“my policeman”

“my policeman” is Patrick Hazlewood’s recurring name for Tom Burgess: at once a description of Tom’s occupation and a possessive expression of attachment. First recorded in Patrick’s journal during 1957, it gives private language to a relationship that cannot safely be acknowledged in public. When passages from the journal are read at Patrick’s trial, the phrase becomes evidence for others as well, exposing an intimacy that Marion Burgess cannot subsequently forget.

The Name and Its First Uses

Patrick’s journal places the phrase within the cautious beginning of his interest in Tom. After seeing the young policeman emerge from a police box, Patrick imagines his beauty and strength beneath the uniform. The uniform is not incidental to the attraction: Tom’s work identifies him as a policeman, while Patrick’s chosen name draws that public identity into a private way of thinking about him.

Patrick does not describe immediate certainty that Tom will become his lover. After the so-called accident, he passes the police box again, feels buoyant, and imagines that friendship may be possible. He understands the pursuit as a “long game,” requiring patience rather than haste. His awareness that seeking a policeman’s look is risky makes restraint part of the relationship’s earliest grammar: he plans to leave the decision to Tom, who can return his glance or walk on. The possessive phrase therefore carries hope, but not evidence of an openly shared claim.

A journal entry dated October 1957 captures the name’s imaginative force. Patrick describes seeing Tom in the museum, standing before a painting, and presents his appearance there as the arrival of someone he has repeatedly pictured. The phrase binds that imagined figure to the actual man in the gallery. It is more intimate than a neutral reference to Tom’s occupation, but the entry also preserves the distance between wishing and knowing: Patrick’s private language has advanced ahead of any publicly defined relationship.

From Private Fantasy to Meetings

As Patrick and Tom meet, the phrase becomes a refrain through which Patrick interprets ordinary encounters. The December 1957 entry records that they have been meeting at lunchtimes when Tom can take a long break. It also notes that Tom has brought a schoolteacher to meet Patrick. Patrick describes the pair as mismatched, but his account’s attention to Tom’s companion shows that the name does not erase the constraints around Tom’s life. The schoolteacher, later known as Marion, is present in the record alongside Patrick’s private attachment.

Patrick imagines what a more public life with Tom might look like. In his projected scene, they arrive together at a familiar place, exchange greetings with Miss Brown, share a knowing smile, and leave with a touch on the shoulder that would signal domestic intimacy to onlookers. The scene is not reported as something that happened; it is Patrick’s imagined future. Its small social gestures matter because they translate the private phrase into a fantasy of being recognized as a pair, including the ordinary expectation of going home together.

The journal also records Patrick’s effort to interpret Tom’s words without making them more decisive than they are. When Tom speaks of a female friend, Patrick treats “Friend” as manageable, placing it among other possible descriptions of a woman in Tom’s life. The phrase “my policeman” thus coexists with uncertainty: it expresses Patrick’s attachment, while the surrounding entries register the need to assess what Tom’s conduct and relationships may mean.

A later visit at Patrick’s home further complicates the distinction between expectation and response. Patrick has prepared the spare room, but admits to himself only when the buzzer sounds that he expected Tom to return, despite having sent him away previously. After Tom emerges looking pale, Patrick kisses him; Tom does not stiffen and then rests his head on Patrick’s shoulder. Patrick reads this brief response as a turning point. The phrase’s emotional certainty is no longer sustained only by an imagined public scene, although the evidence still presents the relationship within circumstances of caution and concealment.

A Private Expression Under Public Pressure

The name also sits within the pressures surrounding Tom’s position as a policeman. Tom tells Patrick that a superior has asked when he will make a respectable policeman’s wife of some girl, and that bachelors may find it difficult to rise through the ranks in the division. The institution’s expectations connect marriage and professional respectability. Against that demand, Patrick’s phrase gives Tom an intimate identity that is not the one his workplace is urging him to perform.

The wider Brighton police scandal sharpens the sense of risk without making Tom responsible for the wrongdoing described. Patrick reads that the Chief Constable and a detective inspector have been charged with conspiracy. He is pleased that senior officers face possible disgrace and imprisonment, then worries that ordinary, honest members of the force may bear the consequences of their superiors’ actions. In this context, “my policeman” joins personal longing to Tom’s vulnerable occupational position: the title that makes the phrase distinctive also ties their private association to an institution under scrutiny.

Patrick’s journal recalls an outing in fog when the two men walk in silence and can see neither the river, the downs, nor the sky. Patrick proposes turning back, but Tom wants to reach the sea first. The scene offers companionship without explanation or declaration. Its quiet is unlike the imagined public entrance in Patrick’s fantasy, yet both passages show him measuring intimacy through shared movement and small choices. The phrase remains his way of holding those moments together, not a neutral label confirmed by public convention.

The Phrase at Trial and Afterward

At Patrick’s trial, the expression crosses from private writing into a public legal proceeding. The courtroom is small and stuffy, and the gallery is warned that the case will contain material considered offensive to ladies; the women leave. The proceedings then turn to Patrick’s journal. A passage dated October 1957 is read aloud, and the question is put to Marion: who is “my policeman”? A December entry follows, including Patrick’s account of meeting Tom at lunchtimes and of Tom bringing the schoolteacher to meet him. The repeated phrase, once part of a personal record, now helps the court frame the relationship under examination.

Marion is directly asked whether Patrick was having an indecent relationship with her husband. Yet Tom is not mentioned again during the remainder of the trial, although Marion later recalls that his name was on the tip of her tongue. The difference is consequential: the phrase has brought Tom into the courtroom’s account, but the trial does not give Marion an occasion to speak his name as she wishes to. Before the case reaches court, Tom resigns from the police force. The phrase’s revelation therefore coincides with professional consequence, while the evidence does not suggest that the trial openly resolves every question about Tom’s part in the relationship.

Afterward, Marion remembers the journal’s wording as a persistent sound she cannot free herself from. In her recollection, Patrick’s casual description of the couple as mismatched hurts because she believes he was right. “my policeman” consequently acquires a second life beyond Patrick’s desire: it becomes part of Marion’s lasting knowledge of the bond between Patrick and Tom, and of the disparity between that bond and her marriage. The expression’s movement—from journal, to courtroom reading, to memory—makes it both an intimate name and a durable record of what could not be openly said.