Down the Figure 7

by Trevor Hoyle

  Terry liked going to Heybrook. He enjoyed most of the lessons and was usually in the first half-dozen when they had exams. Mrs Butterworth, his teacher, had told him he could be top of the class if he concentrated more. ‘Why you and Alec Bland have to be so silly, Terry, I don’t know.’

  The pair of them were sometimes silly, it was true, passing notes back and forth with rude words and drawings on them, and dipping Brenda Harrison’s pigtails in the inkwell. But she was toffee-nosed, Brenda Harrison, and nobody like her.

  Coming home from school one day (it was the first week in November), Terry, Alec Bland and Male Smith were crossing Yorkshire Street and about to turn down Oswald Street when they heard a muffled shout. Terry glanced up at the iron railway bridge almost directly above them and saw a grimy hand sticking out from between the riveted stanchions giving them the vee-sign. It was followed by a mop of red hair, and underneath that, Spenner’s grinning mug. The three lads scrambled up the embankment and shinned over the wooden fence that was made out of old railway sleepers, their tops cut into points.

  ‘I’ve found a stack of wood.’ Spenner was excited. ‘You know Wardleworth Station? The one they’ve shut down? Loads of it: doors, benches, tables, window-frames, the lot.’

  ‘How we going to get it all the way back to Denby?’ Male Smith said. ‘It’s miles.’

  ‘Is it buggery; a mile at most,’ said Spenner, who was twelve-and-three quarters and therefore had a better conception of distance.

  Alec Bland looked dubious. ‘Still too far to carry all that bommie.’

  Spenner curled his lip and said scathingly, ‘Bogies, you pie-can. Wait till tonight and take the bogies along th’Arches and load ’em up. Us lot and some more of the lads could shift tons of stuff. Dead easy!’

  Something had occurred to Terry. He said, ‘We’ll have to pass South Street.’

  There were two rival gangs in the area, Gowers Street and South Street, and of the two the South Street mob was the worst.

  ‘Who’s chicken-shit scared of South Street?’ Spenner said jeeringly; he slouched with his hands in his pockets and kicked at one of the rusting stanchions. The three smaller boys watched him, unsure and a bit fearful, uncertain what went on in a big lad’s head. ‘Not scared of Brian Creegan, are you?’

  No one said anything because this was precisely who they were scared of. South Street were mostly big lads, and Brian Creegan’s reputation as a sadistic nutcase struck terror into younger kids.

  ‘I don’t think me mam’ll let me stay out that late,’ Male said, chewing his thumbnail. He was a full half-inch smaller than Terry and Alec and this always seemed to put him at a disadvantage, or he thought it did.

  ‘Mard bugger,’ Spenner snarled, and gave Male a push in the chest. ‘His mam won’t let him stay out that late,’ he taunted in a jeering whine.

  Terry was glad it was Male and not him that Spenner was getting at; all the same he didn’t feel too comfortable about it either. Male sat next to him in 4A, they were good pals, and Terry liked him.

  The four of them walked down Oswald Street, crossed Entwisle Road near the UCP tripe shop and went behind the hoardings which advertised Rinso ‘for Whites that are Whiter than New!’ and Mansion Polish and Dinneford’s Pure Fluid Magnesia.

  This was the Common: a rough square of dirt and cinders enclosed on all four sides by the hoardings, the Arches, a foul trickling stream called the Hey, and the bare brick ends of two rows of houses. The Common was the Gang’s cricket pitch in summer, its football field in winter, and it was here they built their bonfire. And behind the hoardings on most dark nights you could find one or two of the older lads groping the girls.

  A low stone wall bordered the brook, the water sluggish and sulphurous with swirling patterns of brown and purple and dirty white. A grey viscous tidemark of chemical scum clung to the far bank: the residue of the Eclipse, Rydings and Buckley mills upstream. At this time of year the brook was fairly innocuous, but in the heat of summer the smell rose in dense torpid waves, sickly and slightly sweetish, like rotting meat, infiltrating through open back doors into the kitchens of houses even as far as Hovingham Street.

  Spenner issued final instructions. ‘You tell Mitch and Danny, Terry. Alec can tell Roy Pickup and I’ll see the others.’ He was exultant. ‘It’ll be bloody great’ – he hunched his body low down – ‘ten of us creeping along th’Arches with our bogies, sneaking in under Creegan’s nose and raiding Wardleworth Station! Eh, Terry?’

  Terry nodded. He could feel the tension rising in his chest. Scrounging for bommie in the South Street gang’s territory. Bloody Nora. It was exciting all right, but he was scared and wasn’t sure he really wanted to go. He said calmly, ‘About eight?’

  Spenner nodded. He was picking his nose and examining the results on his fingers. ‘Yeh, we’ll all meet up here, on’t Common. Tell ’em to bring as many bogies as they can. We’re going to need six or seven at least—’

  He jerked his head up. He said softly, ‘Look who’s coming. Owd Riggy.’

  Through the iron railings the lads could see old Ma Rigall tottering slowly down Cayley Street in her worn pointed shoes and wrinkled black woollen stockings. She lived next door to Terry at number seventy-nine, alone in filth and squalor. The house was a tip and stank of cat pee, and once when Terry had gone down her cellar-grate because she’d locked herself out he had to hold his breath while he stumbled to unlock the front door and rushed out gasping into the fresh air. She had given him an apple for his trouble, which Terry, having seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, had chucked into the brook.

  The lads crouched behind the low brick wall, just their heads showing, their noses poking through the railings, and chanted:

  ‘Rigall is a Witch, Rigall is a Witch… Ee-Aye-Addio, Rigall is a Witch.’

  Ma Rigall perked her head up inside her shawl, the face like an ancient yellow prune with dirt etched into the cracks as into a scrap of soiled parchment. She carried a string shopping bag of indeterminate colour and her hands were like claws, with black curved nails.

  ‘Dirty Old Witch, Dirty Old Witch!’

  Ma Rigall crossed the muddy street, avoiding the puddles. She had to bear these taunts, as well as having bangers pushed through her letterbox and dead cats thrown over her backyard gate. Partial deafness and near blindness meant that she was isolated in a dim private world, lost in her own loneliness, but even so she heard the taunts.

  ‘Terry Webb! Alec Bland! David Spencer!’

  It was Bessie Smith, Malcolm’s mam, poking her fat red face into things as usual. She was a large woman, broad-shouldered and big-bosomed, and carried her ample body like a sergeant-major on parade. At the moment she was leaning out of her front bedroom window, pointing a finger at them as steady as a Colt 45.

  ‘I can see you, don’t think I can’t! I’ll tell your mothers. Get off home, the lot of you.’

  Spenner was staring up at her with a perfectly bland, innocent expression on his face, while below the level of the wall both hands were giving her vigorous vee-signs. Terry’s face cracked in a smile and Mrs Smith shouted, ‘Right, Terry Webb. Just wait till I see your mother!’

  Bessie Smith’s face disappeared and the window slammed shut.

  Spenner jumped onto the low wall bordering the brook, pretending to lose his balance and teetering on the balls of his feet, arms circling backwards like the sails of a windmill.

  Terry said, ‘I’ll have to go in for me tea.’

  Spenner said, ‘What you having, bread and spit?’

  ‘No,’ Terry said. ‘Shit with sugar on.’

  Joe came into the small, steamy, overheated kitchen in his greasy raincoat and heavy boots, smelling of metal turnings and machine-oil. He pulled a wadded bundle from his pocket, grimy in the folds from spending all day in the locker of an engineering works. Tuesdays he brought home the Adventure and the Wizard, Thursdays the Rover and the Hotspur. The Rover was Terry’s favourite because it had the best stories: ‘The Tough of t
he Track’, ‘Morgyn the Mighty’, and Nick Smith, the football hero of ‘It’s Goals That Count’.

  Sometimes Joe would relax enough to wrestle Terry to the floor in a claustrophobic bear-hug, rubbing his sandpaper chin against Terry’s cheeks until they were inflamed and burning. Barbara would say: ‘You’re far too rough with him, Joe, you’ll hurt him.’

  ‘You mard him too much,’ Joe replied. ‘You’ll have the lad growing up a cissy.’

  Terry still had a vivid memory of that time last summer when he lifted half-a-dozen flags in the backyard, intending to make a vegetable garden between Ma Rigall’s wall and the outside lavatory. Joe came home from work and the first thing he did, even before sitting down to his tea, was to march straight outside and lay them all down again. Barabra had to physically restrain him from taking extreme retribution; as it was, Terry got a crack that sent him reeling across the kitchen and head-first into the back door, which made him literally see stars.

  There had been another incident last summer that Terry found himself smiling at every time he recalled it, involving Simple Annie, who was the younger sister of Mad Johnnie Johnson.

  Annie was eight or thereabouts: a dirty, bedraggled girl with matted hair and dark staring eyes, always in the same torn frock and wearing clogs on her bare feet, the ankles caked with dirt. As usual he had been out playing with Alec and Male, the three of them messing about (which they shouldn’t have been) in Sam Clegg’s coalyard at the back of Terry’s house.

  It was mid-summer, the day baking hot, the tar melting and bubbling in-between the stone setts and seeping sluggishly into the drainage grids. The three of them were mixing mud, dropping a tin can on the end of a piece of string into the brook and using the discoloured water to shape mud pies, which were then lined up on a stone slab to dry in the sun. Alec and Male mixed while Terry decorated the pies with dandelions and dock leaves. They looked appetizing on the slab, and when Simple Annie drifted by they called her over and told her how tasty they were, and which flavour did she prefer, and would she like to try one?

  Simple Annie sat down cross-legged, her bony knees sticking out, and picked up a pie in her grimy little paws. Then Terry had a fiendish idea. He said that before she could eat it she had to play Truth, Dare, Force or Promise. Simple Annie gazed at him incomprehendingly out of a blank face and vacant eyes, and Terry said quickly, while he had the nerve, almost stammering it: ‘I dare you to show us your bum.’ (It was a well-known fact that Simple Annie never wore any knickers.) She stood up at once, lifted her ragged dress, and the three of them sat in a circle, leaning forward for a better view. There wasn’t much to see, and what there was was mostly covered in dirt.

  When their curiosity had been satisfied and they reckoned the forfeit had been paid, Terry said, ‘All right, Annie, you can have the pie now,’ and Simple Annie crammed it into her mouth and wolfed it down.

  The three of them looked at one another, shocked and amazed, and a bit frightened. They hoped that mud wasn’t poisonous or that the stinking water of the brook wouldn’t give her a disease.

  ‘Do you really like them?’ Terry asked her.

  ‘Mmm,’ Simple Annie said. Her little pink pointed tongue came out and licked a few crumbs of mud from the sides of her mouth. ‘Can I have ’nother please?’

  If Simple Annie was a harmless simpleton, her brother was a raving nutter.

  Mad Johnnie Johnson didn’t belong to any gang (it’s doubtful whether any gang would have tolerated him): he was a loner who came and went mysteriously. You might see him chasing rabbits across the ash-tips, firing at them with his Diana air pistol, or building a fire for himself dangerously close to the wooden garages under the Arches. The truth was, the other lads were scared of him because his behaviour was completely unpredictable – such as the time he tied an old car inner-tube to a length of rope, which he fixed to a telegraph pole, and performed a wild yelling Tarzan act over the brook, skimming the rusted bedsteads and slimy green house bricks and whirlpools of scum. Sometimes his feet struck the water but Johhnie didn’t care. Then one of his shoes came off and sailed away, without him bothering to retrieve it.

  A little crowd gathered. It was good spectator sport, and besides, everyone knew what was bound to happen sooner or later, and of course it did: the inner-tube snapped and Johnnie fell into the brook. It wasn’t more than two feet deep but he went completely under and emerged with the foul liquid dripping from his hair and a gaping stupid grin on his face. There was an appreciative spatter of applause as he crawled up the bank, barefoot, with his trousers stuck to his legs.

  Terry recalled, with a sense of disbelief even now, what Mad Johnnie Johnson did next: how he built a fire against one of the brick archways, stripped down to just his yellowing shrunken vest that finished at the navel, and sat drying his clothing while a semi-circle of nine- and ten-year old girls gazed wide-eyed at the willy of this fifteen-year old youth. Dusk came on and the group huddled closer as he told them ghost stories in the cosy fireglow and held up his trousers to dry.

  Across the brook, Terry and the other members of the Gang lounged on the wall, lobbing stones into the water and making crude, sarcastic remarks, loud enough for Mad Johnnie Johnson to hear; still, they kept their distance.

  Scrounging for Bommie

  THE GANG ASSEMBLED AT EIGHT O’ CLOCK: THERE were nine of them altogether, with five bogies and an old pram with buckled wheels. Male Smith wanted to bring his kid brother but the others wouldn’t let him.

  ‘Suppose we have to run for it,’ Kevin Hartley said, ‘he wouldn’t stand a chance. And we couldn’t wait for him.’ Male Smith’s kid brother went home scriking his eyes out.

  They wheeled their bogies across the wooden footbridge at the end of Gowers Street and climbed the embankment: the Arches loomed above them in the darkness, the huge semicircular archways of Victorian brick rising out of the mist that drifted like steam from the river. There was a nip of frost in the air, the grass on the embankment a ghostly frozen white crackling underfoot like splintered glass. Terry looked over the millstone parapet and saw, far below, the gaslamps of Denby gleaming faintly, dim glow-worms all in a row. He felt suddenly afraid and wished the scrounging expedition was over and done with. Why did they have to go to Wardleworth Station anyway? There was tons of wood to be had without traipsing miles to get it – and without running the risk of a gang fight with the South Street mob. Some of them carried half house-bricks and Tizer bottles broken off at the neck.

  In single file, Spenner leading the way, they crossed over Entwisle Road, then Yorkshire Street, cars speeding underneath with their yellow lights fanning out, and were soon approaching the deserted station. With the closure of the Rugby Road LMS Cotton Warehouse the station was no longer used: a cluster of abandoned buildings with rusted tracks disappearing into an overgrowth of stunted grass and dandelion leaves. So far nobody had dared speak, until Male said in a hoarse whisper: ‘I can see a light.’

  Everybody froze. Then Dougie Milne said, ‘It is nowt.’

  ‘It’s miles away,’ Spenner said. ‘Up Syke somewhere. Come on, don’t be yeller.’

  They crept up onto the platforms and started tearing doors off their hinges, gently at first, with consideration and the minimum of noise, and then with increasing force as the thrill of destruction overcame them. Kevin Hartley swung a bucket of sand through a window and wrenched out the frame, scattering glass everywhere, and Roy Pickup set to work with a hacksaw blade, cutting an LMS bench into manageable portions.

  ‘Give us a hand with this,’ Spenner said to Terry, and together they hung onto the guttering and brought it crashing down, almost crowning Danny Travis in the process. The station was filled with the clamour of banging, hammering, smashing and sawing as the gang tore the buildings to pieces – haphazardly and yet with great efficiency – as a group of lads can do when toiling earnestly as if to some methodical, carefully-worked-out plan. They were adept at destruction and went about their task joyfully.

 
; After twenty minutes the bogies were loaded to the gunnels and they took a break, sitting amidst the wreckage and passing Woodbine dimps from hand to hand. Terry had forgotten his fear. He dragged on the dimp and felt the satisfying contentment of comradeship and of a job well done. He still wasn’t completely sure about being accepted as one of the older members of the gang and not just a snivelling mard-arse kid. He thought back to the time when he’d been a scrotty eight-year-old, when he, Alec Bland and Male Smith had been on the fringe of things and never been allowed to go on raiding parties, always being told by the big lads to stand guard over the bommie and keep a look-out for Mad Johnnie Johnson and stop him crapping on the roof of the air-raid shelter, which he was wont to do.

  Spenner started to sing softly, and it was taken up by the others:

  ‘Don’t eat Brierley’s bread

  It makes your shit like lead

  No bloody wonder

  You fart like thunder

  Don’t eat Brierley’s bread.’

  It was getting late; Terry would get murdered if he wasn’t in by half-past nine. At the same time he couldn’t suggest moving till one of the older lads did, or he’d be branded a soft cock.

  ‘Anybody fancy the flicks this week?’ Dougie asked, the glow of the dimp lighting up his squarish chin with the faint white scar across it.

  ‘Ceylon Saturday afternoon?’ somebody suggested.