ONE sure way to get people in the Stroud Valleys scurrying from shops and offices and heading for their cars is for Jayne Fellowes to walk down the street.

Jayne has been a traffic warden for the past seven years and she is now used to the fact that simply by walking past a line of parked cars she can get more hearts beating than David Beckham or Kylie Minogue.

Every day of her working week motorists appeal to her better nature and plead with her not to issue a parking ticket, assuring her that they have only been parked illegally for a matter of moments and that her watch must surely be wrong.

More rarely someone will shout abuse when he or she (women are more hostile than men when it comes to parking tickets, apparently) finds the dreaded white ticket stuck to the windscreen.

Only once in seven years has Jayne been physically assaulted after issuing a ticket and she doesn't expect to have to face that particular problem for at least another seven years.

"I don't get a lot of hassle," she said. "I try and treat people with a nice manner. If you treat people how you would like to be treated, with politeness and a smile, which doesn't cost anything, they are normally polite in return."

That seemed generally to be the case during the morning I spent with Jayne while she went about her duties in the centre of Stroud.

Of the dozen or so motorists to whom she issued tickets no-one was openly rude or abusive and only a few complained.

One man, whose car had been parked outside his own offices in London Road for more than an hour, complained bitterly that it was hard enough for small businesses to be successful without adding parking tickets to the worries.

Jayne's answer was that if he freed up the parking space his customers would be able to park more easily and perhaps the business would do better as a result.

One woman bemoaned the fact that she had only been parked for 10 minutes longer than the permitted half hour.

"They don't go into a shop to buy a pint of milk and expect half a pint free, so why should they expect to park for 45 minutes when it says clearly on the sign that the limit is 30," was Jayne's argument.

Jayne and her colleague Noel Baadjes are between them responsible for patrolling a wide area of the Stroud Valleys.

Their patch includes Nailsworth, Painswick, Stonehouse, King's Stanley, Rodborough, Paganhill, Cashes Green and Cainscross as well as Stroud town centre and the outskirts such as Slad Road and the Top of Town.

Their aim, contrary to the view of a lot of motorists, is not to issue as many parking tickets as possible but to keep traffic flowing freely by preventing parking in no parking zones and to make as many legal on-street parking spaces available as possible by ensuring that cars are not parked for longer than the legal time limit.

Jayne stressed that, unlike private contractors in cities, traffic wardens who work, as Jayne and Noel do, for the police Federation do not have a quota of tickets to fill and they are as happy to issue just two or three a day as 20 or 30.

For one thing, issuing a parking ticket involves a great deal of paperwork back at their base, Stroud police station.

Each time Jayne writes out a ticket she has to make a note not only of which road the car is parked in, for how long and the colour, make, model and registration number of the vehicle but also which shop it is parked in front of, which shop it is opposite, how many paces the vehicle is away from the sign stating the waiting limit, check that the tax disc is current and belongs to the vehicle and whether or not there is a disabled ID card and timer on display.

These checks are necessary in case the driver decides to challenge the ticket through the courts and every ticket has to be carefully logged back at the station.

Jayne, who confesses to being over 30, applied to join the police force when she left school but failed the maths test, ironic really as she went on to become chief cashier of a building society before throwing it all up for the joys of her present job.

And she does enjoy it, she likes the smart uniform, although she finds the woollen skirts very hot in summer, and it annoys her that some of the people she meets believe that because she is wearing a uniform she is somehow sub-human.

"A lot of people think if you're a traffic warden you've got a personality defect," she said.

But she is saved from sinking into despair by her sense of humour, which she says is essential, by the relative freedom on the job and by the people she meets every day, many of whom treat her as a mother confessor and unburden all their problems.

The motorists of Stroud town are, on the whole, pretty law abiding, Jayne finds, and they are mostly friendly and polite, not always the case with some of the smaller communities she has to patrol.

She was reluctant to say where the people were least pleasant but she did indicate that the more affluent the community the worse the rudeness.

But she has few complaints.

Most motorists realise that she has a job to do and if she was not doing it well there would be nowhere to park and traffic snarl-ups would be commonplace.