The Boyhood of Burglar Bill (3 page)

At dinnertime – bulging with meat and potato pie, carrots and gravy, little squares of bread, semolina and jam – we had our first team meeting. Games of tick’n’release, horses and riders, marbles, buttons and the like were going on all around us. Amos was up to his usual tricks in the toilets. Mrs Harris was on duty.

We talked about team selection, training and the money Spencer and I were owed.

‘A tanner each, I make it,’ I said. ‘Ice Cream Tommy won’t pay.’

‘He should, though,’ said Trevor. ‘His dad’s got loads.’

‘What about me?’ said Tommy Pye. ‘I’m only seven.’

‘Ask your mummy,’ said Joey, laughing. ‘Give her a cuddle.’

Then Wyatt joined in. He was eager to tell us how he had had a bath last night and trimmed his toenails. Wyatt was one of our later acquisitions. A tall, thin boy, with ears set sharply at right angles
to his head. He looked like a wing nut. He was a good player all the same, good-natured and with a touching belief – fostered no doubt by his loving mother, grandmother and four sisters – in the intrinsic interest of his entire life to everybody he ever met.

Presently, as though on a prearranged signal, Mr Reynolds and Mr Cork came striding down the steps, across the playground and into the toilets. They hauled Amos and two or three others out of there and marched them off.

The bell rang and we all lined up in our classes. As he departed to join his line of first-year tiddlers, Tommy Pye tugged Spencer’s sleeve.

‘The shirts,’ he said, in his little piping voice, ‘’ave they got numbers on ’em?’

5
Edna May Prosser Arrives

The match was played till after dark
Till gates were closed on Albert Park
By shadowy boys whose shapes dissolved
Into the earth as it revolved.

Friendly Matches
(2001)

The shirts. The shirts! I blame that application form. No mention of shirts there, team colours or anything. Of course, they were expecting school teams mostly, teams already kitted out. It was a cock-up in the Parks and Cemeteries department. This competition, this cup, was a bit of a rush job. Somebody’d had a bright idea and not followed it through. All the same, there we were, an established
named
team, with melodramas of suspense and triumph blossoming in our heads, commentaries already in rehearsal, whispered aloud in the privacy
of lavatories and bathrooms. ‘It’s Wyatt now, the ball glued to his foot…’ And no shirts.

Spencer, Ronnie, Arthur Toomey and I sat in the sheds again – more rain – and contemplated our situation. Ways of obtaining the shirts were proposed.

‘We could get our mums to make ’em!’ Spencer.

‘Each of us get a shirt and dye ’em!’ Me.

‘Nick ’em.’ Ronnie.

Meanwhile, Arthur was digging away with his penknife into the scarred boards of the shed without speaking. He was listening, though.

Spencer had a bag of chips and batters which he was passing round, cautiously. He’d cover the bag with his free hand, allowing you just room enough to secure a single chip or batter. Archie, the Purnells’ lop-sided dog, lop-sidled up. He could smell a chip a mile off. Joey Skidmore arrived. So could he.

Other members of the team appeared, some non-members too. It was early evening and Tommy Pye was there. No Tommy Ice Cream yet. The rain had eased. Coat goals were set up and a game began. Spencer stayed out of things, attending to his few remaining chips. Archie, unable to choose between the ball and food, darted irresolutely back
and forth. In between the surges of the game – the ball in the pond for a while – in the street! – we kicked around this business with the shirts. The best we came up with, Joey’s idea, was just to turn up anyway and expect to play.

By and by the first of the mothers arrived, Mrs Pye. She removed her tiny son from the pitch. To compensate and console him, and shut him up, she stuck a lolly in his mouth. Tommy Pye, the prodigy with a ball, deceiver of boys twice his size, destined for fame in years to come with Aston Villa, departed holding his mummy’s hand. Mrs Glue was next. She said not a word but stood with her hands on her hips till Graham reluctantly acknowledged her existence. And he departed.

No other mothers appeared that evening, though their influence was felt. Trevor left, off to the hospital again. Edna May Prosser arrived with a message for her brothers from
their
mother: Come. Home. Now. Edna May, a bold girl with a liking, it was commonly supposed, for Joey Skidmore, joined in the game, dispossessing her brother (Malcolm? Patrick?) and charging off down the wing with the ball. She hit a decent cross into the middle which Joey himself, as it happened, bundled in.

Tommy Ice Cream arrived in his usual ankle-length coat, worn in all weathers. He ambled on to the pitch, shrugged off the coat and revealed one brand-new bright green goalie’s jersey. He made no comment, wearing also his usual expressionless expression, but occupied the nearest goal. He had new boots too, his trousers tucked in his socks. In the distance, Ice Cream Jack himself in
his
long coat could be seen hovering near the gates, checking out Tommy’s reception. Was his horse and cart outside, I wondered? Was his ice cream?

At seven o’clock the park bell rang. Mr Phipps rode up on his bicycle inviting us, in his amiable way, to clear off out of it. Out in the streets darkness was falling, gathering around the yellow street lights. The air was smoky and damp, old man Cutler’s latest still smouldering defiantly after the rain. He himself was off to the pub. Street lights, like everything else, were different in those days. Less light, but more colour. Bottle-green privet hedges, rosy-red house bricks and garden walls, the fading purpling sky itself. Spencer and I went home, Tommy Ice Cream accompanying us part of the way. Well, sort of. He was with us in his fashion, that is, silent and two paces to the rear. If
you spoke to him, he pulled his head down deeper into his coat. If you waited for him to catch up, he waited for you to keep going.

At the corner of Seymour Road he went his own way. Spencer was telling me a tale that Wyatt had told him. Not about haircuts or toenails, but a body. A dead body, Wyatt claimed, had been found in the toilets up in the cemetery. It was all muddied up (like us!) but wearing a suit. We speculated about this body. Was it a murder? Had somebody just gone in there and died? Had some
body
been dug up? I suggested we walk up Cemetery Road, which conveniently divided the cemetery in two, and see what we could see, a police car perhaps. Spencer was enthusiastic at first, but it was pretty well night now and both of us thought better of it. A dog chased a hissing cat right out in front of us, which made us jump. Edna May came bowling along on her bike – no lights – looking for Joey maybe. I felt low, miserable really, thinking about those nonexistent shirts. Outside Starkey’s in the glow from the window I spotted a Turf packet on the pavement. It was fairly dry, protected under the awning. Turf cigarettes had pictures of footballers in them, fifty in the set. Not cigarette cards exactly, not separate, but part of the packet itself. (My dad preferred Woodbines, though he’d smoke Turf
sometimes at my request.) I snatched the packet up. It was a player I already had, but useful for swaps. I felt a sudden surge of joy.

A few days later, early on a Monday morning, Spencer lifted the latch of their back veranda gate, which opened on to an entry, and fell over a large object. It was a parcel: brown paper, roughly wrapped and held together with string. No name. No address. No stamps. There were dirty hand prints on the outside and what looked like tea stains (or, Ronnie reckoned, blood). But inside, crisp and new and folded beautifully, as Spencer found, inside there was a set of shirts.

6
Spencer Sorrell and
Ronnie Horsfield

‘That’s a nice tin of beans, I’ll have that.’

Burglar Bill (1977)

Cat on a Wall
. Spencer Sorrell was my best true friend, not that I would ever have told
him
. We had known each other about a year. He was a medium sort of boy, dark hair combed flat to his head with a knife-like parting. He sometimes wore two pairs of socks to make his legs look thicker. He had a mild, hesitant expression and smelled of furniture polish. (Everything in Spencer’s house gleamed from his mother’s relentless attentions.) Yes, a true friend. I remember when I was ill in bed one time and he came round with a present. He left it on the step; my mother scared him, she scared most people. It was a tomato, picked from his own plant, with a little face stuck on it.

Spencer was tactful. Early on in our friendship he witnessed at close range one of Mum’s mad explosions with me sent flying across the yard, and made no comment, nor did he subsequently pry. Despite the sunray treatment he regularly received, his face was pale. He had spent some months away in Malvern at an open-air school or sanatorium. There was, my mother informed me, ‘a patch on his lung’.

Actually, most faces in Oldbury were pale then, or dirty at best. Sunlight struggled to penetrate the town’s protective shield. Spencer attended his sunray clinic on Tuesday mornings. After a time and a bit of badgering, he told me about it. He had to wear blue goggles and sit in a circle with other children around this special lamp, a dazzling column of light. Most of the others were younger than him; all of them, him included, were just in their underpants or knickers. Now and then they joined hands and moved around.

Spencer revealed all this, wished he hadn’t and swore me to secrecy.

‘Don’t tell!’

‘I won’t. Do you sing songs in that circle?’

‘On y’mother’s grave.’

‘Do you dance?’

‘
Promise.
’

The love of Spencer’s life was his cat. He came home from school for his dinner on certain days, mainly, in my opinion, to play with her. Her name was Minnie and
she
was older than him. She would roll on the floor to have her tummy tickled. In her youth, Spencer recalled, she would leap like a goalkeeper to catch a ball of silver paper tossed in her direction. In old age she was more sedate. Spencer called her ‘Mrs Furbag’.

I learnt much about cats from Spencer. We’d had a cat in Stone Street. Watching Spencer with his, I felt ashamed of what I’d done with ours, rolling it up in the bedclothes, terrorizing and then
forgiving
it. When we moved, it ran off. Who can blame it?

Spencer’s dad was as soft as he was. Sometimes when Minnie was up on their high wall, he and Spencer joined forces to bring her in. Mr Sorrell would bend down below the wall, Spencer would pat his back and call to the cat. Sometimes he’d position a cushion to protect the cat’s paws from his father’s bony spine. And down she’d jump.

The Frankenstein of Frogs
. Ronnie Horsfield was a friend too, but more recent, harder. He had attached himself to us in the last few months. Ronnie was small and wiry and often wore a balaclava. He smelled – pleasantly, in my opinion
– of dogs. Two slept in his room. He lived with his gran; his parents were never mentioned.

There was a huge hand-painted message, I remember, on the end wall of Ronnie’s house:

WELCOME   HOME   GEORGE

with a roughly painted Union Jack above it, and the date: 14 August 1946. So who was George? Ronnie’s dad, perhaps, coming home from the war? The message and the flag were fading year by year. But if he was welcomed home, this George, where was he now?

What Ronnie was good at was climbing: walls, gates, drainpipes, anything. In the park behind the boathouse there was a pair of trees where it was possible, with some daring and skill, to climb up the one and down the other. Ronnie and I were among the elite who could accomplish this. Yes, Ronnie might look like a sparrow, but his strength/weight ratio was off the scale. He could swing across between those trees one-handed like a chimp.

But, when all was said and done, the thing about Ronnie Horsfield was, he had
a reputation
. There were stories and rumours about him. He had no great talent apart from climbing, was not
particularly clever or brave, and yet he seemed quite effortlessly to get his own way. Nobody ever bothered him, not even Amos. His reputation was both mysterious and horrible: things he was
supposed to have done
. He had a level gaze. Even Mr Cork thought twice before banging Ronnie Horsfield’s desk.

It’s all about perspective and scale. To the adults, except Mrs Milward maybe, we were little boys.
Amos
was a little boy. But in the playground, or anywhere with his fists up, Amos was a colossus, a terror, the biggest shark in the sea. And Ronnie too: a skinny scrap, a shrimp of a boy, but in our minds at times, if the truth were told, a regular Dr Frankenstein no less. Of frogs.

A Sad Jelly
. My friends, you’ll note, were somewhat odd; I was the normal one. I did a bad thing once, it’s true, and more than once. (‘That’s a nice pencil sharpener, I’ll have that.’) Took Dennis Johnson’s marbles too, burgled his desk one wet playtime, I’m ashamed to say. Sorry, Dennis. Also, I had this talent for making things up. If Spencer taught me cats, I taught him alibis. One time we were fooling around with some matches and he got a burn hole through two thicknesses of sock. He was greatly agitated. What could he tell his mother?

‘Tell her… tell her you fell on a lighted cigarette!’ A convincing explanation, I thought. It had worked with my mother.

There again, what’s normal anyway? What’s odd? That whole town was populated with oddities, as I remember it, broken and damaged people that the doctors had not yet tidied up or locked away. Men with missing arms, dogs with missing legs. Ice Cream Jack had a great black built-up boot on one of his feet. A boy in our class was covered top to toe with livid flaky scabs. Bobby Edwards ran errands for his sister to the shops with a note of what to get, creases of concentration on his face. And he was forty-six. Mrs Moore shook permanently like a sad jelly. Likewise, mysteries and unlikelihoods abounded. Mr Reynolds always offered you a sweet – a Fisherman’s Friend or pear drop – after whacking you with his cane. There was a ghost in the boathouse, a body in the cemetery toilets, a parcel of football shirts conjured up from nowhere on Spencer Sorrell’s step.