BARRY WALSH
The Pimlico Kid

For Bronwen

Also for my father, Thomas Walsh and my brother, Terry Walsh. The best men I’ve known are the first men I knew.

In memory of Sarah McCormack (1978–2006), a wonderful Pimlico Kid.

“Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take”

From Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue – October 1975

London: August 1963

Fabulous Flesh

Fish, Fags and Devil Cat

Back Seat Dreams

Strength, Thrift and Gigli

Comanche Spite

Size Matters

Jubblies, Pigeons and Lies

Beach Magic and Sunray Stories

Bikini Close-Up

Books, Empires and Dickens

Female Company

A Man’s Life

Indian Camp Raid

Front Row Touch-Up

Different Dads

Kissing Khrushchev

Fish Paste and Flaming Turds

Race Lessons

Drowning and Denying

Bodyline Cricket

Headlong

Truth

Promises

Teamwork

Friends

Shaking Hands

Revenge Deferred

Haircuts and Maltesers

Bargains and Casualties

Making Audie Proud

Blood

Aftermath

Revelation

Forgiveness

Losing and Finding

Last Request

Epilogue – October 1975

Acknowledgements

Coming in 2014 from Barry Walsh – Love Me Do

W6 Book Café

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue – October 1975

Taunton 20 miles. The road sign slips past and another, listing local villages, glides towards me. One name stands out like my own on a guest list. A door into the past swings open and releases a locked-away ache. The car slows, behind me a horn blares. I pull into a lay-by.

Lower Sinton: part of an address written above two kiss crosses on a sheet of lined paper. I have never been here but I know it from what she told me: narrow lanes of pale yellow cottages; black window boxes crammed with flowers; main street pavements that rose three feet above the road. Her grandmother’s house stood next to the village post office and in the road outside her father’s black Humber gleamed. Beyond the back garden lay the wide meadow and further still there was the river. She spent her holidays here: where the sun always shone. When she returned to London, I marvelled at her golden skin and the extra light that had crept into her hair. It’s what happened in Somerset. It should have been Summerset.

I close my eyes. Back they come. First, as always, her face: bright, elfin, thanks to a short hairstyle, known at the time as Italian Boy. Beside her, my friend is making a circle with thumb and forefinger to tell me that everything is OK. And the other girl, with shining blue eyes, is hiding a smile behind her hand.

Scar reverts to wound. I tell myself, again, that we were children; that we couldn’t have prevented what happened; that when the most we might have been expected to deal with was a first kiss or a dying grandparent, we were undone by love itself, and violence – and that adults betrayed us.

Childhood love can endure but childhood promises are hard to keep.

London

Fabulous Flesh

High summer in Pimlico. After days of fierce sunshine, the meagre lawns of the prefabs in Grimsdyke Street are bleached and balding. A breeze churns the baked urban air and releases a faint, blended odour of street dust and dried dog shit.

In the afternoon heat, even the flying ants are walking. Rooksy and I have stopped moving altogether. We’re draped over the chest-high wall of Madge Smith’s garden, savouring the smell of wet soil in her hosed flowerbeds, and admiring her lush, watered grass.

I rest my head on my arms. It would be easy to fall asleep on the hard-sponge bricks, except that Madge is here. We pretend not to look as she bends to set down the large basket of washing on her terrace, which is an extension of the concrete slab on which the prefab stands. Rooksy props his chin on his hands. Sweat beads down his face in glistening lines. He sucks in air around his clenched teeth, and sighs. ‘Do you think Madge would show us her tits if we asked her nicely?’

‘Jesus, not so loud!’

Rooksy says thrilling things but he has sod-all volume control. Madge hasn’t heard what he’s said but her frown makes it clear that she wouldn’t have liked it. I ignore his question, but it’s got me wondering, again: what is it about tits? Hearing the word said aloud excites in a way that bosoms can’t. Mum has bosoms, so does my Aunt Winnie; hers are enormous and stretch her cream blouses and twin sets with more weight than push. Madge has tits.

How, and at what point, they become bosoms is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps they are tits that are no longer exciting? For now, imagining Madge naked from the waist up makes speech difficult and, not for the first time, Rooksy has conjured up images that I’ll be thinking about later.

He straightens up. ‘You know, I think she might. She must be so proud of them.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Rooksy.’

Madge will be doing no such thing. She’s little Jojo’s mum, and she isn’t much younger than mine.

He closes his eyes. ‘Oh the fabulous flesh.’

‘Rooksy, please!’

I turn away but he puts his arm around my shoulders and steers me back to stand alongside him as if we’re in a urinal. Madge glides to her back door where she lifts a cloth peg bag from its hook and returns to drop it on top of the washing.

Rooksy starts moving up and down against the wall, forcing me lower as he rises and shoving me up as he drops. I resist but after a few upward scrapes against the warm bricks, I’m moving under my own steam. A ‘love it, can’t bear it’ feeling grows in my groin and Rooksy’s tight smile makes him look as if he’s trying to whistle through a Polo mint.

Madge looks across at us and our bobbing figures freeze. Rooksy is down low and I’m at the top of my stretch.

‘What are you two doing?’

‘Whoops,’ says Rooksy.

‘You standing on a biscuit tin Billy? Or are you in a hole Peter Rooker?’

‘If only,’ he whispers.

‘What?’ says Madge.

We return to our proper heights and I speak up to stop Rooksy saying any more. ‘Nothing, Mrs Smith.’

‘You have grown though haven’t you Billy, filling out a bit too. What with those blue eyes, you’ll soon be …’ She winks.

My face burns. Thank you Madge. But soon be what? Please say what what is. I’ve started to grow, at last: a little taller, a bit less skinny. Mum and Aunt Winnie have said as much recently, but to hear this from Madge … who has tits.

Rooksy nudges me. ‘Ooh, I’d watch her.’

‘What’s that?’ says Madge.

‘Four nil,’ I say.

‘What?’ says Rooksy.

‘Four nil.’ I shrug as if it’s obvious. Football scores can divert the attention of those who’ve heard something they shouldn’t have. It hasn’t worked; Madge is frowning again. Please Madge, don’t change your mind about me; you’re my only fan with tits. Her eyes narrow but she relents and gives me the smallest of smiles.

She picks up the basket and carries it to the far end of the clothesline, using the top of one thigh to provide extra lift with every other step. At the far end, furthest from prying eyes, she begins pegging out the family’s underwear. First, her husband’s and Jojo’s Y-Fronts, then her whiter, more slender knickers. Knickers: a word as potent as ‘tits’. Could those she’s hanging out be the kind she’s wearing right now? I swallow hard.

Even fully clothed, Madge looks wonderful. A red headscarf squeezes her dark hair into a ponytail. She’s wearing a sleeveless white frock with buttons all down the front. Each time her suntanned arms reach up, her breasts stretch the fabric either side of the brown V of her chest. When she bends down to the basket, they settle back and her cleavage narrows and darkens.

‘Oh, definitely tits.’

‘Without a doubt Billy,’ says Rooksy.

Blimey, have I really said that out loud?

Rooksy jogs me with his elbow and starts whispering a commentary like the mad woman on telly who jollies ladies through health and beauty exercises.

‘That’s it Madge, bend and stretch, bend, sort, pick and stretch.’

One of the pegs fails to close over a shirt and slips down the front of her dress. As she picks it out, Rooksy groans and Madge glares at him.

The clothesline rises as it reaches the pole near us, forcing her to stretch higher. Rooksy can’t help himself. ‘And stretch up … Oh Billy look at them.’

I’m looking, I’m looking!

‘And down …’

Closer now, she stoops to rummage in the remaining washing, allowing us to see further into the ‘happy valley’ – another Rooksy term.

‘And feel …’

Madge’s bum pushes out before she straightens up. Oh god. I should leave now but my legs aren’t up to it. I cling to the wall.

Rooksy is covering every movement. ‘And stretch …’

Now that the basket is lighter, she shoves it along the ground with the outside of her foot. This highlights the curve of her thigh and widens the unbuttoned split of her dress to let us see higher up her suntanned leg. Too much for Rooksy, who puts a forearm over his eyes. ‘Oh, fabulous.’

‘Rooksy, please.’

He grins. ‘What? What have I done?’ A bubble appears and collapses on his shining white teeth.

He knows what he’s done, and he’s doing it from his favourite position: within earshot and out of reach. Rooksy is almost fourteen, only six months older than I am but he knows things that I’m still guessing about.

He’s a ‘dirty bastard’, which is what his cousin called him when she caught him watching her dry herself after a bath. He happily admits that this is exactly what he is.

It’s all very well being a dirty bastard in private but Rooksy makes it public and takes things too far. Some of the parents in our street say he’s been spoiled because he’s an only child. However, if having more money, better clothes and amazing confidence is being spoiled, what’s so wrong with it?

‘Hello Madge.’ His voice is a poor imitation of Humphrey Bogart but his smile is real Errol Flynn – except that saliva has collected at the corners of his mouth and stretches like bubble gum between his lips as he speaks. Above his brown eyes, fair hair sweeps back in glossy waves. Like Kookie in 77 Sunset Strip, he grooms it constantly with a comb, which he tracks with his other hand to smooth down or push up where necessary. And he stares ahead so intently that you’d think he was looking in a mirror.

‘Don’t you Madge me, you cheeky bugger. Mrs Smith to you.’ She puts her hands on her hips. ‘Billy Driscoll, what are you doing hanging around with the likes of him?’

‘Nothing much, Mrs Smith, is Jojo around?’ Like mentioning football scores, asking your own questions can help to change the subject.

‘Over East Lane Market with his dad.’

‘Can I give you a hand Ma— isis Smith?’ says Rooksy.

‘Give me a hand, you dirty bleeder? You’ll get my hand around your ear if you come it with me. Go on, out of it. Why can’t you play football like other kids?’

Football? Rooksy? On the rare occasions he joins in our street matches, his short-lived efforts range between bored wandering about and surprisingly aggressive tackling. We play ‘first-to-ten’ and when one side reaches five, we change ends. This is when Rooksy sods off.

‘Sorry Madge, I mean Mrs …’

Blasted by her fierce look, we turn and squat down behind the wall. Rooksy cowers, ready for her to lean over and aim a clout at him. When she doesn’t, he sits back, closes his eyes and starts rubbing his crotch, whispering, ‘Oh Madge, fa-abulous flesh.’

I want to run away but sit tight rather than let him know I’m a bottler, especially as I’m now looking into the grinning face of the one person who does know this. I’ve forgotten that John is with us. My younger brother is crouched by the kerb and smiling, not so much at Rooksy’s antics as at my ‘scared face’. His eyes widen as he opens and closes his mouth like a goldfish. He claims this is how I look when I’m frightened. I haven’t seen this face myself but I suspect that it’s a fair description. John has his faults but he rarely tells lies. I’d like to show him what his scared face looks like but he hasn’t been frightened often enough to develop one. As far as I know, he has no interest in Madge or the differences between bosoms and tits. This should make me feel more grown up than he is, but it doesn’t.

He turns away and, with his fingers, starts killing the winged ants that are filing suicidally in columns along the gutter. We all kill crawlies but John uses bare hands to squash large spiders and beetles that we would only tread on. As he presses down on the ants, his back broadens into a smaller version of our dad’s, and the sight of John’s flat shoulder blades moving under muscle has me straightening up.

On our sideboard there’s a photo of me, taken a couple of years ago by a beach photographer at Brighton. I hate it but Mum keeps it because, she claims, she likes my smile – not because it’s a big print and the only one that fits her favourite silver frame. I’m standing on Olive Oyl legs and wearing woollen swimming trunks that sag from non-existent hips. My arm is raised in an embarrassed wave that accentuates the white hoops of my ribs.

Skinny arms may have given me a whip-like throw but they’re no good for the important skills, like fighting or looking good in short-sleeved shirts. However, things are getting better at last and there are clear signs that I am going to have biceps after all. Others have noticed too, not least Aunt Winnie, who has stopped putting her arms around me and John to present us as Charles Atlas before and Charles Atlas after.

Rooksy, eyes closed, is chanting softly while pretending that he’s wanking ‘… ninety-nine, a hundred, change hands, don’t care if I do die.’

I shuffle away from him and settle for just thinking about girls and what nestles under bras and knickers. I often ache, really ache, to see breasts close up on women like Madge – or girls like Christine Cassidy, who sticks hers out in case you don’t notice them. Some chance, she’s built like a young Aunt Winnie. I’d still love to know what they feel like. I’ve seen naked women on a pack of Rooksy’s playing cards but the pictures were disappointingly indistinct in areas where I’d have welcomed more detail. When you flicked through them, the women cavorted about, arching back or bending over, while always managing to look as if they were about to give you a kiss. Of course, I made the appreciative noises that Rooksy expected but closer examination revealed that there weren’t fifty-two different women but a hard-working half-dozen. Viewed one at a time, there was nothing happy or sexy about their smiles and, although I didn’t mention it to Rooksy, their flesh was far from fabulous.

The best pictures are in my head. Lying in bed, eyes shut; I can picture girls I actually know, without their clothes. These images are hard to hang on to and my brain could do with a ‘vertical hold’ button to stop them sliding from view. But no matter how fleetingly they appear before me, at least their flesh is fabulous.

‘You still here?’

Madge’s face looms over us like God’s on the church ceiling.

Rooksy rolls to one side, pulling his hand from inside the top of his trousers. Madge notices but she focuses on me. ‘Get out of here, Billy Driscoll, now, and don’t think that what he’s doing is clever, ’cos it’s not!’

‘No, Mrs Smith’.

Rooksy catches my eye. His smile disappears and I wince at having betrayed the shameful truth that I agree with Madge.

As he scrambles to his feet, he makes the mistake of pushing down on John’s shoulders. John spins around, fists clenched. ‘Get off me.’

‘John!’ Madge screams. John freezes. Rooksy’s smile returns as he holds up his hands. Madge points a finger at him. ‘And you, Peter Rooker, next time you’ll be sorry.’

‘Sorry … Cheerio then Madge.’

‘What?’ She scoots after him as far as she can along her side of the wall.

He jogs away laughing.

Before she goes indoors, she flashes me an angry glance. When I look at John, he gives me the gasping-fish face.

Fish, Fags and Devil Cat

I’m sitting, feet up, on the bench in the shady corner of our backyard. Lord of the Flies is face down on my knees while I picture the dead parachutist swinging in the trees.

I’ve just come to the uncomfortable conclusion that if I were one of the boys on the island, I’d soon be exposed as less than heroic. For relief I ponder the easier subject of how quickly the dead parachutist’s face would rot in heat like this.

‘Billy, ducks, run and get us a packet of Weights and a bit of fish for Chris will you?’ Ada Holt is leaning out of her kitchen window above me. What could be her last fag is hanging from the corner of her mouth.

‘Up in a minute Mrs Holt.’

Ada lives on the ground floor. Getting to her flat involves going up to the street and in through the main front door. It’s never locked because no one in the flats upstairs wants to answer knocks that might not be for them. Our street is made up of large terraced houses that were once Victorian family homes but have now been carved into flats and single-room lets. The houses are fronted by iron railings at street level from where stone steps dogleg down to the ‘areas’ belonging to basement homes like ours. In another era, our front door would have been opened only to tradesmen.

On the wall at the top of our steps, the cheap cream paint fails to cover the words AIR RAID SHELTER and an arrow pointing down to our two coal cellars. During the War, they were damp, distempered refuges from German bombs. Ada cowered in one of them the night her house next door was firebombed. Today she lives on the same floor in our house with only a party wall between her and the charred shell of her old home. Twenty years on, it remains open to the weather and when it rains, damp seeps down through to our flat and glistens on the passage wall. In winter, John and I can play noughts and crosses in the condensation.

Only one cellar is used for coal. The other is used as a storeroom, where all the things that Mum won’t throw away, ‘just in case’, are packed in. She went on at Dad for ages to seal the manhole cover above it. He finally got around to it, and did a thorough job, the day after a new coalman opened it to pour in five hundredweight of best anthracite – proving Mum right, again, about doing things straightaway. Being right isn’t her most endearing trait.

Ada does her crushed-slipper shuffle to the door.

‘Hello ducks, come in.’ She’s wearing her quilted ‘all-day’ housecoat that, in Ada’s case, could be described as ‘all week’.

‘No thanks, Mrs Holt, think I’ll get going straightaway.’

Wafting past her is one reason for staying outside. Our house has its own smell; the main ingredients are cabbage and cigarette smoke. Ada’s flat is a prime source. A second reason crouches behind her, glaring at me, tail twitching. Chris is a black-and-white tom that terrorizes other cats, most dogs and me. A real sour puss, his mouth is already open in full feline snarl. Only Ada is allowed to stroke him and even she waits until his mealtimes. Get within range and he slashes like Zorro at exposed skin, and he’s undeterred by gloved hands or trousered legs. His lair is by the fire, inside the fender on the scored brown tiles – an ingrate in the grate. Because Chris hasn’t been ‘seen to’, he adds a bitter edge to the distinctive smell of Ada’s flat and of Ada herself.

She calls his malevolent behaviour his ‘funny little ways’ and carries the livid lines of his affection on hands, wrists and legs. She deems most of them ‘he’s only playing’ scratches. But she has deeper wounds from his ‘you little bugger’ attacks, usually provoked by absent-minded attempts to brush cigarette ash off his back as he snoozes beside her.

Ada squints at me through smoke rising from the fag that clings to her bottom lip. ‘Just ten Weights and a tanner’s worth of whiting please, ducks.’ Her right eyebrow arrows up above her open eye and the left crouches around the one that’s closed. It makes her look as if she doubts everything she sees.

She takes a deep drag, which pulls her jaw to one side and gets her goitre on the move. The cigarette rises and falls like a railway signal but fails to dislodge the lengthening ash, which also resists the buffeting of her speech. Only when it’s longer than the unsmoked bit does Ada notice. She taps it into a cupped hand and goes inside to cast it vaguely towards the fireplace and provokes an acid spit from Chris. She returns with a string bag and, with a nicotine-stained index finger, stirs the money in her purse to find the right coins. ‘Here you are, ducks. Keep the change.’

Ada isn’t the nicest of old dears but she’s not tight, and errands to get fish for her devil cat always bring a bit of pocket money.

‘Oh, just a sec,’ she says with an irritated lift of her chin. ‘I think her ladyship upstairs wants you to get her something.’ She’s referring to Miss Rush, who lives on the first floor. Ada doesn’t her like because of what she claims are her posh, hoity-toity ways. But she dislikes her most because everyone else does like her.

Miss Rush opens the door just enough to frame her tiny body. She tucks a duster into a full-length floral pinny; I’ve caught her ‘mid clean’. She’s bright-eyed and her rosy cheeks seem out of place on her bony face, which is haloed by a perm of white hair. Miss Rush neither smokes nor, as far as anyone can tell, does she ever eat cabbage. The smell emerging from behind her is a blend of Mansion floor polish and Sunlight soap. Her passion for cleaning extends to polishing the lino outside on the landing; a practice that Ada thinks is showing off. Miss Rush’s home must be spotless but no one knows for sure because, unlike Ada, she never asks anyone in.

She has run out of Bournvita. ‘Very kind Billy and that’s for you,’ she says softly, and hands me a threepenny bit extra. Like Ada, she tips in advance. Mum encourages me to be especially polite to Miss Rush because she’s a ‘lady’. Whenever neighbours indulge in raucous behaviour or use bad language, Mum says, ‘What will Miss Rush think?’ But Miss Rush doesn’t seem to mind and she’s the only tenant who manages to stay on good terms with everyone. She isn’t all that genteel either because she reads the Daily Mirror and calls lunch ‘dinner’. She’s old, clean and speaks quietly. It doesn’t take much to be a lady in our street.

‘Won’t be long Miss Rush.’

Before closing the door, she nods towards the rope blocking off the stairs to the second floor and the empty top flat. ‘Terribly sad.’

Old man Fay died of TB and his flat is waiting to be fumigated before it can be re-let. He was ‘a right stinker,’ according to Ada, who could have run him a close second. Mr Fay rarely washed and he had a strong smell, even out in the street. He was also deeply religious and did weird things, like laying crosses made of two matchsticks on the pavement and asking people to mind where they walked.

Our landlord, Mr Duffield, found him lying naked in bed, eyes open, staring in terror along an outstretched arm to where his fingers curled around a large wooden crucifix. Scores of empty matchboxes were piled in the corner of his bedroom and matchstick crosses dotted the floor like tiny Christian land mines that had failed to protect him. When they took him away, the sooty outline of his body was stained on the bedclothes. Mr Duffield joked that, unlike the Turin Shroud, Mr Fay’s sheet bore only a rear impression.

It’s exciting to have known someone who has died and I’ve been embellishing Mr Fay’s death with tales of strange noises coming from his empty flat at night. When John hears these stories, he shakes his head but, like most of our friends he wants to believe that spooky things can happen in our street. For the little kids, Old Man Fay is becoming a bogie man.

Mum and Dad are desperate to move to a flat on the new estate by the Thames. However, they’re a long way down the waiting list. The home they want most of all is on the back of Shredded Wheat packets. The Swedish-style ‘dream house’ stands bathed in sunshine above a sloping lawn. By the garden gate, a man, his wife and a boy are waving while a younger girl crouches to pet a Scottie dog. They’re all smiling, even the dog. The house could be ours if we can come up with a winning description for a Nabisco breakfast. Mum has had several attempts, each one sent off with its three packet tops and a catchphrase. She thinks her latest try is a potential winner: ‘Shredded Wheat, your morning treat’. We’re not holding our breath.

If this one doesn’t win, Mum says it will be her last try and she’s already eyeing the matching kitchen cabinet, table and chairs that are up for grabs on the back of the Corn Flakes packet.

Dad is an even more committed competitor and he’s convinced that sooner or later he’ll predict eight draws on the Football Pools. When he does finally line up his ‘Os’ against the right games in the coupon’s little squares, he says we’ll all be on the pig’s back and able to buy the Swedish house outright – Scottie dog and all. Mum tells him to get away with his nonsense but pays secret attention when he checks the results in the Sunday paper.

Back in the street, I run into John who is bouncing a tennis ball on a cricket bat as he makes his way home.

‘Where you going?’

‘To get stuff for the old girls.’

‘Sharesy.’

‘Yeah.’

We share whatever is earned from running errands. It’s one of Dad’s rules that covers most things we do, even when there’s no real money at stake. We’ve never finished a game of Monopoly because as soon as one of us runs out of money, the other lends him enough to carry on.

Back Seat Dreams

‘Watcha Billy.’

‘Watcha Josie.’

Josie Costello is sitting on the ‘Big Step’, a foot-high terrace of black-and-white tiles that surrounds Plummer’s corner shop.

‘What are you doing?’

I hold up the string bag.

‘Been to get stuff for Ada Holt and Miss Rush.’

Josie sits a lot to ease the strain on her callipered leg – the result of what she calls her ‘brush with polio’, which she cheerily tells everyone is better than being swept away altogether. Even in summer, she wears a heavy brown shoe to match the clamped boot. When you meet Josie, you have to cope first with her face, and the purple stain that rises on one cheekbone and spreads down to thicken part of her top lip. A smile-wrecker, but it doesn’t stop her smiling. When she does, she raises a hand to stop you seeing the birthmark’s flat weight tugging at her face. She would look ashamed if her eyes dropped at the same time, but they resist and look straight at you.

‘How’s your breathing?’

‘Pardon?’

She’s talking before I’m listening. Her face no longer shocks, but it takes time not to notice.

‘Your breathing.’

‘Oh, fine.’

She’s asking about my asthma. At primary school, it had often meant having to stay in the classroom at playtime. Josie would be there too, with her bronchitis. While I wheezed, she coughed, which made her face go red and her birthmark turn dark blue. Those who stayed in, with anything from a sty to a broken arm, had Josie for company. Even when she wasn’t ill, she preferred being inside to loneliness in a crowded playground. In class, she sat at the front to one side with her birthmark close to the wall, so that when she turned around the rest of us saw only clear skin. She was always the last to leave the room.

Being asthmatic has set me apart and gets me quite a bit of sympathy. When I get one of my ‘attacks’, there are small white pills to take and vapour to breathe from an asthma pump. These help my breathing but they’ve also become props for my role as ‘plucky Billy’, an image I try to portray with subtle references – at least I think they’re subtle – to what I manage to do in spite of being out of breath so often. Truth is that on the days when my breathing is OK, I’m no different to any other kid. Josie doesn’t have ‘good days’. Aunt Winnie says that, like Josie’s disabilities, asthma is my cross. It’s also a bit of a crutch.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

‘Oh, just waiting. Christine and Shirley are going over the park this afternoon; I might go too.’ She pats the tiles next to her. ‘Want to sit here for a bit?’

I don’t think so. Being seen talking to any girl guarantees piss-taking from mates, even though we talk a lot about girls and, especially, tits. Some even claim they’ve done more than talk about them, but clam up when asked for detail. However, no one talks about Josie, even though she’s well endowed in the chest department.

If I don’t sit down, I’ll hurt her feelings. Most kids find it easy to say no to Josie, or to leave her company when there’s something better on offer, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I sit down where she beckons me, on her good side.

‘Where did you go on holiday? Scotland, wasn’t it?’

‘No, Carlisle. It’s in England.’ This has sounded harsh. ‘But it is near Scotland. What about you?’

‘We’re going to Ireland again in a couple of weeks. Mum says we might visit some holy place where sick people get cured, and this,’ she flicks a hand up to her face, ‘might …’

‘Oh … that would be great.’

‘Yes, but it only works for a few people. You have to have faith you see, really believe that Jesus will help you.’

‘Oh.’

I try to imagine her face without the purple stain, and whether she would be pretty. She does have the shiniest dark hair and Mum says that the skin on the clear side of her face is beautiful. Josie’s blue eyes can be fierce while she waits for people to take in her birthmark, but sparkling and kind once they have.

‘I hope it works.’ I say.

‘Thanks. Mum thinks that saying prayers helps, the more the better.’

‘I see.’ No, I don’t.

Her head drops. ‘Will you say one for me Billy? For my new face?’

‘What, now?’

‘Oh no, whenever you …’

She looks at me full-on and I’m reminded of what is at stake. So, yes, I will say a prayer for her new face, as well as for the end of my asthma, for Arsenal to win the League and for a Charles Atlas physique.

‘OK Josie.’

‘Thanks Billy.’

She leans closer. As I look into her eyes her face blurs and I see no blemish. She sits back, wraps her arms around her knees and stares at the ground.

‘Josie Costello and Billy Driscoll, what are you two up to then?’

Sarah Richards has a neat accent that turns most of her ‘rs’ into ‘rrrs’. Rooksy once said that she sounded like the country yokels who sing the TV advert for cider: Oh Coates comes up from Somerset, where the cider apples grow.

She told him it was better than sounding like a Cockney. Then she sang the real song, as she called it, which ends with, ‘because we loves it so’. Fair enough. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner ends with: ‘’Cos I love London so’.

Sarah’s question has pleased Josie and I think that she meant it to.

‘We were just chatting,’ says Josie. True but not what I’d have said; chatting is what girls do. Sarah sits down and gives Josie’s knee a little squeeze. Josie covers Sarah’s hand with her own. If she could have a new face, I think she’d choose one like Sarah’s.

Sarah Richards came to Pimlico two years ago when her dad, a chauffeur, followed his employers up from Somerset. His large black Humber looked strangely out of place, like it could be visiting Sarah’s house for a funeral or something. There were no more than half a dozen cars in her street and even fewer in ours. Mr Richards is forever washing and polishing the car outside his house and looks askance when the elderly cars and vans of his neighbours pass by.

At first, Sarah was the skinny new girl who sat in front of me in my last year at primary school. However, in the final term, things changed. Not that she had changed much – she was already pretty – but I was finding her more likeable. I observed her more closely, noticing things, like the way she wore ribbons in her hair when most girls thought them babyish, and how she never waited after school for friends to walk home with, but that others waited for her. Soon I was thinking about her a lot and even guessing, the night before, which of her dresses she’d wear the next day. My favourite had thin blue and white stripes with piping at the neck. I’d stare at her back, at the straight seam between her shoulders, and admire the way she held herself square to line up with it. And whenever she pushed up her hair to reveal the back of her neck, the hairs would stand up on the back of mine.

I even played a game in which seeing her face by getting her to turn around in class was worth twice seeing it elsewhere. One way was to answer the teacher’s questions. My hand was usually first up. Christine Cassidy and Shirley da Costa, my rivals for being top of the class, would scowl from their front-row desks. But Sarah would swivel round, head-on-hand, without taking her elbow off the desk and give me a smile that said, Go on then, clever clogs, tell ’em. And I did, although seeing her face sometimes made me forget the question and there would be jeering.

When there were no questions to answer, I’d stare at her back, willing her, like Svengali, to turn around. On the only occasion it seemed to work, she grinned as if to say, OK, just this once.

Then came the11-plus exam and the traumatic move to an all-boys grammar school. Sarah surprised Christine Cassidy and Shirley da Costa by passing the exam too and joining them at the local girls’ grammar school.

Even in my new uniform, I no longer felt special. At my new school, everyone was clever and almost everyone was bigger than me. In my form room I sat behind a fat kid with body odour. In my darker moments I’d superimpose Sarah’s slender blue and white dress on his black blazer, dreaming of her swivel and smile. Thankfully he never turned around when I put my hand up as he was too busy waving his own. He, too, had also been top of his class at primary school.

I saw little of Sarah during my first year and this was just as well. She was maturing fast, while I wasn’t. Even worse, she had grown taller than me and, in the company of her school friends in their grey school uniforms, she seemed reluctant to have much to do with me. I felt young, small and left behind. So while I continued to look for her, I avoided any meetings. Even in the holidays I saw little of her as she spent most of the time at her Nan’s in Somerset.

However, at the end of this year’s Easter holidays, I met her again. She was sitting on the Big Step with Josie. For the first time since primary school she seemed pleased to see me and said how tall I’d got. She asked me all sorts of questions about my school and what I was up to. I forgot to ask her any questions in return, something that often happens when talking with girls. Then, as I was leaving, she said ‘see you later then? At the same time, she turned her head and pushed her hair up. With that glimpse of her neck, everything and more that I had felt for her at primary school came flooding back. I’ve looked for her most weekends since but with school cricket matches on Saturdays and the agony of quiet family Sundays our meetings have been restricted to brief hellos, often in the company of our respective parents.

In the two years since primary school, her face has grown slender, and her cheekbones seem to have moved closer to the surface. I’m struck more powerfully than ever how pretty she is and dismayed to realise that this is what her woman’s face is going to look like. Panic rises in my chest about how much I need to grow up, to catch up, to get better looking. I’ve been checking my own face daily in the mirror. There has been some improvement, but one or two spots seem to have become as permanent as my nose.

She must have been on holiday in Somerset because she’s suntanned and blonde strands streak her light brown hair where it’s brushed past her ears. A pale green cotton frock snugs her slender body from her bony square shoulders down to her waist. Each time she smiles, tiny dimples appear either side of her mouth and I have to catch my breath. Even though she’s so pretty, the boys say they don’t fancy her because she’s flat chested. This has become such an important issue that even ugly girls are OK, if they have tits. I wouldn’t let on to my mates, but I think that if a girl has a face like Sarah’s, breasts are worth waiting for.

‘My dad’s cleaning his car. Would you both like to come and sit in?’

I’d love to get behind the wheel of a Humber, although it’s not one of my favourites. A vertical chrome grille and big headlamps give it a smug, snobby face and it has a fat-arse boot that can swallow not only cases but also the large trunks that wealthy people use. I’ve only ever ridden in cars like the Morris Minor belonging to my aunt in Cumberland, and I can’t wait to get inside a limousine similar to the one used by the Prime Minister, Mr Macmillan.

I’m thinking this as we get up from the Big Step when Josie’s bad leg gives way and she tumbles forward on the pavement. Instead of trying to get up, she rolls onto her back clutching the elbow that has taken the brunt of the fall.

‘Oh Josie,’ says Sarah.

Josie’s eyes fill with tears. ‘Blinking leg … goes to sleep on me.’

Sarah looks at me, expecting me to take action. This makes knowing what to do even harder. Josie doesn’t look as if she wants to be helped up, and touching a girl isn’t so straightforward any more.

Sarah kneels down. ‘Come on Josie, let’s get up.’ She strokes her hair.

Josie doesn’t move and covers her face with her hands. Sarah shrugs and looks to me again.

My cowboy hero, Audie Murphy, would simply lift her in his arms. I don’t know why I always think of Audie in difficult situations because it only highlights everything that I’m not up to doing: punch the baddie; dive into deep water; lift girls off the floor. Anyway, Josie is probably as heavy as I am. Faced with her tears and Sarah’s expectations, I look away to hide my confusion. Then it comes to me: I’ll give her my ‘Norman Wisdom’. This may not be the place for the elbows-out rolling walk or his famous trip, of which I’m especially proud, but I lie beside Josie and prop my head on one hand – a horizontal version of the way Norman leans on walls and other, less solid, objects. I give her the high-pitched voice. ‘Now Mrs, up we get, can’t lie here all day, got an appointment in that nice big car over there.’ Her fingers part and she peeps through to see Norman’s yawning grin and his eyes going up into his head. Her shoulders start shaking.

Sarah frowns before realizing that Josie is chuckling. I roll onto my back, exaggerating Norman’s laughter. Sarah joins in and I feel a little guilty at how much more her laughter means to me than Josie’s. With Sarah’s help, she gets up. From her frock’s short sleeve she pulls out a hanky to dab her eyes and wipe away some tear-snot.

Mr Richards calls over to say it’s OK to sit in the car but only in the back, and not to make a mess as he’s just ‘brushed out’. The girls get in and sit back on the deep bench seat. They pat the space between them for me to sit there too. Mr Richards closes the door and soon has the car rocking gently as he polishes the bonnet. In the carpeted hush, we talk in whispers and before long we fall silent, breathing in the heady mix of car wax and Windolene – and when I squeeze the seat’s soft leather, it releases a faint smell of cigars. Josie puts one hand through the looped strap and waves with the other like the Queen. Then she touches the gleaming ashtray in the door and snatches back her hand when she sees her fingerprints on the chrome.

‘Oops, sorry.’

Sarah smiles and gets up to wipe the ashtray with the hem of her frock.

Mr Richards has moved into the road on Sarah’s side. He squats lower to polish the door and we catch him making a cross-eyed face. We smile but he doesn’t smile back because he had done it only for Sarah. The vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows deepens and he stands up.

‘Blimey, this is smashing,’ says Josie. ‘Fancy being driven in one of these wherever you want to go. He’s got a great job your dad. Will he give us ride?’

Sarah shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so. He’s only taken Mum out a few times, on his way to work.’

Christine and Shirley arrive. Josie’s proud tap on the window is too loud and Mr Richard’s face goes into full frown. The girls wave but don’t stop.

Josie clambers out. ‘Thanks Sarah, see ya.’ Christine and Shirley carry on, shoving each other playfully, unconcerned whether Josie follows or not. She limps after them but stops briefly to wave at us with little shakes of her upright hand that only we can see. Sarah waves back. Josie resumes her struggle to catch up. Then something about the girls’ cruel giggling, their turned backs and their sound legs gets me to my feet. I jump out of the car. ‘Wait a minute, can’t you!’

They stop, glaring, but they wait with eyebrows raised and cheeks sucked in. When Josie reaches them, they set off, arm-in-arm, and as quickly as they can. Once again, Josie struggles to keep up.

I get back in the car. Sarah reaches across me to pull the door shut and I catch what she feels for Josie in her fading smile. I’d give anything for her to feel like this about me.

‘I like Josie,’ she says.

‘Me too.’ This is true, although I wouldn’t normally say so.

‘It was nice what you did for her.’

‘Well, they could see she was trying to catch up.’

‘Yes, but I meant when you rolled on the ground to make her laugh.’

‘Oh.’

‘It was kind.’ She’s talking about me! Silence. My turn to speak, but I can’t. ‘She’s got lovely blue eyes, Josie, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Like yours.’

Bloody hell Billy, say something! There’s so much I’d like to tell her but my words stick, like too many people trying to get through a door at once. I eventually mumble something about Josie’s trip to the holy place for her face, and how it’s important to have faith.

‘Really?’

‘You know, praying a lot … Josie asked me if I’d say a prayer for her.’

‘And will you?’

I hesitate. ‘Yes, I will.’

‘That’s nice of you, Billy.’

I have never felt nicer.

Her father appears again, polishing the door on the nearside. This time his smile is for both of us, but he doesn’t mean it.

‘I’d love to have a car, to be a chauffeur, like your dad … to drive all the time.’

‘Where would you go?’

‘Oh, all over, everywhere.’

She leans closer. ‘Would you take me with you?’

A weird fluttering fills my chest. Something has changed, like the moment in cowboy films when the hero and heroine first notice each other. I can see her face so clearly: the little mole beside her nose and the tiny bleached hairs above her lips. I’m not sure what to say but I know what I want to do: for the first time in my life, I want to kiss someone.

‘Well?’ she says.

‘Oh yes, yes, I’d take you.’

‘Where?’

‘Well, to Cumberland … maybe. It’s a long way. We’d have to take food and things for the journey.’

Her face comes closer. ‘What’s it like?’

‘It’s smashing. Near my Aunt’s, there’s a big river where we fish for trout, but we only ever catch eels. There are caves in the riverbank, where my cousin smokes a tuppenny loose. My aunt has a Morris Minor and drives us to the Lake District where there are huge mountains and er … lakes. In Carlisle Castle, one dungeon has a licking stone.’

‘A what?’

‘It’s a curvy-shaped bit of wall made smooth by prisoners licking water that seeped through from the moat. And we go to the seaside at Silloth, where there are huge sand dunes to jump from, and the best ice cream: it’s Italian. And there’s a funfair with flick-ball machines; if you get three balls in the holes, you get one cigarette. And my aunt never stops baking, there are always cakes and different kinds of tart at teatime, and lemon curd, although they call it lemon cheese up there. Her kitchen table is as big as our kitchen.’

I’m out of breath. She’s looking at me and I want to tell her more to keep her looking.

‘Sounds wonderful.’ She puts a hand on mine. ‘Shall we go then, one day?’

I have to swallow to start breathing again. ‘Yes.’ Then, instead of telling her how I feel, all I manage is, ‘It does rain a lot though. And we never get brown like you do in Somerset.’

‘Would you take me to Somerset too?’

‘Oh I would, yes.’

‘Then I could show you our village, Lower Sinton. My Nan runs the post office but it’s not like the one here; it sells sweets and food and newspapers. There are haystacks in the fields where hares hide, but I’ve never seen them. The man next door has ponies and we get free rides. In a cottage on the edge of the village there’s an old woman called Miss Walthough. She looks a bit like a witch but she isn’t, although she does know about potions for curing sick animals, and she grows the best raspberries for miles around. We’ve also got a river; it runs across the fields behind Nan’s garden. There are all kinds of beautiful stones in it and you can wade across, except in winter when it’s too deep.’

Her face is so close. Talking has made her breathless too. Embarrassed, she shifts forward on the seat. I’m afraid that she’s getting up to go, but she’s pushing down with her feet to sit further back. Now the sunlight can reach her hair through the rear window and her face shines like it’s a Technicolor close-up of the heroine in a Western. I move closer. She looks away but slides her hand over mine. To the sound of our breathing, we stare ahead. Through the windscreen, the roads of Cumberland and Somerset stretch before us in a sunny world in which I will drive a sports car with Sarah beside me, and she’ll put her head on my shoulder. After several minutes I say, ‘I can’t wait to be able to drive.’

The door opens with a rich click. Mr Richards ducks his head inside. ‘All done, time to lock up.’ His eyes narrow and he sniffs. ‘What is that? It’s not fish is it?’

I haven’t noticed the smell until now. The whiting has soaked through its paper wrapping and there’s a damp patch on the beige carpet. The Bournvita will be OK but I fear for the flavour of Ada’s Weights.

I snatch up the string bag and stammer, ‘It’s for Mrs Holt.’

‘Well, whoever it’s for you can take it out of my car.’ He holds the door wide open and for a moment it feels as if he’s my chauffeur.

I step past him. ‘Thank you.’ I’m only being polite but Mr Richards doesn’t see it that way and he’s about to say so, when Sarah stops him. ‘Dad, please … it’s all right.’

I walk away.

Sarah calls out, ‘Bye.’

I wave and keep going. I turn the street corner and start running as if I could keep it up for ever.

Strength, Thrift and Gigli

Dad breaks clocks. Every now and again, a snap and a metallic uncoiling signal the end of another innocent Westclox. Death follows a brief whirring of detached innards failing to turn the luminous hands. This is when Mum starts shouting.

This evening she has caught Dad as his hand settles nonchalantly on the mantelpiece. She reaches around him to snatch the clock and hold it safely against her stomach. He throws up his hands and smiles.

‘I’ll wind it,’ she says.

He winks at John and me. ‘Fair enough, Maureen.’

She lifts the winder’s butterfly top and turns it with the tips of her fingers to demonstrate how it should be done: a gentle ratcheting that doesn’t go too far. Showing him, for the hundredth time, how every task in hand needs careful attention.

She sets it back on the mantelpiece. ‘Now leave it, I’ll bring it when I come to bed.’ During the day it’s a kitchen clock, at night it sits on the table by their bed.

Dad is nothing if not thorough, but he can’t resist the final turn that destroys the heads of already embedded screws, or the last twist of the tap that chews up washers. At Christmas, he literally blows up balloons. John and I have hidden the bicycle pump since the time he continued pumping a rock-hard tyre after a squeeze convinced him that it was well short of its right pressure. The bang from the exploding inner tube lifted Chris from his slumbers on Ada’s windowsill and dumped him spitting and wailing in our backyard.

Accuracy isn’t his strong point either but we love watching him miss at the coconut shy at Battersea Funfair just to see the vertical ripples that roll around the canvas marquee wall after each thump of a wayward wooden ball.

To placate Mum, he picks up the dinner plates from the table and slides them into the sink with enough noise to get her to bar him from clearing the rest. He stands back, eyeing the clock furtively, his big fingers twitching. Mum catches John grinning.

‘It’s not funny. Your father’s lack of self-control wastes our hard-earned money.’

We stay quiet because she’s taken the deep breath that means she hasn’t finished. Dad, too, is paying close attention; he’s heard what she’s about to say before but he’s going to have to hear it again.

‘Nothing is safe when he gets his hands on it.’ She catches Dad winking at us. ‘What is wrong with you? It’s not as if you don’t know your own strength, you do …’

John and I struggle not to laugh. She takes a threatening step towards us but weakens when she realizes that Dad, too, is choking back laughter.

She returns to the sink. ‘I give up.’

‘That’s the way he is,’ Aunt Winnie told us when Mum wasn’t around. ‘Easygoing chap, your Dad, but when something gets in his way, he has to push.’ With a phlegmy chuckle, she added, ‘Then it’s best to back off, ask the Colquhoun brothers.’

The Colquhouns are beefy scaffolders who used to throw their weight around in the Queen Anne until Dad got them to apologize for picking on Michael O’Rourke’s father. Aunt Winnie told the story as if Dad were Burt Lancaster seeing off the Clantons in the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

When he left the navy, Dad didn’t go back to Ireland because he’d met Mum when on shore leave during the war. She had left Cumberland looking for excitement in the Capital but found only long days in a munitions factory. When the war ended, they decided to stay in London because even bomb-blasted Pimlico gave them more than they could hope for in Ireland or Cumberland, so they stayed and made it home. As a result, even though John and I are Londoners, we have no relatives living nearby, unlike our Cockney friends, who have loads of cousins and two homes: their own and their Nan’s.

Dad wears a cap to work and on Sundays he sports a trilby that he tugs down over his right eye: the ‘Connemara side’. On the days he doesn’t go to work, he’s bursting with energy. This is often expressed in a shouted ‘hup’ as, with a flip of his heels behind him, he accelerates to complete short trips, like crossing roads or climbing steps – or, sometimes, to end tricky conversations with Mum.

When we were little, he used to wait till we were walking ahead of him before tearing past us, shouting ‘zing’ and jogging backwards, challenging us to catch him. Then he’d turn and run in slow motion until we overtook him. ‘God, if these boys haven’t wings on their feet,’ he’d complain, before shaking our hands to congratulate us on another fine victory.

Most evenings, a whistled Joseph Locke song and the slap of the rolled up Evening Star announces his arrival. He has a key but he prefers to rap the knocker. When one of us opens the door, he crouches like a boxer and lunges to lift and clinch, and to administer a rub of his day-old beard and fill our nostrils with the smell of sand and cement from his clothes.

He’s a ganger for a group of men who lay concrete on building sites: tamping it down with a big beam of wood to even out floors, or pouring it into shuttering for walls and pillars. The more concrete a gang lays, the more it earns. It’s heavy work and he often falls asleep in the easy chair after his dinner. This is when Mum looks at him most tenderly and insists that we keep quiet. While he dozes, she picks bits of hardened concrete from his shirt but leaves those that are clinging temptingly to the small hairs of his cheekbones.

Dad gets a bit ‘soft’ in drink and regularly throws his pennies in the air for the kids to scramble after when he leaves the Queen Anne on Sunday afternoons. This infuriates Mum because she will walk to Victoria rather than take the bus to save fewer coppers than she sees bouncing around on the pavement.

‘If we all treated money the way your father does, there’d be little food on the table; what with giving money to tramps and buying drinks when it isn’t his turn, anyone would think we were made of money.’

Money isn’t something that worries Dad who’s convinced that it’s only a matter of time before we win the Football Pools. Every week, he slides the coupon into the Littlewoods envelope and insists that we all kiss it for luck: Mum, me, John and then him. Mum does so grudgingly because she believes that you get richer only by working hard and saving. His belief that we’ll win the Pools and chucking money to kids provides more fun than going on about how much things cost, but if Mum’s right, and she usually is, it’s probably a good thing she’s different to Dad.

Looking after what money we do have is Mum’s preserve. At the back of the kitchen cabinet, she keeps three tea caddies: one for the rent; one holds shillings for the gas meter; and the third is for ‘clothes, holidays and Christmas’. This one gets raided most, usually by Dad, who puts back what he owes on payday – Thursday in the building trade. This is when Mum gets her housekeeping and Dad is extra cheerful because he’s had a couple of pints on the way home.

In a weekly ritual, they sit at the kitchen table and he hands her the brown envelope. She teases out the white ribbon and pulls it through her fingers to examine the pay details. He gives her a nod – ‘job done’ for another week – and she puts most of the money into the tins. Then she hands him a pound and some change and drops the rest in her purse.

‘Thrift’ is Mum’s favourite word. We rarely have the pleasure of using a new bar of Pears soap because, rather than waste the old sliver, we have to press it into the depression on the new one.

Our clothes are bought to ‘grow into’. I once had to wear pyjamas with eight-inch turn-ups. ‘Bound to shrink,’ she said when I protested. This was embarrassing enough at home, but humiliating during a stay in hospital, when the turn-ups rolled down during the night and, on pulling back the sheets in the morning, the nurses joked about their little ‘double amputee’.

Mum makes us all feel lazy because she’s forever ‘doing’. Even when listening to the wireless or watching telly, she sews, knits or does other thrifty things, like cutting old washing-up gloves into rubber bands. This requires the big light to be on in the front room and stops us watching telly in the dark to make it feel more like the pictures.

When we were small, Dad’s stories made us the envy of our friends. And we’d get him to tell, again and again, while Mum closed her eyes, how he killed a shark with a knife when swimming close to his ship in South Africa. And, for years, we thought he knew Italian because while shaving on Sundays he renders in beautiful gibberish the arias sung by his favourite opera singer, Gigli. Dad’s a fine light tenor, like John McCormack. In the Queen Anne, they’re always asking him to sing his Irish songs and on the rare occasions that Mum drinks too, he makes her cry by singing, ‘I’ll take you home again … Maureen’.

Mum says that exaggerating and inventing are the same as fibbing, even if it does make people laugh. He defends himself with, ‘A bit of colour, Maureen. Where’s the harm? Just a little salt and pepper on the meal?’

Aunt Winnie once stopped coming to see us after Mum told her that her breath smelled of cigarettes. Mum eventually apologized for upsetting her, but not for what she had said. ‘There you are Maureen,’ said Dad, with a wink at us, ‘the truth is not something to be trotted out on just any old occasion.’

Although Mum isn’t quite as shapely as Madge Smith, she’s prettier, and her eyes are as blue as Josie’s. She has a mole on her cheek that she darkens with a brown pencil. I tell her it makes her look like Elizabeth Taylor. It doesn’t really, but I do think that to be beautiful, women have to look something like Mum.

Before she goes out, or when someone knocks at the door, she smoothes invisible creases at the sides of her skirt and flicks real or imagined strands of hair from her forehead with her little finger. When she gets wolf whistled outside building sites, she pretends to disapprove, but she’s betrayed by her freshly flattered look, and can’t resist pushing up the back of her hair with the palm of her hand.

Mum and Dad don’t act as if they’re in love, not like Rooksy’s parents, who hold hands in the street. However, they seem happy enough and never have screaming fights like some of our friends’ parents.

Their rows usually involve the subject of John and me having been christened Catholics, something that Mum, a relaxed Methodist, says she’ll always regret. Life isn’t made easier by the nuns of St Vincent de Paul who haven’t given up trying to get us to go back to Westminster Cathedral, even though we’ve only ever been to a Church of England school. Their disapproval of ‘mixed marriages’ infuriates Mum. ‘Anyone would think that your father had married a black woman.’

Sister Phillipa, a tall nun made taller by her sailing-ship wimple, once said to me, ‘Your father knows best which church you should go to.’ After I told Mum, she tore into Dad as if Sister Phillipa were his sister. When Sister Phillipa made the mistake of calling in to see Dad on the following Saturday, Mum answered the door, potato peeler in hand. After apologizing that her husband (she didn’t like Sister Phillipa referring to Dad by his name, Dan) wasn’t in, she laid into her about trying to influence her sons with Roman Catholic mumbo jumbo. The affronted nun left muttering about returning when Dad was home, when she might be received with better manners. That’s when Mum followed her up the stairs shouting ‘and another thing’.

She came back in, teeth gritted, and we waited for another stern warning about talking to nuns. Instead her face crumpled into smiles. ‘She ran … when I went up the stairs after her, she speeded up! By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she was running and I could see her little white socks!’ She bent double laughing and lifted her pinny to dab her eyes.

Dad was angry and embarrassed about the incident but he said nothing because this was the one subject about which he knew he’d always get a fight. In any case, he’s far more tolerant than either Mum or Sister Phillipa, and doesn’t mind which church we go to, as long as we go. He’s also pretty good about going himself, even after a late night at the Queen Anne.

On Sundays, if there is a working alarm clock in the house, it doesn’t go off until 9.30am. This gives him time for a lie-in and a cooked breakfast before he goes to eleven o’clock mass, when I suspect he asks forgiveness for his volatile wife.

Comanche Spite

John and I are playing knockout. The game involves kicking the plastic football at a goal on the primary school wall and, with one touch, returning it on target, a sort of football squash. The rules are enforced as much by what we hear as what we see. The goal is an oblong of cement render surrounded by glazed bricks. Hitting its crumbling surface makes the flat sound of goal; striking both render and brick is post and the ping of ball on brick, means a miss. Neither of us is trying to win but simply to keep the game going in satisfying thuds that eventually bring Mrs Johnson to the front door of her prefab.

‘Boys, I hope this wretched game will be over soon, the Archers is starting shortly.’

Plump Mrs Johnson is Akela for the local cub pack. Her loud voice is ideal for conducting games for excited small boys in the church hall but she has trouble speaking quietly, even when she’s standing close. At Sunday Service, hymns don’t really get going until she joins in.

‘OK, Mrs Johnson.’

‘Thank you, Billy.’ She gives me smile and goes back indoors.

John kicks the ball extra hard against the wall. ‘OK Mithith Johnthon.’ He points to the sign on the nearby lamppost. ‘This is a bloody Play Street!’

In Play Streets, kids have priority and passing cars have to slow to walking pace. No one knows this better than John. When motorists toot him to get out of the way, he goes into slow motion, or kneels down in the road to do up a shoelace. If they toot again, he puts his hands on his hips and tells them that kids have rights here.

He’s a natural resister, who meets requests or orders with silence or slow, sullen acceptance. His standard answer to challenges from other kids, no matter how big they are, is ‘gonna make me?’ He prefers to leave me to do the talking when adults ask questions but he’s quick to attack goody-goodness. Grown-ups like me. Kids prefer John.

Michael O’Rourke is perched on the end of Mrs Johnson’s garden wall. Behind him, smoke rises from a concealed cigarette. Between hunched, furtive drags, he looks up and down the street like a spy in a doorway. He blows the smoke down between his legs and his fat cheeks flap out to ‘thtup’ real and imagined bits of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, followed by a squirt of saliva through the gap in his top front teeth. Michael admits to being a ‘heavy ould lad’ and his bulk makes describing sport easier than taking part. He’s reporting our game as if it’s the Cup Final.

‘A great attempt by Billy Driscoll, roising star of English football … and what a clearance from his kid brother, surely de foinest young fullback in de country.’

Today he’s broadcasting from his commentary box but he often strolls around in the middle of our football or cricket matches, speaking into an imaginary microphone. It’s like having Kenneth Wolstenholme or John Arlott down on the pitch. However, Michael’s knowledge of cricketing terms remains extremely Irish. ‘Driscoll is after firin’ de ball past de bowler’s kisser.’

Michael loves all things American, especially Westerns and gangster films. So do we, but he wants to be an American. In the weeks after he arrived from Ireland, we knew him as ‘Gene’, after the cowboy, Gene Autry, until we heard his mother call him Michael. When explaining, he said, ‘Tell me now, what kinda cowboy, goody or baddy, was ever called Michael?’ He had a point.

I was delighted when he christened me ‘the Kid’ to go with my name and, with most of the street cowboys, I was won over by his colourful language in our Wild West games. Outdrawing the fastest gunslingers and saving settlers from marauding Indians had never been more fun. And he’d never say, ‘stick ’em up’ when he had enemies cornered; instead he’d slowly waggle his revolver under their noses and say, ‘Now I’d be obloiged if ye’d be after hand’n me your weapons, and den reachin’ for de skoy.’ Sometimes, in the heat of battle, he’d confuse cowboys and gangsters, ‘vamanos muchachos, dey’re packin’ heat’ or ‘dirty hoodlums are speaking wid forked tongues’.

We no longer play cowboys but Michael continues to ‘mosey on home’, eat ‘chow’ and greet you with ‘howdy’.

Further along, Madge Smith’s son, little Jojo, is astride the same wall, spurring it to a gallop while swivelling left and right to fire his cap guns at chasing Indians. He’s wearing a fawn Roy Rogers hat that was once John’s pride and joy. He gave it – grudgingly – to Jojo last year when I told him he was too old to be playing cowboys. John wanted so badly to be a real cowboy. Even now, it irks him that the Wild West is no longer a place he can go to fight outlaws and Indians.

Cowboys are the kind of men we all want to be. Other TV heroes like Robin Hood, William Tell or Ivanhoe can’t hold a candle to Flint McCulloch in Wagon Train, Bronco Layne or scary Richard Boone in Have Gun Will Travel – it’s something to do with guns or ‘equaloizers’, as Michael calls them. In the cinema, our favourite is Audie Murphy whose films we sit through at least twice when they’re showing at the Biograph.

Jojo is blasting away when, worse than Indians, he sees David Griggs loping up behind him. ‘Griggsy’ is the son of ‘Scrapman’ Griggs, who rides around calling out for ‘old iron’ or ‘any lumber’ from a cart pulled by a muscular skewbald pony who is as gentle as a lamb, until he gets near enough to bite.

Like his dad, Griggsy is a street scavenger, only he takes stuff from other kids: sometimes sweets, sometimes money and – always – any fun they might be having.

He’s a year older than I am but we were in the same class for the last year of primary school as he was too thick to go on to secondary school. He hates anyone cleverer than him, which is most people – especially me, ever since an encounter at the bus stop on Vauxhall Bridge Road. As a bus approached, he jabbed me in the back because I hadn’t put my hand out to hail it.

‘You want this bus?’

I couldn’t help myself. ‘Why, are you selling it?’

He jumped ahead of me on to the rear platform and as he grabbed the white pole, swung a fist into the side of my head. ‘That’s all I’m selling today, shitbag, very cheap.’

Pretty good for a moron.

Today he’s wearing a baggy plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up his beefy arms and, even in high summer, he’s in heavy brown corduroy trousers held up with braces. He bounces towards us on spring heels that launch him on to the balls of his feet the moment they touch the ground. He comes to a halt in front of us, rising and falling on the spot like a nasty copper.

Jojo sits petrified on his brick horse as if the whole Sioux nation has appeared on the skyline. Michael stares at the ground and I smile an appeasing welcome. John, who smiles only when he finds something funny, waits.

‘Gis a kick then, brains.’

This is no friendly request to join in. I pass him the ball. He steadies it and thumps it against the wall. The kick is hard and uncontrolled, like Griggsy himself. The loud thud on the bricks is intimidating and he knows it, but he’s missed the goal. This angers him and he smashes the returning ball back at the wall; another miss! He makes a mess of retrieving the rebound and lurches after the ball. Once he has it under control, he folds his arms and scans us for any sign of piss-take for his complete absence of skill.

Why doesn’t Mrs Johnson or, better still, her big milkman husband come out to complain about the thumping noise now? Why do bullies always have so much time?

He beckons me forward by flicking up the fingers on his upturned palms. ‘Come on then Brains, try and geddit.’

The thing to do is fail but make the effort look genuine. Even so, I risk a clump once I’m in range. My attempted tackle is to one side, making it obvious, even to Griggsy, that he should go the other way. He does but the ball bounces off my shin, and he has to chase it again. He gets one foot on the ball and calls to John. ‘Now you, come on then.’

John refuses. With widened eyes, I silently urge him to do what Griggsy wants. He shakes his head. I’m about to shout at him, when Griggsy relents and dribbles towards him.

The one person John takes notice of is Dad, whose advice on tackling is ‘follow through and you won’t get hurt’. But it can hurt, especially against someone bigger, and if the follow-through contains too much flinch, as it usually does in my case. John shrugs and leans in hard to block the ball. The tackle takes Griggsy’s leg away and sends him sprawling. Silence. Griggsy springs to his feet in a ludicrous attempt to make it look like he’s gone down deliberately. Jojo starts laughing. Griggsy, checks for a smile on my face – not a chance – before dashing over to cuff Jojo across the mouth. Jojo burst into tears.

‘Ah now, Griggsy, de little fellah meant no harm …’ says Michael.

‘You what, fatso?’

Michael has many one-liners for facing down Comanches and other baddies. But this isn’t Jesse James, it’s mental Griggsy. Instead of replying, he holds his chin in the air like Randolph Scott in Colt .45.

Griggsy paces up and down, nodding his head, working out his next move. As he passes Jojo, he yanks the cowboy hat from his head, but the chinstrap holds and pulls him off the wall. He hits the ground hard and stays silent until he realizes he’s not badly hurt and starts screaming.

‘Shuddup you little bastard. Cowboy eh? Well, cop this, Roy Rogers.’

He snatches up the hat in both hands. The tendons in his neck stand out as he snorts up phlegm with such force you’d think he had a muscle inside his forehead. He spits into the hat, throws it on the ground and stamps on it. Forgetting he’s no longer the owner, John dives to rescue it. Griggsy grabs him around the neck.

‘And you … fink you’re an ’ard tackler do ya? Well, this is ’ard.’

He runs John at the wall. I close my eyes until I hear the thud-scrape of his head on the bricks. Griggsy lets go and John wheels round, ready to fight. This startles Griggsy but he recovers and grabs John’s shirt collar, twists it around his fist and shoves it up under his chin.

‘You little shitbag.’

‘Leave him alone, you fucking bully.’ I can’t believe I’ve said this and after one step towards Griggsy, I regret it. He hurls John to the ground and turns to face me. I lose momentum and freeze in the no-man’s land between spontaneous bravery and rising fear.

‘Oh yeah? What’s big brother gonna do then?’

What’s he going to do? Nothing. Anger and courage drain from me as if plugs have been pulled in my ankles. John gets up and shakes his head to tell me to ‘leave it’. This is exactly what I’m going to do. I lift my hands like a cowboy starting to surrender.

Griggsy moves forward. I wait for the first punch, praying that my legs won’t give way before he hits me. The punch doesn’t come. Instead, he drops his fists and takes a penknife from his pocket. He opens it and circles the blade inches from my face. John barges between us, fists clenched. On top of his head, blood is gumming up his blond hair.

Griggsy lowers the knife and steps back sneering, not at John but at me for standing behind my younger brother. Being stabbed couldn’t hurt as much. He makes the quivering arsehole sign by curling and uncurling his fingers. ‘Chicken windy fucker, got your number.’

He has, and I’m close to tears. He swaggers over to pick up our ball and stabs it. The air hisses out and John rushes forward. I grab him and hold tight while we watch a grinning Griggsy plunge the knife in again and again. Then he goes over to Jojo, who is crouching on the kerb.

‘Ere’s a cowboy ’at for ya.’

He moulds the ruined ball into a bowl and jams it on Jojo’s head. Jojo curls up, humiliated but not daring to take it off.

Mrs Johnson appears at her window. Griggsy puts the knife away and says to me as if everything is back to normal. ‘Got any money to borrow me?’

‘No.’

For once, he believes me and I’m not forced to empty my pockets. Instead, he gives me a contemptuous pat on the cheek and bounces off down the street. ‘See ya, windy.’ Before he turns the corner, he snorts again and spits in our direction.

Jojo hurls the squashed ball to the ground, pulls out his guns and fires wildly after Griggsy. And I want to be Audie Murphy, to gallop after him and drag him through the dust at the end of a lasso, before running him out of town.

‘A Comanche if ever I saw one,’ says Michael. He knows no greater insult. Comanches are the lowest of the low; treacherous bastards even attack wagon trains at night.

John gives the remains of our ball a last violent kick down the road and Jojo picks up his soiled cowboy hat.

Michael eases off the wall. ‘Jojo, y’ill need dat disinfectin’. Sure, ye might catch TB, or even vinurial disease.’ Jojo looks at him, then at me, mystified.

Michael strokes the few dark hairs above his lip that he hopes make him look a bit like Richard Boone. ‘Dat bastard deserves a bit of his own Comanche treatment: staked out in de sun, bollick-naked, near an anthill dat I’d be after givin’ a good kickin’.’

I join in. ‘Yeah, balls smeared with honey to get the ants in the mood for something sweet.’

Jojo giggles and our humiliation fades as we imagine ever more painful retribution.

John doesn’t laugh, even when we’re removing Griggsy’s dick with a tomahawk. His revenge isn’t going to be in the Black Hills of Dakota.

Size Matters

‘Go on then,’ says Rooksy, ‘show us.’

Raymond Dunn’s dick was big even when he was a toddler. His nickname is ‘Swole’. It comes from the time he was having a bath with his little cousin who, noticing the difference in sizes, pointed between Raymond’s legs, and said to Mrs Dunn, ‘Look Auntie, it’s all swolled up.’

This remained a private family joke until the day Rooksy saw it during a piss-up-the-wall contest. He claimed it gave Raymond an unfair advantage that should be taken into account when measuring the height of the wet stains. Caught between pride and embarrassment, a flustered Raymond mentioned the story of his cousin in the bath. Rooksy’s growing smile told him that this had been a terrible mistake. Soon, everyone knew about ‘Swole’s snake’, and no one called him Raymond again.

Rooksy, John and I are sitting on Swole’s bed. He’s the only kid we know who has a ‘double’. Swole’s home is an ‘apartment’ rather than a flat. Flats are what we and Peabody tenants live in, although ‘Peabodies’ are posher because they have bathrooms. Our bath is in the kitchen beneath a lift-up board. It doubles as a high table top that we sit around on stools. Inside, the bath is chair-shaped; so there’s no lying back under bubbles as women do in the Camay soap adverts. This is one of three things that would mean luxury to John and me, along with a fridge, so we can drink cold Gold Top milk all year round, and a telephone. We’d like a car most but Dad doesn’t drive.

Swole’s bedroom is above the entrance to the large wood yard that stretches up Morton Hill. We rarely have to call for him by ringing the bell because he sees us first from his window, where he spends a lot of time propped on his elbows and spitting on the timber lorries as they pass through the gates below.

Swole’s bedroom is also his playground. He’s rarely allowed out. His dad doesn’t like him mixing with us because he thinks we’re common. Swole doesn’t have any uncommon friends and he lives in fear of being sent to a boarding school, where he’ll sleep in a dormitory with posh boys and probably have to become a queer.

On the rare occasions his dad isn’t around, Swole invites us in and his mum gives us cold lemonade: the kind you make by adding water to yellow powder.

The shelves beside his bed are stacked high with books and board games but Swole doesn’t read much and he has no brothers or sisters to play games with. His pride and joy is the huge wooden battlefield, painted green and brown, on which battalions of British and German soldiers line up against one another. There are hundreds: running or marching across the uneven terrain, lying down or kneeling to fire from black trenches, or from behind balsa-wood rocks and bushes. Some are frozen in action, arms flung back in the moment of being shot, while others are charging enemy lines with fixed bayonets, led by officers armed only with pistols. Each model is immaculately painted: the British in khaki and the Germans in grey with contoured helmets that are so much smarter than the British pudding bowls. ‘Dad made everything, apart from the soldiers,’ says Swole. He tells us this with pride but little affection.

He was proud enough recently to take me into the separate area of the wood yard adjacent to their home where his dad makes his own stuff. When working here, Swole says that he always wears a full-length white apron instead of his overalls.

‘Take a look at this,’ he said, carefully lifting the sheet from a large cabinet whose delicately shaped doors lay unattached beside it. ‘It’s for keeping trophies in. Look at those joints, they’re called dovetails.’

I ran my finger across the interlocking wooden teeth at the corners and could feel only smooth wood.

‘I said, “look” not “touch”!’ He leaned close to check for incriminating fingerprints before he put the cover back, and tugged it left and right to make it look undisturbed.

‘Let’s go.’

‘Jesus, Swole, what’s the matter?’

‘My dad, he’d kill me if he knew I’d let you in here.’

The look on his face made me as keen to get out of there as he was.

John and I used to play with toy soldiers but Swole deploys armies. Today, John is eyeing them longingly. If he were on his own, he’d happily lead them into battle. Swole regularly rearranges the formations and we would much sooner help him to do this than look at his dick, again. Rooksy, however, is persisting.

‘Come on then Swole, let’s see if it’s got any bigger.’

I hate these moments because they can lead to Rooksy suggesting cock comparisons, which only involve establishing whose is next biggest after Swole’s. I always refuse. Although things are starting to happen for me down there, progress is depressingly slow. Rooksy and Swole have pubic hair. So do I, but unlike them, I know exactly how many I’ve got. We’ve seen Swole’s dick before because he likes showing it. He spends a lot of time in his bedroom, making do with his solitary games of soldiers, reading American comics, playing chess against himself and, we suspect, playing with himself. Rooksy says that it couldn’t have got that big without hours of attention, something that could work for us if we do the same. We’re obviously not devoting enough time to it.

Swole looks like Alfred E. Neuman, the kid on the cover of Mad Magazine; his ears don’t just stick out but are cupped towards you by invisible hands. He’s aware of his less-than-film-star looks but his dick is a consolation and, although his ears turn deep red when others refer to it in front of girls, he’s secretly pleased and fondles it gratefully in most idle moments.

Rooksy gives him a shove. ‘Give it some air Swole or it might stop growing.’

Swole grins. ‘OK, shut the door Billy.’ He unbuttons his trousers. And there it is on his open palm, like Mr Bevan our butcher showing a lamb chop to a customer. Only the greaseproof paper is missing.

‘You lucky bastard,’ says Rooksy, poking at it with a German lieutenant. ‘Can you make it bigger?’

Swole is ahead of him and everything is swelling nicely until we hear his mother coming along the hall. He grabs a comic from the shelf and throws himself face-down on the bed. Rooksy stands bolt upright. John and I whip round to study the soldiers but crash into the battlefield. The resulting earthquake sends the British and German armies bouncing into one another. Mrs Dunn flings open the door to the silence of illicit activity rapidly abandoned.

‘Four nil!’

Mrs Dunn raises an eyebrow. ‘What’s that, Billy? I hope it’s not four nil to the Germans.’

She’s a sharp one is Mrs Dunn, a skinny woman with short, violently permed hair. She purses her lips while her darting, nervous eyes probe the room.

‘Now what are you up to, Raymond?’ she asks, in the way mums do when they really mean everyone present.

‘Nothing, just playing.’ The choked squeak betrays his excitement.

‘Why don’t you go out now and get some fresh air.’

‘OK Mum.’ His voice is closer to normal.

‘Well, up you get then.’

‘In a minute, Mum, I want to finish something off.’

Rooksy snorts. Mrs Dunn’s eyes flash but she says nothing.

‘Quick about it then, Dad’s home you know … and that comic is upside down.’

Very sharp, Mrs Dunn.

Swole won’t be finishing off anything. Mention of his dad has drained the colour from his face. After his mum closes the door, he rolls on to his back, frantically doing up his fly buttons. John starts setting the soldiers in khaki back on their feet to show a British victory. Rooksy looks disappointed enough to ask for his money back.

‘Let’s go,’ says Swole.

In our house, ‘Dad’s home’ means noise and what Mum calls ‘foolery’; at Swole’s, it brings a scary hush. Even when out with us, Swole behaves as if his dad were standing behind him, and whatever he’s about to do, he takes a look around first.

Mr Dunn is a cabinetmaker. He hates running the yard and the business of buying, cutting and selling wood when all he wants to do is work with it. According to Swole, he’s happy only when he’s making his own furniture. But most of the time, he seems to be waiting to get angry and the red marks that we often see on Swole’s face show that he doesn’t wait for long. Sometimes it’s worse: a black eye that Swole swears comes from being bashed up by kids from the other side of Vauxhall Bridge Road. Even if this were true, they would never hit Mrs Dunn. So where does she get her bruises?

It’s not as if other parents don’t hit their kids; some fathers even use their belts. John and I have been spared this. While Mum used to slap out spontaneously at whatever part of us was closest, Dad has never hit us, or threatened to. His own father beat him and Mum says we’re lucky that he’s decided to be different. Not that he doesn’t make his disapproval clear: he can freeze you with a look. But it lasts only long enough to make a point before a tilt of his head and, sometimes, a smile tells us it’s over.

At the foot of the stairs, Swole’s wide-eyed warning brings us to a halt by the open door to the wood yard. On the workbench, Mr Dunn, in his white apron, has the carcass of the trophy cabinet on its back and he’s rubbing it with sandpaper wrapped around a small wooden block. His work-thickened shoulders and Popeye forearms couldn’t be moving more gently. After each pass, he runs his fingers over the smoothed surface and holds them close to his face to examine the white dust as if he’s about to taste it. He wipes it on his apron and rubs again.

He hasn’t looked at us but he knows we’re here. He stops working. We’ve interrupted him and he isn’t going to start again until he’s told us so. He closes his eyes, tilts his head forward and stretches his neck by easing it from side to side. We wait. Swole is shaking. His dad opens his small, dark eyes and his instantly accurate gaze makes me want to run away.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ His soft, menacing voice makes me forget he’s only our mate’s dad.

‘Just going out for a bit,’ says Swole.

‘No you’re not, upstairs.’

‘But Mum said I …’

‘Now!’ His whisper is more frightening than a shout.

Swole’s head dips to his chest and he climbs the stairs to his room.

Rooksy, John and I stand there, waiting to be dismissed.

‘Well?’ he says and shows us the way out with an angry flick of his eyes.

‘Miserable bastard,’ says Rooksy, once we’re in the street. ‘Do you think Swole’s mum told him what was going on?’

I shake my head. ‘No, she’s scared of him too. He blames her for anything Swole does.’

Rooksy shrugs. ‘Jealous then, Swole’s got a bigger dick.’

Jubblies, Pigeons and Lies

Wooden crates of R Whites and Corona empties are stacked four high on the Big Step outside Plummer’s corner shop. The sun has turned the black-and-white tiles into a chequered hotplate. I’m sitting on its edge holding a Jubbly that was frozen ten minutes ago but is already turning to orange juice in its collapsing tetrahedron carton.

‘Hello Billy.’

Sarah’s slender silhouette stands before me. A gentle fizzing in my chest has me rising to my feet. But a bigger outline moves alongside her and I sit down again. It’s Kenneth ‘Kirk’ Douglas. He’s blond, very blond. Girls like him, giggle when they see him, send him anonymous notes, and the younger ones use his name in their skipping games.

On a mountain stands a lady

Who she is I do not know

All she wants is gold and silver

All she wants is a nice young man

The rope turns faster.

All right Susan, I’ll tell your mother

Kissing Kirk Douglas around the corner

Is it true?

Faster still, to catch the girl’s legs.

Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes …

The rope invariably traps their legs on yes.

I listen out for my name but never hear it. When I was little, the girls never caught me in kiss-chase because I didn’t want them to. Even if I’d made myself catchable, they would have rushed past me in pursuit of Kirk, who was a good runner but enjoyed being caught. At the time, it made him a sissy. Not now, it doesn’t.

I didn’t care much about girls at the time but it bothered me that they liked Kirk so much. They still do, especially his ‘lovely long eyelashes’ and his blond hair. What makes him bearable is knowing that he’s not too bright. Not backward or anything, only a little slow on the uptake.

‘Hello Sarah, watcha Kirk.’

His push on my shoulder is heavier than playful. ‘Watcha Billy, hot eh?’

He has this likeable, irritating way of talking without thinking, while I waste time searching for clever things to say that, once said, are rarely worth the effort. Inside Kirk’s head, there’s no space between thinking and speaking and although what he says isn’t funny or that interesting, it’s OK. I can’t stand him.

‘We’re going to have Jubblies too,’ he says.

‘We’re’? Because they’re both going to buy one? Or because they’re boyfriend and girlfriend, and he’s buying? An ache spreads in my stomach as I hold up my Jubbly.

‘Just the job in this heat, it’s … melty hot.’

Melty hot? Melty bloody hot? Thankfully, they don’t seem to be listening. Kirk goes into the shop but Sarah waits outside. He is buying hers and she’s avoiding looking at me.

Kirk emerges with a Jubbly in each hand, tearing along the top strip of one with his teeth to reveal the orange ice. He holds out the other one. ‘Here you are Sarah.’

‘Thanks Kirk.’

It hurts to hear them say each other’s names. And is Kirk standing between us to make it clear she’s his girlfriend?

Sarah squeezes the orange ice out through the edge that Mr Plummer has cut with scissors; girls ask for it to be cut, boys tear it. Kirk sits down, and jostles me to move over, pretending to be friendly but determined to make room between us for Sarah to sit next to him. I’m about to leave when I catch her glance at the space Kirk has made for her and pretend she hasn’t seen it! She walks in front of us to sit down beside me. One in the eye for Kirk, long lashes and all.

She is wonderfully close and her bare arm is touching mine. She stretches out her brown legs on the pavement and, with her free hand, pushes her frock down to her knees. I clutch my Jubbly too hard and orange juice squirts on to the pavement

‘Ha,’ says Kirk, ‘what a waste.’ He leans over, knocking me against Sarah. His bulk doesn’t threaten in the same way that Griggsy’s does but with Sarah next to me, I hate him for being bigger than I am.

‘Kirk, do you mind?’ she says.

‘Looks like he’s peed on the pavement.’

It does.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ she says.

He smirks. I swig long and slow at my Jubbly, trying to think of a clever response. Nothing comes to me and we sit in awkward silence until relief arrives in the shape of Michael, who is toiling towards us, arms straight down like he’s carrying an invisible rucksack. One hand is cupped backwards as if ready to draw a gun; it’s hiding a cigarette.

He flicks the brim of an invisible cowboy hat. ‘Howdy M’am, Kork, and if it isn’t Billy de Kid. Buenos dias, how are ye?’

‘Hello Michael, what’re you up to?’ says Sarah.

‘Not much señorita but I’m just after hearin’ on de wireless that de bandits who robbed that train vamoosed with more than two million pounds. Jesse James would have been proud of ’em.’

‘Oh yeah?’ says Kirk, dropping his jaw to mock him.

Michael spits a shred of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. ‘I’m too late for de Jubbly swallying contest den?’

‘Contest? It’s not a contest,’ says Kirk.

Michael winks at me. ‘Just as well, doesn’t Billy have yiz both well beat?’

Sarah laughs.

Kirk takes the bait. ‘Anyway, he started before us.’

‘Dat’s de way to win muchachos, dat’s de way.’

‘If we’d started at the same time …’

‘Ah Kork, if de moon were made of cheese …’

‘What?’

‘Oh nottn’, just a bit of poetry.’

I suppress a laugh. Michael looks away, eyes narrowed against the sun and prairie dust, like Randolph Scott. He drops what’s left of his cigarette and shreds it with the sole of his shoe. ‘Will yiz be at the hoedown on Sunday?’ He’s referring to our street party that has been held ever since the Coronation, except that it now takes place in the school holidays. We nod. ‘Me ould fellah’s doin’ de announcements. Isn’t he after gettin’ ahold of won of dem loudhailer yokes to help with de organizin’?’

Other Irishmen have difficulty understanding Michael’s dad’s accent and our Cockney neighbours will be taking the mickey as usual. Kirk shakes his head and smirks at me. I refuse to smile. Dad sticks up for Mr O’Rourke because he says it’s better to be a doer than someone who watches doers.

Behind Michael, some pigeons scatter as a Morris Minor burbles by. It’s white, like my aunt’s. I’m about to mention this when Sarah cries out and puts her hands over her eyes.

Michael gasps. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’

In the road, a pigeon is flapping, straining to pull itself off the tarmac. Several times the squashed body peels up but can’t break free of its own goo. Small, surprisingly white feathers swirl like snowflakes around the grey body and some settle on the dark red intestines that have wormed out on to the road.

‘Yeuch,’ says Kirk, dropping his head between his knees.

Sarah clutches her hair and turns to put her face against my chest. ‘The poor thing, the poor thing …’

The pigeon rests, then tries again. It must be in agony but its face just looks puzzled. If only it would stop flapping. Its neck writhes up between wings that are scraping the ground like a weird dustpan and brush. Please stop flapping! I ease Sarah away from me and she looks at me like she did when Josie fell over, expecting me to make things OK. My head swirls with pride – and the need to be sick. I stand up and grab a bottle from a crate.

When I reach the pigeon it stops moving. Relieved, I spin round to announce its death when the bloody bird flutters back to life. I raise the bottle to strike, but the bird is still again, watching me with its orange-bead eye.

‘Do it Billy, de poor yoke’s buzzard meat.’

I bring the bottle down but miss the head and make a greater mess of its body.

Sarah screams, ‘No, stop!’

The neck lifts. This time the eye is closed. With the next blow, I crush its head. Jubbly-flavoured vomit rises in my throat.

I wobble back to the Big Step. Michael takes the bottle from me and puts a hand on my shoulder to reassure me as if I’m Roy Rogers and I’ve had to put Trigger out of his misery.

‘How could you? The poor thing,’ says Sarah.

‘T’was for de best Sarah. Sure wasn’t de bird dyin’ in agony?’

I want to say something too, but my head is too full of what I’ve just seen, and done. I sit beside Sarah, breathing hard to stop myself being sick. Until now, I’ve killed only insects and worms, which can’t look you in the face as you’re doing it. I put my hands over my eyes and can still see the pigeon’s writhing neck, and its accusing orange eye. Even when I was bringing down the bottle on its head, I could think only that here was a living creature that would soon not be alive anymore, because I was killing it. I tuck my shaking hands into my armpits, unsure whether I’m proud or disgusted by what I’ve done.

The Corona lorry pulls up at the kerb to screen the corpse from view. Michael holds out a hand to me. ‘Well done compadré, it had to be done.’

We move to sit on the other side of the shop to let the deliverymen load the crates. No one speaks until Michael gets up and squints into the distance, as if checking whether Sioux or Comanches are waiting up ahead for the wagon train. ‘Hasta la vista, muchachos. I have to be gettin’ back to de ould hacienda … chow time.’

Squashed pigeon or not, a meal is not something to be missed.

Kirk looks at Sarah and winks at me. ‘Hasn’t that put you off eating Michael?’

‘Not at all Kork. But aren’t ye looking terrible pale in de face. Was it all a bit much for ye?’

‘What are you talking about? I could have done it if Billy hadn’t.’

‘Not easy when ye are sat der wid your head in your hands. Sure wouldn’t de bird be dead of ould age before he got a belt from ye.’ He grins at me. ‘See ya around Kid.’

He lumbers off at a pace that will get him home before hunger sets in. For me, meals are interruptions to whatever I’m doing; for Michael, they’re vital staging posts in a day that consists of eating, short periods of satisfaction and longer, more difficult, times spent looking forward to eating.

‘What’s Fatty O’Rourke on about?’ says Kirk, who should keep quiet, as it’s the best thing to do when you’ve had the piss taken out of you.

Sarah and I don’t answer.

After a while, she says, ‘Well Billy, what about the round-the-block race on Sunday? Are you running?’

‘I am,’ says Kirk, with a forward one-two shrug of his shoulders.

Well, Kirk, aren’t you the bloody marvel.

The ‘round-the-block’ race is four times round an oblong circuit that takes in our street and the next one. Last year Kirk won it. This year, I think I’ve a chance of winning if I can stay free of asthma. Sarah hasn’t answered him. She’s waiting for my answer!

‘Maybe.’

Maybe? Of course I’m running in the race but I don’t want Kirk to think that it matters that much.

‘Well, may the best man win,’ she says.

‘Yeah,’ says Kirk, ‘hope it’s me … again. Last year, I won two big bottles of Cream Soda.’

That’s where he gets it wrong: boasting is worse than being thick. Sarah misses my modest smile, which is a pity, because it’s like Audie Murphy’s before he beats up bigmouth baddies.

I change the subject. ‘How was your holiday in Somerset?’

‘Oh, marvellous … didn’t want to come home.’

‘At your Nan’s?’

‘Yeah.’

She can see I’m trying to exclude Kirk and decides to be fair, ‘What about you, Kirk? Going hop picking again?’

‘S’pose so.’

I envy Kirk his late summers in the hop fields, when his whole family goes down to Kent to live in wooden dormitories with other Cockney families. They have a great time and, according to Aunt Winnie, it isn’t only the kids who get up to all kinds of mischief. And everyone comes home brown as berries.

We don’t get much sunshine in Cumberland. When John and I returned from holiday last week, Kirk greeted us with a rare joke, ‘Nice tan, Driscoll brothers, been moonbathing?’ Of course, he’s at his best in the summer, when his hair goes ‘straw blond’. Bastard.

Everyone looks better with a suntan. It makes Rooksy’s dad look like a film star. My dad goes dark brown in summer when working on the building site but because he keeps his vest on, he looks like he’s wearing one even when he isn’t. I’ve been sitting in the sun myself at every opportunity because it’s supposed to shrink spots – and Mum says a tan makes my eyes look bluer.

I pick up my empty Jubbly carton. Punching down over the hole at the corner can get it to burst with a satisfying bang. I place it nonchalantly on the step and bring the side of my fist down hard. It’s my day for missing targets. The blow fails to cover the hole and instead of a small explosion, there’s an embarrassing ‘phut’ as the carton collapses.

‘Ha, he’s farted,’ says Kirk.

My face burns.

‘Billy Driscoll’s farted.’ He’s rolling backwards on the step, forcing himself to laugh.

Sarah smiles. Does she think I have?

‘Don’t be stupid, it was the Jubbly packet, I say.’

‘Wasn’t. You farted, we’ll get the smell in a sec.’

My voice goes sissy-thin. ‘I have not farted.’

‘Pooh, the whiff,’ says Kirk, like some five-year-old.

‘It was the Jubbly packet, I say.’

‘It was a faaaarrrt.’

‘It wasn’t a fart. I don’t fart.’

‘Yes you do.’

Then I say it. ‘No I don’t, I’ve never farted.’

Kirk throws his arms in the air. Sarah’s eyebrows rise. I stand up, desperate to get away.

‘Never farted? Ha! Everyone farts,’ says Kirk.

Embarrassment boils through me but now I can’t help myself. ‘I haven’t.’

‘You’re not only a farter, Billy Driscoll, you’re a liar too.’

It’s true. I’m unravelling in front of them.

‘It was the Jubbly packet,’ says Sarah.

Kirk stops smiling, ‘But he said he’s never farted … liar.’

‘Have you ever heard him?’

Unlike me, Kirk doesn’t lie. ‘Fart? Well, no. But …’

‘How do you know he has then?’

His mouth opens and he looks around for an audience to share his disbelief. ‘But everyone …’

‘You don’t know, Kirk, do you? So stop it.’

Her words cut through the shame roaring in my ears.

‘But …’ He flashes her a furious look and thrusts his face into mine. ‘You bloody liar.’ He storms off.

Although Kirk can be dim, he’s made me look dimmer. I hate him. But not as much as I hate myself for being a lying idiot in front of Sarah.

She gets to her feet. ‘I have to go now … see you at the street party?’

I can’t look at her. ‘Yeah, see you.’

‘The pigeon … it was brave.’

I tingle at hearing ‘brave’. Now I can look at while her ‘brave’ competes with the other voice in my head screaming ‘liar’.

‘Thanks. Look, sometimes I say … want to say things that don’t come out like they should …’ She stops me with a shake of her head.

‘I hope you win the race.’ She touches my arm with Jubbly-cold fingers. Guinevere is tying her favour to my lance before I go jousting with Sir Bad Knight.

‘Thanks Sarah, yes, see you there.’

She walks away, pushing a hand through her hair and revealing the back of her neck. I wonder, again, if it’s normal to find this so exciting. I watch her until she reaches her doorstep half way down the street. She turns and gives me a wave, and goes indoors before she can see mine.

Beach Magic and Sunray Stories

I sit down again on the Big Step and squeeze my palms into my eyes. Why not be like Kirk and simply say what comes into my bloody head? Being dull has to be better than being a liar.

I don’t often get caught out lying because I rarely tell complete lies. At a hint of doubt in someone’s face, I can adjust smoothly back towards the truth. I fib because in that second before speaking, there’s enough time to make things funnier, smarter – and I can’t resist. However, my ‘improved’ versions are often pathetic. Melty hot?

It’s when I’m scared or ashamed that I lose control. ‘Never farted’? For God’s sake! While I can laugh when others talk of bodily functions, I can’t bear it if it has anything to do with me. This goes back to when I was four years old. I was at sanatorium on the Kent coast: a ‘fresh-air haven’ for the chesty kids of smoggy London.

My stay began badly. On the first morning, the nurse stood me on the bed to pee into the wide-necked bottle. When she thought I’d finished, she took the bottle away. But there was more and my arc of pee splashed on to the floor. ‘Billy!’ she screamed and lunged forward to field the waning stream. Startled, I swung round, spattering her white apron and dribbling over the blankets. She stretched again to get the bottle between my legs but slipped to her knees on the wet floor. The bottle flew from her hand and spun along the ward, sprinkling left and right. The other kids scrambled to the ends of their beds to cheer its progress.

I was frozen with shame until I had to jump, two-footed like Spartacus in the gladiator school, above the nurse’s slap at my legs. Before she could aim a second swipe, sister arrived, scrubbed arms on hips.

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