The Boyhood of Burglar Bill (5 page)

A boy named Horace Crumpton had fallen and dislocated his shoulder while fooling around in a derelict house. Mr Reynolds felt sure we could learn a lesson from him. Horace took a bow, embarrassed and pleased with himself, arm in a sling. Other boys, so far unidentified, had been chased out of Danks’s on Saturday night by the watchman. It was Amos and his lot treading the boilers again, but Mr Reynolds was not to know this. He was sick and tired of getting phone calls to his home, he said, and promised retribution.

On a happier note, Mr Reynolds invited us to bask in the achievements of both our teams in the
Coronation Cup. They had done tremendously well. The ‘B’ team had lost narrowly to Rolfe Street, while the ‘A’ team had simply slaughtered the Good Shepherd, 14–3. Three cheers were called for and supplied. No mention of us. Mr Reynolds, Mr Cork and the others had yet to hear of
our
achievements, though by the end of the day word had spread. Mr Cork, it was reported, took offence. He hammered a few more desks than usual, including his own. He saw it as a comment on the lawless times in which we now lived. If Rood End had needed three teams, or been capable of them, he was the one to say so, not Master Joseph bloomin’ Skidmore or Mr Spencer blinkin’ Sorrell.

By Wednesday Mr Cork had simmered down (as far as he was likely to). At 1.30 p.m. sixty-six boys trooped out of the school, Amos and Vincent Loveridge leading the way, Mr Cork to the rear. A low and heavy pancake of smog overhung the town. There was no wind. The air was pungent, full of sulphur, soot and worse. The smoke from old man Cutler’s bonfire rose straight up in a white column, adding its contribution, with a smaller offering of bluer smoke from old man Cutler’s pipe.

We arrived at GKN’s sports ground. Mr Cork – proudly? stubbornly? – saw no reason to alter his arrangements. The ‘A’ team played the ‘B’ team on
the top pitch, the odds and sods were left to their own devices on the bottom. And yet I wonder now, wasn’t he the least bit curious? Did he not take a peep, perhaps, now and then? Notice the odd – sod – flash of skill?

The bottom pitch was not stuck in its ways. Instead of two teams and one match, we sorted ourselves into four teams and two matches. There was plenty of room, if you didn’t mind long grass and the occasional heavy roller. Spencer had provided himself with a whistle. The first time he blew it, Mr Cork came thundering down the bank and grabbed it off him. Two whistles! It was a recipe for anarchy.

Spencer, as you will have gathered, was no footballer himself. He’d make up the numbers, if required, otherwise his preferred position was outside outside left. But Spencer had an enquiring mind, took things seriously. If he was the manager he was going to manage.

Spencer had two books in his possession: a small cash book from his dad’s office in which he made tactical notes (and kept account of who still owed us money), and
The Stanley Matthews Football Book
. I can picture this book even now. I especially delighted in the sequences of little photographs
showing Stanley Matthews and his Blackpool teammate Stanley Mortensen. They demonstrated Matthews’s amazing dribbling skills. Spencer was more interested in moves and positional play, the ‘ball inside the full back’ (except with us there never was a full back), the ‘wall pass’ and so on. His two big ideas, the means by which we were to triumph over St Saviour’s, our next opponents, were (1) that we should pass the ball, and (2) that we should stick to our positions. Team sheets, you see, while they might look official, were pure fiction. Right back, left back, it didn’t mean a thing. The Prosser brothers complained about their positions, disliked being
labelled
as full backs, but never allowed it to restrict their movements. The main thing was, attackers were attackers, and defenders were attackers. It was an attacking game. On the other hand, an even greater influence was the ball. The ball was a magnet; where it went we went. So in a way we were all defenders… on occasion.

We had got most of our team together playing Tony Leatherland’s lot. Both the Tommys were missing, of course, and Trevor Darby. His gran had finally died; it was her funeral that afternoon. Spencer’s influence on the game was not great. He refereed, attempting valiantly to be impartial and
persuade the players of anything at all. He urged us to pass, run into space, hold our positions. Meanwhile, the fog was thickening. Up on the top pitch the wraith-like figure of Mr Cork flitted here and there, yelling, waving his arm, blasting his whistle. His influence was not great either.

Suddenly, from nowhere, out of the sulphurous air, Tommy Ice Cream emerged, removed his coat and occupied our goal. He ignored the resident goalie, who gratefully trotted off to take up a more attacking position. Some of the kids gave Tommy sidelong looks. He both fascinated and scared them. He was, or seemed anyway, dangerously unpredictable. If he got the ball in his grasp, they wondered, would he ever let it go? His dark eyebrows met menacingly in the middle of his face. He didn’t look like he could take a joke.

Eventually, the atmosphere became too impenetrable, too pungent even for Mr Cork. He called it a day, and it was only three o’clock. The office building which overlooked the sports ground shone like a lighthouse. Out on the Birmingham Road, buses, bikes and cars sailed by in ghostly fashion.

Ronnie, Spencer and I were huddled together outside Milward’s. Ronnie was reading aloud from
the paper, the five-line, three-sentence match report on our game with Tividale. My defence-splitting pass, I grieved to hear, got no mention. Mr and Mrs Smith appeared out of the fog, caught briefly in the haze of light from Milward’s window. They had a pram with a baby in it. Mrs Smith greeted me. I felt myself begin to blush and could not look at her. Earlier in the week, despite all protests on my behalf, my mum had dragged me round to see Mrs Smith lying upstairs in her bed with the baby wrapped in a blanket beside her. I was much embarrassed by the whole business. I knew more or less how babies were made. What I couldn’t understand was how Mr and Mrs Smith could bear to walk the streets with the baby, where everybody could see them and know what it was they had been up to.

The Smiths were swallowed up in the gloom. Mrs Milward rapped sharply on the window and shooed us away. Archie trotted up, sniffed around, trotted off. A huge black car came slowly, silently into view. Solemn men in black suits were visible through the windows. Headlights lit up but did not penetrate the solid air. And there, pale and frowning, like a little lord almost in his unfamiliar suit and collar and tie, was Trevor. The car, and the second car behind it, moved on and
disappeared. Trevor in a car, I thought. The first time in his life, perhaps. (It was!) Mrs Milward knocked once more on the glass. A kid on roller skates whizzed by. And we went home.

10
Treading the Boilers

Football boots in those days were massive objects. It’s a wonder to me how our little spindly legs could raise them off the ground, let alone kick anything. The shape of the boot was
boot
-shaped, not carpet slipper-shaped as it is now. They had rock-hard toe caps, and studs were hammered into their soles like a blacksmith shoeing a horse. (Play football in them? You could have marched out of Russia in them.) To soften this rigid, clog-like footwear you needed dubbin, a kind of brown grease, used also on footballs.

Footballs in those days were like dumb-bells without the bar in between, or those stone balls you sometimes saw on the top of posh gateways. I have seen boys head a ball and fall backwards into a sitting position, stunned. When a ball was wet it was like a concrete sponge. When it was dry and well dubbined it would skid off your head –
remember Prosser’s own goal? – like a baby on a slide.

And then there was the lace. A football consisted of a stitched leather outside with an inflatable rubber inside. Once you’d blown a ball up, you had to lace it up, a tricky business in itself. No matter how well you did it, the lace stuck out. If you headed the lace, it hurt. The courage – foolhardiness? – of some boys was amazing. They’d head it, it would hurt, and they’d head it again. Footballs made more of an impression on boys’ heads back then than teachers, or Mr Cotterill even.

It was Thursday evening. A gang of us were sitting out in Joey Skidmore’s yard, admiring a litter of puppies and discussing the forthcoming game. The Skidmores’ yard was like an outpost of Dudley Zoo: cats and dogs, hens, chickens, a couple of ducks and God knows how many rabbits. Pigeons too, in their own special loft fixed high up on the end wall which was actually the property of the Creda. At other times, in season, you could find tin baths full of fish or frogs, linnets even (caught by Mr Skidmore), suspended in their home-made wooden cages from hooks along the sunlit wash-house wall, singing away. Recently, I happened upon a rent
book from those days in a box of my mother’s things. Listed on the back among the ‘Conditions of Tenancy’ I read this:

5.
THE TENANT SHALL NOT

(a) Erect any sheds or structures of any kind without the proper written consent of the Landlord.
(b) Keep poultry or pigeons on the premises unless consent has previously been obtained.
(c) Keep pigs on the premises under any conditions.

I suspect this rent book was written with the Skidmores in mind. They’d kept a pig too, by the way. But that was in the war.

Spencer had some coloured chalks, acquired by me and Trevor from Miss Palmer’s chalk box. He had drawn the outline of a pitch on the flagstones and was demonstrating moves.

‘See. If you all chase the ball, when you get it there’s nobody to pass to.’

‘So?’ said Wyatt.

‘But if
you
–’ Spencer drew a little stick-man Wyatt on the left wing – ‘stop out there –’

‘Like y’did for that goal,’ said Arthur.

‘And
somebody,
’ said I, ‘passes to you.’

‘You get a clear run,’ Spencer said.

‘And score,’ said Wyatt.

Tommy Pye was present but silent, absorbed in petting one of the puppies. I picked up one myself, its eyes tightly shut, twitching paws, bulging belly smooth as an egg.

Tommy said, ‘How much?’

‘For one of these?’ Joey held his puppy high in the air and kissed its nose. ‘It’s a pedigree, y’know Pure boxer spaniel.’

‘How much?’ said Tommy.

‘Well… a fiver,’ said Joey.

‘Five quid!’ cried Wyatt and me and Tommy together.

‘All right, five bob, then.’

‘I ain’t got five bob.’

‘Ask your mummy,’ Joey said. ‘Ask y’daddy Ask y’gran.’

Tommy was silent.

‘You can have two for seven-and-six,’ said Joey.

A cat sauntered in and sat on Spencer’s pitch. A smell of ironing drifted sweetly out from the Skidmores’ open kitchen window, the clatter of teacups, Mrs Skidmore singing. Pigeons cooing up in the loft. Late-evening light piling up in the sheltered yard.

‘Tell y’what,’ said Joey. ‘If we win tomorrow, I’ll give y’one.’

‘Which one?’ Tommy’s face was a picture.

‘The one you’re holdin’.’

Silence for a while. Then, ‘I love ’im,’ Tommy said.

‘’Er,’ said Joey.

Mrs Skidmore stepped out into the yard, pink-faced and stretching her arms above her head. She spotted Spencer’s accordion case by the door.

‘Hey Spence – give us a tune!’

Spencer rarely played in public and not that often in private, but had once performed one of his pieces at Mrs Skidmore’s request. She was a music lover.

Spencer looked startled. ‘Oh, blow it!’ He grabbed his accordion, apologized to Mrs Skidmore and bolted across the yard. He had forgotten his lesson again. Soon after, Tommy Pye made his reluctant departure, having previously asked Joey at least half a dozen times if he meant it, if he really meant it, if he really really meant it.

This left me, Joey, Wyatt, Arthur and an ark full of animals. Malcolm Prosser arrived, out of breath, with a bag of chips and bad tidings. Patrick had bust his foot.

‘Which one?’ said Arthur.

‘Left ’un,’ Malcolm said.

‘So?’ said Wyatt, acknowledging that all Patrick ever used his left leg for was standing on.

Patrick, it turned out, had been one of a gang of boys – organized by Amos – who under the cover of fog and darkness had last night revisited Danks’s. Treading the boilers involved a dozen or so boys getting inside a boiler and walking in unison, causing it to roll. For some boys, notably Amos, this was an addictive experience. Danks’s manufactured boilers of all sizes, used in ships and so on. They stored them in a nearby field. The story goes that the first time boys ever worked this trick, the watchman had a heart attack. There was this huge red-oxided cylinder rolling off all by itself in the moonlight.

Anyway, this time poor old Patrick had got his toes in the way and now had half his leg in plaster. Malcolm was carrying his brother’s freshly laundered shirt. The discussion of who should play in Patrick’s place began. Spencer would fill in, if we were desperate. Trevor’s cousin could be approached or maybe one of the Cubs; they’d been knocked out.

‘Bet y’can’t play for two teams, though,’ said Wyatt.

Trevor himself showed up. He had been off
school since Tuesday, had a black armband sewed to his coat. He seemed all right and, of course, nothing was said.

‘I know who we should get,’ said Joey.

‘Who?’

‘Albert Pye.’ (Tommy’s brother.)

‘Albert Pye – he’s only five!’

‘He’s six, actually.’

‘Six – he’s a infant!’

‘Have you seen him play?’

‘A baby!’

‘Have you
seen
him?’

Wyatt drew a baby in a nappy on the pitch. Sadie, the mother of the pups, ambled lazily out of the house. She flopped down in a sunlit patch and pretty soon the pups had sniffed her out. They snuggled and suckled like a row of little sausages beside her. Mr Skidmore came out and removed his bicycle from the wash house. Mrs Skidmore leant in the doorway with a cup of tea. The sound of Mrs Purnell yelling at Mr Purnell drifted in over the wall. Wyatt was doodling on the pitch. A dog in boots was added to the team. Trevor picked up some chalk and joined in. He drew a little stick-girl with triangular skirt and flying pigtails, and gave Wyatt a nudge.