LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

the hill with his basket delivering bread and cakes door to door. We waited till he weren’t looking and crept over to the barrow. There was racks of little loaves and cakes inside and tucked in a corner was a money pouch. Joey reached in and took sixpence out.

      It turned out that the bloke always left his barrow there cause he didn’t want to push it back up the hill. So every morning for months and months we took sixpence out of his pouch. There was probably thirty bob in there altogether, but we never took a lot out and he never noticed it was gone. That was a game, that was! We would spend the sixpence on food on our way to school.

      When we wasn’t at school we was always outside doing jobs, scrounging or playing in the street. We was never indoors. There was always a big gang of kids playing games in our street. We would line up some screws and aim cherry pips at them to see how many each of us could win—that was called cherry hogging. We would play hopscotch and spinning tops and race each other. We would throw a rope over the arm of a lamppost and swing round and round on it. If it was a summer evening and me dad was sitting on the steps outside our house he might say, ‘There’s a ha’penny for the first one round the block,’ and we would tear off. Sometimes we played a game called ‘Release’. We would chalk a big box on the street and then split into two teams. One side went and hid and the other team had to find them, one by one, and put them in the box. At any time their mates, if it was all clear, could run to the box and holler out ‘Release!’ to free the blokes in the box. We played lots of other games too, but nine times out of ten it was fighting.

      Me dad taught me how to fight in the back garden. ‘Cabby Day from Tiger Bay,’ he would sing as he hopped about. ‘The only man to go fifteen rounds with a wasp and never get stung!’ We liked to have street fights with other streets. Our street would go round to Chesnall Road and fight a gang round there. There was the Tiger Bay mob, Raydon Street mob, Doighton Street mob and Dartmouth Hill mob. Each road had its own little mob of hounds. Sometimes we went over to Campbell Bunk in Lower Holloway where me uncle, Tinker Day, lived. It was the worst place in the country I should think; the most violent road there ever was for drunks, prostitution—you name it, it all happened in Campbell Bunk. They burned the floorboards, the joists, the doors—burned everything to keep warm—and nobody dared go near them to ask for any rent. Me own uncle was pretty bad when it come down to it, though I never had much to do with him or me cousins really, apart from going to fight them occasionally with the mob from our street.

      When we wasn’t fighting we might try tormenting the old people in the Bay. For our favourite trick we needed a reel of black cotton, a button and a pin. When it was dark we would dig the pin in the putty over the top of a window. Then we tied the button on the cotton and dangled it over. We took the reel across the road and tugged it so that the button kept on tapping on the window of the house, ‘pip, pip’. They would come out, look round and say, ‘What the bleeding hell’s happening here?’ We drove the poor old sods mad with that. They was always telling us off, throwing a bucket of water over us and Gawd knows what else. ‘Sling yer hook out of it,’ they would say, and we would go back to our other games.

      There was seasons for the different types of games like cherry hogging and top spinning. We would go from one game to another. There was special times in the year for other things too, like Guy Fawkes. We looked forward to that most of all. Each year we made a guy out of potato sacks stuffed with straw and gave it a mask for a face. Me mother sewed on the arms and the legs for us and we took the guy round the streets in a barrow hollering, ‘Penny for the guy, penny for the guy!’ The best places to go was outside the big hotels. One year we got more than eight shillings in a day doing that. We spent the money on sweets and fireworks for the big bonfire that was lit every year in the middle of our street.

      We thought up some other ways to get hold of money, too. Opposite Buckingham’s in Raydon Street there was an off licence run by a woman. All the empty bottles was kept in the side garden in Doighton Street where the lorries loaded and unloaded. I was passing one day with Ruddy and Joey Booth when I had an idea.

      I says, ‘Give me a hoof up.’

      Ruddy shot me up and over the green doors of the gate. Soon I climbed back with some empty bottles.

      ‘What are you going to do with them?’ says Joey.

      ‘Wait here a minute.’

      I took the empties into the shop and got tuppence a bottle. After that we was over those bleeding doors all the time. One day the woman in the shop took a long look at me.

      She says, ‘Where d’you keep getting all these bottles from?’

      I says, ‘Over the hill.’

      ‘Over the hill?’

      I says, ‘Yeah.’

      She says, ‘They must do a lot of drinking over there.’

      She never did find us out. Daytime, night time, any bleeding time we passed, we would go and get three or four of her own bottles to return to her.

      Another time I went into the coal and greengrocer’s shop round the corner in Raydon Street. I crept along, bent down under the window and went through the door. Me mates waited outside. I couldn’t see the owner, Mrs Stevens, so I took a handful of peanuts. Just as I passed the board that divided the vegetables from the coal she sprung out and caught me. She hit me so hard with her broom she knocked me scrabbling into the coal. Then she chased me round and round, over the heap of coal, hitting me all the time till I got out. Me mates was laughing so much they could hardly run. All that for a few bleeding peanuts!

       VI

      Alice was the eldest of us kids. She had long black hair right down her back and she was a greedy cow. She would sit cracking nuts by the fire and not give you a shell. I didn’t live with her for long cause she went into service when she was fifteen and then got married and moved to the other end of the street.

      Bill was the oldest boy. He was smart and good looking with tight curly hair and he was always joking. He worked in the building with me dad and sometimes gave me a penny to spend. Bob was next—he was the quiet one. He looked the most Spanish and his hair was wavy and as black as coal. He had eyes like a hawk—he could kill a bird with a single stone—and he wound up a champion darts player. He liked to walk over Hampstead Heath three or four times a day with his friend George Mead. George was long, like all his family, and he wound up about six foot seven. He had a lurcher that would tear other dogs to bits. He and Bob would set their dogs to fight other dogs up on the heath.

      Me brother Jim was closest to me in age and we spent a lot of time together with Ruddy and our other mates. Lulu was the youngest and she was all up front. She was a spitfire and we was always fighting. Once I hit her round the ear’ole and she flew up the stairs after me and stabbed me in the arse with a pair of scissors. She always wanted me to give her money. I was one for saving and I always had a few coppers in me pocket. I don’t think she liked it cause gels couldn’t go scrounging and scrumping like boys could.

      Like me brothers, I always wore a cap and I had no hair. Me dad would cut it with old horse clippers, right over except for the fringe—that was the style. I was bald headed all bar that fringe on the front, which stuck out under me cap. I wore a pair of the old man’s trousers, cut down, with braces to hold them up. When the old man finished with a pair of trousers he would give them to one of us boys. If it was my turn he would put them on the table and tell me to lay on them. ‘Up you go,’ he would say. Then he would chalk round me, cut round the outline and sew them up. They looked like nothing on earth—old corduroy trousers with two buttons either side of a flap. The length depended on how old and worn they was and how much the old man had to cut off them—they might be as much as knee deep. I never had a long pair of trousers. I wore a wool jersey on top in the winter and nothing in the summer, except a shirt when I was at school. I looked scruffy in me hand-me-downs, but you weren’t a boy unless yer arse was hanging out of yer trousers.

      Me shoes was hobnail boots—leather boots with studs in the bottom of them. They

Скачать книгу