Eye of the Storm (3 page)

He worked hard, to be fair, getting up at 4.30 each weekday morning to go to the bakery to pick up the van and begin his rounds. I never knew him have a day off sick in his life. On Saturday mornings we kids would help him on the bread van and then, in the afternoons, we’d go to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United play. I became an ardent fan, and by the time I was eight years old I was regularly going to the ground by myself. My problem, however, was lack of cash, so to pay my way through the turnstiles I used to steal money from my father’s pockets.

He must have suspected that I had been nicking his change, because I’ll never forget what happened the day he caught me at it. He said very little, just made me pack my things in a suitcase and then took me down to the local police station. There, behind the wooden counter in the front hall, was the largest police sergeant I had ever seen. What was worse, he was obviously waiting for me. ‘Come with me,’ he said in a deep, official-sounding voice, and marched me off down a grey-painted corridor and into a room where another stern-faced copper took my fingerprints, handing me a piece of tissue paper with which to wipe the sticky black ink off my fingers. Then, gripping my arm with fingers that felt like pliers, the sergeant put me in a cell, slamming the steel door – also painted grey, like all the metal in the place – shut with a bang that sounded like the end of the world. I was scared to death, tears of sheer fright pouring down my cheeks.

If I’d hoped the police would be moved by my plight, however, I was disappointed. They left me alone in that cell for about half an hour, though it seemed like forever. Then the sergeant unlocked the door and gave me a hell of a bollocking. He told me that if I didn’t stop thieving, I would wind up spending most of the remaining years of my life in a cell like the one I’d just left. Looking back, I could see that my father must have arranged the whole charade with the police. Nevertheless, I was so terrified by the experience that it stopped me from stealing – well, for a time, anyway.

During the Second World War, my father had served in the Royal Navy as a signals operator in destroyers. I remember him giving me a Morse key for my birthday one year. He never tried to teach me the code, however – not that I wanted to learn it. He just wanted to practise his own Morse at home.

He had received all sorts of medals for his war service. He was not in the least militarily minded and never took any great care of his decorations, simply leaving them lying around in the bottom of a drawer. Given to foraging anywhere in the house where I thought there might be something – especially cash – that I could use, I soon came upon them.

As these things go, they were nothing very special, just campaign medals of the kind awarded to someone just for having been there, like the Atlantic Star. It was not until much later that I realized what being on the Atlantic convoys must have been like, and how courageous my father, and all the sailors who did that job for up to five years, when life expectancy for any of them was often measured in weeks, had been. By then, however, it was too late to undo the damage.

I had found a pawnbroker who bought medals. Well, not exactly found, for I had actually been looking for one like him for some time, but once I had located him I became, for a time, one of his most regular customers. I used to take the medals, one at a time, down to the pawn shop, where the owner would give me a half-crown (12½ pence) for each of them. I never redeemed them, and no doubt they were sold on to some collector when the time limit for their redemption expired. I spent the money watching Manchester United play, telling myself that the medals were being used in a good cause.

My father never knew where his medals had gone. Probably he thought they had been lost during one of our dozen or so house moves, for my mother, who had something of the gypsy in her character, was always swapping council houses and flats with other people. She’d answer adverts from similar-minded people and we’d just exchange houses. It was always within a radius of about ten miles, but we moved so often that I sometimes forgot where we lived.

By 1958 we were halfway through this housey-housey cycle and living in Wythenshaw, a rough, sprawling council estate on the southern outskirts of Manchester. Outsiders reckoned that council-house tenants in Wythenshaw were so savage that the weak were killed and eaten. It wasn’t that bad – but it was pretty bad.

In those days, even in rough areas, many working-class households kept a ‘best’ room set aside like a shrine in their houses. We were no exception, maintaining what we called ‘the parlour’ even though desperately short of space. There we were, a family of seven crammed into a three-bedroom terraced house. I had to sleep in a bed with my brother, my two sisters slept in another room, and my younger brother, who was at a school for the deaf and only came home at the weekends, also slept in our bed. An extra room would have made an enormous difference, yet we only went into our parlour, the ground-floor room at the front of the house, at Christmas, Easter or Whitsun. It was pristine – so spotlessly clean that you could have performed brain surgery on the floor. Meanwhile, when we weren’t asleep in bed my mother and father and the rest of us all lived in the back room like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. It was complete bedlam.

The back room also contained the kitchen and a large scullery sink. My mother had a washing machine with a mangle on top, into which she hand-fed the clean wet clothes. The mangle rollers would squeeze out most of the water, which whooshed into the sink. Mum would then take the damp, flattened washing and hang it to dry from a wooden airer fixed to the ceiling, which could be raised and lowered by a rope that ran over pulleys. She spread newspapers on the carpet to catch the drips. On washing days we’d all sit watching television, peering round hanging clothes. Everything was dripping wet, and, coupled with the heat from the coal fire, the effect was like being in the jungle.

We had a tiny back yard, half of which had been laid with crazy paving, while the other half consistied of a tiny patch of balding grass that backed on to the boundary fence and, beyond that, the playing fields of the primary school I attended. On that scrap of garden – you couldn’t dignify it with the word ‘lawn’ – my brothers and I built a den, which we used as the headquarters for a gang we recruited from among other kids in the street. Sometimes we broke into the school tuck shop and nicked packets of crisps, at others we went shoplifting biscuits from the corner store. It was not really badness. We just dared each other, as children will.

We were bored a good deal of the time, too, and some of the traditional boys’ pastimes were closed to us. None of us was in the Boy Scouts. The scoutmaster was far too well aware of our collective reputation as tearaways to let us in; besides, we couldn’t have afforded the uniform. When the Scouts held a ‘Bob-a-Job’ week to raise funds, however, we went round the houses pretending that we were members of the local pack. We’d do the jobs all right, but we’d keep the money for ourselves.

We got away with most of our light-fingered or dishonest activities through a combination of luck and guile. I came thoroughly unglued, however, when I was found to have been stealing from the collection box at the local Catholic church, where I was a trainee altar boy. Perhaps bothered by conscience, I took only a very small sum, but I made the mistake of buying sweets with it in one of the local shops.

A particularly nosy neighbour of ours – curiously, I still remember her name, Kath Sykes – who lived about four doors away from us, was in the shop at the time. Next day she told my mother, ‘If you’d told me you had wanted something from the shop I would have got it for you.’ When my mother replied that she hadn’t needed anything, the eternally inquisitive Kath said that she’d seen me in there buying something at the counter. My mother knew that I had no money, and that therefore I didn’t have any reason to be in a shop unless she’d sent me to get something.

Retribution wasn’t long in coming. When I got home Mum called me to her and asked me, ‘Peter, what were you doing in the shop?’ There was a note of sternness I didn’t much care for. I looked away and said, ‘Nothing.’

Perhaps it was the result of a Catholic upbringing, but whenever I lied I used to go bright red. Now I felt my face and neck flushing. My mother took one look and said, ‘You’re lying to me. Now, what were you doing in that shop?’ So I told her that I’d bought sweets with money I’d found in the street on my way back from the church. Without a moment’s pause back came the answer, ‘You’ve stolen the collection money.’

My denials were hopeless, for the more I protested the more obvious it became that I was lying. When she finally got me to own up she dragged me off to the priest. He gave me a terrible telling off, full of sin and damnation, and sacked me as a trainee altar boy. This had been a fairly good number because I could earn about ten shillings (50 pence) for helping him at weddings, of which there seemed to be quite a number. So I lost a good job for stealing threepence.

I can still hear that priest telling me that I was guilty of stealing money from the Church, and that this was a mortal sin. What he meant was that I was stealing money from him. He was well known as a drinker, and between the booze and the bookies he spent a bundle of money that wasn’t his, as priests are supposed to be poor. I had often seen him at Manchester United matches, too. Even as young as I was, I didn’t see that he had any great right to lecture me about sin.

With all our moves from place to place, I ended up attending several different schools, which I don’t suppose did much for my education. I did at least go to school – my parents saw to that – but no one would have called me academically brilliant. I was always very good at mathematics, however, and especially at mental arithmetic, which I found a piece of cake. But I had a terrible stammer, which made speaking in class a torment, even when I was confident I knew the answer. Nor could it be said that the teachers at my primary school in Walkden did anything to help it. Once we were putting on a school play,
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
. I had been given a speaking part, but on the last night of rehearsals the whole show had to be cancelled because I couldn’t get my words out. On the following day one of the teachers brought in a tape recorder to record our voices. ‘That’s how you sound,’ he said, playing back the tape after I had stuttered and stammered into the microphone. I slowly grew out of my stammer, mainly as a result of joining the army, I think, but to this day I hate hearing my voice on tape.

When I was nicking my father’s medals, we were living in a three-bedroom council house in a terrace in Little Hulton, a giant housing estate that had been built to house people who, like us, had been moved from the Salford dockland slums, which were due to be demolished. We were poor, although we didn’t know how poor because everybody around us was in the same state. Some of our neighbours were so close to the breadline that they drank out of jam jars and scavenged coal that the railway trucks had dropped on the line. We were a good deal better off than that, but still a long way below anything that might have been called comfortable. We got watered-down milk every day, for example. My mother would buy pasteurized milk in a bottle with a crown cap on it, similar to those still used on beer bottles. She’d take two empty bottles just like it, and put a third of the milk in each, then top them all up with cold tap water and snap the tops on again. That way we got three pints of milk out of one, enough to last us a day.

With only my father’s meagre wages from the bakery to live on, by Thursday of each week we had always run out of money for food, so on those days we ate toast and dripping. My brother and I also came home from school at lunchtime on Thursdays because we hadn’t enough money for school dinners. Friday, when my father was paid, was the big day in our house – that’s when we had chips.

Yet although the family never had any money to spare, as a kid I was never short myself, largely because I had so many scams going. After school I used to chop wood for an old gypsy who lived near by. We wired it into bundles, and he would then go round on his cart selling the firewood from house to house. He’d always give me a few shillings for helping him, and loose change he left around the place would also find its way into my trouser pockets. If he noticed, he never said anything. Probably he expected me to steal. Besides, he had his own scams running, and he could see that I was only a snotty-nosed kid who was no threat to any bigger bits of villainy he might have been into.

Worse, and despite the warning from the police sergeant, ripping off the firewood seller wasn’t the only stealing I did. I take no pride in it now, but as a boy I seem to have spent a good deal of time and energy on being dishonest. My mother had a tick card running at the local corner shop, where they would mark down what she had taken and she would pay later. (In Harrods this is called a ‘customer account’. In a corner shop it’s called ‘tick’.) I would go to the shop and tell the woman behind the counter, ‘My Mum wants a siphon of soda.’ She would often give me a funny look, since people around there rarely bought soda water because they couldn’t afford any whisky to go with it – except at Christmas, perhaps.

Anyway, the shop would put the siphon on my mother’s tick account and I would take it and go round the corner and squirt the soda down a drain. Then I’d take the empty siphon – in those days they were substantial glass bottles wrapped in fine wire mesh like chicken coop wire – to another shop and get the deposit of five shillings (25 pence) ‘back’ for turning it in. When my mother went to pay her bill at the corner shop, she’d have a row over why they were charging her for a soda siphon she’d never had. She never tumbled to the fact that it was me, however.

She never discovered another of my scams, either. Tesco had just opened a supermarket in Walkden, about two miles away from our home in Little Hulton, and my brother and I used to be sent there to buy the family meat for the week. Mum always gave me enough money to buy a cow’s heart. I would get that from the meat counter first and hide it in the bottom of the shopping bag – they didn’t have wire baskets in those days – and then buy something really cheap which I would pay for at the checkout with the money I had been given, without mentioning, of course, that I had a cow’s heart concealed in my bag. Back at home I’d give my mother the correct change for the heart, as though I’d actually paid for it, and surreptitiously pocket the difference between the price of the meat and the small item I’d actually bought. I always felt that I had only stolen from Tesco, and not from my mother – although in fact I was stealing from both of them.