by Lee Evans
But I panicked and stupidly opened my mouth too soon. The gas ignited in a deep whooshing sound and, instead of blowing out, I sucked in. I felt the hot flame draw into my wind pipe and chest. My eyes widened, and I just stared, stunned, into space, unable to do anything, frozen to the spot, mouth wide open, as I exhaled the blue flame and it wafted up my face.
Every kid in front of me dropped to the floor and rolled around with paralysing laughter, holding their stomachs in pain, as they watched first my eyebrows then my fringe singe and melt into powder. I was the Twisted Firestarter – but not in a good way.
Another favourite stunt was ‘The Jump of Death’. Finding an abandoned motorbike and making it work again was the hard part. The easy part was finding some poor lemming with the brain density of a garden sieve willing to lay down his life for ‘The Jump of Death’. That would be me.
It was quite simple. ‘Evans, you’re in “The Jump of Death”.’
‘Oh, all right then.’
Our proper, perilous, death-defying leaps were much more dangerous than Evel Knievel’s – he had it easy! It was all done behind closed doors, so to speak. A discarded door was dragged over and hastily raised up at one end on a pile of breeze blocks. That formed the take-off ramp.
Then, the bone-rattling, wobbly bucket of bolts was driven full pelt by some mad hormonal fifteen-year-old across the back fields towards the rickety door ramp. He would launch himself and the heavy metal rust bucket into the air and hope to clear the line of petrified kids who had been volunteered for ‘The Jump of Death’ and were lying on their backs beneath. The object was to add another kid to the end of the line after each attempt, and try to beat the record for the number of lads cleared.
That was great in theory, but everyone knew that in practice, when the bike eventually clipped the final kid, the next chosen numb-nuts to lie down at the end of the line was going to get a motorbike full of sump oil right in the mush. That would, of course, be me, as I was always chosen as the last mug in the line.
So I would lie there, staring up at the sky, tensing up as the bike’s screaming engine got closer. Everyone was just waiting for me to get it, but it was still an almighty shock to be on the receiving end of a darn good thumping from a trailing back wheel. As it brushed past my head, it left a skid mark longer than Lewis Hamilton’s across my face, much to the amusement of all the other kids either lying next to me in the line or standing around watching.
I was the only kid who never got a turn on the bike. After it had hit me, I couldn’t really see much. But my souvenir of the day was to go home and explain to Dad why I had a faceful of tyre marks that made me look like a miniature Maori tribesman. I was always the butt of everyone’s bullying, but at least I was part of the gang and wasn’t being ignored. A lifetime of feeling like an outsider had made me pathetically grateful for the attention.
So that was life with the lads on the Lawrence Weston. As you can see, scientists in search of proof of the Chaos Theory needed to look no further than the everyday existence on that estate.
7. Nanny Norling
We kids never had any money. But that forced us to come up with ever more inventive ways of finding it. We had a first-class education in the fine art of fund-raising as we spent our days and nights roaming the streets of the Lawrence Weston.
Len and Faith’s paper shop was part of a parade of local shops on the estate. Next to the paper shop, there was a small supermarket, then a butcher’s, and a fish and chip shop, which was a real cash cow for us kids as they would give you the money back on returned bottles.
We duly obliged by climbing over the back wall into the yard where they kept crates full of returned bottles. We would pass them over the wall to other waiting kids, then stroll round the front of the chip shop and, without batting an eyelid, inform the manager that we had a lot of returnable bottles. You could only do it once a week, otherwise the manager would get suspicious.
After getting the money, we would wait until just before closing, when we would go in and ask whoever was serving if they had any ‘scrackling’, which is stray batter that has fallen down to the bottom of the fryer and is dredged up by the cook in a huge spoon and kindly put in a cone of paper. They didn’t mind as it was only fat and it would normally go in the bin anyway. Then we would sit on the wall outside, boasting to the other kids riding around on their bikes that we had not only made money that day, but also got a free meal.
Of course, a meal consisting of pure fat nowadays would be considered so unhealthy. Just looking at it, Madonna would scream in horror, collapse and shrivel into a steaming pile. But we loved it!
Across the street from the parade of shops was the Giant Gorham pub. It was certainly a rough place, but it had such an atmosphere that we’d get our entertainment every weekend by just hanging around eating crisps and mimicking the drinkers inside. We all sat there with the bottles of Tizer which one of the kid’s parents had bought us to keep us happy outside while they got pissed inside.
For us kids, it was really exciting sitting about outside until eleven at night, watching people struggle out of the pub with blood pouring from their noses! Every weekend the Giant Gorham would put on entertainment. The resident band would have to back anyone unfortunate enough to be booked there to entertain the mostly drunk and disorderly dock-workers. After the guest acts had either died on their arses or been dismembered and sold off for parts, it was time for some of the locals to get up and have a go.
We would sit in the car park outside, enveloped in the beery cloud that emanated from the pub doors, drinking, eating, listening and watching the huge frosted-glass frontage. Through that, we could see the wobbly outline of animated figures inside who were lit up by coloured flashing lights. Every week, the usual suspects would climb on to the stage and have a go at singing with the band. It was not a pretty sight.
Then every now and then towards the end of the night, the doors would swing open and out would fall one of the locals, mumbling drunkenly and staggering up the road. For us, the big prize was Paddy. Paddy lived about a hundred yards from the pub and was well known to us kids as ‘The Slot Machine’. He would stumble out of the pub at the same time every Saturday, as his strict wife ordered him to be home by twelve.
He would crash out of the doors and stand in the middle of the car park, swaying and rocking, like a sapling in a tornado. As he tried to focus on the route home, he would suddenly be surrounded by us kids. In order to get the slot machine to pay out, you had to say the magic words to Paddy: ‘’Ere, Paddy, you ain’t got no money!’
To which he would shout back, slurring his words: ‘Ieeev goh looooaaads a mawneee!’
All the kids would then buzz about his legs like manic flies. He would wave his arms around in the middle of us, like King Kong on top of the Empire State Building, trying vainly to swat us.
‘You ain’t got no money, Paddy, you spent it all,’ we would taunt.
‘I’ve got millions!’ he would rant, delving deep into his trouser pockets and pulling out handfuls of change to show us the evidence in his clenched fists. ‘See, you bastards!’ He would then hurl the change, spraying it right across the car park floor. ‘There, look, I’m loaded!’
We would frantically dive on the floor, fighting each other to be the first to get the silver coins. Paddy would weave away off home to his wife to explain why he now had no money, leaving us like pigeons pecking away at the tarmac. We would huddle up to compare our riches.
Some of the kids would then run to a call box about fifty yards down the hill and with the change make random calls to people. I listened in to a call a couple of times.
‘Is that Mr Walls?’ they would ask.
‘Mr Walls? No, there are no Walls here.’
‘Well, what’s holding your ceiling up then?’ the boys would shout and put the phone down.
Well, we thought it was funny at the time.
Because we never had
any money, trying to find something that might make us a few bob was a major preoccupation on the estate. If it wasn’t tied down, it was gone. And if something was going cheap, it would be already gone by now. Bob-a-job week was always extended to gissa-bit-more-a-job month, and a local character called Nanny Norling was just another way of getting in on some action.
An elderly lady, Nanny Norling lived in the very top flat of the block across from ours, and was to some kids a great source of income. I personally think she may even have been the first cash machine on the estate.
Initially, as a kid of around seven years of age, all I ever saw of Nanny Norling was her ominous, bony hand, the hint of her long, unkempt, grey hair that would wave wildly in the wind around her gaunt, ashen face, and the two small, pea-shaped eyes that would peer over the edge of her window box down towards us as we played beneath the flats.
Someone would notice her window open and, looking up, we’d stop dead still in anticipation as a hand would emerge and begin to be royally wafted around. It was a signal similar to the one they give at the Vatican when they have chosen a new Pope. This was our own, equally important, sign that there was going to be a major food drop.
The hand would retreat back into the open window and suddenly emerge again, but this time bulging with hard-boiled sweets. Then the palm would open like a claw-crane, letting the sweets cascade on to the courtyard below. We would watch them descend through the air, clucking away beneath like hungry chickens waiting for seed to drop to the ground.
We would run to the bottom of the flats, hands up ready to catch them, but alas, more often than not the sweets would smash uselessly into a thousand pieces on the concrete at our feet, rendering them into nothing but powdered sugar. It was the same with another food she liked to drop, fruit. The hand would come out, holding an orange or an apple. The hand would open and the fruit would drop. Even if you caught it from such a great height, it would splatter in your hands. But we still fell for it every time; it was as if we had been trained like chimps on a sort of ‘press-the-button-get-the-banana’ reward scheme.
Some of us kids knew that Nanny Norling was bedridden and so unable to leave the flat. Sad for her, but the advantage to us was that she always needed someone to make the trip to the corner shop for her essentials. So if her hand came out of the window and made a sort of regal beckoning motion – well now, that’s where the real money was at.
When that happened, by God, the race was on. All hell broke loose – there might be five, six kids, maybe more, running up the stairwell towards her flat. Before you could say ‘The Nanny Bank of Bristol’, we would be banging at her door offering our services in exchange for some cash. It was mostly pennies, but it was still money.
I remember on one occasion, I was hanging around at the bottom of the flats, along with my brother Wayne and a couple of other kids, Tony and Alex, when Nanny Norling’s window suddenly opened and the usual little wave summoned one of us up to see her. We shot a look at each other, like gunslingers waiting to see who would draw first.
I had never been fortunate enough to go on a Nanny shopping trip, as I was one of the youngest and never had the strength or the speed to get up to her flat before the others. But on this occasion there were only four of us, so maybe, just this once, the odds might be in my favour.
I needed no second invitation. I was off, with the three other boys, suddenly realizing I had legged it, in hot pursuit. As I made it to the entrance to the flats, though, I was grabbed from behind and pulled back through the doors, allowing Tony, Wayne and Alex to barge past me. I took off after them, as they fought tooth and nail up the stairwell. Suddenly, Tony lost his footing and fell on the first landing and Wayne and Alex fell giggling in a heap on top of him. This was my chance. Stepping over the hysterical pile, I was suddenly out in front. I had to take advantage of my lead – I knew it wouldn’t be long before they were on my tail. This was survival of the fittest, and I wasn’t that fit, so I needed to get a real head start.
As I reached the last flight of stairs, just feet away from Nanny Norling’s door, my legs were on fire, my muscles burning from all the stairs I had galloped up. I took a quick glimpse over my shoulder to see Wayne bounding up behind me like a giant antelope. With all my energy, I put in a last, exhausting sprint along the passageway to her door, but Wayne was already on top of me.
We hit the doorway together in a human crash. Wayne popped forward through the unlatched door and into Nanny Norling’s flat. I watched from where I lay and it seemed his upper body was going way too fast for his legs to catch up. The momentum propelled him forward and down on to a metal bucket that had been left in the hall. Crack! Wayne’s nose hit the side of the bucket, splatting in as many directions as a compass.
Wayne rolled over and lay on the floor moaning, clutching what was left of his hooter, as blood oozed out between the gaps in his fingers. It looked like the only place he would be going was A&E.
I couldn’t have cared less; I had my eyes on the prize. This was it, this was my moment, my time to shine, to bask in the sunlight that would lead to the Nanny Norling treasure trove and wealth beyond my wildest dreams. I snapped to my feet and slid quietly past the groaning lump that was Wayne. The treasure was mine.
I went to enter triumphantly through her living-room doorway, but, ‘Nann–aaaargh … bollocks!’
A hand had grabbed my ankle and I was gone, whipped back out of the door without so much as a by-your-leave. All that Nanny Norling must have seen was some scruffy kid appear, then just as quickly disappear from view. I was gone, sucked back through the door in a flash, like some demented cuckoo clock on the stroke of one.
As I lay sprawling on the floor beside him, Wayne quickly got to his feet, trying desperately to cup the blood now flowing like a river from his nose. I watched as he entered Nanny Norling’s front room, cool as you like, as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and say, quite calmly, ‘Do you need something from the shops, Nanny Norling?’
I entered the room behind him, battered, exhausted and breathing heavily. I was too late. Wayne had secured the lucrative contract.
This was the first time I had been in the famous Nanny Norling flat. It was jam-packed with all sorts of odd artefacts, not unlike the set of Steptoe and Son. These objects had clearly seen better days. She had, it appeared, at some point fallen on hard times.
Up against the far wall of the front room was a four-poster bed where Nanny Norling lay. The mattress was thick and high enough above the window sill so that the poor old dear could, as she liked to, constantly stare out of the window. A huge grandfather clock loudly tick-tocked away at the foot of the bed, a cabinet with dusty, faded, black-and-white photos of men in uniform sat on a lace cloth across a chest of drawers, and by the window next to the bed was a stand supporting a bird cage with a small yellow budgie chewing frantically on a cuttlefish.
‘Here,’ she said, quietly holding out a bag of birdseed to me as I stood, crestfallen, after losing out to Wayne yet again. ‘Feed the bird.’ I fed the bird, gave her back the seed, and she handed me a sweet – one frigging boiled barley sugar was all I got for my troubles! Well, at least it was a whole one and not a shattered fragment.
Deeply disappointed, I followed Wayne down the stairs. His nose was still pouring blood, but what did he care? ‘I got it, I got it!’ he crowed to the others as we passed them on the stairs.
Wayne has that scar on his nose to this day.
But I still have the mental scars.
One year later, Nanny Norling died, or as Dad put it: ‘’Ere, Wayne, you know that bucket you caught your hooter on? Well, Nanny Norling has kicked it.’
I asked if her foot was all right.
When I say she died, she didn’t actually die – well, not the first time anyway.
One of the neighbours called in a panic at our flat. She was crying, because she had gone into Nanny Norling’s flat and found her lying motionless in bed
. Mum and Dad and some other neighbours rushed over to Nanny’s flat immediately. A few of us kids followed along too. By the time a few doors had been knocked on the way over there, quite a procession of people had built up.
When I got to Nanny Norling’s flat, I had to squeeze gently under and through the legs of loads of people. The crowd led right down to the second landing. The door was open, with three, maybe four of the neighbours all trying to get a better look inside. I could just hear faint whisperings from the front room as I crept through the small hall, weaving in and out unnoticed by everyone – they were all too concerned with Nanny Norling. I made it into the front room, and there was Nanny Norling lying completely still on her bed, face white as a ghost as if she had fallen into a bath of talc.
About eight people were around the bed, all doing their most convincing over-concerned whispering act and discussing what the best thing to do was. Have you noticed people will always say the same thing in those situations?
‘I think it’s for the best.’
‘Yes, I think that’s what she would have wanted.’
How do they know? She’s dead!
Dad whispered loudly in a mock-respectful, authoritative voice: ‘I think we should tie her mouth up.’
There were gasps from the gathered crowd. ‘Tie her mouth up?’ someone exclaimed.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ remonstrated another.
‘No,’ replied Dad, keen to explain. ‘I saw it on a programme once. If rigor mortis sets in, her mouth will be permanently jammed open like that. So we need to tie it shut.’
A voice piped up from the crowd, ‘There’s a few people round ’ere I’d like to do that to.’
Dad asked if someone would pass him a tea cloth from the kitchen. He took it and, with everyone looking on, he mournfully and carefully closed Nanny Norling’s mouth. He asked another neighbour to hold it shut as he wrapped the tea cloth around her chin and up over her head, where he tied it in a huge bow. She lay there, like a giant rabbit, as everyone bowed their heads and said a little prayer. A couple of women began to cry.