Anything to Declare? by Jon Frost Read Free Book Online Page A

hand in her mouth, she bit down with her chisel teeth and took three of his fingers clean off at the knuckle.
    Well, I did say it was lucky for
us
that he was there, not that it was lucky for
him.
    Being so close to the Newmarket racecourse, our airport also catered for the super-rich owners who flew in and out. A few times a year, billionaire oil-rich sheiks would descend in their private luxury Gulfstream jets and we, the lowly uniformed Customs officers (the unclean ones), would board to do a search of the plane. It wasn’t so much that we seriously thought these were legitimate targets for drug smuggling – we didn’t – but more that we were just a bit nosy. We wanted to see how the other half lived, so we could then report back to the other
other
half and say, ‘Blimey, it’s even better than we thought! Actually, they
don’t
eat kebab-topped pizza like us!’
    The bathrooms alone on these jets were small, gaudy palaces in themselves. Never before has so much gold and marble and onyx been employed in the simple task of a man wiping his arse. Or his manservant doing it for him. And there is a strange pleasure to be gained from having hot water running out of a solid gold tap. I guess it’s from getting something so ordinary from something so extraordinary. You’d more likely expect it to dispense chilled champagne. Or perhaps Irn Bru. But somehow the water seemed to take on a magical quality. Tap on/tap off . . . smile. Tap on/tap off . . . bigger smile. Yes, little things like this kept us simple people very happy.
    I was once on one of these super-luxurious planes of the super-rich when the owner and his entourage arrived back from Newmarket. The sheik invited me to sit down for coffee. He was fascinated by the job of Customs and we sat talking for a good hour. Finally, he leaned forward and, with his hand out, offered me a job as a sky marshal (an armed bodyguard on an aircraft). I was really shocked by the offer of this prestigious and literally high-flying job, so what could I say but . . . no. I hadn’t been with Customs for long and I felt like I owed the department greater service. Fool!
    The other unpredictable, sometimes nasty things we came across other than the horses were the little devils that rode them – the jockeys. Now, Patrick, our own little Irish short-arse Customs officer, had a pathological hatred of jockeys. Especially those from nearby Newmarket. We never did find out why. But, if it was because of anything like the encounter we were to have with a famous jockey, then it was perfectly understandable. Now, I’ve got nothing against a dwarf who dresses like a jester and spends his working life bouncing up and down on horses, really I haven’t (unlike Patrick – and why
was
that?). But if the guy behaves like an evil little twerp then all bets are off and, even though I’m a six-footer, don’t throw a ladder against me and send a jockey up it to tell me to pick on someone my own size. Some of these guys punch way above their height.
    The worst by far was a famous jockey named Leonard (the name has been changed to protect my life savings). He really was – and was well known for being – a total shit. Or, to give him his full title, as we called him, the World’s Shortest, Biggest Bastard. He had his own driver and a very large Mercedes limo that one day we found parked up in our staff-only car park. We approached the driver. He was a really nice bloke and he explained that, if he parked in the expensive short-stay car park, his boss, the millionaire Leonard, made him pay all the charges. In fact, he had to pay all the parking charges at all the race grounds and airports, and Mr Little Big Jockey would never recompense him. Over a couple of crafty fags, he told us more.
    He said that his boss, Leonard, made it a rule that any hitch-hiker had to be picked up. Not bad, I thought, maybe I’d misjudged him. But, the driver went on, the hitch-hiker was made to sit in the front, was not