It’s a cylinder of solid timber (possibly hickory) stained dark brown, three feet long and four inches in diameter. About seven inches from one of its rounded ends, the handle end, there’s a rubber washer, which was designed to stop it falling straight through a metal ring on a gun-belt. It’s the old-fashioned version of what’s variously known as a baton, a night-stick, a riot-stick, a club. In Los Angeles, it was carried by police officers up until the early 1980s, for use in circumstances when they needed an “impact weapon” that would be “less than lethal”. Less than lethal, that is, provided it didn’t make contact with a skull.

  I’ve imagined sometimes how it might have been wielded in the past, in bar brawls or on the street, against rioters or even against demonstrators; students, maybe, protesting over the Vietnam War. When it came into my hands, I hadn’t long finished being a student myself.

  It was March 1979, I wasn’t yet 21, and on my first foreign assignment as a reporter. Well, assignment might be stretching it. I was in Los Angeles on a holiday, with a party of British police officers. My first job was on the independent weekly for coppers, Police Review, which had recently begun arranging annual trips to LA for its readers. They did all the things tourists did in the city: touring the stalls and nibbling the produce of the butchers, bakers and candy-makers at Farmers’ Market, wandering the sets of Hollywood movies such as Jaws and The Bionic Woman at Universal Studios, and hurtling round Space Mountain in Disneyland. But they also learned a little of how law enforcement worked on the other side of the pond. There were visits to the FBI Academy and a women’s prison, and gatherings where they could talk shop with their local counterparts. A few of us even hitched a ride in a patrol car.

  I remember Sergeant Bob Darnell, one hand on the wheel, waving the other out of the window at fizzing, come-hither, neon signs. “Not the sort of place where you’d want to take a walk,” he said. We were patrolling a section of Sunset Boulevard, that fabled thoroughfare on which, a couple of evenings earlier, traveller’s cheques, passport and camera stuffed in a bag over my shoulder, I’d taken a walk. It was my first time in America, and I liked the idea of a street that, from the hotel map, seemed to go on for ever. 

  A few blocks further on, Darnell waved at a restaurant. That was a meeting place for “chickenhawks” (old men, he explained, with designs on young ones). It was also where, a few days earlier, one member of the group with which I was travelling had gone for breakfast. A stretch further on (“which we’ve pretty well cleaned up”) had previously been “one big massage parlour”. Darnell, a softly-spoken man, was offering a guided tour of his Hollywood: more grime than glitter; more tack than tinsel. And all through the windows of an LAPD patrol car.

  Hanging out with cops wasn’t what I’d imagined myself doing when I’d arrived in London from a small town in Northern Ireland in 1976 to train as a journalist. I’d enrolled at the London College of Printing, which turned out to be a green-and-grey tower block opposite a pink shopping centre on the edge of one of the city’s biggest roundabouts. It was the tail-end of what had been one of the warmest, sunniest and driest summers of the 20th century. In the halls of residence in Tooting, in the south of the city, where I found a room, there was still a notice up in the bathroom I used: “SAVE WATER — SHOWER WITH A FRIEND!” Ah, I thought, this is the big city my mother warned me about.

  I could have trained nearer home, at the College of Business Studies in Belfast, but Belfast at the height of our inadequately named Troubles held little appeal. One of my sisters had done a bilingual secretarial course at the college, and when she came home at weekends her talk was always of bag searches and bomb scares. But there was another reason I didn’t want to train in Northern Ireland: I didn’t want to work in a place where even the newspapers were seen as Republican or Loyalist, and I didn’t want councillors, when I was noting down their circumlocutions, to be asking themselves whether I was a Protestant journalist or a Catholic one.

  Not that I dwelt much on council meetings. Like many of the students I joined in London, I pictured myself further down the line. When I was still at home, where I’d been a regular reader of Sounds, Melody Maker and New Musical Express, I’d quite fancied the idea of being a rock critic. But in London I found that the music papers, on the rare occasions when I could afford to buy them, were in thrall to punk, and I wasn’t. Yes, prog rock had been dreary, but punk was for pogoing to, not for listening to. I preferred lyrics with a little more subtlety. Anyway, a couple of months into my one-year course, and terrified by the cost of living in London, I’d begun to think that a career as a rock critic might be a short-lived one. I couldn’t have imagined then that the Rolling Stones would rock on into their seventies.

 Though journalism training quickly disabuses you of the notion of heroes, many of us had one. He was Harold Evans, whose paper, The Sunday Times, had a few years earlier broken the story of thalidomide, the supposedly harmless morning-sickness “wonder drug” that turned out to have devastating side-effects on babies while they were still in the womb. Evans’s five-volume manual of Editing and Design became our bible, and some of us dreamed of working one day for the man who had written it.

  At the end of the course, we were encouraged to try for as many job vacancies as possible, on the basis that we’d learn a few things and perform better in an interview for a position we really wanted. I applied, unsuccessfully, for work at Carpet Review Weekly, but shortly afterwards I was offered a job at Police Review.

  My boss there was Colin Simpson, a former member of Insight, the investigations team at The Sunday Times, who now and again, I quickly discovered, would take a story to his old colleagues. Colin had served as an army officer in Borneo and Sarawak and then dabbled in antique dealing before becoming, in Harold Evans’s own words, “a wily and fertile” journalist. Every so often when I was passing his office he’d call me in, push back his chair and, at the same time, his floppy hair and ask me: “Are you doing anything on Saturday? Because I might need a bit of help at The Sunday Times…”

  He hired me, I reckon, partly out of mischief. At the time, though I’d been teased for it at college by both fellow students and tutors, I still had a broad Northern Irish accent. Colin, I think, relished the idea of hearing me ask senior coppers about their firearms policies.

The cops I met on my trip to LA were certainly less stuffy than their British counterparts. Only a few hours before we were introduced to Sgt Darnell, I had gone into a station with Marie Bruniges, a Metropolitan policewoman, to inquire about the possibility of seeing how policing was done in Hollywood. We had assumed that there would be at least two days of form-filling and it still might never happen. There was none of that. “You wanna see the precinct and ride in a black-and-white? Sure, we can fix it. What time would you like to go out?”

 Now seemed as good a time as any. There was one tiny form to sign: the form that said that, in the unlikely event of our coming to any harm, we would not sue the Los Angeles Police Department for every cent it had.

  Then we were off, first to Sunset and later to downtown police headquarters, workplace for admin staff and senior detectives with city-wide jurisdiction. Officer Ellington, who told us he used to run the rollercoaster at Disneyland, showed us round the jail with its bank of closed-circuit TV cameras, under which some wag had taped a label with the words “Manufactured by the George Orwell Company”.

  Then it was back to the black-and-white and a drive through Rampart and Central, divided by the Harbour Freeway. It was there that a call came through on the radio: gunman at Hawthorn Avenue; officers in need of assistance. Darnell consulted his “cheater”, a thick LA street atlas. Hawthorn was just south of Hollywood, and the trouble was about nine blocks along it.

  We got to the building, an apartment block, to find another half a dozen officers outside, one with a pump-action shotgun. Another officer was reeling off a description: “Male, five feet, eight inches, 150 pounds, moustache, short Afro, tracksuit.”

  Inside, a man was said to be threatening his neighbours with an automatic rifle and a 44 Magnum. The previous night, we heard, he had shot at one of them through the door, been arrested and bailed. Now he was at it again.

  The Hollywood cops were cool enough, but the script seemed a bit cooked-up. The gunman claimed to be the son of the comedian Bill Cosby; the man he had shot at the night before taught martial arts to LAPD officers; and the maintenance man, who volunteered to to try to talk the gunman into giving himself up, was, like everyone else in Hollywood, including the bartender in my hotel, an aspiring star, who said he had a bit part as a police officer in a forthcoming Disney movie.

  All this came secondhand, passed on by cops coming and going as Marie and I stayed well back and I scribbled. Then Sgt Darnell came out to say it was all over. “They’re taking him away for 72 hours’ psychiatric evaluation.”

  We were about to get back in the car when Darnell told us there was no need: “You can walk — we’re right behind your hotel.”

  That hotel was the Hollywood Roosevelt, which had been the scene both of the first Academy Awards (in 1929) and of Marilyn Monroe’s first commercial, for suntan lotion, for which she posed on the diving board of the Tropicana Pool. At the time of our stay, 50 years on, the Roosevelt was generally acknowledged to be well past its best. (Or so I see now, when spare time and 21^st-century technology allow me to browse the shelves of a virtual library.) The hotel had fallen into disrepair in the 1970s and, according to Marc Wanamaker, a Hollywood historian, “was a disaster inside. It was remodelled different times inside and ruined — the ugliest interiors you ever saw.”

  It was the scale, the space, the height of it that registered then with me. Journalism college and a couple of years on the job had taught me to be a professional sceptic, but away from the desk, on my first trip to the United States, on my first stay in a skyscraper, I was a rubber-necked tourist.

  I was also a month or so shy of 21, so sometimes one of my fellow tourists would have to order my beer for me. That wasn’t a problem when, as happened a couple of times, we were socialising at the homes of local cops.   

  One of the cops invited a group of us to his house for drinks in the garden. There was LAPD memorabilia on sale, and — being young and foolish — I bought something to take back to the Police Review office. I can’t be certain now, but I think it might have been one of the new-style extendable batons made of polycarbonate. Anyway, I put it down somewhere and, when I was leaving at the end of the night, I couldn’t find it. 

 Our host, embarrassed by the disappearance of my souvenir, sent a colleague to my hotel the following day with some replacements: a cap, a badge and an old-fashioned wooden riot stick. How the hell, I wondered, was I going to get that on the plane…

  “Carry it as a walking stick, and limp a bit,” one of the British coppers suggested. So I did. Or maybe he did. And maybe he was asked in the end to check it in as hold luggage. I can’t remember – but it was too long to fit in a case and somehow I got it home. Security at US airports was a little more casual in 1979 than it has been since September 2001.

  On my return, the badge went into the office, and the cap, having sat around for a while on a shelf, was passed on elsewhere for children’s dressing-up games. The riot stick, for reasons this pacifist can’t properly explain, has survived a series of clear-outs and moves. I see it as something of a historical artefact.

  It was there in the first house Teri and I owned, which we moved into in April 1982. She was still unpacking boxes when I came home with untimely news: I’d been made redundant. Robert Maxwell, who owned the paper where I was then working as a sub-editor, Financial Weekly, had decided to close it.

  Having had a dull but steady job for nine months, I spent the next two-and-a-half years working as a “casual” sub anywhere I could find a shift: on the business and foreign pages of The Guardian; briefly, on the sports pages of The Sun; and, eventually, on Fridays and Saturdays, on the news pages of The Sunday Times. The last would turn into a full-time job, but before it did, there were, for a short time, shifts for three nights a week from midnight till six in the morning on the weekend pages of The Daily Express.

  Those were the days of hot metal, when newspapers were still printed in their own basements and the air down there smelt of lead and ink and the whole building would rumble when the presses began to roll. My boss at the Express, the night production editor, was a genial guy named Ian Norton. Shortly before we finished one morning, he asked: “Which way are you heading when we’re done?”

  “Victoria,” I told him.

  “Me too,” he said. “I’ll give you a lift.”

  I’d meant Victoria railway station; he’d meant an all-night pub called The Victoria opposite Smithfield meat market, where a notice declared that anyone “lawfully engaged on business in the market may drink… from the hours of 5 to 8 o’clock in the morning”. We opened its door to find butchers and porters in blood-spattered overalls buying rounds at the bar; night-bus drivers settling down at the tables to a breakfast of a heart attack on a plate. It was a scene that Hogarth would have relished.

  On one of the nights I was at the Express, and long before I was due home, Teri was woken by a noise; a noise that suggested to her that someone was downstairs.

  What the hell should she do? That LAPD riot stick was leaning against a corner of the wardrobe. She pulled it out, crept down the stairs and kicked open the door into the kitchen, swinging the riot stick in front of her as she went — like that Sixties spy Emma Peel* in The Avengers, I like to imagine, seeing off yet another villain. There was nobody there, nothing. She did the same in the other rooms. Clear there, too. She went back to bed, far from reassured.

  In mid-morning, while I was still asleep after my shift, she was chatting to our next-door neighbour, Howard. Had he heard anything last night, she asked. What sort of thing, he answered. She told him about the noise downstairs that had scared the life out of her. A grin spread across his face. 

  “Oh, Teri,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to get up and finish a bit of wallpaper-stripping. It must have been me you heard moving about.”

*Diana Rigg, who played Emma Peel, was among speakers at a rally in Trafalgar Square in London in  November 1976 after a march organised by the Peace People, the campaigning group founded in Northern Ireland by Mairead Corrigan, Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown. Also on the platform was the singer Joan Baez, belting out “We Shall Overcome”. I was on the march, too, partly as a supporter, partly as a student journalist learning the trade. A couple of years ago, when searching online for reports of the day, I found an obituary of McKeown, who died at 76 in 2019.  The accompanying picture showed him at the front of the march, arm in arm with Baez. On the far right of that picture was a young reporter in bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes, notebook in the left hand, pen in the right.