The Boyhood of Burglar Bill Read online

  A lucky rebound got us back in it. A mighty clearance from Tommy Ice Cream bounced awkwardly and caught their goalie a glancing blow on the side of his head. As he spun round looking for the ball – ‘It’s behind you!’ – Tommy Pye arrived, undetected at knee level, and poked it in the net.

  Now we were starting to play. Arthur got the ball, passed to Wyatt and, urged on by Spencer, ran beyond their defenders for the return. Wyatt, though, had only undertaken to receive passes, not give them. With Arthur and others creating confusion, and me yelling at Wyatt to pass it – ‘Bloody pass it!’ – he moved serenely inside, took a couple of galloping strides and slammed a goal from twenty-five yards.

  It was still 2–all at half-time. Tommy Ice Cream had blocked shots with various parts of his body. He was fairly well covered in mud. (The pitch was lush, low-lying and cut up easily.) Edna May had distinguished herself with some bold tackles and a cross-cum-shot which skimmed the opposition’s bar. The crowd was struck by the unusual composition of our side: girls and infants on the pitch and a grown man in goal. The traffic of alcoholic refreshments from the Perrott Arms continued: full pints one way, empty the other. Most of the men were in overalls, their hands and faces grimed and dirty with work, only their mouths washed clean by the beer.

  We gathered on the halfway-line in a cluster around Spencer. Mrs Pye was giving her Tommy a clean-up of his own with spit and a hankie. Mr Glue gloomily anticipated defeat unless Graham pulled his socks up. Mr Skidmore urged all of us to get stuck in and stop ‘faffin’ about’. Wyatt had befriended a passing dog and was busy turning its ears inside out. Rufus and Albert Toomey came forward shyly almost, conspiratorially, with a paper sack, buttoned up inside Rufus’s coat, of oranges. Albert produced a fearsome-looking knife and cut them up. Tommy Ice Cream ate his bit and, before anyone could stop him, swallowed the peel with it.

  The second half was a disjointed affair. Perrott Street playing field was small: one pitch with a path around it, shrubberies and flowerbeds, swings, toilets, and that was it. This did not prevent gangs of kids from (dis)organizing rival games of their own on the touchline and behind the goals. Sometimes we found ourselves with three balls to choose from. Dogs sauntered on to the pitch; a pair of them got into a snarling vicious fight and had to be separated. The referee was gradually losing his temper. He urged the grown-ups to control their kids, and their dogs. But the dads in general were no help, becoming, as they did, increasingly light-hearted and rowdy. They passed loud comments about the match and the referee, who got grumpier still. A short fat man with yellow hair and a penetrating pub voice climbed up on a bench and began singing:

  ‘Why was he born so beautiful?

  Why was he born at all!’

  Anyway, they scored another but we scored three. The first, a composed, placed penalty from me – I had been practising; the last, the best, the most ‘faffed about’ one of the lot: Joey to Ronnie – Ronnie to Edna May and back to Ronnie (a wall pass!) – down the line to Tommy Pye – square ball to Joey, who had not stopped running – Goal!

  A word about celebration. There was less of it then. We’d leap about and yell all right, get a pat on the back maybe, but none of this kissing and cuddling stuff, high-fives and all that. Some of the mothers though… Mrs Skidmore, for instance, made an embarrassing fuss of Joey when the final whistle went. Tommy Pye was ambushed by female relatives: mother, auntie, gran. They surrounded him; you could hear him in the middle protesting. Seconds later he wriggled free and bolted, leaving their loving circle briefly hollow, like a human doughnut.

  Mrs Pye looked puzzled.

  ‘Puppy?’ she said. ‘Did he say “puppy”?’

  ‘Yes, puppy,’ said her mum.

  ‘Puppy,’ her sister said.

  Mrs Pye stuck out an expert hand to grab little Albert as he went flying past. ‘C’mere, you.’ The puzzled look persisted on her face, joined now by a shadow of suspicion.

  ‘What puppy?’

  12

  The Ball inside the Full Back

  The ever-increasing variety of the town’s industries augurs well for the future prosperity of Oldbury. Besides the wide range of its hardware output, from edge-tools to bicycle frames, and of its chemicals, from alkali to phosphorus, it produces blue bricks and cardboard boxes, tar, jam, and pale ale, immense engine boilers and delicate surgical dressings, and a catalogue of other manufactures equally strange in their diversity, to say nothing of the railway carriages and the canal barges by which they may be expeditiously carried away.

  Frederick William Hackwood,

  Oldbury and Round About (1915)

  We walked home through the darkening town, up Perrott Street, round behind the covered market, past the town hall and the library, past the shops.

  ‘I don’t like it at left back,’ said Graham. ‘I’m better at right half, really.’

  A low sulphurous fog, expelled from Danks’s furnaces, fanned out across the road. Street lamps floated like jellyfish in the spooky yellowish light. The smoke stung in our noses, prickled our eyes, shortened our lives.

  ‘I don’t like it at right back,’ Malcolm Prosser said.

  We paused from time to time to gaze into some lighted window. Sturgess’s, the butcher’s, had a model of a pig in a butcher’s apron waving a cleaver at us. There was the sound of singing from the Zion Chapel, set back from the road behind a wrought-iron fence and pair of gates. Singing too, and cigarette smoke from the Blue Gates pub close by. Interestingly, both establishments were adorned with stained-glass windows.

  ‘Edna May likes it on the wing,’ said Brenda, walking beside Edna May who was riding her bike. ‘You should pass to her more.’

  My invisible dad appeared, and soon after disappeared, on his bike. He tinkled his bell and waved. He’d arrived straight from work, plus overtime, five minutes before the end. Almost as shy as Mr Sorrell, he’d come up to us when the whistle went, slipped me a sixpence and melted back into the crowd.

  ‘I’d pass to her,’ said Brenda.

  ‘I’d pass to you,’ Edna May said. She pedalled up alongside Joey, who was kicking a ball in a sprout bag. ‘Who we playin’ next?’

  We had reached the boundary of Danks’s private fog and were out into clearer air. Haywood’s Outfitters loomed ahead, its double window occupied by posing dummies, suits and dresses and hats, sheets, tea towels, pillowcases, school uniforms… and sports kit. Ten days ago half of this impressive frontage had been boarded up, the window smashed, stock removed, suspects sought. Ronnie had seen it the morning after, broken glass and splintered wood all over the pavement, blood too, Ronnie said. Dummies in even more preposterous attitudes, slumped sideways or hanging out beyond the jagged edges of the window. Blood, yes. And Rufus Toomey had that progressively dirtier bandage on his hand for days after.

  ‘Who we playin’ next?’ said Edna May again.

  ‘Aston Villa,’ said Joey and flicked his sprout-bagged ball – playfully, flirtatiously – in Edna May’s direction.

  A pungent smell of a different sort was reaching us now from the green and curdling waters of the Tipton canal. As we crossed the bridge, a woman came up from the towpath hauling a small boy behind her and clipping him round the head. The boy was stoical and made no sound. An elderly dog followed on at a safe distance.

  Monica Copper was with us with two other girls. Their white ankle socks shone luminously in the dark. Trevor – don’t ask me how, I had not told a soul, except Spencer maybe – had picked up on my partiality for Monica and was doing his best to further our romance.

  ‘He loves you,’ Trevor said. ‘He said –’

  ‘No, I never.’

  ‘She loves him,’ said one of the other girls.

  ‘I don’t!’ said Monica, rather too emphatically for my liking.

  ‘You love ’er,’ said Joey, joining in. But with his face in shadow it was not possible to tell who this particular attachment referred to.

  The Birmingham Road was quiet; it was almost eight o�
��clock. Joey spilled his ball from its net and began dribbling along; passes were given and received. Spencer had dropped back and was talking to Tommy Ice Cream. Tommy had his collar up and his flat cap on. He looked like a column of cloth.

  ‘That’s the best pitch ever!’ cried Ronnie, in a rare display of enthusiasm.

  ‘I could play for always on that pitch,’ agreed Arthur.

  ‘Me too,’ said Edna May.

  ‘Not right back, though,’ Malcolm said, and he produced a massive sigh. ‘I don’t like it.’

  One more canal with its bridge and we were out and above the main cup of the town. Nowadays, 2004, at this junction the M5 thunders overhead on thirty-foot stilts. The houses that we passed that night are, most of them, still there: vibrating with the traffic, shivering like Mrs Moore.

  When I arrived home the house was in darkness. Dad had left already, off to the Buffs: the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes, a club for men that met every Friday night in an upstairs room at the Malt Shovel. Mum was not yet back from her work, cleaning offices. Dinah rose up from the rug, wagging her stumpy tail. I drank thirstily, straight from the tap, made myself some bread ‘n’ drippin’ and sat for a time with the lights off, in the firelight.

  In the heat of the fire my mud-slicked socks and knees were drying out. Soon little patterns and crazings would form and eggshell layers of mud would fall away. My boneless body sank into the easy chair – under extra gravity, it seemed – worn out and sore. A graze on my elbow was beginning to sting. My brain was drifting.

  I felt… what? A wordless, thoughtless something. A sense of radiating contentment, happiness. Moves played out in my head. I could see the 3D geometry of them: the pitch, the players, the ball. Especially this: I get the ball, moving left, moving left, drawing the defenders across the pitch, then swivel and hit a twenty-yard pass with my left foot back the other way, into space. ‘The Ball inside the Full Back’, exactly as Stanley Matthews described it.

  And later, drifting still: three cheers from the ever-generous Sister MacPherson and her bumblebee team; more magical oranges from the capacious folds of Rufus Toomey’s coat; Tommy Pye shadowing Joey’s every move, intent on getting that puppy; a commotion, smashed glasses in the Perrott Arms; Brenda dropping hints about ‘other girls getting a game’; Monica smiling, maybe, but not at me.

  I go to bed, forgetting to draw the curtains, omitting to have a wash. (I’d pay for that in the morning.) A double-decker bus comes blazing past the window. I just about hear the lifted latch on the door below. Mum’s home. But the sound is in my dreams already. Spencer and Tommy Ice Cream talking. Brenda in the team. That little stoical boy. I am asleep… well, almost. Ankle socks.

  13

  Mrs Purnell and the Creosoted Fence

  Saturday morning and pandemonium in the street.

  ‘Raag-aboah! Raag-aboah!’

  The rag-and-bone man was out there giving away paper windmills in exchange for household scrap. Also, in certain circumstances for special items, day-old chicks! Kids, of course, are suckers for anything free. They will scramble and fight to get it, needed or not. I was supposed to be helping Mrs Moore. I had fetched a sack of coke from Russell’s yard, balanced precariously on our old pram. Presently, I was drinking a glass of Vimto and eating arrowroot biscuits in Mrs Moore’s kitchen. Later I would shovel the coke down the chute into the cellar. But when the cry arose, ‘Raag-aboah! Raag-aboah!’, it was like the Pied Piper. And I ran with all the rest.

  Spencer joined me and together we ransacked the wash house and dad’s shed. Elsewhere in the street other more law-abiding kids were pestering their mothers. Mine, fortunately, was out. Spencer’s situation was different. His mother kept everything so spick-and-span there was nothing in their house to swap.

  We gathered together a few items – tin cans, buckled bike wheel, ruined umbrella, newspapers – and stuffed them into a sack. Jack Piggott with his pony and cart was parked at the bottom of Tugg Street with a scrum of kids and a flurry of windmills around him. His pony, Monty, was tucking into a nosebag of oats and being petted half to death by the crowd. Up on the cart, in a cardboard box with little holes in it (‘That’s a nice cardboard box with little holes in it!’) were the day-old chicks. You could hear their tiny tantalizing ‘Cheep, cheeps’! I was familiar with day-old chicks. We bought them ourselves from time to time in West Bromwich market. Once, I remember, we had this chick, one of half a dozen, and it died in the kitchen, slumped forward on its beak like a book end. Mum came in from the yard, saw it and put it in the oven. I was horrified. Only the oven was not so hot, and the heat, as Mum intended, revived it.

  What Spencer and I got from Jack Piggott were two windmills. Which pleased us at first till we realized we were too old for windmills. A day-old chick was a prize to possess; windmills were for babies.

  I accompanied Spencer then to Cotterill’s to get his hair cut. Mr Cotterill was hard at work; Saturday morning was his busy time. Mysteriously, he had acquired two cups of tea, one to the left of him, one to the right, from both of which he was drinking. He also had a racking cough. There was more tea in the saucers than anywhere else. The radio was on so loud conversation was impossible. The floor had disappeared under a rug of hair. Three or four smokers were assisting Mr Cotterill in obliterating the atmosphere.

  In the afternoon Ronnie, Spencer and I got a fire going at the end of Ronnie’s garden, which sloped away and was therefore hidden from the houses. Ronnie acquired the matches and a couple of paper bags. Spencer and I foraged around for combustible material: stuff from dustbins, twigs, an old and rotting seed tray. I had a passion for lighting fires. I would have made a good caveman. Later, Ronnie obtained a potato from the house and we tried cooking it. As time went by, other items were added to the flames: a rubber band which produced a dreadful (wonderful!) smell, a lead soldier which melted down into a blob, a tiny celluloid frog which disappeared entirely in a puff of smoke. Eventually, we ate the potato, passing it round from hand to hand. Spencer, well-mannered as always, wiped it first with his hankie. The potato was charred black on the outside, raw on the inside and delicious. I can recall the taste of it even now.

  We sat on our haunches around the dying fire. Ronnie proposed that we piddle on it to put it out. For safety reasons. I made a joke about Ronnie becoming a fireman when he grew up. Spencer rubbed – thoughtfully, absent-mindedly – his cropped head, and pulled something out of the long grass.

  ‘Hey, look at this!’

  It was a rusty tin can with a wire handle.

  ‘Mine,’ said Ronnie.

  What Spencer had found was a fire-can. He gave it a swing. ‘Remember that time with Mrs Purnell?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said I.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ronnie, though he as it happened had not been there.

  A nosy cat came down the garden to have a look at us. A plane flew overhead. We poked the fire, resurrected it, and told ourselves, patchworking it together, the story (resurrecting it too) of…

  Mrs Purnell and the Creosoted Fence. It was last year, early November and the dark nights coming. It was the season for fire-cans. A fire-can was a serious delight to me: portable fire! To make one you needed a can, a hammer, a six-inch nail, a block of wood for hammering into and wire for the handle. Then, take the can, hammer a dozen holes into it and attach the handle. Grown-ups disapproved of fire-cans and confiscated them on sight. Spencer and I hid ours behind the Bodleys’ hen house.

  One evening about half-past five – it was the night before bonfire night – Spencer and I were returning from Milward’s with a bag of fireworks and sparklers, bought with our own money. We had stood for three nights outside the Malt Shovel with a guy in a pram. The guy was hardly more than a sack of salvage in a pair of trousers and a hat, but it had earned us three and ninepence.

  The street was darkening fast. A solidifying mixture of fog and smoke was gathering above the rooftops and blocking off the ends of the street. The cemetery was invisible. We paused beneath a s
treet lamp to admire again our collection of bangers, volcanoes and silver rain. It seems to me now I almost more loved looking at them, reading them, with their fairground colours and exotic names, than letting them off.

  A figure loomed out at us from the entry, hesitant and quivering. ‘H-h-hallo, boys.’ It was Mrs Moore – ‘Evenin’, Mrs Moore!’ – off with her jug to the pub.

  Spencer took the fireworks into his house and returned soon after with a newspaper under his coat. We drifted across the yard. The Bodleys’ dog barked and rattled on its chain. The Bodleys’ baby howled from an upstairs window. Behind the Bodleys’ hen house we recovered our fire-cans and prepared to christen them: Spencer’s paper, my matches, a previously collected stash of rabbit-hutch straw and twigs.

  The theory of fire-cans was straightforward: light your fire, get it going, fill it up and swing. The rush of air acted as a bellows. In the right conditions, a well-made can would glow red hot like a furnace. Sometimes they even melted. Sometimes sparks flew and boys set light to themselves. Eyebrows and even eyes were lost.

  This time we were more in danger of choking to death. Smoke was considerable, but flames were few. The twigs were too green and sappy.

  ‘Come on!’ I headed back up the yard.

  ‘Where we going?’

  Crouching down, I scuttled along behind the row of wash houses. Spencer followed.

  ‘Where we –’

  ‘Sh!’

  Mrs Purnell’s was where we were going. She had a fence of loosely slatted creosoted boards around one section of her garden to keep the dogs off. What she grew there, I cannot recall.

  It was getting darker and foggier all the time. Blurred squares of light glowed out across the yard from various windows; a cloud of steam from the open lighted window of the Fogartys’ wash house; an expanse of lighted roof from the Creda.