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Non-Fiction
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| Target Practice | |
| By patterjack | ||||||||||
| 13 January 2007 | ||||||||||
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Target Practice Les was big , strong , but withal very quiet and easy going . I never knew him as other than a gentle person who, in the very best tradition of big boys , looked after his ageing mother . She was not his only care , as he was a police sergeant of the old school . I am not sure if he could have actually run down a younger fleeing criminal , but by the time I got to know him , he had moved more towards desk jobs , and was in charge of many of the matters to do with roads and traffic . He lived opposite us in the new house we had built , itself a thankful transition from Housing Commission dwellings on the other side of town , and almost at the end of the development westwards at that time. As I was developing the gardens around the house , and in particular the rockery on the side that was nearest to his home , I often fell into conversation with him , and w e got to know each other quite well. He did , in a very neighbourly fashion , take care of the proceedings in which I was involved after a traffic accident . It was not in anyway a dishonest business, either , I hasten to add , since he had a strong ethical sense . But he looked after my interests well to nobody else's disadvantage . Likewise , when my son was learning to drive , I asked him one afternoon whether he would come out with us in the car while I was instructing the lad , and see if there were any infringements of driving rules wherewith I might be leading the boy astray from the righteous path of good driving . It is not a good thing to teach another member of the family to drive and I felt that Les might put a polish on his skills or more importantly , correct errors . So out we went , all around he main streets of the town and out into the rougher country tracks . John drove well , and when he did a hill start on a steep gravel road , Les remarked that he could see nothing wrong with his driving , and that he wished he himself could hill start as well as the boy did . Naturally we were very pleased and John was even more so when he walked into the Police Station to arrange to go for his licence test. Les was at his desk , and simply told the young constable to issue the licence, remarking that he would vouch for the boy. But the most interesting occurrence with Les was when I was chatting with him one Sunday morning . Not long before , a young constable in a western town not all that far from ours had been shot when his service issue pistol had jammed . It was a Biretta , and it was not the first time that the force had had trouble with them . As a result , the make of the issue was changed to a revolver -- a traditional style of six shooter . I asked Les what he thought of his new weaponry, and in the ongoing conversation he remarked that he had never even fired it , though he had been issued with a certain number of cartridges per month for target practice. Tell you what , he said , come on out to the reserve with me , and we'll try it out . There was of course no way that John would be left out of such an event , so he volunteered to come too. The reserve was a couple of miles from our place , so we piled into the blue police car and out we went . On arriving there we found an old tin can and set it up on a stump . I was given first shot . I hit the stump -- I think ! John had next go , and he did hit the stump. Then Les tried -- and missed everything . So it seemed that desperate bandits would have not much to fear from him , were he called upon to use the gun. We all thought it was harmless fun. But you must bear in mind that this was a Sunday -- and shooting on Sundays was illegal -- though not a law that very many obeyed . It is also illegal to use firearms on a reserve . Thus it was no surprise when a utility truck came racing up along the track-- with a no doubt irate law -abiding body ready to denounce us . When , however ,the driver saw the police car there , he made an even hastier exit . I assume he was not so law -abiding as to wish to become involved in what he must have thought was a cops and robbers siege scenario .
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