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He has dealt with people such as Larry, an alcoholic, pot-bellied Del Boy who always managed to stay just one step ahead of the law. And then there was Phoebe, a vulnerable woman with learning difficulties forced into handing over her home by two heartless tricksters. As an anti-social behaviour officer, Nick spent years tackling cases like these. And now he has revealed it all in a jaw-dropping new book about his last year on the ASBO front line. “If somebody next door to you is hoovering at three in the morning or is dealing crack and is armed with a machete, I was the person on the other end of the phone armed with nothing more than a pen,” Nick says.

It’s a shocking testament to what happens when mental illness, abuse, drug-dealing and domestic violence collide with an out-of-control workload set against a system beset by funding cuts.

That is the backdrop for Anti-Social: The Secret Diary of an Anti-Social Behaviour Officer, a book that could have been a bleak and depressing read. But although some of the content is disturbing, it is also laugh-out-loud funny. The delivery is punchy, and the humour dark – think Irvine Welsh minus the Scottish vernacular.

It came about after Nick, 48, realised he could either continue his 15-year career or hang on to his sanity.

“People are inspired to write books for loads of reasons such as love or passion,” he says. “For me it was October, I was standing in a tower block in the freezing cold and I was photographing some human waste on the floor because somebody had been sleeping in the stairwell.”

Nick’s role as a local authority anti-social behaviour officer was to support communities living in social housing and to resolve disputes of any size.

In one example, Nick recalls being lambasted by Only Fools And Horses actor Roger Lloyd-Pack at a residents’ meeting. “Being called incompetent by Trigger,” he admits wryly. “That’s the kind of thing that stays with you.”

Elsewhere, the reader is taken from pathos to snort-inducing comedy and back again in just two sentences, as in the case of Larry.

“I still think to this day, he’s immortal,” jests Nick, who is originally from Liverpool but now lives in south London with his wife.

“He was 5ft, a heavy drinker with a complexion of a faded lemon and just the most cartoonish potbelly you’ve ever seen, caused by his renal functions breaking down. He always looked on the brink of collapse but year after year he thrived.

“One day there was a flood in his home on the 22nd floor and when the plumbers went in – Larry was not at home so they forced entry – they found a fully operational cannabis factory.

“They fixed the leak, phoned the police and as they were waiting for them to arrive, Larry turned up and went into the flat. Everything started flying out of the window – lights, cannabis plants, soil bags, the lot.”

By the time the police arrived, all the evidence was on the pavement and there was nothing they could do to link Larry directly to the crime.

“It was a perfect example of what you know and what you can prove being two different things,” says Nick. Neither the housing estate in question nor any of the locations are revealed and all names have been changed to protect identities. Even without the potential legal ramifications if Nick did identify them, it is a wise choice because some stories would be just too haunting to read otherwise.

Such as Albert, for example, an 80-year-old tenant with mental health issues who died alone in squalor with his cats after repeatedly refusing help from the council.

His body lay in his flat undetected for two weeks until neighbours reported a terrible smell. When he died, he’d been writing out Christmas cards to himself from his cats.

“Even for somebody like me who had done the job for so long, there are cases that will always stay with you and Albert is one of them,” Nick says candidly. “There are a lot of people out there living on their own who don’t have family or friends to support them. There are probably a lot more Alberts out there to be honest, I just happened to be the person who found out about that particular Albert.”

Despite the humour, Nick treats his subjects with respect. He wrote the book partly out of an increasing frustration with television programmes and societal depictions of people facing unimaginable hardships and/or grinding poverty. He attributes much of the extreme behaviour he witnessed to the absence of a safety net caused by funding cuts to the police, welfare and legal systems.

“At the start of the job I was doing, you were maybe trying to put out a house fire with a fire extinguisher. By the time I left, it was like trying to do it with a colander full of water,” he says.

Several of the offenders he dealt with represented themselves in court, some out of choice, some because they couldn’t afford a solicitor.

“The cuts to legal aid are denying people basic access to justice and everybody should be concerned about that,” Nick says. “Nobody ever thinks they will have to defend themselves in court, including the people I used to take there.”

The consistent, unadulterated horror of the cases he dealt with took a huge toll.

One such case was that involving Phoebe, who had an electrical cord wrapped around her neck by her assailants. They told her they would cut her up and dump her body in tiny pieces “in bins all around the estate”.

Thankfully, her story had a happy ending but cases like hers impact on the mental health of the council staff who have to intervene.

“My colleagues and other frontline officers that I’ve worked alongside had their own ways of dealing with what they saw,” says Nick. “Some were prominent churchgoers and found solace in that.

“I knew one person who would go paintballing and shoot people with paint every weekend as a way of getting it out of their system. As I mentioned in the book, some of my coping mechanisms were probably not the best – maybe drinking more than I should.”

It’s an understatement. Preceding each month of the year-long memoir, Nick details the medication and alcohol he’s consumed to deal with his depression and anxiety.

By the December, this had reached 90 units and he started drinking at lunchtime to get through the day. He says his mental health has improved since he left but he wanted to be truthful about the realities.

Nick grew up on a council estate, the kind, he writes, which “wins design awards, then has to be demolished 15 years later because chunks of concrete are falling off the buildings”.

His parents separated when he was young, although his dad “was always completely in my life”, and he, his mum and his sister relied on school uniforms provided by the council and occasional trips to food banks.

“I had a practised line in deception when answering the door to the rent man,” he says, although he stresses there were “checks and balances in place” which he does not believe exist any more.

As a youngster he could have slipped into a life of crime himself because of the people he mixed with.

“One evening one of them said they were planning to do something criminal and I said, ‘Right, I’m going home’. Whether that decision was made through outstanding moral fibre or cowardice I don’t know but I made the right decision. On another night I might not have.”

He was nearly lured into drug dealing a few years later. “There was a period in my life which I’m not proud of, but also not ashamed of, where I was taking drugs and knew a local dealer from the same pub,” he says. “He felt I was trustworthy because I was not of that world and offered me a job. It was the weirdest job interview I ever had but, thankfully, I made the right decision to politely decline.

“I was in a stable relationship, I had a job and supportive family so the decision not to go down the route of drug dealing was an easy one.”

Nick has performed stand-up and taken two shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He is modest about his talent, saying he is not good enough to be a full-time comedian, but the university graduate is hoping for a career in writing.

The book is ripe for a TV or film adaptation. Who would play him?

“Tom Hardy,” he says of the Peaky Blinders heart-throb. And Larry? “Hmmm, as long as we have really good prosthetics and make-up I think anyone could handle that role,” he jokes.

I already can’t wait to see it.

Anti-Social: The secret diary of an anti-social behaviour officer by Nick Pettigrew (Century, £16.99) is published on Thursday. For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via www.expressbookshop.co.uk

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