Paige talks about working as a police officer

Yes, certainly I was treated differently but it was of its time and that’s one of the paradoxes posed with trying to judge what happened in the past with today’s values and in all honesty I was so pleased to be a police officer and have a job and be working in London when the differences arose as they did I just saw it as – that’s how it is. So I can’t with hand on my heart say I was annoyed or angry about it or anything because I wasn’t. And the differences were for instance, our own protection. I patrolled on my own in central London and that was expected I was on equal pay at the time in 1981. They’d equaled the pay. Equal hours. Equal circumstances. And was expected to patrol on my own. However I wasn’t issued with a truncheon like the men were and I was given a handbag instead [laughs] and the rationale behind that was if they gave you a truncheon and you got into a fight they’d take the truncheon off of you and assault you and hurt you with the truncheon. Obviously that’s changed now.