THE SAGA OF REGGIE'S DRIVE

CAPTAIN (QM) Thurston (Retired) has decided to set up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme in the village. He'll be in charge of it, of course.
Reggie Thurston and his 'mem', as he always refers to her, Gloria, retired a few years ago and moved here last Easter, since when they have really tried to fit in. The mem business puzzles me a little, I know that old military men have always picked up a smattering of Hindustani but Munchen Gladbach is hardly Uttar Pradesh and Reggie is not really any sort of an old India hand.
Anyway ever since he's been here he seems to have had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about security. Take his car, not that you'll have much chance, he guards it like the Crown Jewels. He always keeps it in the garage - and by that I mean always. When it's not in use, it's either moving along the road at a sedate pace or it's well and truly under lock and key.
In the morning he goes down to the village store to get his paper. Out of the house he strides, unlocks the garage, strolls in and reverses the car out. He then jumps out and locks the garage door again. He then repeats the whole performance with the gates.
When he comes back he enacts the whole time-consuming act in reverse. A three minute trip has turned into a 20 minute epic. Within the hour he's usually off somewhere or the other and has to go through the whole rigmarole again, sometimes it happens four or five times a day. I asked him about it once, "You can't be too careful," he told me, "there's all sorts of undesirables about - travellers, hippies, subversives you name them. They'd steal the shirt off of your back if you gave them half the chance." I didn't feel that there was a lot I could say to that. His house is fortified like one of the establishments he might well have spent his working life in, there's burglar alarms, chains on the door and locks on all of the windows - then there's the security lights.
He had a company from Dorchester come and install at them at, no doubt, enormous expense. They've got a built-in detector so that should anyone walk up his drive during the hours of darkness they are immediately flooded in the brightest light imaginable. The lads at the Lark Ascending took them as an insult and a challenge.
For several weeks a few of the younger chaps would take a walk home past Reggie and Gloria's house after closing time. The idea was for a volunteer to vault the gate and run up the drive towards the house. His score depended on the distance covered before the lights came on, making the whole place look like the old Checkpoint Charley on a busy night. Needless to say Reggie did not see the funny side of this new village entertainment. In fact he used to bang on the windows and shout hideous threats at the trespassers, he would have opened the windows but they were locked and I don't suppose that he could turn the keys up at short notice.
There had been some fairly reasonable attempts, I understand, with one or two of the fitter chaps almost reaching the front door when Reggie went and put the hammer on the game by wrapping barbed wire around the tops of his gates.
The only ally he has managed to find for his crusade against crime, so far, is the local policeman, PC Stratton. Usually he has about one case of cycling without a light and a couple of noisy parties to deal with in this village each year so I suppose that he feels the new organisation will help to justify his existence. Certainly no one who has lived here for more than a very short while thinks that assorted footpads and villains are something to worry themselves about unduly.
Everyone else seems to be consumed with apathy but Reggie has been sticking up little notices all over the place. They invite householders to telephone him and discuss 'the rising tide of lawlessness and crime which is engulfing our society'. It might be engulfing some places but since Peter Lavell stopped poaching and Ted Throssel got himself a television licence there's been little signs of a dribble around here, yet alone a deluge.
Still I suppose it all gives Bertie something to keep himself active. It must be a bit of a come-down going from running a busy miltary stores to living in a peaceful Dorset village. Nobody resents what he's up to, they just find it slightly amusing and completely irrelevant to their everyday lives. Bert, the landlord of the Lark Ascending has a theory about it, as he does about most things, "It's this fear that does it. If he took a bit more notice of what was going on around him and a bit less of what he saw on television he wouldn't be so frightened and could start to enjoy his life a bit more". In the mean time several of his regulars are practising pole vaulting ready for the next episode in the saga of Reggie's drive.