‘Politics,’ he says blinking through the strings of mucus. I look at him differently now. ‘Politics,’ he repeats it, holding a test tube up to the light, he peers into it. The way he sees it, he knows more about politics than the whole school rolled together: the headmaster and old Dog-Jaw included.
‘Hitler was right and Stalin was left. Conservative and Labour . . . Communism’s left. Socialism’s left but not as left as Communism, red. Fascism is right, Liberal is in between, yellow, neither left or right. Conservatives are right but not as right as the fascists, blue. So what are you, left or right?’
Hmmm . . . left or right? I try and remember which hand is which, I have to imagine I’m drawing to do that. I sort of mime it out on the desk in front of me, then look up quick to see if he’s noticed anything . . . I pretend to be examining the effect of the grain.
‘Blue, red or yellow?’
Now that’s easy, I know that one, colours, that’s my department. Red, blue or yellow? hmmm? OK, hold on a minute. Red! Or blue? Or yellow? Well, give me a second to think . . . Red! No! Blue! That’s right, blue!
* * *
In the days before the IRA bombed Maidstone, you could walk into any chemist and buy the ingredients for black powder: sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre. We’d buy each item off a different chemist and work them in rotation, so’s not to arouse their suspicions.
If they question you, you have to have the right answers right off pat. ‘Saltpetre?’ That was the tricky one. ‘It’s for dusting my mother’s dahlias’. That was the answer Goldfish taught me.
‘If there’s any questions, tell them it’s for dusting your mother’s dahlias, and don’t try buying all the ingredients in one shop! They’ll cotton on . . . And never go back to the same chemist’s twice in the same month!’
I nod . . . ‘Yeah yeah, and the weed-killer, sure thing!’
‘What do you want saltpetre for?’
‘For dusting my mother’s dahlias.’
‘Your mother’s dahlias?’
‘Yeah, my mother’s dahlias.’
I have to learn all the answers by heart. He sends me out on little errands with a shopping list . . . He gives me half a crown and sends me across the road to Boots. He waits for me on the corner ’til I emerge clasping the sherbet.
He looks over his shoulder, opens the bag and sniffs at it. ‘What did he say?’
‘It was a she — she didn’t say nothing.’
‘Call me sergeant when we’re on active service.’
‘She didn’t say nothing, sarge.’
He narrows his eyes at me, ‘Not sarge . . . sergeant!’
I have to stand back and wipe my face; I try and calm him, to stem the explosions of phlegm. The more excited he gets, the harder the taps flow. He sucks back on it, his whole mug a crusty mosaic from the nostrils out. A soldier of snot, that was Goldfish, his sleeves sodden with the stuff. He waves his arms about for extra emphasis, to get his point over, to make sure I’ve understood. I’ve got the message.
‘The first thing an army needs is discipline! Discipline! Food! Guns! And Glycerine!’
HOW TO MAKE A GUN
Materials:
One length of metal tubing ¾" to 1" diameter One nail
One length of wire
One piece of scrap timber
Tools:
Hammer, vice, drill, matches, wood for fire
To make a pistol, cut off a one foot length of metal tubing: this is your basic barrel. Heat one end of the barrel until red hot, then hammer flat for approx 3". Now hammer it back over on itself, thereby totally sealing one end of the barrel. This is now your breech. Next drill a small touch hole approx 1" in front of the folded end. It is important to make sure that the touch hole can be neatly plugged by a small nail or screw which will be your firing pin. You may find it easier to drill the touch hole after the barrel has been securely bound onto a stock with wire.
The stock may be carved from a piece of scrap timber and can be as elaborate or as simple as you wish. Once the barrel is secured and an appropriate handle has been cut, you are ready for your first firing.
Pack the barrel half full with black powder. (See earlier notes on black powder). Then plug this with a mixture of clay, shot (fishing lead) or small gravel. All that remains, is to prime the touch hole with philomites (red match heads). Insert the firing pin and find your target.
The gun is fired by striking the firing pin with a blow from a hammer. Happy shooting!
N.B. Do not lean over the gun during firing, as the firing pin has a tendency of firing upwards out of the touch hole, as happened to my brother, who narrowly escaped death. This can be remedied by securing it to the stock with a small twist of wire.
Bit by bit, we were building up our munitions, and all of them safely stowed away in an underground hide. We dug it at weekends and after school, in a small copse of saplings. It could fit two of us crouching, plus our guns and black powder. We camouflaged the entrance with a seed tray full of earth.
Goldfish shows me his patented design for exploding marbles. Rolled into the path of an oncoming vehicle, they can take out anything from a moped to a bus! It’s all down to his clever little invention of a hinged pressure plate. What’s more, the whole device is completely concealable in a crisp packet!
He lets go a fresh waterfall of phlegm in sheer delight. He glistens all over like a lizard. He dives in and re-shuffles his papers, blowing his nose on the blue print for his fully automatic machine pistol. He empties the contents of his schnozzle, both barrels, clang-clang! a direct hit in the waste paper bin.
‘The important thing is sulphur!’
He lays his index finger alongside his snout, and winks one of his headlamps at me.
‘You must learn how to acquire your chemicals! A different shop for each of your ingredients! Sulphur!’
I know, I know! For dusting your dahlias, no kidding!
‘What do you want sulphur for then, sonny?’
‘For dusting my dahlias!’
I’ve got it, that’s the answer, straight back, I look him in the eye. ‘I want sulphur for dusting my dahlias, Sir!’
‘Dahlias? Dahlias? You wouldn’t mean saltpetre, would you?’
‘Yeah, saltpetre.’
There’s no doubt about it, if you want to get anything in this poxy world, you’ve got to master the wrangles, all the little strategies of bullshit.
Goldfish takes off his peaked cap and marches over to a big demi-john full of pond water with a couple of old lilies floating about in it. He pulls the cork and sniffs at it suspiciously . . .
‘Polish spirit!’ he informs me. ‘Distilled from dandelion roots!’
That stuff had some poke alright, it made you cough like a dog! A real hack, right at the back . . . He pours me another pint . . . Once you get over the initial vileness of it, it goes down quite smoothly. A bouquet somewhere between lavender and turpentine.
We swig at it like lemonade. I have one more hit before I have to go and take a lie down on his garden wall. I put each foot in front of me, then stand next to the rosebush, I caress it . . . I eat a mouthful of petals . . . I’m in love with the intricacy of its thorns . . . I pull two of them off, and stick them to my nose with spit. I play rhinoceroses, I go on my knees and piss myself . . . crawling on all fours . . . I go looking for pea-bugs . . . Then I remember something . . . I have to talk to the cars, to explain something . . . I climb up onto the roof and won’t come down, I walk in little circles then my knees go and I hit the deck. The tarmac comes up and kicks me in the stomach! I go to puke . . . the world goes sideways, my mouth’s full of dandelions . . . I eat them like grass, like a lion, mooing like a cow.
Our next jump is getting ourselves some recruits. That’s a tall order for a bunch of school kids. We have to start from scratch. As Goldfish points out, ‘You need some kind of discipline before you can go implementing plans for insurrection!’ And raising cash for our armoury, that was another headache. That was where Cr
owsfeet came in. He had pinched me ’til I spilled the beans on our deal, then socked me one . . .
Naturally, Goldfish wasn’t so keen on cutting Crowsfeet in. For his money, he was way too crude, piss poor and a blabber-mouth to boot! He just didn’t appeal to Goldfish’s finely honed scientific mind . . . But on the other hand, he did accept that we needed liberators . . . A war isn’t only fought from the bunker. And as I went to great lengths to explain, you have to have foot sloggers as well as generals. You can only build so many home-made mortars.
OK, charcoal you can make, but then there’s the saltpetre . . . Dusting your dahlias or not, that takes cash, big bucks. I tell you, revolution is an expensive business!
I put the case to Goldfish; I begged him shamelessly to accept Crowsfeet. I had to, you see, my life depended on it. I’d been threatened, set up yet again. I lived in a half world of fear and violence, totally under the fist of others. Opinions? I had none, my only guide was fear of the punch.
In the end Goldfish conceded the point. I was both ecstatic and crestfallen. I was on a no-win wicket: either way, I was beaten . . .
Crowsfeet chucks a rock at my window. I have to let him in and give him a cut of my pocket money. He scans the shelves and helps himself to a bottle of lemonade, he swigs half of it back and the rest he uses to clean his teeth . . . He takes a big chug, gargles on it, then spits it back in, little threads of mucus and the odd onion skin . . . He burps and wipes it with his cuff . . . He hands me the bottle, I replace it and we head out into the chill, black, night fog . . .
Crowsfeet’s expertise certainly came in handy. He starts right in by breaking into the girls’ school. I’m press-ganged as the look-out man, the fall guy. He nicks the rake out of my old man’s shed and uses it to lean in the top window and unhook the bottom window latch. (Actually it was my idea.) We get that bastard open, look left and right, then hop in . . . Goldfish nicks a set of keys from the staff room and then we have the run of the whole school...
They’ve got all the gear in there, and little jam-rag bins in all the bogs . . . First off, we empty the tuck shop and transport it in stages to our bunker . . . Stocking up for the nuclear winter . . . We ransack the whole building — what we can’t flog we scoff! We go green at the gills! Our shit goes rock hard from too much chocolate.
Once we’d cleaned that dump out, we went back over to the boys’ school and emptied Dog-Jaw’s greenhouse of exotic plants. We wheeled the sum total of Dogs-Jaw’s life’s work around the Weeds Wood council estate in an old wheel-barrow. From the rarest orchids to the common aspidistra! From blooming cacti, to a slug infested geranium! We flogged the lot at sixpence a throw. We had the old biddies queuing round the block, staggering back to their cells with their arms full of lettuces. The pansies and the tomato plants were the first to go, then the rarer cacti.
That was some spring — the greening of the concrete jungle. We poured the tax payers’ money back into the community and earned a bit of pocket money into the bargain. We single-handedly wrecked Dog-Jaw’s life’s work. The greenhouse empty, just a couple of fallen petals . . .
Goldfish banks the cash at the post office and sends off thirty pounds for his special project, a pair of 303 Lee Enfields! He answers an ad in the Exchange and Mart and gets them by return post, as simple as that. He comes over my place straight after school with two parcels under his arm. We unwrap them and do a little parade round the front garden. He marches up and down yelling orders . . . Then he makes me get down on my hands and knees and crawl about in the dust. I pretend to be a bush.
‘The Walderslade Liberation Army incorporating The Conservative Union of Green Fascists! Attention!’
Despite the plus side of Crowsfeet’s abilities, Goldfish’s misgivings turned out to be well founded. It seems Crowsfeet wasn’t really into revolution at all. He was more of the realist school of thinking. He wanted hard cash for snout and muff! None of your fancy ideals or politics, just fuck, fags and kip! That was Crowsfeet, alright. Gawky, hurried eyes and a mouthful of sick. He was always shooting his stupid lip off about some junk. Mouthing off about our clandestine exploits. Playing the big ‘I am’! A regular glory-hunter. Spreading his ill-gotten gains in the most obvious of places, arousing unwanted suspicions. A hideous list of righteousness, and not a bit exaggerated.
Me and Goldfish only have about fifteen minutes to empty the bunker before the whole roof caves in. If we hadn’t been keeping a weather eye, we’d have lost everything, black powder, pistols, the lot!
The bulldozer trundles over and sniffs around. They get it started — it takes five or six goes. They take turns cranking it, their little puzzled faces, absolutely comical. No match for our revolutionary minds. Waving their arms about like a bunch of scarecrows.
‘I bet those proles don’t know the first thing about Stalin’s kolkhoz!’
I nod and scratch my head . . . They start again, cranking the engine, they clean out the carbs, oily and indignant, then finally a spluttering. She coughs and hiccups, then again, teetering, precariously. W.L.A. in foot high letters, bright green, set off by the yellow of the body . . . Little puffs of blue smoke . . .
We sit parked on a felled beech, regular wise monkeys, we scratch at ourselves and eat bananas. The driver peers through his paint-splattered windscreen but we show no emotion, poker faced. Then the beast rolls. He crunches the gears, a thousand vibrations, the fear of the rabbits . . .
He lowers the mechanical crab and allows himself a half smirk. Crashing into our copse, the last remaining trees, huddled together, a few charming saplings clinging on to the past. We watch his silly little engine, so brave and full of bluster. He slews in sideways, the world turns a little circle . . . and he sees blue. He tries jamming it into reverse but it’s too late, he’s done for . . . the engine screaming. An unclear obstacle.
We hold our breath . . . We have to force ourselves not to get up and run. There’s shouting and his mates come running, battling through the clay. They hoist him out of the cab . . .
‘What the fuck’s that?’
They stand around staring into the pit. . . The foreman puts his hands on hips and marches over to us.
‘Alright, you kids, what does W.L.A. mean?’
We scratch ourselves and look at each other, is he talking to us?
‘Dunno, mister ..
We pull faces, we stick our fingers in our noses and concentrate, staring into the sky.
‘Na, we give up, give us a clue?’
He turns, spits and walks away. He gives us a meaningful look and strides back to the splutterings, the coughing of the yellow machine.
‘You must have gone down a well, mister!’ we inform him. ‘There’s a lot of wells over there, you has to watch out for ’em, my uncle lost his stoat down one of ’em . . . They’re full of adders!’
One track spinning, through the air. A spurt of mud, the yellow underbelly exposed, helpless and ridiculous. A little crowd gathered, they come running. The men in blue, they look at each other then stare darkly at us. We jump down off our fallen trunk, we swagger, whistling a tuneless tune we carry ourselves away.
24. TB
Maybe I should’ve listened at school, shut my big trap, written down the lie and learned their crummy craft of omission. Then, at least,transported you to someplace nice, somewhere a little more fashionable. There we go, sailing down impossible rivers! The lives of the Great Authors! Gilt edged mirrors and whores wall to wall. But no, my benefactor, you’re stuck here with me, my humble observations, memories. Ten to fifteen drafts, is it? And still nothing coming through. Give up the ghost? I won’t hear such talk! Onwards, ever onwards . . . An all night worker. Lonely, humble and brave. That’s me, ant-like, a Trojan.
I’ve got my own devices, to rid myself of this little burden. To drag this shit through the mire and dump it someplace deep, to let it go. To watch it sinking, settling on the river bed. It’s too late to lay down the pencil now, too many years, too many sorrows and betrayals. Half a l
ifetime of mistakes. Irrevocable, cheeky, grinning at the wrong moments, laughing out of place, embarrassing my poor friends and acquaintances. Come my benefactor, onwards! Foot-weary; but onwards, foot soldiers, companions in a death boat!
My mother getting TB was only the beginning of our troubles. She sat with me, huffing over my little spelling book. Salt! Self! Stile! She winced at the end of every column, her throat cracking. Then a string of snot as she kissed me goodnight.
She got my brother to rub her back with warm oils, but it was plain that it wasn’t muscular. She was finally buckling under the constant pressure, the old man’s assaults, the break-ins. It all mounted up, it repeated on her. Then Nana Lewis dying like that, that certainly compounded everything.
After two weeks and no improvement, the quack sends her into hospital for X-rays and they keep her in indefinitely. I get home from school and the place is all boarded up . . . desolate . . . I have to climb up the cherry tree and break in through my own bedroom window . . . No food in the house, no heating, nothing! And the mutt’s crapped himself. We were left to fend for ourselves, the dog, me, and my brother as bossy boots!
With my father’s miserly hand-outs we had next to nothing to live on, fresh air mostly. And after Crowsfeet’s rake-off we were all but starving to death. Even he got bolshie, his life-style slumped, he had to start saving his dog ends again . . . That made his face turn black, he bunched up his cake hole into a cat’s arse, and Smack! Things were certainly beginning to look pretty desperate; even my brother lost some of his bollock.
Sunday afternoon, the old man drives down to pick us up and go visit the old girl. We hear his car gunning in the driveway, we get up, pull on some rags and march downstairs. We sit around, watching him ghosting round the garden, his little mush mincing away beneath his beards.
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