Still Breathing

by Donnelly, Anthony; Donnelly, Christopher; Spence, Simon

  My first experience of the police was when I was in the infants in Benchill primary school. There were uniformed police and detectives stood outside the classroom with the head teacher. I knew they’d come for me. The head teacher shouted me out of the class and told me I had to go with these men. I went home and my dad was handcuffed. One of the police said to me, ‘Right, Christopher, can you tell us where the gun is?’ I knew then, right then at that very moment, that we were different – I was different to everyone else in the class. And I knew even then, at that early age, not to tell them anything. There’d been a post office robbery and my dad matched the description of the culprit. I looked at my dad and he said, ‘Go get the gun.’ So I got the gun. I knew where it was hid. There were always lots of guns about the house. They may not have worked and some may have been antiques. My dad would come home with random things. He’d come home with big chains of bullets or German helmets from the war – I had a massive collection of World War Two helmets and gas masks.

  Anthony: There was a real gun – a sawn-off shotgun. We watched someone hiding it and they had not seen us. I’ve always been fascinated with guns. My cousin and I went to a place next to my dad’s yard and lifted up the boarding where it was hidden, moved a few stones and it was there in a plastic bag. We were test firing it through a piece of wood and we hit the scrapyard dog in the arse. We ran off leaving the dog with an arsehole like a blood orange.

  At the scrapyard me and Chris used to burn copper wire out of the cars for our spends; rip the wire out of the dashboard, put it in a bucket on fire with holes in the side, melt all the plastic off, wait for it to cool down, chuck the copper in a wheel barrow, walk it to Silverman’s, tip it onto the weighing scales and the geezer would say there’s three quid or a tenner or whatever it was.

  I was in the scrapyard one day trying to impress my dad and a guy came in saying he’d left his tools in the boot of a car that was going to scrap. I put my hand up and said I knew where his tools were. I made this bloke climb six cars high and forty cars along. To me it was an adventure. When I got there, I opened the boot and there was nothing in it apart from a spider jack. This geezer called me a wanker. I went back to the office where my dad and all his mates were with their steel toe-cap boots on, all covered in oil, and I told them what the man had called me. By this time the bloke had walked out of my dad’s scrapyard and into my uncle’s car pitch next door – he sold second-hand sports cars. They kicked him to fuck, kicked him through a wire fence and they were screaming, ‘Say sorry to the lad!’ I had to stand there and watch them leather him. I was made to watch and in the end I actually asked them to stop.

  Christopher: We were allowed to drive cars at the yard. We used to drive a car forward and backward, smashing into other cars. On the six-weeks holiday, if we weren’t going away we’d spend most of our time in the scrapyard. I’d smash every mirror in there. My dad would come home on occasions and we used to play murder in the dark with a knife or ‘split the kipper’. He’s an expert knife-thrower and he’d throw the knife at us. You’d start off with your feet together, throw the knife on the floor, then put your foot to the knife; the other person gets the knife and throws it further away from your feet. The first one to fall over or get the knife through their feet would have their ‘kipper split’. Another one he used to do was get your hand on the table and stab between your fingers. It might sound a psychotic thing to play with your kids. I’m sure there was a minor bit of safety somewhere but not that we could see.

  None of our pals’ families had money like us, we’d come home and there’d be bags of cash on the side, always bundles of cash. My pals would come around and they’d be just looking at it like, ‘What the fuck?!’ My dad was unpredictable. He would turn up at school, come into the classroom, pull all us kids out and take us to an outdoor pool at the Galleon in East Didsbury. We’d have a great day. Or he’d come home and say, ‘Right, we’re going on holiday’ and that was us – we were gone. ‘Pack your bags, we’re going on holiday now.’

  He brought a fox home for a pet one time. We were on holiday in Anglesey once and we had to dump the car. Someone turned up with a new car. We had to book into different digs. That was our family holiday. We were different and we lived differently.

  Arthur: These kids grew up around scrap and the people coming to see me – all the main people in Manchester. And they notice, don’t they? They get wider, don’t they? I was over at the scrapyard and I’m watching our Jimmy trying to sell this car, he’s desperate for money. There’s a kid there looking at the motor and he’s at it, I can see his finger going. So I walked over and I went, ‘Fuck off,’ and hit him. He went down. Our Jimmy had a petrol can and he battered him with a petrol can. The kids have seen me fight a few times. Terrible when you think about it. That’s how we lived. You hired a car for a day and disappeared for month. We used to get a nice car to go on holiday in. Then the police would be looking for it. We did that a few times. I would buy and sell anything.

  June: The scrapyard was always full of characters. They used to come to the house as well. There was Jimmy Wingy – he weighed twenty-five stone. They all had a nickname – Johnny Two Ties, Bill the Clutch, Dummy or Cadbury. There were always American cars in my driveway, flying machines. Arthur was and is his own person. As far as I’m concerned, he’s working – he’s doing his business, but obviously got other involvements.

  Anthony was a very happy, loving kid. You could hear him coming home from school: he would sing all the way home. He’d sit in the toilet singing, he was always singing. Then he just went off. He was a lot of hassle.

  Chris was headstrong. Anthony was more emotional. Tracey was the thinker. When Anthony started getting in trouble, Arthur would murder him. He threw him out. Anthony ran away. But he did do some naughty things. I don’t know why. And then he’d be in public phone boxes phoning me up, or he’d write me little notes, ‘Sorry Mum, couldn’t help it.’ He was a mixed bag.

  One time we went to Wythenshawe market and Anthony wanted these black and white motorbike gloves. I told him no. He stole the gloves. I found out later he had a big hole outside my house in a tree and he had all his loot in there. I tried and tried. But I was not in full control.

  The first thing with Anthony and the police was trespassing. We had the railway police round. I tried to keep the boys safe and right, but it didn’t always work. I did most of it on my own. Arthur was away a lot. I was very young, very naive. I did the best I could.

  Looking back you think, ‘Why didn’t I do this or that for them?’ They were all bright kids. Chris was more creative. Anthony was sporty, but he was a bugger. Chris was a bugger, but Anthony was more out with it. You knew what you were up against with Anthony. Chris was quite good but he probably did his own thing. Anthony’s always had that funny streak. He is his father’s son.

  At the back of ours, on the industrial estate, they had the Mr Kipling factory. Everybody used to be there, robbing it every night. There were Kipling cakes all round the estate. There were lots of factories in the area: Paxo was another – so there’d be plenty of stuffing going about at Christmas. But that was just part and parcel of living there. It creeps up on you and it just becomes the norm. There always seemed to be people moving furniture from house to house, beds strapped to roof racks, chairs on top of prams, somebody always needed it.

  Anthony: Mr Kipling would get robbed every night and you’d always find someone else’s boxes of cakes in what we called ‘scallywag canyon’. We’d go to the crisp factory in Sharston [Wythenshawe] where they’d throw the burst packets of crisps in a skip. Someone would drive past and three heads would pop up from the skip. You don’t think at the time, but that’s pretty bad eating out of a skip. One day a Wall’s bacon wagon tipped over round the corner and the cab landed on the driver and killed him. He’s under the cab dead, the police are on the scene but because it had skidded for 300 yards there’s all pork joints and packs of bacon all over the road. Women from the estate were ru
nning there with trolleys and bags. No one cared about the driver. The estate smelled lovely of bacon for a week afterwards – or was that the local police station?

  I was constantly playing pool at the [estate] youth club. I was going in the youth club four years before you were allowed in. You had to be eleven to get in. I was seven. So whenever I went out with my dad I was always playing pool for money – I’d tell my dad, ‘Make me play.’ The money was mine to keep if I won. I had my own cue. I was a very determined child. We were the ‘sons of’. We were getting noticed on the estate as ‘his boys’. My first charge sheet was walking up the railway line throwing stones through people’s greenhouses. Vandalism. Petty crime. With the gloves, Mum said, ‘No you can’t have them’ because she wanted to keep me in check. So I stole three pairs. That was just how I was. No one was telling me I wasn’t having something.

  Christopher: ‘Scallywag canyon’ would take you from Sharston right through to Northenden [Wythenshawe] past all the industrial estates. There was Vimto, Paxo, Smith’s Crisps and Mr Kipling. I used to go down to Kipling robbing it all the time as a kid. I took it a step further. We’d sneak past the security guards and go into the factory. I’d come home with a shopping trolley full of cakes. It was a strange way to grow up. We were very independent kids.

  The local pub was called the Anvil. We’d climb over the back of the pub wall and nick the old soda bottles. They’d give you two pence if you brought them back, so we’d steal them and sell them back. We’d then go and buy sweets from Flanny’s.

  Our dad was grafting hard. He bought me a motorbike when I was six or seven and my mum kicked right off. It used to run on a car battery, big heavy thing it was. The steering was shite and I smashed straight into the school gates. I was full of cuts. Mum wouldn’t let me have a motorbike after that, but my dad bought me another one – we had to keep it in secret. But my scariest moments as a kid were when my dad kicked off.

  Anthony: I was robbing tins of beans and bread out of the house and feeding my pal Colin, who lived six or seven doors up. He was living with his granddad and his uncle and he didn’t have anything. Talk about poor: their dog – a huge monster – used to shit all over the house. I’d go round and there were old turds laying about with mould growing on them. At Christmas me and Chris used to wrap our old presents up and give them to Colin. I used to go fishing with him. One time we saw some kids who had Mitchell 300 reels that cost twelve quid. So we took all the fishing gear off them. We got caught and charged with robbery. I got a fine but Colin was put in care because of his situation at home.

  I started taking my mum’s rent – finding the money in the pot. Then it escalated: pinching from the purse, the jar for the meter. It wasn’t bad. It was fun. With the rent money I took the whole street to the local shopping centre and bought everyone pudding, chips and gravy. I robbed one of the neighbours. The son had a Sovereign ring I wanted. It was an older boy, and I think he stole it off one of the other lads. He robbed us, we robbed him and we robbed his bike as well. I couldn’t be told no. I was locked in the house for a week – in my room with my food passed in.

  Arthur: This is Anthony. At that time I was smoking a pipe and he came in and said, ‘The fella across the road said he’ll stuff that pipe down your throat and kick your arse. You’ve got to do something.’ So I said, ‘All right, come on son, come with me.’ We cut through my garden and confronted this guy. ‘You’re going to stuff this pipe down me throat, are you?’ He said, ‘Art, honestly, I didn’t say nothing at all.’ I’ve thought, ‘Thank fuck for that’ because he was a big fella. But that was Anthony – he made it up. That sums him up in a nutshell.

  Another time he burst a blood vessel in his nose and was smearing blood all over house. I came in and didn’t know what the hell was going on. I thought somebody had been killed. To look at them, you’ve never seen three more beautiful kids and Anthony could be a lovely kid but he was a one-off. If you took him to the cinema he’d turn round looking at people instead of the film, same at the football, watching the crowd not the game. But you couldn’t control him. And I was always a snapper. I’ve chased after them firing a shotgun in the air. I always go off at a tangent. I’ve always been a bit of a nutter. It was when you got married and had children that you realised your own dad wasn’t as bad as he was painted.

  Tracey: Even though our dad was starting to earn good money now, we were, and are, a working-class family; the only difference was we had a video, we had this, and we had that. In some houses something goes on and they say, ‘Ooh, guess what?’ But in our house, there’s already another event that has happened – there’s never a dull moment. There was all sorts going on. At about ten, eleven, I joined the church choir and that was my way of rebelling because I used to go to these happy clappy events at the Free Trade Hall. On a Sunday I’d go to church. I was up and gone and I used to come back and they’d all be in bed.

  Our dad worked away for most of our childhood – he could be gone for two to three weeks at a time. So if we were up to no good or being cheeky, our mum would threaten us with telling him when he returned home. Very rarely did she tell him, as she couldn’t cope with the aftermath. I think due to our dad’s own childhood he didn’t really know how to discipline so it would go from nought to 100 in seconds. That’s probably why the boys got away with a lot.

  Arthur: I used to put my money on the mantelpiece and they’d all help themselves. They had fortunes. It was straight cash – it wasn’t hooky cash. I’d live like a gypsy for weeks on end. I’d pull up in a wagon and buy engines from scrapyards all over the country. I’d travel through the night, get there at eight in the morning, and have my burning gear, my tools, my diesel and start cutting engines out. I lived in the wagon. I washed in rivers. I lived in yards sometimes if there was money to be earned. Every morning, before half ten I’d have earned two hundred and fifty quid – go to a scrapyard, get under a van, take the gearbox off – hundred and eighty quid! That’s what I used to do. We had a scrapyard in the Gorbals, Glasgow. I was buying British Leyland gold seal engines for reconditioning. I’d earn two grand in a day: exporting engines all over the world. Every week I’d send a forty-foot trailer down to Manchester.

  As kids they knew what an onion bhaji was when every other kid in Wythenshawe had no idea. They used to eat in Chinese and Indian restaurants when I came home. They had the best food, the best gear. While I was living like a tinker, they were right as rain. They were well looked after if you compared them to the other kids on the estate. I bought them a motorised go-kart. They had everything. If I could afford it, they could have it.

  Anthony: If there was a school trip and it was a hundred quid most kids would bring in 50p a week until it was paid off. I’d come in with the hundred, in cash, the next day and just pay it. We were always different. We had a VHS, one of the earliest ones, five or six years before anyone on the estate. My dad would come home from the scrapyard with tens of thousands of pounds. So pals would come round and you’ve got a video player that they’ve not heard about, ten grand in cash on the side, loads of stolen biscuits and T-shirts. You would want for nothing when our dad was there. My mum was still out working. She was at the Golden Garter [a venue in Wythenshawe’s main shopping strip, the Civic Centre, that hosted bands such as the Drifters or Showaddywaddy] laying and clearing tables. She was a proud woman. She wasn’t blinkered but she would definitely turn a blind eye. She wouldn’t have known all that was going on. As far as she was concerned, my dad was a rogue, fair enough, but he’s got a scrapyard, he’s out doing what he’s doing and he’s coming home, bringing the money in. There was loads of weird stuff.

  One time he took me to a proper bombed out Mancunian wasteland and we were throwing away perfectly good paintings. You’d go home and there’s a geezer with 700 gold chains stood there. I started putting two and two together.

  Tracey: We loved it when our mum was working at The Golden Garter. All the big names of the day would play there on the cabaret circuit.
The acts would be booked for a full week and on a Monday they would do the sound check. As our mum worked in the days setting the tables for the evenings, we were able to go in watch them sound check. As young kids this was so exciting, we got to meet loads of people. I used to take my autograph book in and get them to sign it. My mum and dad took me with their friends Peter and Eileen on my first official grown up night out there to see The Chi-lites. I had mithered them to death to let me go. I never forget walking in there that night, I had only ever seen the club in daylight, so to see all the tables and the club lit up was magical.

  Our dad used to buy albums off the shoplifters each week for us. We would get about twenty at a time. He would arrive home with this pile of LPs and we would divide them up. There would be some rubbish ones, but you would also get some real gems. There would be everything from the Top of the Pops album to Brook Benton and Iggy Pop. It was stuff we wouldn’t have necessarily have bought at that age … a great introduction to all different types of music.

  Christopher: My dad was bringing cars and caravans home and all kinds of mad stuff, and one day he turned up with a horse. He brought it back from Scotland. So we cleared the shed out in the back garden, got some hay and we had a horse living in the back garden of a council house. It used to stand at the kitchen window and look through the window. Sometimes it’d come in the kitchen and sit down. While we would be walking in with our plates for dinner it would also be there. Somebody reported us to the RSPCA. They came to visit and went away perfectly happy – said the horse was well cared for, no problems!

  I was in school one day and this kid said to me, ‘I’ve just seen your horse running up the road.’ I ran out of school and followed the horse tracks on the grass to a big public green area. The police were already at the scene trying to catch it. So I said, ‘I’ve got this leash at home.’ The police made me run all the way home to get the leash. By the time I got back the horse had gone. My mum was getting her hair done in the hairdresser’s at Unit 7 in the Civic Centre and the horse was on the Civic marching about with all these police trying to catch it. I was like, ‘Fuck.’ I managed to get the leash over the horse’s head and then I had to walk it all the way home. My mum had seen me chasing it all over the Civic while she was sat there with her hair in rollers. She probably thought, ‘I’m not getting involved in that one!’ Eventually the horse went to a horse farm. My dad realised that we shouldn’t be keeping horses in a small council house back garden. I thought it was pretty cool.