The Boyhood of Burglar Bill (7 page)

‘That’s the best pitch ever!’ cried Ronnie, in a rare display of enthusiasm.

‘I could play for always on that pitch,’ agreed Arthur.

‘Me too,’ said Edna May.

‘Not right back, though,’ Malcolm said, and he produced a massive sigh. ‘I don’t like it.’

One more canal with its bridge and we were out and above the main cup of the town. Nowadays, 2004, at this junction the M
₅
thunders overhead on thirty-foot stilts. The houses that we passed that night are, most of them, still there: vibrating with the traffic, shivering like Mrs Moore.

When I arrived home the house was in darkness. Dad had left already, off to the Buffs: the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes, a club for men that met every Friday night in an upstairs room at the Malt Shovel. Mum was not yet back from her work, cleaning offices. Dinah rose up from the rug, wagging her stumpy tail. I drank thirstily, straight from the tap, made myself some bread ‘n’ drippin’ and sat for a time with the lights off, in the firelight.

In the heat of the fire my mud-slicked socks and knees were drying out. Soon little patterns and crazings would form and eggshell layers of mud would fall away. My boneless body sank into the
easy chair – under extra gravity, it seemed – worn out and sore. A graze on my elbow was beginning to sting. My brain was drifting.

I felt… what? A wordless,
thought
less something. A sense of radiating contentment, happiness. Moves played out in my head. I could see the
₃
D geometry of them: the pitch, the players, the ball. Especially this: I get the ball, moving left, moving left, drawing the defenders across the pitch, then swivel and hit a twenty-yard pass with my left foot back the other way,
into space
. ‘The Ball inside the Full Back’, exactly as Stanley Matthews described it.

And later, drifting still: three cheers from the ever-generous Sister MacPherson and her bumblebee team; more magical oranges from the capacious folds of Rufus Toomey’s coat; Tommy Pye shadowing Joey’s every move, intent on getting that puppy; a commotion, smashed glasses in the Perrott Arms; Brenda dropping hints about ‘other girls getting a game’; Monica smiling, maybe, but not at me.

I go to bed, forgetting to draw the curtains, omitting to have a wash. (I’d pay for that in the morning.) A double-decker bus comes blazing past the window. I just about hear the lifted latch on the
door below. Mum’s home. But the sound is in my dreams already. Spencer and Tommy Ice Cream talking. Brenda in the team. That little stoical boy. I am asleep… well, almost. Ankle socks.

13
Mrs Purnell and the Creosoted Fence

Saturday morning and pandemonium in the street.

‘Raag-aboah! Raag-aboah!’

The rag-and-bone man was out there giving away paper windmills in exchange for household scrap. Also, in certain circumstances for special items, day-old chicks! Kids, of course, are suckers for anything free. They will scramble and fight to get it, needed or not. I was supposed to be helping Mrs Moore. I had fetched a sack of coke from Russell’s yard, balanced precariously on our old pram. Presently, I was drinking a glass of Vimto and eating arrowroot biscuits in Mrs Moore’s kitchen. Later I would shovel the coke down the chute into the cellar. But when the cry arose, ‘Raag-aboah! Raag-aboah!’, it was like the Pied Piper. And I ran with all the rest.

Spencer joined me and together we ransacked the wash house and dad’s shed. Elsewhere in the
street other more law-abiding kids were pestering their mothers. Mine, fortunately, was out. Spencer’s situation was different. His mother kept everything so spick-and-span there was nothing in their house to swap.

We gathered together a few items – tin cans, buckled bike wheel, ruined umbrella, newspapers – and stuffed them into a sack. Jack Piggott with his pony and cart was parked at the bottom of Tugg Street with a scrum of kids and a flurry of windmills around him. His pony, Monty, was tucking into a nosebag of oats and being petted half to death by the crowd. Up on the cart, in a cardboard box with little holes in it (‘That’s a nice cardboard box with little holes in it!’) were the day-old chicks. You could hear their tiny tantalizing ‘Cheep, cheeps’! I was familiar with day-old chicks. We bought them ourselves from time to time in West Bromwich market. Once, I remember, we had this chick, one of half a dozen, and it died in the kitchen, slumped forward on its beak like a book end. Mum came in from the yard, saw it and
put it in the oven
. I was horrified. Only the oven was not so hot, and the heat, as Mum intended, revived it.

What Spencer and I got from Jack Piggott were two windmills. Which pleased us at first till we realized we were too old for windmills. A day-old
chick was a prize to possess; windmills were for babies.

I accompanied Spencer then to Cotterill’s to get his hair cut. Mr Cotterill was hard at work; Saturday morning was his busy time. Mysteriously, he had acquired two cups of tea, one to the left of him, one to the right, from both of which he was drinking. He also had a racking cough. There was more tea in the saucers than anywhere else. The radio was on so loud conversation was impossible. The floor had disappeared under a rug of hair. Three or four smokers were assisting Mr Cotterill in obliterating the atmosphere.

In the afternoon Ronnie, Spencer and I got a fire going at the end of Ronnie’s garden, which sloped away and was therefore hidden from the houses. Ronnie acquired the matches and a couple of paper bags. Spencer and I foraged around for combustible material: stuff from dustbins, twigs, an old and rotting seed tray. I had a passion for lighting fires. I would have made a good caveman. Later, Ronnie obtained a potato from the house and we tried cooking it. As time went by, other items were added to the flames: a rubber band which produced a dreadful (wonderful!) smell, a lead soldier which melted down into a blob, a tiny celluloid frog which
disappeared entirely in a puff of smoke. Eventually, we ate the potato, passing it round from hand to hand. Spencer, well-mannered as always, wiped it first with his hankie. The potato was charred black on the outside, raw on the inside and delicious. I can recall the taste of it even now.

We sat on our haunches around the dying fire. Ronnie proposed that we piddle on it to put it out. For safety reasons. I made a joke about Ronnie becoming a fireman when he grew up. Spencer rubbed – thoughtfully, absent-mindedly – his cropped head, and pulled something out of the long grass.

‘Hey, look at this!’

It was a rusty tin can with a wire handle.

‘Mine,’ said Ronnie.

What Spencer had found was a fire-can. He gave it a swing. ‘Remember that time with Mrs Purnell?’

‘Yeah,’ said I.

‘Yeah,’ said Ronnie, though he as it happened had not been there.

A nosy cat came down the garden to have a look at us. A plane flew overhead. We poked the fire, resurrected it, and told ourselves, patchworking it together, the story (resurrecting
it
too) of…

Mrs Purnell and the Creosoted Fence
. It was last year, early November and the dark nights coming. It was
the season for fire-cans. A fire-can was a serious delight to me: portable fire! To make one you needed a can, a hammer, a six-inch nail, a block of wood for hammering into and wire for the handle. Then, take the can, hammer a dozen holes into it and attach the handle. Grown-ups disapproved of fire-cans and confiscated them on sight. Spencer and I hid ours behind the Bodleys’ hen house.

One evening about half-past five – it was the night before bonfire night – Spencer and I were returning from Milward’s with a bag of fireworks and sparklers, bought with our own money. We had stood for three nights outside the Malt Shovel with a guy in a pram. The guy was hardly more than a sack of salvage in a pair of trousers and a hat, but it had earned us three and ninepence.

The street was darkening fast. A solidifying mixture of fog and smoke was gathering above the rooftops and blocking off the ends of the street. The cemetery was invisible. We paused beneath a street lamp to admire again our collection of bangers, volcanoes and silver rain. It seems to me now I almost more loved looking at them,
reading
them, with their fairground colours and exotic names, than letting them off.

A figure loomed out at us from the entry, hesitant
and quivering. ‘H-h-hallo, boys.’ It was Mrs Moore – ‘Evenin’, Mrs Moore!’ – off with her jug to the pub.

Spencer took the fireworks into his house and returned soon after with a newspaper under his coat. We drifted across the yard. The Bodleys’ dog barked and rattled on its chain. The Bodleys’ baby howled from an upstairs window. Behind the Bodleys’ hen house we recovered our fire-cans and prepared to christen them: Spencer’s paper, my matches, a previously collected stash of rabbit-hutch straw and twigs.

The theory of fire-cans was straightforward: light your fire, get it going, fill it up and swing. The rush of air acted as a bellows. In the right conditions, a well-made can would glow red hot like a furnace. Sometimes they even melted. Sometimes sparks flew and boys set light to themselves. Eyebrows and even eyes were lost.

This time we were more in danger of choking to death. Smoke was considerable, but flames were few. The twigs were too green and sappy.

‘Come on!’ I headed back up the yard.

‘Where we going?’

Crouching down, I scuttled along behind the row of wash houses. Spencer followed.

‘Where we –’

‘Sh!’

Mrs Purnell’s was where we were going. She had a fence of loosely slatted creosoted boards around one section of her garden to keep the dogs off. What she grew there, I cannot recall.

It was getting darker and foggier all the time. Blurred squares of light glowed out across the yard from various windows; a cloud of steam from the open lighted window of the Fogartys’ wash house; an expanse of lighted roof from the Creda.

On hands and knees we crept up to the Purnells’ fence. Nervous hens clucked nearby.
They
knew we were there.

Spencer whispered hoarsely. ‘I don’t like this.’

I pulled hard on a board.

‘I think we should…’

It wouldn’t budge.

‘Let’s
go
!’

I tried another. The Bodleys’ baby was still bawling. A car horn sounded in the street. The board creaked horribly and split; half of it came away in my hand. I fell back on to Spencer, who was crouched behind me. Then – bang! – the nearest lavatory door flew open and a dreadful, raving apparition with a torch was on us. I was grabbed, half throttled, dragged to my feet and yelled at.

‘That’s my fence, y’little bugger!’

It was Mrs Purnell. She snatched the stolen board, threw it down and landed me a fearful swipe to the head.

‘I’ll teach you!’

Back I tumbled on to Spencer again. He yelled, I yelled, Mrs Purnell was still yelling, the hens were going mad and a pink-faced Mrs Fogarty was shouting questions from her wash-house window.

Mrs Purnell hauled me up again. Spencer, she ignored. He could have run but chose to stay.

‘I’ll give you bonfires!’

She was a mighty woman, half as big again as my mother, but, as it turned out, not so tough.

Mum was there, in her apron and one slipper. ‘Hey!’ She grabbed my arm and pulled me free. Mrs Purnell advanced. Mum stood firm.

‘Bloody kids!’

‘
My
kids,’ said Mum, briefly, it seems, adopting Spencer. ‘Hit your own.’

Unpersuaded, Mrs Purnell tried to wallop me again. ‘Bloody bonfires!’

I was tucked in behind my mother, with Spencer (shivering) behind me. Mrs Purnell sought to hit us with the broken board.

‘Hey!’ Mum grabbed the board and hit her with it.

Mrs Purnell dropped her torch, staggered back against the fence and – ‘Bloody cow!’ – retreated.

It was over. Mum shepherded us across the yard. Mrs Purnell’s parting insults were ignored, and Mrs Fogarty’s pleas for information. Spencer came to our house to clean himself up before going home. I could taste blood in my mouth. The stinging pattern of Mrs Purnell’s fingers was visible still as I gazed at myself in the bluebird mirror. Presently, as the pain faded and Spencer left, I began to consider my alibi.

14
Mr Cork, Mr Skidmore
and Mrs Glue

On Monday morning in assembly Mr Reynolds was so cheerful he looked ready to float away. His smile shone down on us like the sun. We were all his friends at that moment, every one of us, even Amos. (Pear drops all round and no cane.) The ‘A’ team had hammered Tabernacle Street 9–2. This was a doubly satisfying result for Mr Reynolds. The headmaster of Tabernacle Street was Mr Gittings. He and Mr Reynolds had been students together at the same college. Their rivalry was ancient and unceasing. So, well, yippee, hooray and goodbye Tabernacle Street. What’s more, amazingly, other boys from this school and – goodness me! – one girl had also achieved great things. Now to cap it all, they were to play each other – ‘Sh!’ – yes, play each other in the semi-finals.

The players were invited to stand up and take a bow. A wave of shyness washed over me and my
face felt hot. Ronnie looked cool; Edna May was smiling confidently around. Spencer, our ever-modest manager, remained seated. Mr Reynolds, glowing like a lamp, continued to speak for some time, concentrating now on the quality of coaching going on, and indeed that Rood End Primary was justly famous for. Mr Cork was invited to take a bow. It startled me, I recall, to see how even this fierce man was affected by such public praise and the ragged cheers that accompanied it. He flushed and waved his solitary arm like a man bothered with bees.

Mr Reynolds in this particular assembly made no mention of Jesus or any goings-on in the toilets. All the same, the otherwise happy scene was blighted in the end. Children, when gathered together in any numbers, have a natural instinct for chaos. They can sense the possibility of it, like a dog anticipating a walk. Thus it was that ripples of movement – nudging, elbowing,
pinching
– arose, accompanied by an expanding hubbub. Mr Reynolds, his smile switched off, was required to quench things.