Dave was Doddoe’s eldest, tall and curly-headed, with sunken cheeks and dark prominent eyes. His sharp face missed nothing as he scanned each window and (like a high-enough camera) took in the pavement from doorways to gutter — bending to pick up a threepenny-bit which Brian would never have seen but which brought their moneybags to one-and-nine. Jobless Dave wore long trousers ragged behind, a brown-holed jersey, and a pair of shoes that let wet in. Brian’s clothes were ragged also, but his boots at the moment kept his feet away from the rain. They passed a secondhand furniture and junk shop, and Brian read whitewashed letters painted across the window: GET YOUR GUNS FOR SPAIN HERE. “Are they still fightin’ in Spain?”
Dave nodded, trying as he walked along to disentangle two pieces of steel, a penny puzzle bought farther down the road. “How long will they go on fighting then?” Brian wanted to know.
“Till they all drop dead,” he was told. The road was wide and cobbled, bordered by scrapyards, toyshops, pubs, pawnbrokers, cheap grocery stores, the livewire artery for back-to-backs and factories hanging like clags on either side. People carried bundles to the pawnshop or sackbags to the scrapyard, or came up from town with untouched dole or wages in their pockets so that trading went on every day of the week.
Dave was fixed by the window of a radio shop. A wireless on show was dissected, and he explained how to make it work: a valve here, a condenser there, an impedance at such a place, fasten an aerial at that point, but Brian was bored because he couldn’t understand it. “If I bought that owd wireless for five bob, I could fix it up,” Dave claimed, “and I bet I could sell it for thirty bob then.”
It stopped raining, and meagre sun shone on wet pools in the road. Buses came slowly for fear of skidding, and a man whose bike brakes didn’t work dragged his boots along the ground when he appeared from a side street. Dave demanded: “Who’s the two best singers in the world?”
“I don’t know,” Brian answered. “I can on’y think o’ one and that’s Gracie Fields.” Dave walked on and said: “Paul Robeson’s the best, and the next is Al Jolson. So don’t forget.”
They looked at the glass-framed stills outside a cinema. “Would yer like ter goo ter’t pictures s’afternoon? You ain’t seen ‘G-men,’ ’ave yer?” He said no, he hadn’t. “It’s a good picture. James Cagney’s in it. About gangsters. It starts where he throws a pen at a fly and pins it to the door. Then a man’s fixin’ ’is tie in a mirror and the mirror gets shot to bits.”
“What time does it start?” Brian said, excited at these details.
Dave took the money from his pocket and began counting. “They wain’t let us in for another ’alf an hour, so we’ll ’ave summat t’eat fost.” He pointed out several shops across the road. “Go into that baker’s and get two tuppenny meat pies, then go into the paper shop and ask for a buckanachure. The buckanachure will cost sixpence.”
Brian drew in his breath at the long word: “What’s a buckanachure?”
“Nowt for yo’,” Dave said brusquely. “Yo’ can’t understand yet what a buckanachure is. But just go in that shop, give the man sixpence, and tell ’im yer want a buckanachure. Understand?”
Brian muttered it aloud as he crossed the road: buckanachure, buckanachure, and said it to himself in the pastry shop: buckanachure, buckanachure, so that he wouldn’t forget such a strange big word and wouldn’t let Dave down by going back without whatever a buckanachure was.
The word seemed ridiculous when he stood in the silent shop. Newspapers hung all around, rows of murder books lined the wall at the back, and in the window he could see magazines with bare women on the cover, and bare men as well, like Tarzans in the pictures. When a man in shirtsleeves asked what he wanted, he slid the sixpence across. “A buckanachure.”
“A buckanachure.” He would have stood there repeating it till he dropped dead, for the word was engraved on his lips for ever. The man looked hard, then rummaged beneath the counter. “Who do you want it for?”
“My cousin,” Brian told him. Nosey bleeder.
“I hope you aren’t going to read it.” He passed a green-covered paperback across the counter, let the sixpenny-bit fall into the till. Brian picked the book up as though he were a thief, walked out, and paused at the curb to look at it: Book of Nature — he said it to himself, then aloud: Book of Nature, Book o’ Nature — Buckanachure — so it’s a book about nature. He’d heard of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Job, but he didn’t know there was a Book of Nature. He opened it and saw drawings he couldn’t understand, but it seemed to be about science, and he thought Dave must be clever to want a book like this.
Dave snatched it from him, munched his meat pie rapidly and skipped through the book with avid interest. When the first unnatural edge had been taken from his curiosity, he slipped the book into his pocket and set to finishing his meal. “Do you ever read books?”
“At school,” Brian told him.
“Have you read Dracula?”
“No. Is it good?”
“Yes,” Dave laughed, “it frightens yer ter death.”
Brian laughed also. “I’m goin’ ter buy a book, though. It’s called The Count of Monte Cristo.”
“I ’erd that on the wireless,” Dave said. “A serial as went on for months, so the book’ll cost a lot o’ money.”
“I know, but I’ve bin savin’ up for a long time. Whenever I get a tanner I tek it to Larker’s down town, and the manager’s savin’ it till I get half a crown. Then I can ’ave the book.”
Dave was impressed by the purposeful method: “’Ow much ’av you got so far?”
“Two bob. I can fetch it nex’ week if I get sixpence more.” Dave fleeced his pockets of every coin, looked them over shrewdly: “’Ere’s threepence, Brian, I’ll gi’ yer the rest on Monday. I’ve got a lot o’ rags ter tek an’ sell, so I’ll cum ter your ’ouse and give it yer.”
Brian could hardly believe it: weeks might have passed before the final elusive sixpence had come his way by pennies and ha’pennies. “Thanks, our Dave. I’ll let yer read the book when I’ve got it.”
“No,” Dave said, “I can’t read long books. Yo’ keep it; if I take it to our ’ouse they’ll use it for lavatory paper, or Doddoe’ll write bets out on it. Anyway, I’ve seen the picture, so I expect it’s the same as the book.”
He screwed up the meat-pie paper and threw it into the road. They talked about films and film stars, until a man began opening doors on either side, and a smell of cloth upholstery that had been locked up in the depths of the small picture-house all night wafted out into the street. Then the doors slammed and a woman went into the paybox. “Come on, Brian, we can goo in now and find a good seat.”
They emerged three hours later. Saucers of sunlight danced before Brian’s eyes, and they ached from the shock of such a bright day, when in the cinema he had expected it to be equally dark without. A trolley-bus at Canning Circus swept them down one hill and up another, past Radford Station to Lennington Road, on which the Doddoes lived.
The long straight pot-holed street of newly built houses ended at a railway embankment. “They’re all bleedin’-well Jerry-built, though,” Dave pointed out, his finger towards the doors from which paint was already peeling. “You have to prune twigs off your doors and windows every so often.” Three children flashed by on a homemade scooter, pram-wheels and a piece of board: “They’d better watch out,” Dave laughed, “or the means-test man’ll tek it away”—as he batted the tab of the rear rider.