy scanning ahead and trying to spot any trouble between us and the entrance to the flats. There was none I could see. We were both on the alert as we watched ahead and to the sides. Remember the surveillance training. Keep the head as still as possible but sweep the area ahead and to the sides with the eyes. Don’t let anyone see how tense you really are. Just act casual. To us, this was just routine, and we wanted to keep the visit low-key, but that did not mean that we would drop our guard. The harridans glared after us but remained silent – unsure as to who or what we were. We were certainly not behaving like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Who else would be out and about on a gloomy Sunday afternoon?

We found the door we wanted, which was thankfully only on the second floor – no need to use the lift, which also seemed to be used as a public toilet. And they had the cheek to call us pigs. I knocked on the door, and after a few moments, a rather large black gentleman opened it. We identified ourselves and enquired after the person we were looking for. The gentleman stared at us for a few moments, and his eyes turned red. Not a good sign.

Without a word, he stepped back, and this left us looking into an empty hallway. My colleague and I glanced at each other. One, two, three, and we would have it away on our toes. This was our safety count, or as we called it, 1-2-3 O’Leary. Des O’Connor had helped us out of one or two scrapes before. We would be moving long before we heard what he said to Mary.

The large gentleman reappeared carrying an axe. Too late to run! He could throw it faster than we could run.

I gave him the cold stare and pointed two fingers straight at him. "Put that down now! Or I will take it off you and shove it up your arse!" I bellowed in the hardest Glaswegian growl I could muster.

To our amazement, he did exactly that. And then he sat down in the hallway and began to cry.

I mentally wiped the sweat off my brow. Life has a habit of throwing you curve balls when you least expect them. Here I was, a reasonably educated young man. What was I doing grubbing about in one the armpits of the universe? If only my mother could have seen me then.

CHAPTER ONE

Youth’s Spring Days

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It all began for me in 1969 when I left school in Glasgow, clutching a handful of school certificates. The way to university beckoned to me, but I was savvy enough to realise that I was not equipped to set the world of academia alight, so I tried the alternative route to find gainful employment. I thought that a bright lad like me would be snatched up at once by all the eager enterprises. I had even managed to be interviewed and put on the Employment Executive Register. The hurdles turned out to be higher than I realised.

At that time a lot of social unrest plagued Northern Ireland, and a joke at the time was: What is green and lives up a tree in Belfast? Answer: A Catholic waiting for a council house. Followed by: What is green and lives in a bush? Answer: A Catholic on the waiting list for a tree. In Glasgow, we were a bit more subtle. Every school leaver from my religious persuasion always dreaded the seemingly innocuous question: And which school did you go to, laddie?

Seems friendly enough, doesn’t it? But if the school had the prefix of a saint’s name, you could kiss the job goodbye. Catholics went to schools with saints names, and the Orange Lodge was a powerful force in the city in those days. A Scottish League Cup final match between Celtic and Rangers had taken place at Hampden Park in 1957 and Celtic had run amok winning 7-1. The BBC Scotland cameras were there to record the whole match but failed to do so.

The excuse offered and accepted was that a technician had forgotten to replace the film to record the second half. The fact that BBC Scotland was rumoured not to hire Catholics at the time was considered a mere coincidence.

They say it has all changed now. Well so they say. Me, I think they just hide the prejudice better nowadays. But then again, I might be just another paranoid Tim.

So after a few months of knock-backs, I bit the bullet and headed for the bright lights and legendary streets of gold called London. Not only that but my one dread was that the only job I would be offered would be in the boring civil service.

And lo and behold, it came to pass that, despite my fluency in the French and Spanish languages, I had the choice of remaining in Glasgow and becoming a supervisor in a laundry company or joining the civil service in London. It wasn’t the hardest of decisions I can tell you. But it did some damage to the self-esteem, and strengthened the paranoia.

I came down to London with a new suitcase and a pocketful of dreams. The first thing that struck me was that I thought Glasgow was big; London was huge. And everybody in it was in so much of a hurry.

The girls were pretty and came in all shapes, sizes, and colours. Unfortunately, my Glasgow accent picked me out to them as being an outsider and an unsophisticated yokel. Even the Caribbean food stallholders tried to overcharge me, as they thought my head buttoned up the back. I decided that it was time to soften my accent but harden my outlook on life.

I also became more dependent on my own instincts and judgement. I adopted a new philosophy. Trust no one until they’ve earned it and take nothing at face value. Most important of all, never keep your wallet in your back pocket – a hard-bitten philosophy for a nineteen-year-old cynic.

My first job was as a clerical officer in the home office, and a more boring job I don’t think I could ever find. I look back on it now and just hope that it was some kind of loyalty test. I used to finish my work by mid-morning on the Fridays and then spend the rest of the day wandering about that magnificent building in Whitehall looking at the oil paintings.

Once I actually bumped into the then Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, and the Ulster Human Rights campaigner Bernadette Devlin on one of these forays. I was smart enough to always have a file under my arm and look as if I knew where I was going. The first lesson: Never look as if you are out of place or draw attention to yourself.

So I gave Uncle Jim and his group a brief smile and a nod as I bustled by before anyone queried what I was doing there. Nobody gave me a second look. That was when I discovered my hidden talent. I was the guy who everybody overlooked. This was something that would come in very handy indeed a bit later in my career.

In the evenings, I walked up Whitehall to catch my two trains home. One train was to get me away from the city centre. The second train took me out to where there was a bit of greenery and more affordable accommodation. I used to watch all the bowler hats, pinstriped suits, and rolled umbrellas waddling up Whitehall each evening at five o’clock like a bunch of penguins. On one occasion, I looked up to the sky and pleaded with God not to turn me into one of them. And do you know, I think my prayer was answered.

One day, I came into work and decided that enough was enough. The sheer drudgery of it all was getting to me. During my lunch break, I found one of those little employment agencies that were all the rage at the time and got registered up. I was sent out on a few interviews, and I have to admit that I did like the sound of one or two of the jobs on offer.

I managed to charm my way through one of the interviews, and I was offered the job. It involved a bit of accountancy, well quite a lot of accountancy actually, and when I came out of the interview, I realised I must have impressed somebody, as I am completely hopeless at mathematics.

My old interviewer had been charm personified himself. But the nagging feelings around my inadequacy at maths remained with me for the rest of the day. Had I really fooled him? In the end, I had to be honest with myself and him. A lifetime with my nose buried in accounts ledgers had never appealed to me, so I had to decline his kind offer.

It wasn’t until a few years later that a chance remark by a friend made me realise what a close encounter I’d had with the Security Service.( I’ve had a few more close encounters with the agency since then.) My friend and I were going past the building where I’d had that accountancy interview, which is a bit up the road from the now infamous Thames House, and I said that I’d once been interviewed for a job in there. My friend had been in the Army Field Intelligence Corps and said that MI5 had interviewed him in there for a job, also in a roundabout way. He hadn’t been too sure about the approach and like me had also declined the kind offer. I managed to keep my face straight – but only just.

So I went back to the Home Office and tried a bluff. I submitted my resignation. I was through with being bored. I was off to become an accountant! Luckily, I was sent up to our version of personnel/human resources, called the establishment division, and the man up there said that, as I spoke two other languages apart from English, I was wasting my time in my department and that I should join the Immigration Branch.

I could not agree more, but… what the devil was the Immigration Branch?

Like everybody else at the time, when I thought of officials at ports and airports, I thought of those beady-eyed blokes in old Royal Naval uniforms that never seemed to fit properly – the guys who shoved a list under your nose, asked you if you had read it, and then whipped it away before you had a chance to read the headlines in bold, black print. You knew that they were going to have a rummage around in your luggage no matter what you answered.

The bloke always started off asking if you had a nice holiday, as he was just about to ruin it. I used to say that I had a bit of Spanish tummy, and he would stop and then poke a bit more gingerly when he was going through my old underwear.

I wasn’t too sure I wanted to become one of those guys. I only liked to interfere with female clothing while they were still being worn.

A little booklet from the Home Office explained that immigration officers were the guys in civilian clothes who you hardly noticed. They asked for your passport, you handed it to them, they looked at it and immediately handed it back, and off you went. It seemed simple enough. I reckoned that I could do that. The booklet went on to explain that the Home Office did not pay good money just to do that. A lot more was involved inside the twilight world of the immigration officer.

CHAPTER TWO

Call the Warden

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If anybody tells you he or she deliberately joined the Immigration Service in the 1970s as a deliberate career choice, then I would treat that person with great suspicion and avoid him or her at parties.

Nobody deliberately joined up; most people just wandered in. What was the attraction? Was it the glamour of working at an airport or by the seaside, like at Cardiff Docks? Good promotion prospects? Being able to travel the world at government expense? Nope, it was none of these.

Quite simply, it was the highest paid job in the Home Civil Service. Most of us had originally applied for the HM Diplomatic Service and had been found to be a bit too rough around the edges for the service’s liking. So we went for the second best plum, which paid you extra money for speaking foreign languages and working shifts.

I have to admit that I thought I would have enjoyed working for the Foreign Office. They are a quirky lot, almost as bad as our bunch in the Immigration Branch. I had a friend in the government hostel where I stayed in Earls Court who had been brought up in Kenya and spoke fluent Swahili. The Diplomatic Service grabbed him up, and for his first posting they were sending him to… Iceland.

Ewan was not your typical role model of a career diplomat. He was a red-hot republican Scottish Nationalist supporter who, after a few Scottish sherbets, would announce to one and all his final solution for the British monarchy and their hangers-on. I think his family had their own tumbrel business. Shortly after Ewan’s posting, the COD War kicked off. I have often wondered if… . No. It’s not possible, though it was said that he could start a fight in an empty house.

I thought that the government hostel scheme for young, single civil servants working in London was a brilliant idea. It brought together a lot of people of diverse regions and cultures. London could be a very lonely place when you are young and on your own. In the hostels, you were never alone.

My introduction to the hostel was by way of the dumpy Cockney cook, whose opening salvo to me was that she did not like the Scotch – just what a newly arrived lad from across Hadrian’s Wall really wanted to hear to make him feel at home. I told her I wasn’t too keen on them either. That stopped her in her tracks.

Every room contained its own brand of delinquent and wannabe urban terrorist. One room was cloaked in mystery and dubbed the Welsh Room. God knows what went on in there, and sometimes even He was excluded. You were not allowed entry unless you were Welsh and spoke the language… or a sheep.

One of the boarders reckoned he heard the sound of a goat one night in the Welsh Room. This was dismissed by the rest of us. He was a city boy and could not tell a goat from a sheep!

Every Friday night we would all go out in groups to chat up the Antipodean barmaids in the local pubs of Earls Court.

As time passed, our hooligan ways were brought to the attention of the warden via her snitch, the cook. All government hostels at the time were run by a manager who went under the title of the warden. Some of us new boys away from home for the first time found this title a little intimidating, and some wardens did have strict rules and ran their organisations like penal institutions.

For the most part, the wardens ran their regimes like benevolent headmasters and headmistresses. You were expected to attend meals on time; be in house before curfew when the door was bolted; adhere to the no alcohol or food in the room rule; and, oh yes, pay your rent to the warden at the appointed time.

Most of us were young, single males who cocked a snook at authority and could be a bit wild at times. Only one or two older guys appeared to have been institutionalised were among us. The thought of ending up like them scared a lot of us young Turks. We committed a lot of minor transgressions just to show off our rebellious nature. In reality, we behaved quite childishly at times, although some of our methods in breaking into the hostel after lights out were quite ingenious and showed promising organisational skills for the future.

Our warden was quite an interesting person. She was a single lady, not unattractive, in her forties who lived on the premises. We discovered her parading up and down outside Earls Court Tube Station late one Saturday night wearing red stilettos and a fake leopard skin coat. What she wore underneath was subject to our collective dirty minds. A few of us, having consumed copious amounts of alcohol, had been daft enough to approach her and ask her what services she was willing to provide and at what rate.

She must have thought we were all tucked up in bed having our Horlicks. In fact, we were trying to smuggle a couple of Melbourne girls into the hostel for some late-night entertainment and had rounded the wrong corner at the wrong moment. We were laden down with fish and chips and beer for a midnight party in our room. This act, along with the cook’s catalogue of our misdemeanours, meant that some of us were invited to leave the hostel. Three of us found a flat in Forest Hill, and others just drifted off to the other suburbs.

We, new residents of Forest Hill, were three completely different characters. Looking back, I suppose I was the peacemaker. I was the nonentity who had his own bedroom and did not like to make waves.

G belonged in the past, the Georgian era, or a lunatic asylum, depending on your point of view. He came from old money in the Shires and every Saturday went up to London to watch the Changing the Guard. He had read everything on the Duke of Wellington, so much so that I thought that, at times, he suffered the delusion that he was the Iron Duke. He had a pair of fine side whiskers and at weekends went out at times wearing a moth-eaten military uniform jacket, which he swore was a Battle of Waterloo original. Yes, G could be definitely classed as eccentric and remained just one step ahead of the men in white coats with the large butterfly nets. As far as politics went, he was definitely in the blue corner.

In the red corner came G’s antithesis, who he cruelly called Chubby. Chubby was, in fact, a well-built, boyish-faced honest lad from the east coast of Scotland. He and G had shared the room in the hostel long before I arrived and seemed to get on well and were always ribbing each other in a good-natured manner. They were total opposites. G was lazy and laconic, whilst Chubby was a bundle of energy and industriousness. It used to amuse me to come home and find G lying full length on the sofa offering advice to Chubby, who was sweeping up around him.

Of course, sharing a flat was different than living in a hostel, and we had the occasional flashpoint when one of G’s verbal barbs struck home and I had to pull Chubby off him. They were like a cobra and a mongoose. G always covered up to withstand Chubby’s initial assault and then counter-attacked before allowing me to get in between them and pull them apart.

Even today I can still picture G like the cartoon cat stretched out on the sofa

and reaching down to rake the sleeping dog with its claws but pretending to be asleep as the dog wakes up and looks all about. He used to deliberately insult Chubby and sit back with a satisfied smirk as Chubby rose every time to take the bait.

Chubby and I shared cooking and cleaning duties, whilst G declared that he never did servant’s work, not even the washing up. So we did our own cooking and washing up after that. As we were lowly paid civil servants, our food was basic, and hamburger and beans was my usual diet, with a tin of Irish stew, two Oxo cubes, and six slices of bread for my weekend feast. Friday night was pub night, and Saturday was shopping day at the local supermarket, with a game of darts in the local pub at lunchtime.

The only things I saw G eat in the flat were toast, Coco Pops, and whatever he brought in from the local fish and chip shop. The rascal did have an allowance and usually ate in restaurants up in town with his family.

Chubby and I tried to keep the flat tidy, but Chubby was a workaholic and could not sit still for long, so he did most of the work and always tidied up after G. I let him get on with it and hid in my room listening to my music.

Despite that, there was a genuine brotherly affection between Chubby and G, and if one of them really needed help, the other would not hesitate to come to his aid. Living with them could be volatile, but mostly, it was a lot of fun. You just never knew what was around the corner.

Many of the escapees from this hostel went on to become Whitehall Mandarins. Some others even went on to wander into the Immigration Branch after a few years and found themselves based up and down the country.

When I left the flat to move nearer Heathrow, Chubby and G tried to get a third peacekeeper in to keep the squabbling down to a minimum. Unfortunately, there were no takers, and when I returned to the flat for a visit, I found my room being used for storage, and two girls had moved into the room and kitchen Chubby and G had shared.

Neither of my old flatmates had left a forwarding address, and the landlord’s son told me that they’d had a real fist fight one night and, over the next few days, had moved out of the area separately. I never saw either of them again.

CHAPTER THREE

Up for Selection

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I can remember my immigration officers’ board vividly, even after all these years. I was sent to one of those large grey anonymous central London buildings beloved by spy fiction. The joining instructions had come from darkest Basingstoke, which, to my mind, was a world away with green fields and fresh air.

In those days, it probably was. The large grey slum called the Shopping Centre or architect’s nightmare did not come until years later. I had hoped for a day out in the country, only to have my hopes dashed and told to report to an address just up the road.

When I arrived at the address on the appointed day at the appointed hour, I had to ask the receptionist if I was in the right place. I found myself in a room with identical young Asian gentlemen, wearing identical smart dark three-piece suits, all carrying smart executive style attaché cases and black umbrellas.

I stuck out a bit, as I was wearing a raincoat over a plain two-piece suit with The Daily Telegraph sticking out of my pocket. My hand was in the other pocket. To my mind, this was just a job interview, not a fashion parade… and what the hell were the briefcases for? Was there a written examination hidden in the small print of the joining instructions? I checked my instructions again. No there was no mention of a written examination and the dress code was smart. Not dress up like a bunch of Hungarian butlers.

The receptionist, an old boy, dressed up in a uniform with enough medals to get him an audition in The Pirates of Penzance, reassured me that I