by Trevor Hoyle
Terry doubted whether anything that appeared in his report – that he’d peed in the inkwells or set fire to the school – would affect his parents in the slightest. If they took the trouble to read it he would be surprised, and if they read it and understood it he would be amazed. Since he started at the High School his dad hadn’t asked him a single question about the work or whether he liked it there; as a subject for discussion it was non-existent.
At another table Taylor was being tormented by Leach and a couple of cronies. Even though big for his age, and not skinny, Taylor was one of their favourite victims because he never, under any circumstances, retaliated. He just sat there with his tongue hanging out like a drooling idiot, never seeming to realise that he had the size and strength to hit back.
Leach had pinched Taylor’s rolled-up towel and was using it as a rugby ball, making low passes to Martin Jackson over Taylor’s head. When Taylor swivelled in his chair to intercept it, Leach crept up behind him and clapped his hands with terrible ferocity over Taylor’s ears. Jackson then completed the manoeuvre by returning the pass and waiting for Taylor to swivel the other way before thumping him between the shoulder-blades.
Terry said, ‘He doesn’t want to stand for that, the daft sod.’
‘Too mard,’ Tom Sorenson said, who though small was stocky and sturdily built, and had the kind of square jaw that made you think twice before picking on him.
‘Nowt to do with us,’ John said.
‘No,’ Terry said. ‘But one of these days somebody’s going to hammer Leach.’
‘Go on then,’ Tom Sorenson said humorously, which was all Terry’s outraged sense of injustice needed to shut it up.
*
A bonus of having a double swimming period in the afternoon was that it was only a short walk for Terry from the Baths at the bottom of Entwisle Road, so he was home twenty minutes earlier than usual. As he came in through the back door he knew there was something wrong, and stopped dead with panic crawling up his throat. There was a battered brown suitcase at the top of the cellar steps. His first thought was that his mam had had enough and was finally off, taking Sylvia with her and leaving Terry behind with his dad. Where was she going, to stay with Auntie Hylda in North Wales? Then from the front room he heard a warm, full-throated man’s laugh that was a rarity in the Webb household.
Suddenly it was like Christmas. There was a fire in the grate (on a Wednesday!) and standing with his back to it, big as life, was Uncle Jack. Terry felt weak in the knees from relief. His mam was sitting on the sofa with Sylvia on her lap; she looked watery-eyed, whether from laughing or crying Terry couldn’t tell.
‘Watch out! Here he comes! The boy from the Brains Trust!’
Jack grabbed Terry and wrestled him to the floor.
‘Not so tough, these High School swots, sis,’ Jack said, tying him in knots. ‘Soft as pig muck.’ His roar of laughter was infectious, and Terry was soon helpless, rolling on the carpet, feeling happier than he had in weeks.
Even Joe’s arrival from work didn’t completely dampen the mood. As a special treat they had their tea (liver and onions and chips) on the extended dining table, and Barbara sent Terry up to Wellens’s for some Kunzle cakes and a packet of Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers. The curtains were drawn and it was snug in the front room, the firelight making patterns on the wallpaper, soft music on the radio coming from a posh hotel in Mayfair with a singer called Hutch. It seemed to Terry a lifetime ago since he’d seen Uncle Jack. He remembered him in his army uniform, wearing boots with toe-caps like mirrors. He’d just come back from Egypt, and with his tanned skin and black glossy hair and dazzling smile he’d seemed like somebody out of a film. His hair was more unruly now, flopping over his dark brown eyes – eyes that were the same as Barbara’s, which Terry had inherited too.
‘Started collecting bommie wood yet?’ Jack asked, lighting up.
‘Next week probably.’
‘What about the Denby gang? How many are in it?’
‘Er, nine I think…’ Terry did a quick calculation. ‘Ten of us.’
‘Who’s yer main rivals?’
‘The worst lot? South Street.’
‘South Street! By heck, we had some rare battles with them. What was he called, now, their leader… Arthur Jessop! We used to call him Jessie. By heck, they used to threaten to stick us in dustbins, slap the lid on and set a fire going underneath. Chased us for miles one year along th’Arches and the top embankment. I nearly cacked me britches.’
Terry snorted and covered his face. Barbara said, ‘Jack… please.’
‘So who’s your leader now?’
‘Spenner. Dave Spencer.’
‘Who’s theirs?’
‘Brian Creegan.’
‘Don’t remember him.’
‘Well you won’t, Jack,’ Barbara said. ‘He’s only twelve.’
‘Thirteen,’ Terry corrected her. ‘Nearly fourteen.’
Jack puffed on his Park Drive. ‘I wonder where he is now?’
‘Who?’ Barbara said.
‘Jessie Jessop. Right bloody tearaway he was. I used to have nightmares about him chasing me over the railway embankment, cobbing half house bricks at us. I’ll have to buy him a pint for old time’s sake.’
‘He was lost at sea,’ Joe said.
‘On one of them Arctic convoys,’ Barbara said sadly.
‘Atlantic,’ Joe said.
‘Atlantic conveyors.’
‘As you were,’ Joe said. ‘Convoys.’
‘They had a service for him at the Good Shepherd. No body of course. They gave him a medal.’
‘Well they would, wouldn’t they,’ Jack said, grinding out his cigarette in the saucer. ‘Bloody nice of ’em, I don’t think.’
Terry said, ‘Did you get any medals, Uncle Jack?’
‘Aye, the DSO.’
‘Did you, Jack?’ Barbara’s eyes lit up. ‘You never told us. What’s that stand for?’
‘Deputy Shithouse Orderly.’
‘Jack, really…’ She frowned in Terry’s direction. ‘The lad.’
‘You think he hasn’t heard worse than that in the school playground, sis? Here – hang on.’ He went into the kitchen and came back a minute later with an object wrapped in greaseproof paper. ‘What do you reckon to this, then, eh Terry?’
Jack unwrapped it and held the weapon in the flat of his hand.
‘Bloody Nora…’
‘Hey, watch that bloody tongue of yours,’ Joe said.
‘Real Luger, nine millimetre, 8-round magazine, as issued to German officers. Swapped it for two hundred Capstan Full Strength from a squaddie in Bengazi.’
It looked practically new to Terry, a dull machined shine under a coating of oil. The handle was moulded plastic with deep slanting ridges for a better grip.
Jack held it out. ‘It’s been fifed. Smell.’ Terry bent forward and there was a faint acrid whiff. His mam said: ‘You won’t get into trouble, will you, Jack, carrying a gun round with you?’
‘Not if you keep quiet, sis.’
‘Is it loaded?’ Terry asked.
‘Never wave around a loaded weapon,’ Jack said. ‘First rule of soldiering. Keep the bullets separate for safety.’
‘I’d have thought you’d had enough of such items,’ Joe said. ‘Not as if you can go out shooting rabbits with the damn thing.’
‘It’s just a souvenir,’ Jack said. ‘Like them Nazzy spoons I brought you.’
‘Spoons with swastikas on is one thing,’ Joe said. ‘Guns is another.’
Barbara started stacking the plates. ‘You’ll stay with us, won’t you Jack?’
‘I will if you’ll have me. Till I find a place.’
‘Course we’ll have you – won’t we Joe? I’ll move Sylvia in with us and you can have the back room with Terry.’
‘Oh yeh! Great!’ Terry punched the air.
‘You planning on finding work up here?’ Joe said. ‘Some mills are on short time as it is.’
‘Sam
e in the Midlands. I had a decent job driving a lorry for a haulage firm till it went kaput. Thought I’d try my luck up here.’
‘You’ll need plenty of that,’ Joe said.
Ambush
IT WAS QUITE A PRIVILEGE TO BE ALLOWED PEACE and quiet in the front room to do his homework, for it meant that an extra bulb was burning beneath the tasselled shade of the chrome lampstand in the corner. The lamp threw a circular orange glow over the linoleum and the edge of the carpet, marked the wallpaper in parabolic curves of light and shade, and faded away to shadow behind the leatherette armchairs and underneath the dark-stained sideboard. There must have been all of sixty watts pounding into the room.
Terry was writing an essay on Sir Francis Drake and the voyages of the Golden Hind. He was cribbing most of it from 100 Daring Sea Adventures, relying on the fact that Mr Redfern, the History master, would never know.
From the street he could hear Doreen Hartley’s voice calling to someone out of earshot; the activity of the night was just beginning. He closed his mind to the temptation and pressed the nib of his Platignum pen into the paper. He wrote steadily, filling the pages with curling blue words. It was very satisfying. He felt rather smug and self-righteous, working so diligently when most of the other lads would be out on the streets, roaming the pens, generally messing about and wasting time. Perhaps if he got a move on and cut it short he might even take a ride over to Gowers Street.
Terry still saw Margaret Parry, most afternoons in fact. Both she and Betty Wheatcroft had passed for the Girls’ High School, and often were in the same bus queue as Terry on the way home from school or sitting a few rows in front of him on the upper deck. Margaret didn’t so much ignore Terry as somehow arrange it so that she was never looking in his direction when he happened to be looking in hers. He could have been wrong, it might not have been calculated, but all the same their eyes never met. Yet how to approach her, how to recapture the magic of that blissful summer day defeated him.
For a moment the page slid away and he was gripped by a raging frustration. In one sense it was revenge he was after: he wanted to break through Margaret’s defences in a wild rush, behaving callously, oblivious to her feelings. Yet in another sense, which was quite the opposite, the desire to be forgiven stirred within him, to be taken back and comforted. Both impulses squabbled like spoilt toddlers, the yearning to be accepted once again, and the malice of spiteful jealousy.
How easy and simple life had been at Heybrook! Terry recalled with a kind of baffled wonderment how much he’d looked forward to going to the High School. A bright new world in which kindly masters in gowns revealed the mysteries of exotic subjects like Latin and French, Physics and Geometry. Instead he was lost and floundering, scared because he couldn’t cope with the work, hating the class he was in, the classroom itself, the building, the fabric of the school and everything it stood for. It was like being caught in a trap. It was a trap. He was trapped.
He didn’t have the patience or willpower to complete the essay properly and scribbled the last page, making the words bigger to fill more space, capped his pen and bunged the lot in his satchel.
Alec Bland said, ‘We could chuck him in’t river.’
‘No, summat worse that that,’ Terry said.
‘What if he’s got his gang with him?’
‘What if he has?’
‘Chicken shit,’ Colin Purvis said.
The three of them were loitering in the doorway of the disused shop on the corner of Hovingham Street discussing how best to get Shap and what to do with him once they’d got him. Although this was Terry’s idea, he hadn’t explained why they were doing it; Colin Purvis didn’t seem to need a reason.
‘He hangs round his pigeon loft a lot,’ Terry said.
‘We could burn it down,’ Colin Purvis said.
Terry didn’t know whether or not to take him seriously. You never could with Colin Purvis.
‘Roasted piddies,’ said the big lad, smacking his fleshy lips. ‘Yum-yum.’
‘No use taking it out on his piddies,’ Terry said, thinking of his own birds. ‘It’s Shap we want.’ He snuggled deeper inside his jacket, staring unseeingly from the shadow of the doorway.
A steady fine drizzle floated down, making everything slick-wet. It was the first of the depressing autumnal evenings when the sky seemed to close over like a grey eyelid, shutting out the night and stars. The people of Denby were comfortably locked away in parlours and kitchens listening to Radio Newsreel, looking forward a little later on to a variety programme featuring Ivy Benson and her Band, with top of the bill Lester Ferguson.
The three of them set off along Entwisle Road, staying close to the stone-fronted houses in a forlorn attempt to keep dry. They sidled behind the hoardings and nipped across the empty Common, climbed the gate decorated with barbed-wire and ran into the draughty shelter of the Arches. The brook made a fast rushing sound in the darkness, the level having risen several inches after the recent rains. The odour was wafted downstream.
Terry felt secure in the night: he knew the Arches like an old friend, every mark and dispoilment on the crumbling brickwork; the way the light from the lamps across the stream was reflected wetly in long diagonal gleams – even the smell of dampness and decay that entered his nostrils like incense. ‘Come on,’ he said, leading the way, his voice hollow under the vault of brick, and they moved in single file up the cindery slope towards the pigeon hut, the black and white stripes painted in tar and whitewash discernible in the gloom.
‘There’s nobody here,’ Alec said, with what sounded to Terry suspiciously like a short nervous laugh of relief.
They approached Gowers Street, dodging from garage to garage in the manner of an Indian raiding party stalking a wagon train. Terry felt no fear – not with Colin Purvis on his side; the stealth was merely an added refinement in order to generate a pulsebeat of excitement.
But Gowers Street was empty. Nothing stirred, not a human soul, dog or cat.
‘I’m getting soaked,’ Alec Bland complained. ‘Can’t we find somewhere to shelter?’
‘Bloody soft cock,’ Colin Purvis said shortly.
‘It’s all right for you,’ Alec said. ‘You’ve got wellies on. My feet are sopping.’
‘Give it a bleeding rest,’ Terry said.
They walked along the dead street towards the main road and stood in the doorway of a shop that sold and exchanged paperback books. There was a row of Hank Jansons fastened by bulldog clips to a sagging wire. The covers showed men with hats shadowing hawklike features, wearing belted raincoats with square shoulders, and screaming red-lipped women clutching torn nighties to their bosoms.
‘I’ve read that one,’ Colin Purvis said, pointing to Moan Softly As You Die. ‘There’s a great bit where they shoot a bloke’s kneecaps off, blood and bits of bone splattered all over the ceiling.’
Alec said excitedly, ‘Have you seen what’s on at the Ceylon, Thursday, Friday and Saturday? Spider Woman Strikes Back.’
‘What use is that?’ Terry said. ‘You’ve got to be seventeen or eighteen to get in an H film.’
‘You’d get in’t Ceylon,’ Colin Purvis said. ‘Dead easy. Wear long pants and go in round the back in’t ninepennies. There’s only an old crone there, seventy-odd, with a deaf-aid.’
‘Have you ever seen an H film?’ Alec asked.
‘Loads. I saw Devil Doll at the Palace. All about this mad scientist who gets these dolls to kill people. And I’ve seen Frankenstein with Boris Karloff.’
‘What time do you reckon it is?’ Alec said.
‘Eightish,’ Colin Purvis said. He added, ‘I’ve got an Everite watch but it’s being repaired. I went to the baths on Saturday and forgot to take the bugger off. Me dad said he’d get me a new ’un but I said don’t bother, I’d have it repaired instead.’
This reminded Terry – uncomfortably – of the payments still owing on the 17-jewel Swiss-movement Cocktail Watch he’d bought for his mam’s birthday. After he’d started a
t his new school the paper round hadn’t lasted long and since then he’d been struggling to meet the payments out of his spence. The struggle hadn’t been too successful: there were two monthly instalments overdue and October’s fast approaching.
Alec said, ‘I’d rather go back to Denby, see if any of the gang’s out.’
‘Nobody’s stopping you.’
Alec wavered, stepping on and off the step in his damp shoes, glancing up and down Entwisle Road, all of a fidget. Before he had time to make up his mind, two girls came down Oswald Street and crossed the main road, linking arms. One of them was Margaret Parry, the other, as Terry recalled, was called Muriel. They had been up to Hamer Youth Club in the basement of Heybrook School. Terry had been once or twice, but it hadn’t much to offer except table-tennis, a threadbare billiards table, crisps and soft drinks.
‘Seen Shap?’ Colin Purvis asked bluntly, which made the girls pause.
‘No,’ Margaret said, looking at Colin Purvis and not at Terry.
‘I saw him on his bike earlier on,’ Muriel said.
‘You girls are getting wet,’ Colin Purvis said. ‘Come in here with us.’
Muriel took a half-step.
‘No thank you,’ Margaret said.
‘What’s up, scared?’
‘Definitely,’ Margaret said. ‘Shaking in our shoes.’
She was so lovely Terry could have killed her. He said, addressing himself to Muriel:
‘Anybody at the club?’
‘Not many. Rod Callaghan was there. Jean Ashmore. Margaret Sutcliffe. Iris Butterworth.’
Terry regretted not having gone to Hamer Youth Club. It would have been one further opportunity to snub Margaret Parry. He could have been near to her and ignored her at the same time.
‘What do you want Shap for?’ asked Muriel.
Colin Purvis smashed his meaty fist into the palm of his hand.
‘Why,’ Muriel said, ‘what’s he done to you?’
‘Nothing at all,’ Colin Purvis said, a fat grin spread across his face.
‘What for then?’ Margaret said. Her face had become sour and ugly with repugnance.