Reading Copy Book Blog

Let me give two small personal examples of episodes that take on a very different hue when refracted through the glass of Bradbury’s fireman’s helmet.

I spent a large chunk of last year living in a small town in the USA. Although it was a pretty little place, easily navigable by foot, no one at all used to walk around. Pedestrians anywhere other than the main street were regarded as eccentric at best. Even so, thanks to my UK programming, it was my frequent habit to go for a walk at dusk. Or at least, it was until I got fed up of being stalked by a slow-cruising squad car as I did so, a car that I would often spot tracking me, at walking place, on the opposite side of green squares that dotted the town, following me down streets, waiting for me at junctions, letting me know that my increasingly less relaxed progress was being monitored.

Just in case readers in the UK are starting to feel superior at this point, the other incident happened near my childhood home, in the Lune valley. There, three friends and I were out one evening, walking a dog. A policeman stopped us, detained us by the road side for an hour, searched us and threatened to arrest us all. The reason he eventually gave? We had wet feet close to agricultural land. That we had just walked from my friend’s house across the fields along a public footpath carried no weight with him.