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To placate Mum, he picks up the dinner plates from the table and slides them into the sink with enough noise to get her to bar him from clearing the rest. He stands back, eyeing the clock furtively, his big fingers twitching. Mum catches John grinning.
‘It’s not funny. Your father’s lack of self-control wastes our hard-earned money.’
We stay quiet because she’s taken the deep breath that means she hasn’t finished. Dad, too, is paying close attention; he’s heard what she’s about to say before but he’s going to have to hear it again.
‘Nothing is safe when he gets his hands on it.’ She catches Dad winking at us. ‘What is wrong with you? It’s not as if you don’t know your own strength, you do …’
John and I struggle not to laugh. She takes a threatening step towards us but weakens when she realizes that Dad, too, is choking back laughter.
She returns to the sink. ‘I give up.’
‘That’s the way he is,’ Aunt Winnie told us when Mum wasn’t around. ‘Easygoing chap, your Dad, but when something gets in his way, he has to push.’ With a phlegmy chuckle, she added, ‘Then it’s best to back off, ask the Colquhoun brothers.’
The Colquhouns are beefy scaffolders who used to throw their weight around in the Queen Anne until Dad got them to apologize for picking on Michael O’Rourke’s father. Aunt Winnie told the story as if Dad were Burt Lancaster seeing off the Clantons in the Gunfight at the OK Corral.
When he left the navy, Dad didn’t go back to Ireland because he’d met Mum when on shore leave during the war. She had left Cumberland looking for excitement in the Capital but found only long days in a munitions factory. When the war ended, they decided to stay in London because even bomb-blasted Pimlico gave them more than they could hope for in Ireland or Cumberland, so they stayed and made it home. As a result, even though John and I are Londoners, we have no relatives living nearby, unlike our Cockney friends, who have loads of cousins and two homes: their own and their Nan’s.
Dad wears a cap to work and on Sundays he sports a trilby that he tugs down over his right eye: the ‘Connemara side’. On the days he doesn’t go to work, he’s bursting with energy. This is often expressed in a shouted ‘hup’ as, with a flip of his heels behind him, he accelerates to complete short trips, like crossing roads or climbing steps – or, sometimes, to end tricky conversations with Mum.
When we were little, he used to wait till we were walking ahead of him before tearing past us, shouting ‘zing’ and jogging backwards, challenging us to catch him. Then he’d turn and run in slow motion until we overtook him. ‘God, if these boys haven’t wings on their feet,’ he’d complain, before shaking our hands to congratulate us on another fine victory.
Most evenings, a whistled Joseph Locke song and the slap of the rolled up Evening Star announces his arrival. He has a key but he prefers to rap the knocker. When one of us opens the door, he crouches like a boxer and lunges to lift and clinch, and to administer a rub of his day-old beard and fill our nostrils with the smell of sand and cement from his clothes.
He’s a ganger for a group of men who lay concrete on building sites: tamping it down with a big beam of wood to even out floors, or pouring it into shuttering for walls and pillars. The more concrete a gang lays, the more it earns. It’s heavy work and he often falls asleep in the easy chair after his dinner. This is when Mum looks at him most tenderly and insists that we keep quiet. While he dozes, she picks bits of hardened concrete from his shirt but leaves those that are clinging temptingly to the small hairs of his cheekbones.
Dad gets a bit ‘soft’ in drink and regularly throws his pennies in the air for the kids to scramble after when he leaves the Queen Anne on Sunday afternoons. This infuriates Mum because she will walk to Victoria rather than take the bus to save fewer coppers than she sees bouncing around on the pavement.
‘If we all treated money the way your father does, there’d be little food on the table; what with giving money to tramps and buying drinks when it isn’t his turn, anyone would think we were made of money.’
Money isn’t something that worries Dad who’s convinced that it’s only a matter of time before we win the Football Pools. Every week, he slides the coupon into the Littlewoods envelope and insists that we all kiss it for luck: Mum, me, John and then him. Mum does so grudgingly because she believes that you get richer only by working hard and saving. His belief that we’ll win the Pools and chucking money to kids provides more fun than going on about how much things cost, but if Mum’s right, and she usually is, it’s probably a good thing she’s different to Dad.
Looking after what money we do have is Mum’s preserve. At the back of the kitchen cabinet, she keeps three tea caddies: one for the rent; one holds shillings for the gas meter; and the third is for ‘clothes, holidays and Christmas’. This one gets raided most, usually by Dad, who puts back what he owes on payday – Thursday in the building trade. This is when Mum gets her housekeeping and Dad is extra cheerful because he’s had a couple of pints on the way home.
In a weekly ritual, they sit at the kitchen table and he hands her the brown envelope. She teases out the white ribbon and pulls it through her fingers to examine the pay details. He gives her a nod – ‘job done’ for another week – and she puts most of the money into the tins. Then she hands him a pound and some change and drops the rest in her purse.
‘Thrift’ is Mum’s favourite word. We rarely have the pleasure of using a new bar of Pears soap because, rather than waste the old sliver, we have to press it into the depression on the new one.
Our clothes are bought to ‘grow into’. I once had to wear pyjamas with eight-inch turn-ups. ‘Bound to shrink,’ she said when I protested. This was embarrassing enough at home, but humiliating during a stay in hospital, when the turn-ups rolled down during the night and, on pulling back the sheets in the morning, the nurses joked about their little ‘double amputee’.
Mum makes us all feel lazy because she’s forever ‘doing’. Even when listening to the wireless or watching telly, she sews, knits or does other thrifty things, like cutting old washing-up gloves into rubber bands. This requires the big light to be on in the front room and stops us watching telly in the dark to make it feel more like the pictures.
When we were small, Dad’s stories made us the envy of our friends. And we’d get him to tell, again and again, while Mum closed her eyes, how he killed a shark with a knife when swimming close to his ship in South Africa. And, for years, we thought he knew Italian because while shaving on Sundays he renders in beautiful gibberish the arias sung by his favourite opera singer, Gigli. Dad’s a fine light tenor, like John McCormack. In the Queen Anne, they’re always asking him to sing his Irish songs and on the rare occasions that Mum drinks too, he makes her cry by singing, ‘I’ll take you home again … Maureen’.
Mum says that exaggerating and inventing are the same as fibbing, even if it does make people laugh. He defends himself with, ‘A bit of colour, Maureen. Where’s the harm? Just a little salt and pepper on the meal?’
Aunt Winnie once stopped coming to see us after Mum told her that her breath smelled of cigarettes. Mum eventually apologized for upsetting her, but not for what she had said. ‘There you are Maureen,’ said Dad, with a wink at us, ‘the truth is not something to be trotted out on just any old occasion.’
Although Mum isn’t quite as shapely as Madge Smith, she’s prettier, and her eyes are as blue as Josie’s. She has a mole on her cheek that she darkens with a brown pencil. I tell her it makes her look like Elizabeth Taylor. It doesn’t really, but I do think that to be beautiful, women have to look something like Mum.
Before she goes out, or when someone knocks at the door, she smoothes invisible creases at the sides of her skirt and flicks real or imagined strands of hair from her forehead with her little finger. When she gets wolf whistled outside building sites, she pretends to disapprove, but she’s betrayed by her freshly flattered look, and can’t resist pushing up the back of her hair with the palm of her hand.
Mum and Dad don’t act as if they’re in love, not like Rooksy’s parents, who hold hands in the street. However, they seem happy enough and never have screaming fights like some of our friends’ parents.
Their rows usually involve the subject of John and me having been christened Catholics, something that Mum, a relaxed Methodist, says she’ll always regret. Life isn’t made easier by the nuns of St Vincent de Paul who haven’t given up trying to get us to go back to Westminster Cathedral, even though we’ve only ever been to a Church of England school. Their disapproval of ‘mixed marriages’ infuriates Mum. ‘Anyone would think that your father had married a black woman.’
Sister Phillipa, a tall nun made taller by her sailing-ship wimple, once said to me, ‘Your father knows best which church you should go to.’ After I told Mum, she tore into Dad as if Sister Phillipa were his sister. When Sister Phillipa made the mistake of calling in to see Dad on the following Saturday, Mum answered the door, potato peeler in hand. After apologizing that her husband (she didn’t like Sister Phillipa referring to Dad by his name, Dan) wasn’t in, she laid into her about trying to influence her sons with Roman Catholic mumbo jumbo. The affronted nun left muttering about returning when Dad was home, when she might be received with better manners. That’s when Mum followed her up the stairs shouting ‘and another thing’.
She came back in, teeth gritted, and we waited for another stern warning about talking to nuns. Instead her face crumpled into smiles. ‘She ran … when I went up the stairs after her, she speeded up! By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she was running and I could see her little white socks!’ She bent double laughing and lifted her pinny to dab her eyes.
Dad was angry and embarrassed about the incident but he said nothing because this was the one subject about which he knew he’d always get a fight. In any case, he’s far more tolerant than either Mum or Sister Phillipa, and doesn’t mind which church we go to, as long as we go. He’s also pretty good about going himself, even after a late night at the Queen Anne.
On Sundays, if there is a working alarm clock in the house, it doesn’t go off until 9.30am. This gives him time for a lie-in and a cooked breakfast before he goes to eleven o’clock mass, when I suspect he asks forgiveness for his volatile wife.
Comanche Spite
John and I are playing knockout. The game involves kicking the plastic football at a goal on the primary school wall and, with one touch, returning it on target, a sort of football squash. The rules are enforced as much by what we hear as what we see. The goal is an oblong of cement render surrounded by glazed bricks. Hitting its crumbling surface makes the flat sound of goal; striking both render and brick is post and the ping of ball on brick, means a miss. Neither of us is trying to win but simply to keep the game going in satisfying thuds that eventually bring Mrs Johnson to the front door of her prefab.
‘Boys, I hope this wretched game will be over soon, the Archers is starting shortly.’
Plump Mrs Johnson is Akela for the local cub pack. Her loud voice is ideal for conducting games for excited small boys in the church hall but she has trouble speaking quietly, even when she’s standing close. At Sunday Service, hymns don’t really get going until she joins in.
‘OK, Mrs Johnson.’
‘Thank you, Billy.’ She gives me smile and goes back indoors.
John kicks the ball extra hard against the wall. ‘OK Mithith Johnthon.’ He points to the sign on the nearby lamppost. ‘This is a bloody Play Street!’
In Play Streets, kids have priority and passing cars have to slow to walking pace. No one knows this better than John. When motorists toot him to get out of the way, he goes into slow motion, or kneels down in the road to do up a shoelace. If they toot again, he puts his hands on his hips and tells them that kids have rights here.
He’s a natural resister, who meets requests or orders with silence or slow, sullen acceptance. His standard answer to challenges from other kids, no matter how big they are, is ‘gonna make me?’ He prefers to leave me to do the talking when adults ask questions but he’s quick to attack goody-goodness. Grown-ups like me. Kids prefer John.
Michael O’Rourke is perched on the end of Mrs Johnson’s garden wall. Behind him, smoke rises from a concealed cigarette. Between hunched, furtive drags, he looks up and down the street like a spy in a doorway. He blows the smoke down between his legs and his fat cheeks flap out to ‘thtup’ real and imagined bits of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, followed by a squirt of saliva through the gap in his top front teeth. Michael admits to being a ‘heavy ould lad’ and his bulk makes describing sport easier than taking part. He’s reporting our game as if it’s the Cup Final.
‘A great attempt by Billy Driscoll, roising star of English football … and what a clearance from his kid brother, surely de foinest young fullback in de country.’
Today he’s broadcasting from his commentary box but he often strolls around in the middle of our football or cricket matches, speaking into an imaginary microphone. It’s like having Kenneth Wolstenholme or John Arlott down on the pitch. However, Michael’s knowledge of cricketing terms remains extremely Irish. ‘Driscoll is after firin’ de ball past de bowler’s kisser.’
Michael loves all things American, especially Westerns and gangster films. So do we, but he wants to be an American. In the weeks after he arrived from Ireland, we knew him as ‘Gene’, after the cowboy, Gene Autry, until we heard his mother call him Michael. When explaining, he said, ‘Tell me now, what kinda cowboy, goody or baddy, was ever called Michael?’ He had a point.
I was delighted when he christened me ‘the Kid’ to go with my name and, with most of the street cowboys, I was won over by his colourful language in our Wild West games. Outdrawing the fastest gunslingers and saving settlers from marauding Indians had never been more fun. And he’d never say, ‘stick ’em up’ when he had enemies cornered; instead he’d slowly waggle his revolver under their noses and say, ‘Now I’d be obloiged if ye’d be after hand’n me your weapons, and den reachin’ for de skoy.’ Sometimes, in the heat of battle, he’d confuse cowboys and gangsters, ‘vamanos muchachos, dey’re packin’ heat’ or ‘dirty hoodlums are speaking wid forked tongues’.
We no longer play cowboys but Michael continues to ‘mosey on home’, eat ‘chow’ and greet you with ‘howdy’.
Further along, Madge Smith’s son, little Jojo, is astride the same wall, spurring it to a gallop while swivelling left and right to fire his cap guns at chasing Indians. He’s wearing a fawn Roy Rogers hat that was once John’s pride and joy. He gave it – grudgingly – to Jojo last year when I told him he was too old to be playing cowboys. John wanted so badly to be a real cowboy. Even now, it irks him that the Wild West is no longer a place he can go to fight outlaws and Indians.
Cowboys are the kind of men we all want to be. Other TV heroes like Robin Hood, William Tell or Ivanhoe can’t hold a candle to Flint McCulloch in Wagon Train, Bronco Layne or scary Richard Boone in Have Gun Will Travel – it’s something to do with guns or ‘equaloizers’, as Michael calls them. In the cinema, our favourite is Audie Murphy whose films we sit through at least twice when they’re showing at the Biograph.
Jojo is blasting away when, worse than Indians, he sees David Griggs loping up behind him. ‘Griggsy’ is the son of ‘Scrapman’ Griggs, who rides around calling out for ‘old iron’ or ‘any lumber’ from a cart pulled by a muscular skewbald pony who is as gentle as a lamb, until he gets near enough to bite.
Like his dad, Griggsy is a street scavenger, only he takes stuff from other kids: sometimes sweets, sometimes money and – always – any fun they might be having.
He’s a year older than I am but we were in the same class for the last year of primary school as he was too thick to go on to secondary school. He hates anyone cleverer than him, which is most people – especially me, ever since an encounter at the bus stop on Vauxhall Bridge Road. As a bus approached, he jabbed me in the back because I hadn’t put my hand out to hail it.
‘You want this bus?’
I couldn’t help myself. ‘Why, are you selling it?’
He jumped ahead of me on to the rear platform and as he grabbed the white pole, swung a fist into the side of my head. ‘That’s all I’m selling today, shitbag, very cheap.’
Pretty good for a moron.
Today he’s wearing a baggy plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up his beefy arms and, even in high summer, he’s in heavy brown corduroy trousers held up with braces. He bounces towards us on spring heels that launch him on to the balls of his feet the moment they touch the ground. He comes to a halt in front of us, rising and falling on the spot like a nasty copper.
Jojo sits petrified on his brick horse as if the whole Sioux nation has appeared on the skyline. Michael stares at the ground and I smile an appeasing welcome. John, who smiles only when he finds something funny, waits.
‘Gis a kick then, brains.’
This is no friendly request to join in. I pass him the ball. He steadies it and thumps it against the wall. The kick is hard and uncontrolled, like Griggsy himself. The loud thud on the bricks is intimidating and he knows it, but he’s missed the goal. This angers him and he smashes the returning ball back at the wall; another miss! He makes a mess of retrieving the rebound and lurches after the ball. Once he has it under control, he folds his arms and scans us for any sign of piss-take for his complete absence of skill.
Why doesn’t Mrs Johnson or, better still, her big milkman husband come out to complain about the thumping noise now? Why do bullies always have so much time?
He beckons me forward by flicking up the fingers on his upturned palms. ‘Come on then Brains, try and geddit.’
The thing to do is fail but make the effort look genuine. Even so, I risk a clump once I’m in range. My attempted tackle is to one side, making it obvious, even to Griggsy, that he should go the other way. He does but the ball bounces off my shin, and he has to chase it again. He gets one foot on the ball and calls to John. ‘Now you, come on then.’
John refuses. With widened eyes, I silently urge him to do what Griggsy wants. He shakes his head. I’m about to shout at him, when Griggsy relents and dribbles towards him.
The one person John takes notice of is Dad, whose advice on tackling is ‘follow through and you won’t get hurt’. But it can hurt, especially against someone bigger, and if the follow-through contains too much flinch, as it usually does in my case. John shrugs and leans in hard to block the ball. The tackle takes Griggsy’s leg away and sends him sprawling. Silence. Griggsy springs to his feet in a ludicrous attempt to make it look like he’s gone down deliberately. Jojo starts laughing. Griggsy, checks for a smile on my face – not a chance – before dashing over to cuff Jojo across the mouth. Jojo burst into tears.
‘Ah now, Griggsy, de little fellah meant no harm …’ says Michael.
‘You what, fatso?’
Michael has many one-liners for facing down Comanches and other baddies. But this isn’t Jesse James, it’s mental Griggsy. Instead of replying, he holds his chin in the air like Randolph Scott in Colt .45.
Griggsy paces up and down, nodding his head, working out his next move. As he passes Jojo, he yanks the cowboy hat from his head, but the chinstrap holds and pulls him off the wall. He hits the ground hard and stays silent until he realizes he’s not badly hurt and starts screaming.
‘Shuddup you little bastard. Cowboy eh? Well, cop this, Roy Rogers.’
He snatches up the hat in both hands. The tendons in his neck stand out as he snorts up phlegm with such force you’d think he had a muscle inside his forehead. He spits into the hat, throws it on the ground and stamps on it. Forgetting he’s no longer the owner, John dives to rescue it. Griggsy grabs him around the neck.
‘And you … fink you’re an ’ard tackler do ya? Well, this is ’ard.’
He runs John at the wall. I close my eyes until I hear the thud-scrape of his head on the bricks. Griggsy lets go and John wheels round, ready to fight. This startles Griggsy but he recovers and grabs John’s shirt collar, twists it around his fist and shoves it up under his chin.
‘You little shitbag.’
‘Leave him alone, you fucking bully.’ I can’t believe I’ve said this and after one step towards Griggsy, I regret it. He hurls John to the ground and turns to face me. I lose momentum and freeze in the no-man’s land between spontaneous bravery and rising fear.
‘Oh yeah? What’s big brother gonna do then?’
What’s he going to do? Nothing. Anger and courage drain from me as if plugs have been pulled in my ankles. John gets up and shakes his head to tell me to ‘leave it’. This is exactly what I’m going to do. I lift my hands like a cowboy starting to surrender.
Griggsy moves forward. I wait for the first punch, praying that my legs won’t give way before he hits me. The punch doesn’t come. Instead, he drops his fists and takes a penknife from his pocket. He opens it and circles the blade inches from my face. John barges between us, fists clenched. On top of his head, blood is gumming up his blond hair.
Griggsy lowers the knife and steps back sneering, not at John but at me for standing behind my younger brother. Being stabbed couldn’t hurt as much. He makes the quivering arsehole sign by curling and uncurling his fingers. ‘Chicken windy fucker, got your number.’
He has, and I’m close to tears. He swaggers over to pick up our ball and stabs it. The air hisses out and John rushes forward. I grab him and hold tight while we watch a grinning Griggsy plunge the knife in again and again. Then he goes over to Jojo, who is crouching on the kerb.
‘Ere’s a cowboy ’at for ya.’
He moulds the ruined ball into a bowl and jams it on Jojo’s head. Jojo curls up, humiliated but not daring to take it off.
Mrs Johnson appears at her window. Griggsy puts the knife away and says to me as if everything is back to normal. ‘Got any money to borrow me?’
‘No.’
For once, he believes me and I’m not forced to empty my pockets. Instead, he gives me a contemptuous pat on the cheek and bounces off down the street. ‘See ya, windy.’ Before he turns the corner, he snorts again and spits in our direction.
Jojo hurls the squashed ball to the ground, pulls out his guns and fires wildly after Griggsy. And I want to be Audie Murphy, to gallop after him and drag him through the dust at the end of a lasso, before running him out of town.
‘A Comanche if ever I saw one,’ says Michael. He knows no greater insult. Comanches are the lowest of the low; treacherous bastards even attack wagon trains at night.
John gives the remains of our ball a last violent kick down the road and Jojo picks up his soiled cowboy hat.
Michael eases off the wall. ‘Jojo, y’ill need dat disinfectin’. Sure, ye might catch TB, or even vinurial disease.’ Jojo looks at him, then at me, mystified.
Michael strokes the few dark hairs above his lip that he hopes make him look a bit like Richard Boone. ‘Dat bastard deserves a bit of his own Comanche treatment: staked out in de sun, bollick-naked, near an anthill dat I’d be after givin’ a good kickin’.’
I join in. ‘Yeah, balls smeared with honey to get the ants in the mood for something sweet.’
Jojo giggles and our humiliation fades as we imagine ever more painful retribution.
John doesn’t laugh, even when we’re removing Griggsy’s dick with a tomahawk. His revenge isn’t going to be in the Black Hills of Dakota.
Size Matters
‘Go on then,’ says Rooksy, ‘show us.’
Raymond Dunn’s dick was big even when he was a toddler. His nickname is ‘Swole’. It comes from the time he was having a bath with his little cousin who, noticing the difference in sizes, pointed between Raymond’s legs, and said to Mrs Dunn, ‘Look Auntie, it’s all swolled up.’
This remained a private family joke until the day Rooksy saw it during a piss-up-the-wall contest. He claimed it gave Raymond an unfair advantage that should be taken into account when measuring the height of the wet stains. Caught between pride and embarrassment, a flustered Raymond mentioned the story of his cousin in the bath. Rooksy’s growing smile told him that this had been a terrible mistake. Soon, everyone knew about ‘Swole’s snake’, and no one called him Raymond again.
Rooksy, John and I are sitting on Swole’s bed. He’s the only kid we know who has a ‘double’. Swole’s home is an ‘apartment’ rather than a flat. Flats are what we and Peabody tenants live in, although ‘Peabodies’ are posher because they have bathrooms. Our bath is in the kitchen beneath a lift-up board. It doubles as a high table top that we sit around on stools. Inside, the bath is chair-shaped; so there’s no lying back under bubbles as women do in the Camay soap adverts. This is one of three things that would mean luxury to John and me, along with a fridge, so we can drink cold Gold Top milk all year round, and a telephone. We’d like a car most but Dad doesn’t drive.
Swole’s bedroom is above the entrance to the large wood yard that stretches up Morton Hill. We rarely have to call for him by ringing the bell because he sees us first from his window, where he spends a lot of time propped on his elbows and spitting on the timber lorries as they pass through the gates below.
Swole’s bedroom is also his playground. He’s rarely allowed out. His dad doesn’t like him mixing with us because he thinks we’re common. Swole doesn’t have any uncommon friends and he lives in fear of being sent to a boarding school, where he’ll sleep in a dormitory with posh boys and probably have to become a queer.
