Drunk, aggressive and swearing…bouncer reveals what your kids really get up to at night

Reading this book, you begin to realise how cripplingly middle-class most of the books you read tend to be. Read any cosy crime recently? Middle-class. Even the ultra-violent thrillers we all enjoy are just fantasies of a life a mite more brutal than our own cosseted existences, where the non-delivery of our milk is more heinous than anything short of high treason.

But here’s another view. George Bass is a full-time security guard at a busy university. He works four days on, four days off, earns a smidgen over the minimum wage, and here he’s writing about his life, which is rather more incident-packed than he’d like it to be.

‘this is a hard life and no mistake’

George can really write, and he supplements his income with some occasional freelance scribbling, which keeps his head above water when the gas bill goes up again. There’s no self-pity here, but this is a hard life and no mistake.

What characterises this book is a certain rough-and-ready humour, probably best summed up by the phrase ‘if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry’, possibly with the addendum ‘or hit someone’. Actually, we soon learn that hitting someone is seen among security guards as a failure. If you can talk your way out of violence, so much the better. One bloke parked on double-yellow lines went ‘from polite to psycho when I asked him to move. Maybe he thought calling me a c*** six times would get me to lose my temper, give him something to be a victim about.’ But he was wrong: ‘he could have called me a c*** all day if he’d wanted. I’ve been called one so many times it’s lost all meaning.’

It’s the stories that set this book apart. When George restocks the portable first-aid kit in his tactical vest, it feels heavy, but it’s the beginning of term, ‘prime knees-up season. I don’t want to run empty-handed to a flat where a girl’s kicked the kitchen door open, screamed “Rave, bitches!”, skidded on a pizza box, fallen backwards on a laminate floor and knocked herself out.

‘One of the last horizontals we attended was at least partially conscious… It roused itself and gave its identity as “mates with Dean in room five”. We got Dean out of his pit, watched him embrace his guest, reminded the pair about signing in visitors, and left them to it.

‘By the time we reached the end of the corridor we heard grunting, then a crash. We knocked on the door again to find the pair wrestling. Dean was told to get back under his duvet. His mate was given water and pointed to a cab rank.’

The use of the word ‘horizontals’ there suggests that security guards have the best jargon, bar none.

There was ‘a kid with a hair-trigger temper who was always threatening to waste his flatmates’ and one of the guards asked him to turn his music down.

‘No f***ing way,’ said the student. ‘I’m going to call my boys from Brixton. On your way home, you’re going to disappear. It won’t even cost me a bill.’

The guard sighed. ‘I’m from Brixton,’ he said. ‘Those 20-year-olds you’re dialling? I’m their uncle.’ The student turned the music down and then quietly went to bed.