II
I don’t say to myself: ‘You shouldn’t have done the job and then you’d have stayed away from Borstal’; no, what I ram into my runner-brain is that my luck had no right to scram just when I was on my way to making the coppers think I hadn’t done the job after all. The time was autumn and the night foggy enough to get me and my mate Mike roaming the streets when we should have been rooted in front of the telly or stuck into a plush posh seat at the pictures, but I was restless after six weeks away from any sort of work, and well you might ask me why I’d been bone-idle for so long because normally I sweated my thin guts out on a milling-machine with the rest of them, but you see, my dad died from cancer of the throat, and mam collected a cool five hundred in insurance and benefits from the factory where he’d worked, ‘for your bereavement’, they said, or words like that.
Now I believe, and my mam must have thought the same, that a wad of crisp blue-back fivers ain’t a sight of good to a living soul unless they’re flying out of your hand into some shopkeeper’s till, and the shopkeeper is passing you tip-top things in exchange over the counter, so as soon as she got the money, mam took me and my five brothers and sisters out to town and got us dolled-up in new clothes. Then she ordered a twenty-one-inch telly, a new carpet because the old one was covered with blood from dad’s dying and wouldn’t wash out, and took a taxi home with bags of grub and a new fur coat. And do you know — you wain’t believe me when I tell you — she’d still near three hundred left in her bulging handbag the next day, so how could any of us go to work after that? Poor old dad, he didn’t get a look in, and he was the one who’d done the suffering and dying for such a lot of lolly.
Night after night we sat in front of the telly with a ham sandwich in one hand, a bar of chocolate in the other, and a bottle of lemonade between our boots, while mam was with some fancy-man upstairs on the new bed she’d ordered, and I’d never known a family as happy as ours was in that couple of months when we’d got all the money we needed. And when the dough ran out I didn’t think about anything much, but just roamed the streets — looking for another job, I told mam — hoping to get my hands on another five hundred nicker so’s the nice life we’d got used to could go on and on for ever. Because it’s surprising how quick you can get used to a different life. To begin with, the adverts on the telly had shown us how much more there was in the world to buy than we’d ever dreamed of when we’d looked into shop windows but hadn’t seen all there was to see because we didn’t have the money to buy it with anyway. And the telly made all these things seem twenty times better than we’d ever thought they were. Even adverts at the cinema were cool and tame, because now we were seeing them in private at home. We used to cock our noses up at things in shops that didn’t move, but suddenly we saw their real value because they jumped and glittered around the screen and had some pasty-faced tart going head over heels to get her nail-polished grabbers on to them or her lipstick lips over them, not like the crumby adverts you saw on posters or in newspapers as dead as doornails; these were flickering around loose, half-open packets and tins, making you think that all you had to do was finish opening them before they were yours, like seeing an unlocked safe through a shop window with the man gone away for a cup of tea without thinking to guard his lolly. The films they showed were good as well, in that way, because we couldn’t get our eyes unglued from the cops chasing the robbers who had satchel-bags crammed with cash and looked like getting away to spend it — until the last moment. I always hoped they would end up free to blow the lot, and could never stop wanting to put my hand out, smash into the screen (it only looked a bit of rag-screen like at the pictures) and get the copper in a half-nelson so’s he’d stop following the bloke with the money-bags. Even when he’d knocked off a couple of bank clerks I hoped he wouldn’t get nabbed. In fact then I wished more than ever he wouldn’t because it meant the hot-chair if he did, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody no matter what they’d done, because I’d read in a book where the hot-chair worn’t a quick death at all, but that you just sat there scorching to death until you were dead. And it was when these cops were chasing the crooks that we played some good tricks with the telly, because when one of them opened his big gob to spout about getting their man I’d turn the sound down and see his mouth move like a goldfish or mackerel or a minnow mimicking what they were supposed to be acting — it was so funny the whole family nearly went into fits on the brand-new carpet that hadn’t yet found its way to the bedroom. It was the best of all though when we did it to some Tory telling us about how good his government was going to be if we kept on voting for them — their slack chops rolling, opening and bumbling, hands lifting to twitch moustaches and touching their buttonholes to make sure the flower hadn’t wilted, so that you could see they didn’t mean a word they said, especially with not a murmur coming out because we’d cut off the sound. When the governor of the Borstal first talked to me I was reminded of those times so much that I nearly killed myself trying not to laugh. Yes, we played so many good stunts on the box of tricks that mam used to call us the Telly Boys, we got so clever at it.
My pal Mike got let off with probation because it was his first job — anyway the first they ever knew about — and because they said he would never have done it if it hadn’t been for me talking him into it. They said I was a menace to honest lads like Mike — hands in his pockets so that they looked stone empty, head bent forward as if looking for half-crowns to fill ’em with, a ripped jersey on and his hair falling into his eyes so that he could go up to women and ask them for a shilling because he was hungry — and that I was the brains behind the job, the guiding light when it came to making up anybody’s mind, but I swear to God I worn’t owt like that because really I ain’t got no more brains than a gnat after hiding the money in the place I did. And I — being cranky like I am — got sent to Borstal because to tell you the honest truth I’d been to Remand Homes before — though that’s another story and I suppose if I ever tell it it’ll be just as boring as this one is. I was glad though that Mike got away with it, and I only hope he always will, not like silly bastard me.
So on this foggy night we tore ourselves away from the telly and slammed the front door behind us, setting off up our wide street like slow tugs on a river that’d broken their hooters, for we didn’t know where the housefronts began what with the perishing cold mist all around. I was snatched to death without an overcoat: mam had forgotten to buy me one in the scrummage of shopping, and by the time I thought to remind her of it the dough was all gone. So we whistled ‘The Teddy Boys’ Picnic’ to keep us warm, and I told myself that I’d get a coat soon if it was the last thing I did. Mike said he thought the same about himself, adding that he’d also get some brand-new glasses with gold rims, to wear instead of the wire frames they’d given him at the school clinic years ago. He didn’t twig it was foggy at first and cleaned his glasses every time I pulled him back from a lamp-post or car, but when he saw the lights on Alfreton Road looking like octopus eyes he put them in his pocket and didn’t wear them again until we did the job. We hadn’t got two ha’pennies between us, and though we weren’t hungry we wished we’d got a bob or two when we passed the fish and chip shops because the delicious sniffs of salt and vinegar and frying fat made our mouths water. I don’t mind telling you we walked the town from one end to the other and if our eyes worn’t glued to the ground looking for lost wallets and watches they was swivelling around house windows and shop doors in case we saw something easy and worth nipping into.