Frankie had finished pumping up the tyre and was pressing it with his fingers. ‘I don’t fink it’s a puncture. Anyway, wiv a bit of luck it’ll get yer home all right . . .’ As he turned to look at her, his blood suddenly turned to ice.
Patty was stark naked.
For a moment, Frankie couldn’t say a word. Then he stood up. ‘Bloody ’ell, Patty! Wot d’yer fink yer doing’?’
Patty smiled mischievously. ‘Wot’s up, Frankie? Ain’t yer ever seen a gel like this before?’
Frankie said nothing. All he could do was stand and stare.
Patty slowly came across and stood in front of him. There was a moment of silence between them which was only broken by an angry clap of thunder and rain pelting down on to the tiled roof.
Frankie bit his lip nervously. He didn’t know what to say or to do or how to react. All he could do was to stare up and down at Patty’s naked flesh, her long neck, and slim shoulders. Her breasts seemed absolutely beautiful to him . . . Gradually, his gaze wandered down to that forbidden area where thighs were separated by no more than a wisp of young pubic hair. Frankie had seen many girls and women during his young lifetime, and had often lain awake at night fantasising about what lay beneath the clothes they wore. Even as a child he had never seen his mother without clothes, and this was arousing him in a way that he had so often dreamed about.
Patty waited a moment, then took hold of Frankie’s hand and placed it on one of her breasts. It felt warm and inviting, and, as he started to feel her nipple, he was surprised to find it becoming firm in his fingers. While this was going on, Patty pulled Frankie’s vest out of his shorts and tugged it off. But when she put her fingers into the top of his shorts and tried to pull them down, he resisted.
‘Wot yer doing’?’ His voice was barely audible.
Patty’s eyes met his. ‘I’ve done it before yer know. You’re not the first.’
Frankie’s heart was thumping fast. This was his chance to do something which he had fantasised about so often before. But as he looked at Patty, all he could think of was Maggs. If it was her, it would be so different. It wasn’t Patty he wanted, it was Maggs. And yet – oh God, he thought – I want to do it. I want to know what it’s like, so that when the same thing happens with Maggs, I won’t look a fool . . . In those few seconds of agonising, Frankie’s resistance ebbed away, and he allowed Patty to pull down first his shorts, and then his underpants.
Both of them were now completely naked. Frankie felt awkward; he knew he should be making the first move. But Patty saved his embarrassment by suddenly throwing her arms around him and kissing him fully on the lips. Their bodies were now pressed together, and Frankie felt the excitement pumping through his blood. He put his arms around her and returned her kiss – and as he did so, someone gave them a shrill wolf-whistle from behind.
Horrified, Frankie turned to find Jeff Murray standing in the doorway, rain running down his cycle-cape. ‘Wow! So ’e does ’ave one, after all!’ And as he spoke, he applauded, and roared with laughter.
At the same time, Patty pulled away from Frankie and she, too, threw her head back and shrieked with laughter.
Frankie felt sick in his stomach. He grabbed his pants, shorts, and vest from the floor, and put them on as fast as he could.
‘Come on now, lover boy,’ jeered Jeff, as he came across to Frankie making suggestive signs with one finger. ‘Yer din’t fink yer was goin’ to get somewhere wiv that, did yer?’
To Jeff’s absolute astonishment, Frankie turned on him in a flash and, with his clenched fist, landed the most devastating punch on Jeff’s face, which sent him reeling across the room.
Patty trembled with fear as she watched Frankie. She had never seen him like this before, the fury and strength of his response boiling over into such a physical outburst. Now, looking faintly ridiculous without her clothes on, all she could do was to rush across to Jeff, who was bleeding heavily from the mouth. But he made no attempt to get up and challenge Frankie to a full-blooded fight.
‘You’re stupid! Both of yer! A coupla bloody, stupid kids!’ Frankie put on his cycling cape, and picked up his bike. ‘In’t yer ever gonna grow up!’
Patty, crouched on the floor with Jeff’s head cradled in her arms, watched Frankie go with a mixture of fear and admiration.
Frankie wheeled his bike to the door, but stopped briefly to call back to them. ‘From now on, you bloody keep away from me – right? ’Cos if yer try ter set me up like this ever again, I’ll tear yer bloody guts out!’
He wheeled his bike out of the café. It was still pouring with rain.
‘I’m sorry, Frank.’
As Frankie was about to wheel his bike off, he found Alan Downs sheltering in the café porch.
‘It ’ad nuffin ter do wiv me – honest. It was their idea – not mine. I’m sorry, Frank – really sorry.’
Frankie glared back at him. ‘Piss off!’ he yelled, and practically ran with his bike until he reached the main road.
A few minutes later, Frankie was cycling along the cycle-path, with driving rain pounding against his face and cycle cape. Although it was not yet dark, the storm had forced most car drivers to turn on their headlights, which dazzled Frankie as he struggled to pedal on the glistening wet path.
So much was going through his head. How could he possibly have been so naïve? He should have known that Patty and Jeff would have tried to pull off a filthy trick like that. They were nothing but a pair of dirty, mindless gits who had nothing to do but think up things that could hurt people. And he thought about how he had betrayed Maggs by allowing himself to be drawn into such a situation. If she knew what he’d done, she’d never want to see him again. The whole episode was causing him to churn up inside, and riding along in the pouring rain he let out the most anguished yell at the top of his voice.
The sound Frankie made intermingled with that of another, quite different sound. It was the eerie clanging of an ambulance alarm. As he turned to look over his shoulder, a white, rain-splattered ambulance came speeding up behind him. It overtook him and came to a halt at the side of the main road just ahead of him.
Frankie had not intended to stop but he noticed something which suddenly sent a shiver down his spine. Lying on the grass at the side of the cycle-path was a bike that he recognised. It was old, with a tattered saddle-bag, and with straight, rusting handlebars . . .
In a blind panic Frankie got off his own bike and threw it down on to the grass. Then he pushed his way through the group of helpers calling, ‘Let me through! Please! Let me through!’ By the time he reached the ambulance, the back doors were open, and the driver and his assistant were already putting their victim on to a stretcher. When Frankie finally succeeded in reaching the ambulance, the small, slight figure, who was quite clearly unconscious, was being wrapped up in a red hospital blanket. But it was only when the stretcher was carried into the back of the ambulance that Frankie’s worst fears were confirmed.
It was Prof . . .
Chapter Twenty
Peter Vernon Moosey, known simply as Prof, died at twenty-past seven on the evening of Sunday, 2nd June 1945. He was just one week short of his sixteenth birthday.
Although Prof was already unconscious when Frankie reached him at the roadside, Frankie was allowed to travel in the ambulance with his best pal, leaving the police to collect both their bicycles. For the thirty minutes or so it took the ambulance to get to the hospital, the driver’s assistant tried to revive Prof with oxygen, but by the time they arrived, a doctor pronounced Prof dead. It was, he said, nothing more than a massive heart failure. ‘Nothing more’, thought Frankie. What a strange way to put it. And because Prof had died unexpectedly, there would have to be an autopsy. The doctor and nurses in the emergency unit were terribly sympathetic to Frankie but nothing could make up for the loss of his pal, who, only a few hours earlier, had called Frankie ‘someone special.’
At about eight o’clock in the evening, Frankie was allowed in to see Prof for
the last time. He was covered with a white sheet, and when the nurse pulled it down to reveal Prof’s face, Frankie couldn’t believe he was dead. If it hadn’t been for the blue colour around his mouth Frankie would have thought he was asleep. His heart! Why did his heart have to fail, Frankie asked himself? Why couldn’t it have gone on and on just like everyone else’s? Why couldn’t Prof have lived a long life, got married, had kids . . .? Damn his stupid heart! Damn it a hundred times over! Tears were trickling down Frankie’s cheeks. He felt so stupid just standing there, so helpless. But then, quite suddenly, he leaned over and whispered close into his best pal’s ear: ‘See yer then, Prof! Fanks fer everyfin’.’ It was an extraordinary, impulsive thing for Frankie to do. But he needed to do it.
Auntie Hilda arrived at about nine thirty. Two kindly police constables from Hornsey Road police station had called on her to tell her the news at her flat above the ladies’ handbag shop in the Seven Sisters Road. When she heard what had happened, she was shocked, but not surprised. She had known how bad her nephew’s condition really was for some time. The policemen took her in a patrol car all the way to Brentwood and, even though she was too late to see young Pete still alive, she was very grateful to everyone for all the trouble they had taken to help her. She didn’t cry at all until she was taken in to see the last of the boy whom she had adopted at the beginning of the war. When she came out, she and Frankie hugged each other.
Suddenly, being together, they felt very close to Prof again . . .
Earlier in the afternoon, Grace and Reg Lewis had gone to tea with their daughter Helen and her husband-to-be, Eric Sibley. It was a highly unusual event for the Lewises, for they hadn’t been visiting to anyone for years. But the two young people made them feel very welcome, and they had certainly made their two small furnished rooms on the first floor of a terraced house in St Anne’s Road, Tottenham very comfortable. The only thing that Reg didn’t approve of was that the walls were painted plain white instead of being covered with a nice patterned wallpaper. But Gracie was very impressed with the tea: Apart from a corn-beef salad, crumpets with margarine, and a strawberry jelly with custard, this included a good-sized fruit cake.
‘Where d’yer buy a cake like this, then?’ asked Gracie, her mouth crammed with as much as she could pile in. ‘You got a good baker shop round ’ere? They don’t ’ave none of these at Stagnell’s.’
‘I didn’t buy it, Mum,’ replied Helen, feeling rather pleased with herself as she poured more cups of tea from a large brown china teapot which Frankie had bought for her from the jumble shop. ‘I made it meself.’
Gracie froze, a large lump of cake still unchewed in her mouth. ‘You made it?’
‘Why not? We’ve got the use of a nice kitchen on the ground floor. I do all our cookin’ down there.’
Reg coughed on the Woodbine Eric had just given him. ‘Since when d’you know ’ow ter cook then?’
‘Well, let’s face it, it’s only common sense, in’t it, Dad?’ Helen put down the heavy teapot.
Eric, clearly enjoying all this, drew hard on his fag, blew out the smoke, and grinned broadly. ‘She’s quite a gel, your daughter, Mr Lewis. She gets recipes from newspapers and fings.’
Gracie and Reg exchanged a glance, continued eating and drinking as much as they could, and didn’t pursue the subject any further.
After tea, they all sat down by the open window and watched the kids from the downstairs flat playing in the back garden. It was a hot night, so Eric and Reg took off their shirts and sat there in their vest and braces while they quickly gulped the first quart bottle of brown ale. Helen and her mum sat side by side on the tiny sofa, but Gracie was irritated to see her daughter knitting baby’s socks, mainly because she didn’t know how to knit herself. However, she was allowed to listen to her Sunday evening ritual on the wireless, and soon they were all joining in the title song with ‘Ramsbottom, and Enoch, and Me’. When it was over, Helen went downstairs and made a pot of tea and when she came back, Eric and her father were talking politics.
‘I can’t believe you’re really goin’ to vote for Churchill though, are yer Mr Lewis?’ The brown ale was beginning to make Eric quite lively. ‘I mean – ’e’s nuffin’ but a bloody ole warmonger, ’e is.’
‘Maybe so,’ sniffed Reg indignantly, pouring himself another glass of brown. ‘But at least ’e got us fru the war! If it ’adn’t been for ole Winnie, bloody ’Itler would ’ave marched right past yer front door!’
‘Well, I’m votin’ for Attlee and the Labour Party. It’s time this country did somefin’ fer workin’ class people, people who can’t even afford ter go ter the doctor’s.’
‘Attlee!’ This was the first Gracie had contributed to the conversation. ‘That ’orrible little man. ’E’s got slant eyes – like a Chinaman.’
‘Don’t matter wot ’e looks like, Mrs Lewis. We need someone who knows ’ow ter run the country in peacetime.’
Gracie came back, quick as a flash. ‘’Ow d’yer know ’e can run the country in peacetime? War’s only been over fer a month.’
‘Anyway,’ said Reg, rolling up his vest sleeves, ‘the war ’ain’t over yet. We still got the Nips ter deal wiv.’
Eric lit another fag. ‘That won’t be long now, you mark my words. The Yanks’ve got somefin’ up their sleeve, all right. Now we’ve got ’Itler and ’is lot out the way, you’ll find the Japs’ll give in at the drop of an ’at.’
‘I dunno about the drop of an ’at,’ retorted Reg. ‘After the way they bin cuttin down our lads out in the jungles, they oughta bomb the bloody daylights out of ’em!’
‘And Mr Clement so-called Attlee ain’t the man ter do that!’ asserted Gracie, dogmatically.
Helen was getting anxious that Eric was becoming too involved in a heated conversation with her parents. ‘Well, I’m glad I’m not old enough ter vote in no General Election. They all sound the same ter me. Anyway, come July we’ll be too busy wiv the weddin’.’
Gracie, stirring her tea, looked up with a start. ‘Weddin’?
‘Yeah,’ said Eric. ‘We’ve fixed the time, Mrs Lewis.’
‘Yer mean just in time!’ joked Eric.
Helen blushed, but Eric and her father laughed.
‘So, when is it?’ Gracie asked, rather nervously.
‘Well, we’re finkin’ about the second week in July,’ said Helen. ‘It’s goin’ ter be in the Registry Office up at Islington Town ’All. Under present circumstances,’ she said, feeling her now very enlarged stomach, ‘I’d feel a bit embarrassed gettin’ married in church.’
‘Fair enough,’ conceded Reg. ‘But why wait ’til July?’
It was beginning to get dark, so Eric crossed the room and turned on the light switch by the door. ‘It’s really because of Frankie. As ’e’s my best man, it’s only fair ter give him time ter get over his school exams.’
Gracie’s face hardened. ‘Are yer sure Frankie’s not too young ter be a best man?’
‘Too young? Frankie?’ Although it was getting late, the kids in the back garden were making a heck of a noise, so Eric went to the window and yelled out, ‘Oy – you lot! Keep it down!’ The noise cut out immediately, and Eric turned his back to the window. ‘Frankie’s not too young, Mrs Lewis. In fact, in my opinion there’s no one in the whole world who’d be a best man as good as Frankie. ’E’s got a good ’ead on ’im, I’m tellin’ yer. One of these days, ’e’ll do yer proud.’
Neither Gracie nor Reg quite knew how to answer that.
‘So – ’ow many people you invitin’ ter the weddin?’ Reg asked, finally.
‘Oh, no more than a couple of dozen at the most,’ said Helen, picking up her knitting again. ‘Some of Eric’s family and a few of our friends.’
Reg seemed a bit put out. ‘Well, wot about our side then?’
‘Our side?’ asked Helen, surprised. ‘’Ave we got anybody?’
Gracie and Reg exchanged an uneasy glance.
‘There’s your Auntie Dot and Uncle ’A
rry,’ suggested Reg.
‘We ain’t seen ’em for years!’
The clicking of Helen’s knitting needles was now beginning to irritate Gracie. ‘That’s not the point. If they’re not asked, they’ll be very hurt.’
‘I quite agree,’ Eric said, nodding in agreement. ‘The last fing we want ter do is to offend any of your relations.’
‘You speak fer yerself!’ said Reg, wryly. ‘Bloody awful lot!’
Eric did his best to conceal a chuckle. ‘Mind you, as yer can see, it’ll be quite a squeeze ter fit ’em all in.’
‘Wot’s that?’ Gracie could no longer bear the clicking of Helen’s knitting needles. She stretched out her hand and pulled the half-completed baby socks down on to Helen’s lap. ‘You’re not goin’ ter ’ave the reception ’ere?’
Eric shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nowhere else, Mrs Lewis.’
‘Blimey!’ Reg quickly lit one of his own fags as he looked around the small room they were sitting in.
‘But yer can’t!’ Gracie was turning around in every direction trying her best to imagine a crowd of wedding guests treading on each other’s toes. ‘There ain’t enuff room ter swing a cat!’
Helen tried to give her mother a reassuring smile. Up until the past few months, she would never have thought that any contact would ever have been possible. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. We’ll manage – some’ow.’
To which Eric added, artfully, ‘Unless of course you’ve got a better idea, Mrs Lewis?’
There followed a pause, in which Gracie and Reg exchanged an anxious glance.
Eventually, after taking a deep drag of his fag, Reg said, ‘There’s always our place.’
‘Oh no!’ Eric said immediately, an earnest look on his face. ‘We couldn’t do that to yer, Mister Lewis – it wouldn’t be fair. I mean, me an’ ’Elen couldn’t put yer to all that trouble, not wiv all the preparation and everythin’.’
‘Well, we’ve got more room than you ’ave!’ Reg started to pace the room nervously – which, given the size of the place, didn’t take him long. ‘We’ve got the front room, the back parlour and scullery, and now we’ve got rid of the Anderson we could get some of them out in the back yard.’ Then he turned quickly to his wife. ‘What d’yer fink, Grace?’
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