The case of Gerald, the naked cyclist, a real Yorkshireman born to be wild

It’s no laughing matter, I told myself as I drove down the steep wooded hillside to Kirkham Priory and bumped my way over the level crossing. No laughing matter all. But when you’re called out to investigate a 60-year-old male, whose been seen on the public highway, on a pushbike, stark naked – well, it’s hard to keep a straight face.

In this day and age of course, we’re all wary of any suggestion of behaviour that might be construed as sexually threatening – or worse – so this could have been a serious matter. However, I was pretty sure I knew the man in question. It had to be Gerald. Who else could fit the caller’s description? He was according to the lady who’d rung in, “riding along with his front basket full of old tin cans, smoking a pipe, and not a stitch on him but a straw hat.”

The thing with Gerald is, first and foremost, he’s a Yorkshireman. And if you don’t quite know what that means, let me say that among his many attributes a real dyed-in-the-wool Yorkshireman is his own man.

I’m not sure what Gerald’s background was. He didn’t have much of an accent, but he was Yorkshire through and through. He was an educated man. He’d been married and had a family, but for some reason or other he’d dropped out of what we call respectable life and gone off to live in the wilds as an ageing child of nature.

Well, I suppose that’s a slight exaggeration: what he’d done was build himself some sort of retreat in the woods, not far away from Kirkham, but a long way off the road. It was part way between caravan and shed, it was static and as such I suppose it wasn’t exactly legal, but the farmer who owned the woods had never objected and in any case Gerald only lived there part of the year. April to October, more or less.

The rest of the time he stayed at his niece’s house over Ripon way. But in the summer months I’d occasionally see him, puffing away on his pipe as he gathered armfuls of firewood, his bike leaning against a convenient hedge or gate; or I’d spot him wheeling it home with a five-gallon container balanced on the handlebars.

He had a couple of old army jerry-cans that he used to fill with spring water he collected from the pipe that fed one of the drinking-troughs in the nearby cow-pasture. He rarely had more than a pair of shorts on, but if he decided to discard them – well, it was time to put him right about what the law did and didn’t allow.

It was cool, grey day but the rain that had been falling all morning had stopped at last. When I came to the green lane that led to his place I saw it was thoroughly overgrown. There was no way I’d get my Puddle Hopper down there. So I parked on the old forestry track and set off on foot. “Great,” I muttered to myself as the overhanging branches showered water down my neck and the rank grasses soaked my trouser legs.

I smelled the place before I actually spotted it. It wasn’t the sweet smell of burning wood, but rather the pungent aroma of charred plastic. And as I entered the little clearing where the old shed stood, there he was: naked as the day he was born, bent over an old dustbin and pulling out a tangle of electrical cable on the end of a garden fork. I watched as he dumped it into the brazier, then stepped back as black smoke and yellow flames swirled around him.

“Now then,” I said.

“Ah, good afternoon.” Gerald didn’t seem at all surprised by my presence. He just stuck his fork into the ground and turned to face me.

“I’m PC Mike Pannett from Malton,” I said. “I’m your rural beat officer.” It’s hard to know where to look when a man’s got nothing on, so I nodded at the fire instead. “At least you’ve got a nice warm job.”

“Yes, I save them up for days like this.” He reached out with his fork and pulled a strand of copper wire from the blaze. “Surprising how much this stuff fetches at the scrapyard.”

As he spoke, a gust of wind shook the trees and a shower of fat drops hissed on the glowing sides of the brazier. “Listen,” I said, “can I have a word – inside?” I looked across at the door of his little dwelling. It was a wooden-framed thing, painted yellow and glazed with the fluted glass they used to put in back doors thirty or forty years ago.

He must have rescued it from a builder’s skip somewhere. It still had the original plastic numbers on it: 34. Inside he sank into an old leather-upholstered car seat and offered me a wooden rocker. There was barely room for both of us between a folding bed, a black pot-bellied stove and one of those glass-fronted kitchen cabinets, its front folded down to make a work top. I doubt that Gerald’s entire home measure more than about six feet by ten. And was it my imagination, or was the whole place titlted to one side?

I decided to get right down to it. I had little choice. He was sitting there, relaxed, at peace with the world, legs apart, wiping some mud off his food on a square of old carpet before tamping a fresh wad of tobacco into his pipe.

“Mr Rodgers,” I said, pulling out a notepad and flicking it open, “I’m afraid I’ve received a complaint which I believe may concern you.”

I stared hard at the empty page of my notepad as he crossed his legs and sucked on his pipe. Then I looked up at the ceiling which seemed to be lined with a patchwork of yellow and blue fertiliser bags. “Oh yes,” he said, through a fog of blue smoke, “and what might that be about?”

“It’s from a lady,” I said, “down in the village. She said she saw someone who answered your description cycling past the other morning dressed in – well, in not very much.”

Gerald took his pipe out of his mouth and balanced it on the edge of a the glass-fronted dresser. “And that’s the point, is it? That I wasn’t wearing very much?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I think you’ll find, Officer, that under British law a man has a perfect right to dress as he pleases. Or has something changed? It’s been a while since I read what passes for a newspaper these days.”

“Her exact words were” – I sought refuge in the empty notepad again – “that you ‘had all your goods on display’. She was quite upset.”

“Look, Constable... Pannett, did you say?” Gerald picked his pipe back up, flicked his lighter into life and sucked the flame in the bowl. “I’m not a paid up member of the Naturists’ Society or whatever they call it, but I believe it is better for mental and physical health to expose my skin to the sunlight during the summer months. That’s the way I believe nature intended us to live.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “In the woods here, that’s fine. But when you’re out and about on your bike, would you just think about the public at large – especially the ladies – and try to...” I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help it: I gestured towards his nether regions. “Try to keep things under wraps, eh?”

Cases like this can be difficult. Where does the law draw the line between self-expression and giving offence? We have naturists’ beaches now, even on the east coast of Yorkshire. And you have to believe that anyone who’ll prance about naked on the beach at Fraisthorpe when that wind’s coming off the North Sea has to believe in what they’re doing. So when you’re dealing with a character like Gerald – well is he just a bit of a character, a determined individualist, or has he some sort of mental health issue? It’s a tough call.

Having had my chat with Gerald, I’d decided that a gentle warning and a word of advice would hopefully sort things out. We would see if there were any more complaints over the next few week. I left him to his scrap-metal reclamation. As I walked back through the dripping woods to my vehicle I thought about the endless variety of cases that come your way as a copper. I certainly couldn’t remember dealing with anything quite like this before.

Not On My Patch, Lad, published by Hodder & Stoughton, is out now in paperback, priced £7.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepost.co.uk