New and Collected Stories (19 page)

The roll-call revealed eleven of us, yet Frankie was a full-blown centurion with his six-foot spear-headed railing at the slope, and his rusty dustbin lid for a shield. To make our numbers look huge to an enemy he marched us down from the bridge and across the field in twos, for Frankie was a good tactician, having led the local armies since he was fifteen years old.

At that time his age must have stood between twenty and twenty-five. Nobody seemed to know for sure, Frankie least of all, and it was supposed that his parents found it politic to keep the secret closely. When we asked Frankie how old he was he answered with the highly improbable number of: ‘'Undred an' fifty-eight.' This reply was logically followed by another question: ‘When did you leave school, then?' Sometimes he would retort scornfully to this: ‘I never went to school.' Or he might answer with a proud grin: ‘I didn't leave, I ran away.'

I wore short trousers, and he wore long trousers, so it was impossible for me to say how tall he was in feet and inches. In appearance he seemed like a giant. He had grey eyes and dark hair, and regular features that would have made him passably handsome had not a subtle air of pre-pubescent unreliability lurked in his eyes and around the lines of his low brow. In body and strength he lacked nothing for a full-grown man.

We in the ranks automatically gave him the title of General, but he insisted on being addressed as Sergeant-Major, because his father had been a sergeant-major in the First World War. ‘My dad was wounded in the war,' he told us every time we saw him. ‘He got a medal and shell-shock, and because he got shell-shock, that's why I'm like I am.'

He was glad and proud of being ‘like he was' because it meant he did not have to work in a factory all day and earn his living like other men of his age. He preferred to lead the gang of twelve-year-olds in our street to war against the same age group of another district. Our street was a straggling line of ancient back-to-backs on the city's edge, while the enemy district was a new housing estate of three long streets which had outflanked us and left us a mere pocket of country in which to run wild – a few fields and allotment gardens, which was reason enough for holding an eternal grudge against them. People from the slums in the city-centre lived in the housing estate, so that our enemies were no less ferocious than we, except that they didn't have a twenty-year-old backward youth like Frankie to lead them into battle. The inhabitants of the housing estate had not discarded their slum habits, so that the area became known to our streets as ‘Sodom'.

‘We're gooin' ter raid Sodom today,' Frankie said, when we were lined-up on parade. He did not know the Biblical association of the word, thinking it a name officially given by the city council.

So we walked down the street in twos and threes, and formed up on the bridge over the River Leen. Frankie would order us to surround any stray children we met with on the way, and if they wouldn't willingly fall in with us as recruits he would follow one of three courses. First: he might have them bound with a piece of clothes-line and brought with us by force; second: threaten to torture them until they agreed to come with us of their own free will; third: beat them across the head with his formidable hand and send them home weeping, or snarling back curses at him from a safe distance. I had come to join his gang through clause number two, and had stayed with it for profitable reasons of fun and adventure. My father often said: ‘If I see yo' gooin' about wi' that daft Frankie Buller I'll clink yer tab-'ole.'

Although Frankie was often in trouble with the police he could never, even disregarding his age, be accurately described as a ‘juvenile delinquent'. He was threatened regularly by the law with being sent to Borstal, but his antics did not claim for him a higher categorical glory than that of ‘general nuisance' and so kept him out of the clutches of such institutions. His father drew a pension due to wounds from the war, and his mother worked at the tobacco factory, and on this combined income the three of them seemed to live at a higher standard than the rest of us, whose fathers were permanent appendages at the dole office. The fact that Frankie was an only child in a district where some families numbered up to half a dozen was accounted for by the rumour that the father, having seen Frankie at birth, had decided to run no more risks. Another whispered reason concerned the nature of Mr Buller's pensionable wound.

We used to ask Frankie, when we made camp in the woods and squatted around a fire roasting plundered potatoes after victory, what he was going to do when the Second War started.

‘Join up,' he would say, non-committally.

‘What in, Frankie?' someone would ask respectfully, for Frankie's age and strength counted for much more than the fact that the rest of us knew roughly how to read and write.

Frankie responded by hurling a piece of wood at his interrogator. He was a crackshot at any kind of throw, and rarely missed hitting the shoulder or chest. ‘Yer've got to call me “SIR”!' he roared, his arms trembling with rightful anger. ‘Yer can get out to the edge of the wood and keep guard for that.' The bruised culprit slunk off through the bushes, clutching his pole and stones.

‘What would you join, sir?' a more knowing ranker said.

Such respect made him amiable:

‘The Sherwood Foresters. That's the regiment my dad was in. He got a medal in France for killin' sixty-three Jerries in one day. He was in a dug-out, see' – Frankie could act this with powerful realism since seeing
All Quiet on the Western Front
and
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
– ‘behind his machine gun, and the Jerries come over at dawn, and my dad seed 'em and started shootin'. They kept comin' over, but the Old Man just kept on firin' away – der-der-der-der-der-der-der – even when all his pals was dead. My Old Man was 'it with a bullet as well, but 'e din't let go of 'is gun, and the Jerries was fallin' dead like flies, dropping all round 'im, and when the rest o' the Sherwoods come back to 'elp 'im and stop the Jerries coming over, 'e counted sixty-three dead bodies in front of 'is gun. So they gen 'im a medal and sent 'im back ter England.'

He looked around at the semicircle of us. ‘What do yer think o' that, then?' he demanded savagely, as if he himself were the hero and we were disputing it. ‘All right,' he ordered, when we had given the required appreciation to his father's exploits, ‘I want yer all ter scout round for wood so's the fire wain't goo out.'

Frankie was passionately interested in war. He would often slip a penny into my hand and tell me to fetch the
Evening Post
so that I could read to him the latest war news from China, Abyssinia, or Spain, and he would lean against the wall of his house, his grey eyes gazing at the roofs across the street, saying whenever I stopped for breath: ‘Go on, Alan, read me a bit more. Read me that bit about Madrid again …'

Frankie was a colossus, yet a brave man who formed us up and laid us in the hollows of a field facing the railway embankment that defended the approaches to the streets of Sodom. We would wait for an hour, a dozen of us with faces pressed to the earth, feeling our sticks and trying to stop the stones in our pockets from rattling. If anyone stirred Frankie would whisper out a threat: ‘The next man to move, I'll smash 'im with my knobkerrie.'

We were three hundred yards from the embankment. The grass beneath us was smooth and sweet, and Frankie chewed it by the mouthful, stipulating that no one else must do so because it was worse than Deadly Nightshade. It would kill us in five seconds flat if we were to eat it, he went on, but it would do him no harm because he was proof against poison of all kinds. There was magic inside him that would not let it kill him; he was a witch doctor, and, for anyone who wasn't, the grass would scorch his guts away.

An express train came out of the station, gathered speed on the bend, and blocked the pink eavings of Sodom from view while we lifted our heads from the grass and counted the carriages. Then we saw our enemies, several figures standing on the railway tracks, brandishing sticks and throwing stones with playful viciousness into a pool of water down the slope.

‘It's the Sodom gang,' we whispered.

‘Keep quiet,' Frankie hissed. ‘How many do you see?'

‘Can't tell.'

‘Eight.'

‘There's more comin' up.'

‘Pretend they're Germans,' Frankie said.

They came down the slope and, one by one, lifted themselves over to our side of the railings. On the embankment they shouted and called out to each other, but once in the field they walked close together without making much noise. I saw nine of them, with several more still boldly trespassing on the railway line. I remembered that we were eleven, and while waiting for the signal to rush forward I kept saying to myself: ‘It won't be long now. It can't be long now.'

Frankie mumbled his final orders. ‘You lot go left. You other lot go right. We'll go in front. I want 'em surrounded.' The only military triumph he recognized was to surround and capture.

He was on his feet, brandishing an iron spear and waving a shield. We stood up with him and, stretched out in a line, advanced slowly, throwing stones as fast as our arms would move in to the concentric ring of the enemy gang.

It was a typical skirmish. Having no David to bring against our Goliath they slung a few ineffectual stones and ran back helter-skelter over the railings, mounting the slope to the railway line. Several of them were hit.

‘Prisoners!' Frankie bellowed, but they bolted at the last moment and escaped. For some minutes stones flew between field and embankment, and our flanks were unable to push forward and surround. The enemy exulted then from the railway line because they had a harvest of specially laid stones between the tracks, while we had grass underfoot, with no prospect of finding more ammunition when our pockets were emptied. If they rallied and came back at us, we would have to retreat half a mile before finding stones at the bridge.

Frankie realized all this in a second. The same tactical situation had occurred before. Now some of us were hit. A few fell back. Someone's eye was cut. My head was streaming with blood, but I disregarded this for the moment because I was more afraid of the good hiding I would catch from my father's meaty fist at home for getting into a fight, than blood and a little pain. (‘Yer've bin wi' that Frankie Buller agen, ain't yer?' Bump. ‘What did I tell yer? Not ter ger wi' 'im, didn't I?' Bump. ‘And yer don't do what I tell yer, do you?' Bump. ‘Yer'll keep on gooin' wi' that Frankie Buller tell yer as daft as 'e is, wain't yer?' Bump-bump.)

We were wavering. My pockets were light and almost empty of stones. My arms ached with flinging them.

‘All right if we charge, lads?' Frankie called out.

There was only one answer to his words. We were with him, right into the ovens of a furnace had he asked it. Perhaps he led us into these bad situations, in which no retreat was possible, just for the fine feeling of a glorious win or lose.

‘Yes!' we all shouted together.

‘Come on, then,' he bawled out at the top of his voice:

‘CHARGE!'

His great strides carried him the hundred yards in a few seconds, and he was already climbing the railing. Stones from the Sodom lot were clanging and rattling against his shield. Lacking the emblematic spear and dustbin lid of a leader we went forward more slowly, aiming our last stones at the gang on the embankment above.

As we mounted the railings on his left and right Frankie was halfway up the slope, within a few yards of the enemy. He exhorted his wings all the time to make more speed and surround them, waving his dangerous spear-headed length of iron now before their faces. From lagging slightly we suddenly swept in on both flanks, reaching the railway line in one rush to replenish our stocks of ammunition, while Frankie went on belabouring them from the front.

They broke, and ran down the other slope, down into the streets of Sodom, scattering into the refuge of their rows of pink houses whose doors were already scratched and scarred, and where, it was rumoured, they kept coal in their bathrooms (though this was secretly envied by us as a commodious coal-scuttle so conveniently near to the kitchen) and strung poaching nets out in their back gardens.

When the women of our street could think of no more bad names to call Frankie Buller for leading their children into fights that resulted in black eyes, torn clothes, and split heads, they called him a Zulu, a label that Frankie nevertheless came to accept as a tribute, regarding it as being synonymous with bravery and recklessness. ‘Why do you run around with that bleddy Zulu?' a mother demanded from her child as she tore up one of father's old shirts for a bandage or patch. And immediately there was conjured up before you Frankie, a wild figure wielding spear and dustbin lid, jumping up and down before leading his gang into battle. When prisoners were taken he would have them tied to a tree or fence-post, then order his gang to do a war dance around them. After the performance, in which he in his fierce panoply sometimes took part, he would have a fire built near by and shout out that he was going to have the prisoners tortured to death now. He once came so near to carrying out this threat that one of us ran back and persuaded Frankie's father to come and deal with his son and set the prisoners free. And so Mr Buller and two other men, one of them my father, came striding down the steps of the bridge. They walked quickly across the field, short, stocky, black-browed Chris, and bald Buller with his walrus moustache. But the same person who had given the alarm crept back into Frankie's camp and gave warning there, so that when the three men arrived, ready to buckle Frankie down and drive him home, they found nothing except a kicked-out fire and a frightened but unharmed pair of captives still tied to a tree.

It was a fact that Frankie's acts of terrorism multiplied as the war drew nearer, though many of them passed unnoticed because of the preoccupied and brooding atmosphere of that summer. He would lead his gang into allotments and break into the huts, scattering tools and flower seeds with a maniacal energy around the garden, driving a lawn-mower over lettuce-heads and parsley, leaving a litter of decapitated chrysanthemums in his track. His favourite sport was to stand outside one of the huts and throw his spear at it with such force that its iron barb ran right through the thin wood.