New and Collected Stories

The Ragman’s Daughter

I was walking home with an empty suitcase one night, an up-to-date pigskin zip job I was fetching back from a pal who thought he’d borrowed it for good, and two plainclothed coppers stopped me. They questioned me for twenty minutes, then gave up and let me go. While they had been talking to me, a smash-and-grab had taken place around the corner, and ten thousand nicker had vanished into the wide open spaces of somebody who needed it.

That’s life. I was lucky my suitcase had nothing but air in it. Sometimes I walk out with a box of butter and cheese from the warehouse I work at, but for once that no-good God was on my side — trying to make up for the times he’s stabbed me in the back maybe. But if the coppers had had a word with me a few nights later they’d have found me loaded with high-class provision snap.

My job is unloading cheeses as big as beer barrels off lorries that come in twice a week from the country. They draw in at the side door of the warehouse, and me and a couple of mates roll our sleeves up and shoulder them slowly down the gang-plank into the special part set aside for cheeses. We once saw, after checking the lists, that there was one cheese extra, so decided to share it out between a dozen of us and take it home to our wives and families. The question came up as to which cheese we should get rid of, and the chargehand said: ‘Now, all look around for the cheese that the rats have started to go for, and that’s the one we’ll carve between us, because you can bet your bottom dollar that that’s the best.’

It was a load of choice Dalbeattie, and I’d never tasted any cheese so delicious. For a long time my wife would say: ‘When are you going to get us some more of that marvellous cheese, Tony?’ And whatever I did take after that never seemed to satisfy them, though every time I went out with a chunk of cheese or a fist of butter I was risking my job, such as it is. Once for a treat I actually bought a piece of Dalbeattie from another shop, but they knew it wasn’t stolen so it didn’t taste as good as the other that the rats had pointed out to us. It happens now and again at the warehouse that a bloke takes some butter and the police nab him. They bring him back and he gets the push. Fancy getting the push for half a pound of butter. I’d be ashamed to look my mates in the eye again, and would be glad I’d got the sack so’s I wouldn’t have to.

The first thing I stole was at infants’ school when I was five. They gave us cardboard coins to play with, pennies, shillings, half-crowns, stiff and almost hard to bend, that we were supposed to exchange for bricks and pieces of chalk. This lesson was called Buying and Selling. Even at the time I remember feeling that there was something not right about the game, yet only pouting and playing it badly because I wasn’t old enough to realize what it was. But when I played well I ended up the loser, until I learned quickly that one can go beyond skill: at the end of the next afternoon I kept about a dozen of the coins (silver I noticed later) in my pocket when the teacher came round to collect them back.

‘Some is missing,’ she said, in that plummy voice that sent shivers down my spine and made me want to give them up. But I resisted my natural inclinations and held out. ‘Someone hasn’t given their money back,’ she said. ‘Come along, children, own up, or I’ll keep you in after all the other classes have gone home.’

I was hoping she’d search me, but she kept us in for ten minutes, and I went home with my pockets full. That night I was caught by a shopkeeper trying to force the coins into his fag and chewing-gum machines. He dragged me home and the old man lammed into me. So, sobbing up to bed, I learned at an early age that money meant trouble as well.

Next time at school I helped myself to bricks, but teacher saw my bulging pockets and took them back, then threw me into the playground, saying I wasn’t fit to be at achool. This showed me that it was always safest to go for money.

Once, an uncle asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I answered: ‘A thief’. He bumped me, so I decided, whenever anybody else asked that trick question to say: ‘An honest man’ or ‘An engine driver’. I stole money from my mother’s purse, or odd coppers left lying around the house for gas or electricity, and so I got batted for that as well as for saying I wanted to be a thief when I grew up. I began to see that really I was getting clobbered for the same thing, which made me keep my trap shut on the one hand, and not get caught on the other.

In spite of the fact that I nicked whatever I could lay my hands on without too much chance of getting caught, I didn’t like possessing things. Suits, a car, watches — as soon as I nicked something and got clear away, I lost interest in it. I broke into an office and came out with two typewriters, and after having them at home for a day I borrowed a car and dropped them over Trent Bridge one dark night. If the cops cared to dredge the river about there they’d get a few surprises. What I like most is the splash stuff makes when I drop it in: that plunge into water of something heavy — such as a TV set, a cash register and once, best of all, a motorbike — which makes a dull exploding noise and has the same effect on me as booze (which I hate) because it makes my head spin. Even a week later, riding on a bus, I’ll suddenly twitch and burst out laughing at the thought of it, and some posh trot will tut-tut, saying: ‘These young men! Drunk at eleven in the morning! What they want is to be in the army.’

If I lost all I have in the world I wouldn’t worry much. If I was to go across the road for a packet of fags one morning and come back to see the house clapping its hands in flames with everything I owned burning inside I’d turn my back without any thought or regret and walk away, even if my jacket and last ten-bob note were in the flames as well.

What I’d like, believe it or not, is to live in a country where I didn’t like thieving and where I didn’t want to thieve, a place where everybody felt the same way because they all had only the same as everyone else — even if it wasn’t much. Jail is a place like this, though it’s not the one I’d find agreeable because you aren’t free there. The place that fills my mind would be the same as in jail because everybody would have the same, but being free as well they wouldn’t want to nick what bit each had got. I don’t know what sort of system that would be called.

While as a youth I went out with girls, I used to like thieving more. The best of all was when I got a young girl to come thieving with me. The right sort was better than any mate I could team up with, more exciting and safe.

I met Doris outside the fish-and-chip shop on Ilkeston Road. Going in to get a supply for supper she dropped her purse, and a few obstinate shekels rolled into the road. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I’ll find them, duck.’

A couple of other youths wanted to help, but I got one by the elbow. ‘Bale out. She’s my girl-friend. You’ll get crippled for life.’

‘All right, Tony,’ he laughed. ‘I didn’t know it was you.’

I picked her money up: ‘This is the lot’ — followed her into the light of the fish-and-chip shop where I could see what she was made of. ‘I’m going for some chips as well,’ I said, so as not to put her off.

‘Thanks for getting my money. I have butterfingers sometimes.’ Her hair was the colour of butter, yellow and reaching for her shoulders, where my hands wanted to be. We stood in the queue. I’d just eaten a bundle of fish-and-chips downtown, so even the smell in this joint turned my guts. ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ I asked.

‘You might, for all I know. I’ve been around nearly as long as you have.’

‘Where do you live, then?’

‘Up Churchfield Lane.’

‘I’ll see you home.’

‘You won’t.’ She was so fair and goodlooking that I almost lost heart, though not enough to stop me answering: ‘You might drop your purse again.’ I didn’t know whether I’d passed her on the street some time, dreamed about her, or seen her drifting across the television screen in a shampoo advertisement between ‘Blood Gun’ and ‘The Kremlin Strikes Again’. Her skin was smooth, cheeks a bit meaty, eyes blue, small nose and lips also fleshy but wearing a camouflage of orange-coloured lipstick that made me want to kiss them even more than if it had been flag-red. She stood at the counter with a vacant, faraway look in her eyes, the sort that meant she had a bit more thought in her rather than the other way round. She gave a little sniff at the billowing clouds of chip steam doubled in size because of mirrors behind the sizzling bins. It was impossible to tell whether or not she liked the smell.

‘You’re a long way from Churchfield Lane,’ I said. ‘Ain’t you got chip shops up that part?’

‘Dad says they do good fish here,’ she told me. ‘So I come to get him some, as a favour.’

‘It’s better at Rawson’s though, downtown. You ought to let me take you there some time — for a supper. You’d enjoy it.’

It was her turn at the counter. ‘I’m busy these days. Two shillings’ worth of chips and six fish, please.’

‘Where do you work, then?’

‘I don’t.’

I laughed: ‘Neither do I.’

She took her bundle: ‘Thank you very much’ — turned to me: ‘You won’t be able to take me out then, will you?’

I edged a way back to the door, and we stood on the pavement. ‘You’re a torment, as well as being goodlooking. I’ve still got money, even if I don’t go to work right now.’ We walked across the road, and all the time I was waiting for her to tell me to skid, hoping she would yet not wanting her to. ‘Does it fall from heaven, then?’

‘No, I nick it.’

She half believed me. ‘I’ll bet you do. Where from?’

‘It all depends. Anywhere.’ I could already see myself taking her the whole way home — if I kept my trap flapping.

‘I’ve never stolen anything in my life,’ she said, ‘but I’ve often wanted to.’

‘If you stick around I’ll show you a few things.’

She laughed: ‘I might be scared.’

‘Not with me. We’ll go out one night and see what we can do.’

‘Fast worker. We could do it for kicks, though.’

‘It’s better to do it for money,’ I said, dead strict on this.

‘What’s the difference? It’s stealing.’

I’d never thought about it this way before. ‘Maybe it is. But it’s still not the same.’

‘If you do it for kicks,’ she went on, ‘you don’t get caught so easily.’

‘There’s no point in doing something just for kicks,’ I argued. ‘It’s a waste of time.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You do it for money, and I’ll do it for kicks. Then we’ll both be satisfied.’

‘Fine,’ I said, taking her arm, ‘that sounds reasonable.’

She lived in a big old house just off Churchfield Lane, and I even got a kiss out of her before she went into the garden and called me a soft goodnight. Doris, she had said, my name’s Doris.

I thought she was joking about stealing stuff for kicks, but I met her a few days later outside a cinema, and when the show was over and we stood by a pavement where five roads met, she said: ‘I suppose you just prowl around until you see something that’s easy and quiet.’

‘More or less’ — not showing my surprise. ‘It might be a bit harder than that though.’ I held up a jack knife, that looked like a hedgehog with every blade splayed out: ‘That one ain’t for opening pop bottles; and this one ain’t for getting stones out of horses’ hoofs either. A useful little machine, this is.’

‘I thought you used hairgrips?’ She was treating it like a joke, but I said, deadpan: ‘Sometimes. Depends on the lock.’ A copper walked across the road towards us, and with every flat footstep I closed a blade of the knife, slipping it into my pocket before he was half-way over. ‘Come on,’ I said, lighting a fag, and heading towards Berridge Road.

The overhead lights made us look TB, as if some big government scab had made a mistake on the telephone and had too much milk tipped into the sea. We even stopped talking at the sight of each other’s fag-ash faces, but after a while the darker side streets brought us back to life, and every ten yards I got what she’d not been ready to give on the back seat of the pictures: a fully-fledged passionate kiss. Into each went all my wondering at why a girl like this should want to come out on nightwork with a lout called me.

‘You live in a big house,’ I said when we walked on. ‘What does your old man do?’

‘He’s a scrapdealer.’

‘Scrapdealer?’ It seemed funny, somehow. ‘No kidding?’

‘You know — rag and metal merchant. Randall’s on Orston Road.’

I laughed, because during my life as a kid that was the place I’d taken scrap-iron and jamjars, lead and woollens to, and her old man was the bloke who’d traded with me — a deadbeat skinflint with a pound note sign between his eyes and breathing LSD all over the place. Dead at the brain and crotch the fat gett drove a maroon Jaguar in an old lounge suit. I’d seen him one day scatter a load of kids in the street, pumping that screaming button-hooter before he got too close, and as they bulleted out of his way throw a fistful of change after them. He nearly smashed into a lamp-post because such sudden and treacherous generosity put him off his steering.

‘What’s funny about it?’ she wanted to know.

‘I’m surprised, that’s all.’

‘I told a girl at school once that my dad was a scrapdealer, and she laughed, just like you did. I don’t see what’s funny about it at all.’ You stupid bastard, I called myself, laughing for nothing when before you’d been getting marvellous kisses from her. A black cat shot through the light of a lamp-post, taking my good luck with it.

‘He’s better off than most people, so maybe you laugh because you’re jealous.’

‘Not me,’ I said, trying to make amends. ‘Another reason I laughed, if you want to know the truth, is that I’ve always wanted to be a scrapdealer, but so far I’ve never known how to get started. It was just the coincidence.’ While she was wondering whether to believe me I tried changing the subject: ‘What sort of school did you go to where they’d laugh at a thing like that?’

‘I still go,’ she said, ‘a grammar school. I leave at the end of the year, though.’ A school kid, I thought. Still, she’s a posh one, so she can be nearly seventeen, though she looks at least as old as me, which is eighteen and a half. ‘I’ll be glad to leave school, anyway. I want to be independent. I’m always in top class though, so in a sense I like it as well. Funny.’

‘You want to get a job, you mean?’

‘Sure. Of course. I’ll go to a secretarial college. Dad says he’d let me.’

‘Sounds all right. You’ll be set for life, the way you’re going.’ We were walking miles, pacing innumerable streets out of our systems, a slow arm-in-arm zig-zag through the darkening neighbourhood. It was a night full of star holes after a day of rain, a windy sky stretching into a huge flow over the rising ground of Forest Fields and Hyson Green and Basford, through Mapperley to Redhill and carried away by some red doubledecker loaded with colliers vanishing into the black night of Sherwood. We made a solitary boat in this flood of small houses, packed together like the frozen teeth of sharp black waves and, going from one lighthouse lamp-post to another, the district seemed an even bigger stretch than the area I was born and brought up in.

An old woman stood on a doorstep saying: ‘Have you got a fag, my duck? I’d be ever so grateful if you could manage it.’ She looked about ninety, and when I handed her one she lit up as if ready to have a nervous breakdown. ‘Thanks, my love. I hope you’ll be happy, the pair of you.’

‘Same to you, missis,’ I said as we went off.

‘Aren’t old women funny?’ Doris said.

We kissed at every corner, and whenever it seemed I might not she reminded me by a tug at my linked arm. She wore slacks and a head scarf, a three-quarter leather coat and flat-heeled lace-ups, as if this was her idea of a break-and-entry rig. She looked good in it, stayed serious and quiet for most of the walking, so that all we did now and again was move into a clinch for a good bout of tormenting kisses. She moaned softly sometimes, and I wanted to go further than lipwork, but how could we in a solid wide open street where someone walking through would disturb us? With the air so sweet and long lasting, I knew it would be a stretch past her bed time before she finally landed home that night. Yet I didn’t care, felt awake and marvellous, full of love for all the world — meaning her first and then myself, and it showed in our kisses as we went at a slow rate through the streets, arms fast around each other like Siamese twins.

Across the main road stretched a wall covering the yard of a small car-body workshop. As soon as I saw it my left leg began trembling and the kneecap of my right to twitch, so I knew this was the first place we’d go into together. I always got scared as soon as the decision was made, though it never took long for fright to get chased off as I tried to fathom a way into the joint.

I told Doris: ‘You go to the end of the street and keep conk. I’ll try to force this gate, and whistle if I do. If you see anybody coming walk back here, and we’ll cuddle up as if we’re courting.’ She did as she was told, while I got to work on the gate lock, using first the bottle-opener and then the nail-file, then the spike. With a bit more play it snapped back, and I whistled. We were in the yard.

There was no word said from beginning to end. If I’d been doing it with a mate you’d have heard scufflings and mutterings, door-rattlings and shoulder-knocks and the next thing we’d be in a cop car on our way to Guildhall. But now, our limbs and eyes acted together, as if controlled by one person that was neither of us, a sensation I’d never known before. A side door opened and we went between a line of machines into a partitioned office to begin a quiet and orderly search. I’d been once in a similar place with a pal, and the noise as we pulled out drawers and slung typewriters about, and took pot shots with elastic and paperclips at light bulbs was so insane that it made me stop and silence him as well after five minutes. But now there wasn’t a scratch or click anywhere.

Still with no word I walked to the door, and Doris came after me. In two seconds we were back on the street, leaning against the workshop wall to fill each of our mouths with such kisses that I knew I loved her, and that from then on I was in the fire, floating, burning, feeling the two of us ready to explode if we didn’t get out of this to where we could lie down. Nothing would stop us, because we already matched and fused together, not even if we fell into a river or snow-bank.

There was no gunning of feet from the factory so that a lawful passing pedestrian could suspect we were up to no good and squeal for the coppers. After five minutes snogging we walked off, as if we’d just noticed how late it was and remembered we had to be at work in the morning. At the main road I said: ‘What did you get?’

She took a bundle of pound notes from her pocket: ‘This, what about you?’

I emptied a large envelope of postage stamps and cheques: ‘Useless. You got the kitty, then.’

‘I guess so,’ she said, not sounding too full of joy.

‘Not bad for a beginner. A school kid, as well!’ I gave her half the stamps and she handed me half the money — which came to twenty quid apiece. We homed our way the couple of miles back, sticking one or two stamps (upside down) on each of the corners turned. ‘I don’t write letters,’ I laughed. It was a loony action, but I have to do something insane on every job, otherwise there’s no chance of getting caught, and if there’s no chance of getting caught, there’s no chance of getting away. I explained this to Doris, who said she’d never heard such a screwy idea, but that she was nearly convinced about it because I was more experienced than she was. Luckily the stamps ran out, otherwise the trail would have gone right through our back door, up the stairs and into my bedroom, the last one on my pillow hidden by my stupid big head. I felt feather-brained and obstinate, knowing that even if the world rolled over me I wouldn’t squash.

By the banks of the Leen at Bobber’s Mill we got under the fence and went down where nobody could see us. It was after midnight, and quiet but for the sound of softly rolling cold water a few feet off, as black as heaven for the loving we had to do.

Doris called for me at home, turned the corner, and came down our cobbled street on a horse. My brother Paul ran in and said: ‘Come and look at this woman (he was only nine) on a horse, our Tony’ — and having nothing better to do while waiting for Doris but flip through the Mirror I strode to the yard-end. It was a warm day, dust in the wind making a lazy atmosphere around the eyes, smoke sneaking off at right angles to chimneys and telly masts. By the pavement I looked down the street and saw nothing but a man going across to the shop in shirtsleeves and braces, then swivelling my eyes the other way I saw this girl coming down the street on a walking horse.

It was a rare sight, because she was beautiful, had blonde hair like Lady Godiva except that she was dressed in riding slacks and a white shirt that set a couple of my Ted mates whistling at her, though most stayed quiet with surprise — and envy — when the horse pulled up at our yard-end and Doris on it said hello to me. It was hard to believe that last night we’d broken into a factory, seemed even more far gone than a dream; though what we’d done later by the river was real enough, especially when I caught that smell of scent and freshness as she bent down from the horse’s neck. ‘Why don’t you come in for a cup of tea? Bring your horse in for a crust as well.’

It was a good filly, the colour of best bitter, with eyes like priceless damsons that were alive because of the reflector-light in them. The only horses seen on our street — pulling coal carts or bread vans — had gone to the knackers’ yards years ago. I took the bridle and led it up the yard, Doris talking softly from high up and calling it Marian, guiding it over the smooth stones. A man came out of a lavatory and had a fit in his eyes when he nearly bumped into it. ‘It wain’t bite you, George,’ I laughed.

‘I’ll have it for Sunday dinner if it does,’ he said, stalking off.

‘It wain’t be the first time,’ I called. My mother was washing clothes at the scullery sink, and it pushed its head to the window for a good look — until she glanced up: ‘Tony! What have you got there!’

‘Only a horse, mam,’ I shouted back. ‘It’s all right: I ain’t nicked it’ — as she came out drying her hands.

‘A friend of mine come to see me,’ I told her, introducing Doris, who dropped to her proper size on the asphalt. My mother patted the horse as if it were a stray dog, then went in for a piece of bread. She’d been brought up in the country, and liked animals.

‘We had a good time last night,’ I said to Doris, thinking about it.

‘Not bad. What shall we do with the money?’

‘Spend it.’

Our fence was rickety, looked as if it would fall down when she tethered the horse to it. ‘Funny,’ she said. ‘But what on?’

‘How much does a horse cost?’ I asked, tapping its nose.

‘I’m not sure. Dad got me Marian. More than twenty pounds, though.’ I was disappointed, had pictured us riding in the country, overland to Langley Mill and Matlock Bath without using a road once, the pair of us making a fine silhouette on some lonely skyline. Then as on the films we’d wind our way far down into the valley and get lodgings at a pub or farmhouse. Bit by bit we’d edge to Scotland and maybe at the end of all our long wanderings by horse we’d get a job as man and wife working a lighthouse. Set on a rock far out at sea, the waves would bash at it like mountains of snow, and we’d keep the lights going, still loving each other and happy even though we hadn’t had a letter or lettuce in six months.

The sun shone over our backyards, and I was happy anyway: ‘I’ll just get rid of my dough, enjoy myself. I’m out of work, so it’ll keep me for a month.’

‘I hope we don’t have to wait that long before doing it again,’ she said, brushing her hair back.

‘We’ll go tonight, if you like. I’ll bet the coppers don’t know we went into that factory yet.’ My mother came out with a bag of crusts for the horse: ‘I’ve just made a pot of tea,’ she said. ‘Go and pour it, Tony.’

When we got behind the door I pulled Doris to me and kissed her. She kissed me, as well. Not having to chase and fight for it made it seem like real love.

We went on many ‘expeditions’, as Doris called them. I even got a makeshift job at a factory in case anybody should wonder how I was living. Doris asked if it would be OK to bring a school pal with us one night, and this caused our first argument. I said she was loony to think of such a thing, and did she imagine I was running a school for cowing crime, or summat? I hoped she hadn’t mentioned our prowling nights to anybody else — though she hadn’t, as it turned out, and all she’d wanted was to see if this particular girl at her school would be able to do this sort of job as cool as she could. ‘Well, drop it,’ I said, sharp. ‘We do all right our oursens, so let’s keep it to oursens.’

Having been brought up as the ragman’s daughter and never wanting for dough, she had hardly played with the kids in the street. She hadn’t much to do with those at school either, for they lived mostly in new houses and bungalows up Wollaton and would never come to Radford to call on her. So she’d been lonely in a way I never had been.

Her parents lived in a house off Churchfield Lane, a big ancient one backing its yards (where the old man still kept some of his scrap mountains) on to the Leen. Her dad had worked like a navvy all day and every day of his life, watching each farthing even after he was rich enough to retire like a lord. I don’t know what else he could have done. Sucked icecream at the seaside? Gardened his feet off? Fished himself to death? He preferred to stick by sun, moon or electric light sorting metal or picking a bone with his own strength because, being a big and satisfied man, that was all he felt like doing — and who could blame him? Doris told me he was mean with most things, though not with her. She could have what she liked.

‘Get a hundred, then,’ I said.

But she just smiled and thought that wouldn’t be right, that she’d only have from him what he gave her because she liked it better that way.

Every week-end she came to our house, on her horse except when the weather was bad. If nobody else was in she fastened her steed to the fence and we went up to my bedroom, got undressed and had the time of our lives. She had a marvellous figure, small breasts for her age, yet wide hips as if they’d finished growing before anything else of her. I always had the idea she felt better out of her clothes, realizing maybe that no clothes, even if expensive like gold, could ever match her birthday suit for a perfect fit that was always the height of fashion. We’d put a few Acker Bilks low on my record player and listen for a while with nothing on, getting drowsy and warmed up under the usual talk and kisses. Then after having it we’d sit and talk more, maybe have it again before mam or dad shouted up that tea was ready. When on a quiet day the horse shuffled and whinnied, it was like being in a cottage bedroom, alone with her and in the country. If it was sunny and warm as well and a sudden breeze pushed air into the room and flipped a photo of some pop singer off the shelf and felt softly at our bare skins I’d feel like a stallion, as fit and strong as a buck African and we’d have it over and over so that my legs wobbled as I walked back down the stairs.

People got used to seeing her ride down the street, and they’d say: ‘Hellow, duck’ — adding: ‘He’s in’ — meaning me — ‘I just saw him come back from the shop with a loaf.’ George Clark asked when I was going to get married, and when I shouted that I didn’t know he laughed: ‘I expect you’ve got to find a place big enough for the horse as well, first.’ At which I told him to mind his own effing business.

Yet people were glad that Doris rode down our street on a horse, and I sensed that because of it they even looked up to me more — or maybe they only noticed me in a different way to being carted off by the coppers. Doris was pleased when a man coming out of the bookie’s called after her: ‘Hey up, Lady Luck!’ — waving a five-pound note in the air.

Often we’d go down town together, ending up at the pictures, or in a pub over a bitter or babycham. But nobody dreamed what we got up to before finally parting for our different houses. If we pinched fags or food or clothes we’d push what was possible through the letterbox of the first house we came to, or if it was too big we’d leave good things in litter-bins for some poor tramp or tatter to find. We were hardly ever seen, and never caught, on these expeditions, as if love made us invisible, ghosts without sound walking hand in hand between dark streets until we came to some factory, office, lock-up shop or house that we knew was empty of people — and every time this happened I remember the few seconds of surprise, not quite fear, at both of us knowing exactly what to do. I would stand a moment at this surprise — thankful, though waiting for it to go — until she squeezed my hand, and I was moving again, to finish getting in.

I was able to buy a motorbike, a secondhand powerful speedster, and when Doris called she’d leave her horse in our backyard, and we’d nip off for a machine-spin towards Stanton Ironworks, sliding into a full ton once we topped Balloon House Hill and had a few miles of straight and flat laid out for us like an airport runway. Slag heaps looked pale blue in summer, full triangles set like pyramid-targets way ahead and I’d swing towards them between leaf hedges of the country road, hoping they’d keep that far-off vacant colour, as if they weren’t real. They never did though, and I lost them at a dip and bend, and when next in sight they were grey and useless and scabby, too real to look good any more.

On my own I rode with L plates, and took a test so as to get rid of them on the law’s side of the law, but I didn’t pass because I never was good at examinations. Roaring along with Doris straight as goldenrod behind, and hearing noises in the wind tunnel I made whisper sweet nothings into our four ear-holes, was an experience we loved, and I’d shout: ‘You can’t ride as fast as this on a horse’ — and listen to the laugh she gave, which meant she liked to do both.

She once said: ‘Why don’t we go on an expedition on your bike?’ and I answered: ‘Why don’t we do one on your hoss?’ adding: ‘Because it’d spoil everything, wouldn’t it?’

She laughed: ‘You’re cleverer than I think.’

‘No kidding,’ I said, sarky. ‘If only you could see yoursen as I can see you, and if only I could see mysen as you can see me, things would be plainer for us, wouldn’t they?’

I couldn’t help talking. We’d stopped the bike and were leaning on a bridge wall, with nothing but trees and a narrow lane round about, and the green-glass water of a canal below. Her arm was over my shoulder, and my arm was around her waist: ‘I wonder if they would?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. Let’s go down into them trees.’

‘What for?’

‘Because I love you.’

She laughed again: ‘Is that all?’ — then took my arm: ‘Come on, then.’

We played a game for a long time in our street, where a gang of us boys held fag lighters in a fair wind, flicking them on and off and seeing which light stayed on longest. It was a stupid game because everything was left to chance, and though this can be thrilling you can’t help but lose by it in the end. This game was all the rage for weeks, before we got fed up, or our lighters did, I forget which. Sooner or later every lighter goes out or gives in; or a wind in jackboots jumps from around the corner and kicks it flat — and you get caught under the avalanche of the falling world.

One summer’s week-end we waited in a juke-box coffee bar for enough darkness to settle over the streets before setting out. Doris wore jeans and sweatshirt, and I was without a jacket because of the warm night. Also due to the warmth we didn’t walk the miles we normally did before nipping into something, which was a pity because a lot of hoof-work put our brains and bodies into tune for such quiet jobs, relaxed and warmed us so that we became like cats, alert and ready at any warning sound to duck or scram. Now and again the noise of the weather hid us — thunder, snow, drizzle, wind, or even the fact that clouds were above made enough noise for us to operate more safely than on this night of open sky with a million ears and eyes of copper stars cocked and staring. Every footstep deafened me, and occasionally on our casual stroll we’d stop to look at each other, stand a few seconds under the wall of a side-lit empty street, then walk on hand in hand. I wanted to whistle (softly) or sing a low tune to myself, for, though I felt uneasy at the open dumb night, it was also the kind of night that left me confident and full of energy, and when these things joined I was apt to get a bit reckless. But I held back, slowed my heart and took in every detail of each same street — so as to miss no opportunity, as they drummed into us at school. ‘I feel as if I’ve had a few,’ I said, in spite of my resolution.

‘So do I.’

‘Or as if we’d just been up in my room and had it together.’

‘I don’t feel like going far, though,’ she said.

‘Tired, duck?’

‘No, but let’s go home. I don’t feel like it tonight.’

I wondered what was wrong with her, saying: ‘I’ll walk you back and we’ll call it a day.’

In the next street I saw a gate leading to the rear yard of a shop, and I was too spun up to go home without doing anything at all: ‘Let’s just nip in here. You needn’t come, duck. I wain’t be five minutes.’

‘OK.’ She smiled, though my face was already set at that loot-barrier. It wasn’t very high, and when I was on top she called: ‘Give me a hand up.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I am.’ It was the middle of a short street, and lamp-posts at either end didn’t shed radiance this far up. I got to the back door and, in our usual quiet way, the lock was forced and we stood in a smell of leather, polish and cardboard boxes.

‘It’s a shoe shop,’ Doris said. I felt my path across the storehouse behind the selling part of the shop, by racks and racks of shoe boxes, touching paper and balls of string on a corner table.

We went round it like blind people in the dark a couple of times just to be sure we didn’t miss a silent cashbox cringing and holding its breath as our fingers went by. People on such jobs often miss thousands through hurrying or thinking the coppers are snorting down their necks. My old man insists I get the sack from one firm after another because I’m not thorough enough in my work, but if he could have seen me on this sort of task he’d have to think again.

There was nothing in the back room. I went into the shop part and in ten seconds flat was at the till, running my fingers over them little plastic buttons as if I was going to write a letter to my old man explaining just how thorough I could be at times. To make up for the coming small clatter of noise I held my breath — hoping both would average out to make it not heard. A couple of night owls walked by outside, then I turned the handle and felt the till drawer thump itself towards my guts. It’s the best punch in the world, like a tabby cat boxing you with its paw, soft and loaded as it slides out on ballbearing rollers.

My hand made the lucky dip, lifted a wad of notes from under a spring-weight, and the other scooped up silver, slid it into my pocket as if it were that cardboard money they used to lend us at infants’ school to teach us how to be good shoppers and happy savers — not rattling good coin ready for grown-ups to get rid of. I went to the back room and stood by the exit to make sure all was clear.

The light went on, a brilliant blue striplight flooding every corner of the room. I froze like a frog that’s landed in grass instead of water. When I could speak I said to Doris: ‘What did you do that for?’ — too scared to be raving mad.

‘Because I wanted to.’ She must have sensed how much I felt like bashing her, because: ‘Nobody can see it from the street’ — which could have been true, but even so.

‘Kicks are kicks,’ I said, ‘but this is a death trap.’

‘Scared?’ she smiled.

‘Just cool’ — feeling anything but. ‘I’ve got about fifty quid in my pocket.’

She stood against a wall of shoe boxes, and even a telly ad couldn’t have gone deeper into my guts than the sight of Doris now. Yellow arms of light turned full on her left me in the shade — which was fine, for I expected to see the dead mug of a copper burst in at any moment. Yet even at that I wouldn’t be able to care. I felt as if music was in my head wanting to get out, as if it had come to me because I was one of those who could spin it out from me, though knowing I’d never had any say in a thing like that.

She didn’t speak, stood to her full fair height and stared. I knew we were safe, that no copper would make any capture that night because the light she had switched on protected us both. We were cast-iron solid in this strongbox of shoes, and Doris knew it as well because when I couldn’t help but smile she broke the spell by saying:

‘I want to try some shoes on.’

‘What?’

‘Maybe they’ve got some of the latest.’

The idea was barmy, not so that I wanted to run like a shot stag out of the place, but so that I could have done a handstand against the wall of boxes. I lifted out an armful and set them on the floor like a game of dominoes. She chose one and opened it gently. I took up a box and split it down the middle: ‘Try these.’

They were too small, a pair of black shiners with heels like toothpicks. ‘I wish the shopkeeper was here,’ she said, ‘then he could tell me where the best are. This is a waste of time.’

I scoffed. ‘You don’t want much, do you? You’d have to pay for them, then. No, we’ll go through the lot and find a few pairs of Paris fashions.’

‘Not in this shop’ — contemptuously slinging a pair of plain lace-ups to the other side of the room, enough noise to wake every rat under the skirting board. From the ladder I passed down a few choice boxes, selecting every other on the off chance of picking winners. ‘I should have come in skirt and stockings,’ she said, ‘then I could have told which ones suit me.’

‘Well, next time we go into a shoe shop I’ll let you know; I’ll wear an evening suit and we’ll bring a transistor to do a hop with. Try these square toes. They’ll go well with slacks.’

They fitted but, being the wrong colour, were hurled out with the other misfits. The room was scattered with shoes, looked as if one of them Yank cyclones — Mabel or Edna or whatever you call them — had been hatched there, or as if a meeting of cripples and one-legs had been suddenly broken up by news of the four-minute warning. She still hadn’t found the right pair, so went on looking as if she lived there, ordering shop-assistant me about, though I didn’t mind because it seemed like a game we were playing. ‘Why don’t you find a pair for yourself?’ she said.

‘No, we’ll get you fixed. I’m always well shod.’

I knew that we were no longer safe in that shop and sprang to switch off the lights. ‘You silly fool,’ she cried.

Darkness put us into another world, the real one we were used to, or that I was anyway because it was hard to tell which sort of world Doris felt at home in. All she wanted, I sometimes thought, was a world with kicks, but I didn’t fancy being for long at the mercy of a world in pitboots. Maybe it wore carpet slippers when dealing with her — though I shouldn’t get like that now that it’s been over for so long.

‘Why did you switch off the light?’ she yelled.

‘Come on, let’s get outside.’

We were in the yard, Doris without any pair of shoes except those she’d come out in that evening. The skyline for me ended at the top of the gate, for a copper was coming over it, a blue-black tree trunk bending towards us about twenty yards away. Doris was frozen like a rabbit. I pushed her towards some back sheds so that she was hidden between two of them before the copper, now in the yard, spotted the commotion.

He saw me, though. I dodged to another space, then ricochetted to the safe end of the yard, and when he ran at me, stinking of fags and beer, I made a nip out of his long arms and was on the gate saddle before he could reach me.

‘Stop, you little bogger,’ he called, ‘I’ve got you.’

But all he had was one of my feet, and after a bit of tugging I left my shoe in the copper’s hand. As I was racing clippitty-clop, hop-skip-and-a-jump up the street, I heard his boots rattling the boards of the gate as he got over — not, thank God, having twigged that Doris was in there and could now skip free.

I was a machine, legs fastened to my body like nuts and bolts, arms pulling me along as I ran down that empty street. I turned each corner like a flashing tadpole, heart in my head as I rattled the pavement so fast that I went from the eye of lamp-post in what seemed like no seconds at all. There was no worry in my head except the need to put a mile of zig-zags between that copper and me. I’d stopped hearing him only a few yards from the shoe shop gate, but it seemed that half an hour passed before I had to give up running in case I blew to pieces from the heavy bombs now getting harder all over me.

Making noises like a crazy elephant, I walked, only realizing now that one of my shoes was missing. The night had fallen apart, split me and Doris from each other, and I hoped she’d made a getaway before the copper gave me up and went back to check on what I’d nicked.

I threw my other shoe over the wall of an old chapel and went home barefoot, meaning to buy myself some more next day with the fifty quid still stuck in my pocket. The shoe landed on a heap of cinders and rusting cans, and the softness of my feet on the pavement was more than made up for by the solid ringing curses my brain and heart played ping-pong with. I kept telling myself this was the end, and though I knew it was, another voice kept urging me to hope for the best and look on the bright side — like some mad deceiving parson on the telly.

I was so sure of the end that before turning into our street I dropped the fifty pound bundle through somebody’s letter box and hoped that when they found it they’d not say a word to anybody about such good luck. This in fact was what happened, and by the time I was safe for a three-year lap in Borstal the old woman who lived there had had an unexpected good time on the money that was, so she said, sent to her by a grateful and everloving nephew in Sheffield.

Next morning two cops came to our door, and I knew it was no good lying because they looked at me hard, as if they’d seen me on last night’s television reading the news. One of them held my shoes in his hand: ‘Do these fit you?’

A short while before my capture Doris said, when we were kissing good night outside her front door: ‘I’ve learnt a lot since meeting you. I’m not the same person any more.’ Before I had time to find out what she’d learnt I was down at the cop shop and more than half-way to Borstal. It was a joke, and I laughed on my way there. They never knew about Doris, so she went scot-free, riding her horse whenever she felt like it. I had that to be glad about at least. As a picture it made a stove in my guts those first black months, and as a joke I laughed over and over again, because it would never go stale on me. I’d learned a lot as well since meeting Doris, though to be honest I even now can’t explain what it is. But what I learned is still in me, feeding my quieter life with energy almost without my noticing it.

I wrote to Doris from Borstal but never received an answer, and even my mother couldn’t tell me anything about her, or maybe wouldn’t, because plenty happened to Doris that all the district knew of. Myself though, I was kept three years in the dark, suffering and going off my head at something that without this love and worry I’d have sailed through laughing. Twenty of the lads would jump on me when I raved at night, and gradually I became low and brainless and without breath like a beetle and almost stopped thinking of her, hoping that maybe she’d be waiting for me when I came out and that we’d be able to get married.

That was the hope of story books, of television and BBC; didn’t belong at all to me and life and somebody like Doris. For three solid years my brain wouldn’t leave me alone, came at me each night and rolled over me like a wheel of fire, so that I still sweat blood at the thought of that torture, waiting, without news, like a dwarf locked in the dark. No Borstal could take the credit for such punishment as this.

On coming out I pieced everything together. Doris had been pregnant when I was sent down, and three months later married a garage mechanic who had a reputation for flying around on motorbikes like a dangerous loon. Maybe that was how she prolonged the bout of kicks that had started with me, but this time it didn’t turn out so well. The baby was a boy, and she named it after me. When it was two months old she went out at Christmas Eve with her husband. They were going to a dance at Derby on the motorbike and, tonning around a frosty bend, met a petrol bowser side on. Frost, darkness, and large red letters spelling PETROL were the last things she saw, and I wondered what was in her mind at that moment. Not much, because she was dead when the bowser man found her, and so was her husband. She couldn’t have been much over eighteen.

‘It just about killed her dad as well,’ my mother said, ‘broke his heart. I talked to him once on the street, and he said he’d allus wanted to send her to the university, she was so clever. Still, the baby went back to him.’

And I went back to jail, for six months, because I opened a car door and took out a transistor radio. I don’t know why I did it. The wireless was no good to me and I didn’t need it. I wasn’t even short of money. I just opened the car door and took the radio and, here’s what still mystifies me, I switched it on straightaway and listened to some music as I walked down the street, so that the bloke who owned the car heard it and chased after me.

But that was the last time I was in the nick — touch wood — and maybe I had to go in, because when I came out I was able to face things again, walk the streets without falling under a bus or smashing a jeweller’s window for the relief of getting caught.

I got work at a sawmill, keeping the machines free of dust and wood splinters. The screaming engine noise ripping through trunks and planks was even fiercer than the battle-shindig in myself, which was a good thing during the first months I was free. I rode there each morning on a new-bought bike, to work hard before eating my dinner sandwiches under a spreading chestnut tree. The smell of fresh leaves on the one hand, and newly flying sawdust on the other, cleared my head and made me feel part of the world again. I liked it so much I thought it was the best job I’d ever had — even though the hours were long and the wages rotten.

One day I saw an elderly man walking through the wood, followed by a little boy who ran in and out of the bushes whacking flowers with his stick. The kid was about four, dressed in cowboy suit and hat, the other hand firing off his six-shooter that made midget sharp cracks splitting like invisible twigs between the trees. He was pink-faced with grey eyes, the terror of cats and birds, a pest for the ice-cream man, the sort of kid half stunned by an avalanche of toys at Christmas, spoiled beyond recall by people with money. You could see it in his face.

I got a goz at the man, had to stare a bit before I saw it was Doris’s father, the scrap merchant who’d not so long back been the menace of the street in his overdriven car. He was grey and wax in the face, well wrapped in topcoat and hat and scarf and treading carefully along the woodpath. ‘Come on,’ he said to the kid. ‘Come on, Tony, or you’ll get lost.’

I watched him run towards the old man, take his hand and say: ‘Are we going home now, grandad?’ I had an impulse, which makes me blush to remember it, and that was to go up to Doris’s ragman father and say — what I’ve already said in most of this story, to say that in a way he was my father as well, to say: ‘Hey up, dad. You don’t know much, do you?’ But I didn’t, because I couldn’t, leaned against a tree, feeling as if I’d done a week’s work without stop, feeling a hundred years older than that old man who was walking off with my kid.

My last real sight of Doris was of her inside the shoe shop trying on shoes, and after that, when I switched off the light because I sensed danger, we both went into the dark, and never came out. But there’s another and final picture of her that haunts me like a vision in my waking dreams. I see her coming down the street, all clean and golden-haired on that shining horse, riding it slowly towards our house to call on me, as she did for a long time. And she was known to men standing by the bookie’s as Lady Luck.

That’s a long while ago, and I even see Doris’s kid, a big lad now, running home from school. I can watch him without wanting to put my head in the gas oven, watch him and laugh to myself because I was happy to see him at all. He’s in good hands and prospering. I’m going straight as well, working in the warehouse where they store butter and cheese. I eat like a fighting cock, and take home so much that my wife and two kids don’t do bad on it either.

The Other John Peel

When the world was asleep one Sunday morning Bob slid away from the warm aura of his wife and padded downstairs — boots in hand — to fix up a flask and some bacon sandwiches.

Electric light gave the living-room an ageless air, only different from last night in that it was empty — of people. He looked around at the house full of furniture: television set, washing machine glinting white from the scullery, even a car on the street — the lot, and it belonged to him. Eric and Freda also slept, and he’d promised to take them up the Trent and hire a rowing-boat this afternoon if they were good. Wearing his second-best suit, knapsack all set, he remembered Freda’s plea a few days ago: ‘Will you bring me one o’ them tails, our dad?’ He had to laugh, the fawce little bogger, as he combed his dark wavy hair at the mirror and put on his glasses. I must tell her not to blab it to her pals though.

He opened the cellar door for his guns and pouches, put them under his arm to keep them low — having a licence for the twelve-bore, but not the.303 service rifle — and went out into the backyard. The world was a cemetery on short lease to the night, dead quiet except for the whine of factory generators: a row of upstairs windows were closed tight to hold in the breath of sleep. A pale grey saloon stood by the kerb, the best of several left out on the cobbles, and Bob stowed his guns well down behind the back seat before lighting a cigarette.

The streets were yours at six on a Sunday morning, flying through the cradle of a deadbeat world with nothing to stop you getting what fun and excitement you wanted. The one drawback to the.303 was that out of fifty bullets from the army he’d but twenty left, though if he rationed himself to a shot every Sunday there’d still be six months’ sport for the taking. And you never knew: maybe he could tap his cousin in the Terriers for a belt of souvenirs.

He bounded through the traffic lights, between church and pub, climbing the smooth tarmac up Mansfield Road, then pouring his headlights into the dip and heading north under a sky of stars. Houses fell endlessly back on either side, a gauntlet trying to cup him but getting nowhere. The wireless had forecast a fine day and looked like being right for a change, which was the least they could do for you. It was good to get out after a week cooped-up, to be a long-range hunter in a car that blended with the lanes. He was doing well for himself: wife and kids, a good toolsetting job, and a four-roomed house at fifteen bob a week. Fine. And most Sunday mornings he ranged from Yorkshire to Linconshire, and Staffordshire to Leicestershire, every map-point a sitting duck for his coolly sighted guns.

On the dot of six-thirty he saw Ernie by the Valley Road picture house. ‘Hey up,’ Ernie said as he pulled in. ‘That was well timed.’ Almost a foot taller than Bob, he loomed over the car dressed in an old mac.

‘It’s going to be fine,’ Bob said, ‘according to the radio.’

Ernie let himself in. ‘The wireless’s allus wrong. Spouts nowt but lies. I got welloes on in case it rains.’

They scooted up the dual carriageway. ‘Is this the best you can do?’ Ernie asked. ‘You can fetch ninety out of this, I’m sure. ’Ark at that engine: purring like a she-cat on the batter.’

‘Take your sweat,’ Bob said. ‘This is a mystery trip.’

Ernie agreed. ‘I’m glad there’s no racing on a Sunday. It’s good to get out a bit like this.’

‘It is, an’ all. Missis well?’

‘Not too bad. Says she feels like a battleship with such a big belly’ — and went silent. Bob knew him well enough: he’d never talk just to be friendly; they could drive for an hour and he’d stay shut, often in an icy far-off mood that didn’t give him anything to say or think of. They worked a dozen feet from each other all week, Bob on his precision jobs, Ernie watching a row of crankshaft millers. ‘What guns you got then?’ he asked.

Bob peered ahead, a calm and measured glance along the lit-up wastes of the road to Ollerton. ‘A twelve-bore and a.303.’

‘I wish you had,’ Ernie laughed. ‘You never know when you’re going to need a.303 these days. Best gun out.’

‘Keep your trap shut about it though,’ Bob said. ‘I got it in the army. I wouldn’t tell you except that I know I can trust you by now.’

Maybe he wasn’t joking, Ernie thought. Bob was clever with hands and brain, the stop-gap of the shop with micrometer and centre-lathe, a toolmaker who could turn off a candlestick or fag-lighter as soon as look at you. ‘Do you mean it about a.303?’

Bob pulled into a lay-by and got out. ‘Keep clear of the headlights,’ he said, ‘but catch this.’ Ernie caught it, pushed forward the safety catch, the magazine resting in the net of his fingers. ‘God Almighty! Anything up the spout?’

‘I’ve a clip in my pocket. Strictly for rabbits’ — Bob smiled, taking it back.

‘A waste,’ Ernie said. ‘The twelve-bore would do. Mixermatosis has killed ’em all off, anyway.’

They drove on. ‘Had it since I left the army,’ Bob told him. ‘The stores was in a chronic state in Germany at the end of the war. Found myself with two, so kept one. I have a pot-shot with it now and again. I enjoy hunting — for a bit o’ recreation.’

Ernie laughed, wildly and uncontrolled, jerking excited shouts into the air as if trying to throw something out of his mouth, holding his stomach to stop himself doubling up, wearing down the shock of what a free-lance.303 meant. He put his arm around Bob’s shoulder by way of congratulation: ‘You’d better not let many people know about it, or the coppers’ll get on to you.’

‘Don’t worry. If ever they search, it’s a souvenir. I’d get rid of the bolt, and turn another off on the lathe when I needed it.’

‘Marvellous,’ Ernie said. ‘A.303! Just the thing to have in case of a revolution. I hope I can get my hands on one when the trouble starts.’

Bob was sardonic: ‘You and your revolution! There wain’t be one in our lifetimes, I can tell you that.’ Ernie had talked revolution to him for months, had argued with fiery puritanical force, guiding Bob’s opinion from voting Labour to a head-nodding acceptance of rough and ready Communism. ‘I can’t see why you think there’ll be a revolution though.’

‘I’ve told you though,’ Ernie said loudly. ‘There’s got to be something. I feel it. We wok in a factory, don’t we? Well, we’re the backbone of the country, but you see, Bob, there’s too many people on our backs. And it’s about time they was slung off. The last strike we had a bloke in a pub said to me: “Why are you fellows allus on strike?” And I said to ’im: “What sort o’ wok do you do?” And he said: “I’m a travelling salesman.” So I said, ready to smash ’im: “Well, the reason I come out on strike is because I want to get bastards like yo’ off my back.” That shut ’im up. He just crawled back into his sherry.’

At dawn they stopped the car in a ladle of land between Tuxford and the Dukeries, pulling on to a grass verge by a gate. A tall hawthorn hedge covered in green shoots bordered the lane, and the bosom of the meadow within rose steeply to a dark skyline, heavy rolls of cloud across it. Ernie stood by the gate: ‘The clouds smell fresh’ — pulling his mac collar up. ‘Think we’ll get owt ’ere?’

‘It’s good hunting country,’ Bob told him. ‘I know for a fact.’

They opened flasks and tore hungrily into sandwiches. ‘Here, have a swig of this,’ Ernie said, pouring some into his own cup. ‘It’ll do you good.’

Bob held it to the light. ‘What is it?’

‘Turps and dash. Here’s the skin off your lips.’

‘Don’t talk so loud. You’ll chase all the wild life away. Not a bad drop, is it?’

‘A rabbit wouldn’t get far with a.303 at its arse.’ A sort of loving excitement paralysed his fingers when he picked up the rifle: ‘Can you get me one?’

‘They don’t grow on trees, Ernie.’

‘I’d like one, though. For the next war. I’d just wait for somebody to try and call me up!’ They leaned on the gate, smoking. ‘Christ, when the Russians come I’ll be liberated.’

‘It’s a good job everybody ain’t like you,’ Bob said with a smile. ‘You’re a rare ’un, yo’ are.’

Ernie saw a movement across the field, beginning from the right and parting a diagonal line of grass, ascending towards the crest on their left. The light from behind showed it up clear and neat. ‘See it?’ he hissed, ramming a shell in the twelve-bore. Bob said nothing, noiselessly lifted the.303. No need to use that, Ernie thought. It’d bring a man down a mile off; a twelve-bore’s good enough for a skinful of mixermatosis.

A sudden wind blew against the dawn, ruffling the line of their prey. Bob’s eye was still on it: a single round went into the breech. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said softly. It was already out of buck-shot from Ernie’s twelve-bore. Both lost it, but said nothing. A lull in the wind didn’t show it up. ‘I expect it’s a hare.’

Bob lowered his.303, but Ernie signalled him to be quiet: it seemed as if a match were lit in the middle of the field, a slow-burning brown flame moving cautiously through shallow grass, more erratic now, but still edging towards the crest. The cold, star-flecked sky needed only a slow half turn to bring full daylight. What the bloody hell is it? Ernie wondered. Fields and lane were dead quiet: they were kings of the countryside: no houses, no one in sight. He strained his eyes hoping to discover what it was. A squirrel? Some gingernut, anyway.

A smile came on to Bob’s face, as when occasionally at work his patience paid off over some exacting job, a flange going into place with not half a thou’ to spare. Now it was more heightened than that: a triumph of hunting. Two sharp ears were seen on the skyline, a hang-dog tail, a vulpine mouth breakfasting on wind — with Ernie’s heart a bongo drum playing rhythms on his chest wall: a fox.

The air split open, and from all directions came a tidal wave of noise, rushing in on every ear but that to which the bullet had been aimed. Together they were over the gate, and speeding up the slope as if in a dawn attack. Gasping, Bob knelt and turned the dead fox over: as precise a job as he had ever done. ‘I always get ’em in the head if I can. I promised one of the tails to a neighbour.’

‘Ain’t this the first fox you’ve shot, then?’ Ernie couldn’t fathom his quiet talk: a fox stone dead from a.303 happened once in a lifetime. They walked down the hill. ‘I’ve had about half a dozen,’ he said by the car door, dragging a large polythene bag from under the seat and stuffing the dead fox into it. ‘From round here most on ’em. I’ll knock off a bit and go to Lincolnshire next time.’ The fox lay as if under a glass case, head bashed and tail without colour. ‘It never stood a chance with a.303,’ Ernie grinned.

He took the wheel going back, flying down lanes to the main road, setting its nose at Mansfield as if intent on cutting Nottinghamshire in two. Bob lounged behind using a pull-through on the.303. ‘I’ve allus liked hunting,’ he shouted to Ernie. ‘My old man used to go poaching before the war, so we could have summat to eat. He once did a month in quod, the poor bastard. Never got a chance to enjoy real hunting, like me.’

‘I want the next tail, for the kid that’s coming,’ Ernie said, laughing.

Bob was pleased with himself: ‘You talk about revolution: the nobs around here would go daft if they knew I was knocking their sport off.’

It was broad daylight: ‘Have another turps and dash,’ Ernie said, ‘you clever bleeder. You’ll find the bottle in my haversack.’

The road opened along a high flat ridge through a colliery village, whose grey houses still had no smoke at their chimneys. Silent head-stocks to the left cowered above the fenced-off coppices of Sherwood Forest.

The Firebug

I smile as much as feel ashamed at the memory of some of the things I did when I was a lad, even though I caused my mother a lot of trouble. I used to pinch her matches and set fire to heaps of paper and anything I could get my eyes on.

I was no bigger than sixpennorth o’ coppers, so’s you’d think I wasn’t capable of harming a fly. People came straight out with it: ‘Poor little bogger. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.’ But my auntie used to say: ‘He might not be so daft as he looks when he grows up’ — and she was right, I can see that now. Her husband had a few brains as well: ‘He’s quiet, nobody can deny it, but still waters run deep. I wouldn’t trust him an inch.’ At this the rest of the family got on to him and called him bully with neither sense nor feeling, said I was delicate and might not have long for this world — while I went on eating my way through a fistful of bread-and-jam as if I hadn’t heard a dickybird and would last forever.

This match craze must have started when, still in leggings, I was traipsed downtown by my mother one day midweek. The streets weren’t all that crowded and I held on to her carrier-bag, dragging a bit I should think, slurring my other hand along the cold glass of shop windows full of tricycles and forts for Christmas that I would never get — unless they were given to me as a reward for being good enough not to pinch ’em. As usual my mother was harassed to death (on her way to ask for a bit more time to pay off the arrears of 24 Slum Yard I shouldn’t wonder) and I was grizzling because I couldn’t share as much as I’d have liked in the razzle-dazzle of the downtown street.

Suddenly I left off moaning, felt the air go quiet and blue, as if a streak of sly lightning had stiffened everybody dead in their tracks. Even motor cars stopped. ‘What’s up, mam?’ I said — or whined I expect, because I could only whine up to fourteen: then I went to work and started talking clear and proper, from shock.

Before she could tell me, a bloody great bell began clanging — louder than any school or church call — bowling its ding-dong from every place at once, so that I looked quickly at the up-windows to wonder where it was coming from. I felt myself going white, knees quaking. Not that I was terrified. I was right in the middle of another world, as if the one and only door to it had a bell on saying PRESS, and somebody was leaning his elbow spot-on and drilling right into my startled brain.

The bells got louder, so’s I couldn’t any longer hope it was only the cops or an ambulance. It was something I’d never seen before nor dreamt of either: a flying red-faced monster batting along the narrow street at a flat-out sixty, as if it had been thrown there like a toy. Only this weighed a ton or two and made the ground shake under me, like a procession for the Coronation or something — but coming at top speed, as if a couple of Russian tanks were after its guts and shooting fire behind. ‘What is it, mam? What is it?’ I whined when it got quiet enough to speak.

‘Only a fire,’ she told me. ‘A house is on fire, and they’re fire-engines going to put it out.’ Then another couple of engines came belting through the deadened street, both together it seemed, turning all the air into terrifying klaxons. I started screaming, and didn’t stop until I’d gone down in a fit.

Mam and a man carried me into the nearest shop and when I woke up there was nothing but toys all around, so’s I thought I was in heaven. To keep me calm the shopkeeper gave me a lead soldier which I was glad to grab, though I’d rather have had the toy fire-engine that caught at my sight as soon as I stood up. It was as if my eyes had opened for the first time since I was born: red with yellow ladders and blue men in helmets — but he turned me away to ask if I was all right, and when I nodded walked me back into the street out of temptation. I was a bit of a bogger in them days.

The long school holidays of summer seemed to go on for years. When I could scrounge fourpence I’d nip to the continuous downtown pictures after dinner and drop myself in one of the front seats, to see the same film over and over till driven out by hunger or God save the king. But I didn’t often get money to go, and now and again mam would bundle me into the street so’s her nerves could have a rest from my ‘give-me-this-and-I-want-that’ sort of grizzling. I’d be quite happy — after the shock of being slung out had worn off — to sit on the pavement making wrinkles in the hot tar with a spoon I’d managed to grab on my way through the kitchen, or drawing patterns with a piece of slate or matchstick. Other kids would be rolling marbles or running at rounders, or a string of them would scream out of an entry after playing hide and seek in somebody’s backyard. A few would be away at seaside camp, or out in the fields and woods on Sunday treats, so it worn’t as noisy as it might have been. I remember once I sat dead quiet all afternoon doing nothing but talking to myself for minutes at a time on what had happened to me in the last day or two and about things I hoped to do as soon as I got either money or matches in my fist — chuntering ten to the dozen as if somebody unknown to me had put a penny in the gramophone of my brain as they walked by. Other people passing looked at me gone-out, but I didn’t give a bogger and just went on talking until the noise of a fire-engine in the distance came through to my locked-in world.

It sounded like a gale just starting up, an aeroplane of bells going along at ground level with folded wings, about ten streets off but far enough away to seem as if it was in another town behind the big white clouds of summer, circling round a dream I’d had about a fire a few nights ago. It didn’t sound real, though I knew what it meant now, after my downtown fit a long time back in the winter. Hot sun and empty sky stopped it being loud I suppose, but my heart nearly fell over itself at the brass-band rattle, it went so fast — sitting in my mouth like a cough-drop or dollymixture getting bigger as the bells went on. Most of the other kids ran hollering to where the noise came from, even when I thought they were too far off for anybody else to hear, went clobbering up the street and round a corner until everywhere was quiet and empty except the bells now reaching louder all the time.

I wanted to join in the chase, fly towards fire and smoke as fast as my oversize wellingtons would take me, to see all them helmeted men with hatchets and ladders and hosepipes trying to stop the red flames but not managing so that the only thing left was a couple of cinders one on top of the other. And then I’d try to sneak up and blow the top one off. But I’d never be able to catch them, that much I knew as sure as God made little apples, so I waited till my face changed back from white to mucky and my blood stopped bumping, and went on playing tar games in the sun.

But sometimes I’d sit and hear the bells of a fire engine that none of the other kids would hear, would leave off playing and listen hard for it to come closer, hoping to see one swivel around the bend at the top of our street and pour down with its big nose getting closer — and if it did I wouldn’t know whether to stick by and see what happened or run screaming in to mam and get her to hide me under the stairs. I was always hoping for a sweltering fire close by so that I could watch them trying to put it out — hope for one at the bike factory or pub or in some shop or other. But I just heard them now and again in my mind, sat (before I cottoned on to this) waiting for the others to hear it and run yelling to where it came from, but they didn’t and then I knew it was just in me the bells had played. This was only on summer days though, as if the sun melted wax in my tabs and let me hear better than anybody else — even things that didn’t happen at all.

But fire-engine fires were rare as five-pound notes, and up to men then nearest a big blaze ever came to our street was on Bonfire Night. They told us about Bonfire Night at school, about how this poor bloke Guy Fawkes got chucked on a fire because he wanted to blow up parliament, and I learned as well about the Great Fire of London where all the town got lit because everything was built of wood. What a sight that must have been! Thousands and thousands of houses going up like matchboxes. Still, I didn’t like to think of people getting burnt to death, I do know that. I was terrified on it, and so was dad, and though he used to poke the fire cold out every night, and pull the rugs a long way back from the grate and set the chairs under the window, I was still worried in bed later in case a hot coal lit up again and walked to right across the room where the rugs were; or that somebody next door would go to sleep with his pipe lit and the first thing I’d know was a rubber hose slooshing water through the window and onto us four kids. I wouldn’t even have heard the dingdong-belling of the fire-engine I slept so deep — and that would have broken my heart.

On Bonfire Night fires were lit like cherry trees, two or three to a long street like ours, and the only thing I ever prayed for was that it wouldn’t rain after the bigger lads got busy and set their matches under piles of mattresses, boxes and old sofas. The flames climbed so high by ten that house walls glowed and shone as if somebody had scrubbed them clean, and I used to go from one fire-hill to another eating my bread and jam and jumping out of the way when firecrackers got close. I was so excited the bread almost wouldn’t go down, and my breath gulped as the warmth tried to ram itself through my throat when I went too near the fire.

If only flames like this blazed all winter, was my one big wish. But they didn’t, my brain told me: they flared for one night, hands of fire waving hello and good-bye while we shouted and danced, then died to a glowing hump of grey ash for corporation carts to clear away like the bodies of big runover dogs next morning. Christmas was a letdown after these mountainous fires.

This Bonfire Night I stayed out till twelve hoping, now that everybody else had gone, for a last-minute flame to shoot up for one second and show its face only to me; but all that remained was the smell of fire-ash and gunpowder. Then in the dead quietness I heard the bell of a far-off fire-engine, flying down some empty street with bells full on, passing houses that were so quiet you might think God had gone before and like some fat publican shouted TIME in each. I looked at the fire again in the hope that it would flare and bring the distant engine to where I was, frightened a bit at the same time because I was on my own and would have nobody to stand with if it did. All I got for my waiting though was a spot of icecold rain on my arm, and the sound of another big drop burying itself with a hiss chock in the middle of the ash. And the fire-engine went tingling on till I couldn’t hear it no more, off to some street where, I thought, they had a bigger fire than could ever be built in ours.

My first fires were nothing to speak of: baby ones built in the backyard with a single sheet of paper that burned out in half a second like celluloid, scattering like black butterflies at the draught of another kid. Mam clouted my tabhole and took the matches off me — to begin with — but realizing after a while how it kept me occupied at a time when she was hard-up for peace and quiet she let me play: a couple of old newspapers and half a dozen matches stopped me whining for an hour, which was cheap at the price. For mam was badly right enough, holding her heart all the time and blue in the face when anything harassed her, so that even if I’d wanted to make a row dad would have thumped me one.

So nobody bothered me and my midget fires, because they could see I wasn’t doing no harm. One or two of the nosey parkers went as far as to tut-tut loud when they looked over the fence in passing and saw wisps of smoke floating in front of my eyes, but they soon got used to the sight of it and stopped pulling meagrims. They must have known mam knew I’d got the matches, and didn’t want a row with her because she was still a wild fighter badly or not. I soon stopped making fires outside our back door, though, because one day I collected a whole tin of matchsticks off the street and they burnt so long in a bad wind that when mam smelled them up in the bedroom dad kicked the fire out with his boots and locked the gate on me. I’d only got a couple matches left, and had forgotten to snatch up the newspaper when dad’s fist lifted me, so I was feeling hard done by as I sulked near the yard lavatories.

At the first nip of a cold rainspot I went into the nearest because if there was one thing I didn’t like it was getting wet. It made me feel so miserable I could have put my head in the gas-oven or gone to the railway line and played with an express till I was bumped into, rolled over, and blacked-out for good. Whenever a spot of rain fell I sheltered in a shop doorway or entry until it stopped even if I was there for hours, because when rain landed on me it was like a shock of pins and needles sending me off my nut, as if every bit of me was a funny bone. And big rain was worse than ever, for it seemed to stick into me like falling penknives.

If I hadn’t opened the door and gone in to get out of the rain I’d never have noticed the wad of newspapers stuffed behind the lavatory pipe. Two or three thick Sunday ones, the sort I liked because they’d got bigger letters on the front page than any. Once at Aunt Ethel’s one of my grown-up cousins was reading the Sunday paper and his brother put a light to the bottom for a lark, and the other didn’t know what was going off till flames reached the terrible headlines and started licking his nose. Or maybe he did, for he stayed as calm as if it had happened before: he was near the range and when the whole paper was in flames just leaned over and let it fall in the firegrate to burn itself out — as if he’d read all he wanted to anyway — and calmly asked his mam if there was any more tea in the pot. I laughed at the thought of it for days and days.

As soon as the heap of papers caught I ran out of the yard and rattled to the bottom of the street, went up to a gang of pals and played marbles so’s nobody’d twig anything. I was so excited at what I’d done, and at listening all the time for a fire-engine (that I hoped somebody had called to come rumbling full tilt down the cobbled street with bells ringing), that I lost all my five marbles because I hardly knew what I was doing.

I didn’t hear the bells of a fire-engine though: the only ringing that went on was all night in my ears after the old man had given me a good pasting when I went home a long time later. The whole yard talked about my fire-making for days: ‘The little varmint wants taming. He’s got too much on it.’

‘You’d better lock your door when you go over the road shopping, or he might sneak in and send your home up in flames.’

‘If I was his mother I’d take him to have his brains tested, though she can’t do a sight at the moment, poor woman. So he gets neglected. I don’t know, I don’t.’

‘He’d be better off at Cumberland Hall,’ another woman said — which made me shiver when I heard it because Cumberland Hall’s a stark cold place they send kids to as ain’t got no mam and dad, where they hit you with sticks, feed you on bread and porridge, and get you up at six in the morning — or so mam once told me when I asked her about it. And it was a long way in the woods, she said, so’s I knew if I got sent there I wouldn’t be able to hear a fire-engine for years and years. Unless I made a fire on the sly and one had to come and put it out, then I might, but you couldn’t depend on it because I knew by now that fire-engines didn’t fly ding-donging to every bit of fire in the open air: they had to be big ones, which meant I was beginning to learn. Also I didn’t want to get caught again and have my head batted, for as well as it hurting a long time afterwards it might send me daft or dead which would be terrible because then I wouldn’t be able to make the fires or hear the engines.

So I knew I’d got to be careful next time and thought about how secret you could be if you did it in a wood and how big a fire it’d grow to if once it got going and the wind blew on it. I dreamed about it for weeks, saw yellow matchlight jump to paper, spread to dry leaves and twigs, climb to dead wood and branches and bushes and little trees and big trees, changing colour from red to blue and green and back to red as the big bell ding-donged through everything, racing from the main road. And all the firemen would just stand there, helmets off and scratching their heads because they wouldn’t have a dog’s chance of putting it out. I was sweating myself at the thought of it. Once on the pictures I saw where a big oil well caught fire, and they had to have dynamite to put it out. Dynamite! Think of that! Many’s the pasting I got from the teacher at school for being half asleep in these daydreams. Once I was called out to the front for it, and as he was holding the strap up to let me have it, the thundery quiet of the classroom was filled with the roar of a fire-engine out on the boulevard. A few seconds went by as everybody wondered where it was going, and I thought the teacher would let me off at such a fire-awful noise, (though I don’t know why he should), but the next thing I knew the strap had hit the outstretched palm of my hand as if a large stone had fallen on it from a thousand feet up. The bastard. I should have been listening to him telling us about how the army of some batchy king or other chopped up the senseless blokes of another army; then the two kings shook hands and signed a bit of paper to say things should be the same, but peaceful, and all the soldiers just sat in gangs around their little fires boiling soup and laughing, when all I thought of was how all these little fires could be joined together into a big blaze, as big as a mountain, with the two kings on top instead of that poor bloke called Guy Fawkes — just because he had a funny name.

I went off early one morning, a sunny day one Sunday, all by myself after a breakfast of tomatoes and bacon. Dad was glad to get rid of me because mam was still badly and the doctor was up with her. She hadn’t spoken to me for a week because she’d been sleeping most of the time — and all I had to do, dad said, was keep out of her way and then she’d get better quicker.

Well, I was glad to because I’d got other things to brood on, walking down the street well into the wall with a box of matches and some folded paper in my pockets, my hand clutching the matches because I didn’t want them to jump out — or fall through the hole that might get wider as I walked along. I’d be hard put to it to get any more if they did, because I hadn’t got a penny to my name. Admitted, I could always stop and ask people to give me a match, but it was risky, because I’d often tried it, though sometimes I managed to beg one or two from a bloke who didn’t care what I was up to and perhaps wanted me to smoke myself to death, or set Nottingham on fire. But mostly the people I asked either pushed me away and said clear off, or told me they were sorry but their matches were safeties and no good without a box. Now and again a bloke with safeties would give me a few anyway — wanting to help me and hoping I’d find some way to strike them, though I never did, unless I lit them with proper matches I latched on to later. The people I never asked were women, after the first one or two had threatened to fetch a copper, being clever enough to twig what I was up to.

Wind blew my hair about as I crossed the railway bridge by the station. Trolley buses trundled both ways and mostly empty, though even if I’d had a penny I’d still have walked, for walking my legs off made me feel I was going somewhere, strolling along though not too slow and enjoying the faces of fresh air that met me by the time I got out to the open spaces of Western Boulevard. I was feeling free and easy, and hoped a copper wouldn’t stop me and ask what I was doing with paper and matches sticking out of my pockets. But nobody bothered me and I turned down from the bridge and onto the canal bank, looking in deep locks now and again, at the endless bottoms of water, as if the steep sides of the smooth wall still went on underneath — to the middle of the earth as far as I knew. A funny thought came to me: how long would it take for this canyon with water at the bottom to be filled to the brim with the fine and flimsy ash from cigarettes, only that? I sat on a lock gate and wondered: how many people need to smoke how many fags for how many years? Donkey’s years, I supposed. I’d be an old man on two sticks by then. Even teachers at school wouldn’t be able to work that sum out. I stood up and had a long pee down into the smooth surface, my pasty face in the mirror of it shivered to bits when the first piss struck.

After a good while of more walking I cut off along a lane at the next bridge leading towards the wood I’d set my heart on: a toy for Christmas. I was excited, already heard fire-engines crossing the sky, bells going off miles away, a sound that thrilled me even though I did know I was hearing things. The wheat was tall, yellow and dusty-looking over hedges and gates, bushes so high along the lane that sometimes I couldn’t see the sky. Faded fag packets and scorched newspaper had been thrown among nettles and scrub by lads and courting couples out from Nottingham, for the fields weren’t all that far off from the black and smothercating streets. My teeth still felt funny at the screams of tree-trunks from Sunday overtime at the sawmill not far off, though after a while I couldn’t hear anything at all, except the odd thrush or blackbird nipping about like bats trying to get their own shadows in their beaks. I’d been out here a time or two with pals looking for eggs in birds’ nests but I wasn’t interested in that any more because my uncle once caught me with some and told me it was wicked and wrong to rob birds of their young ’uns.

So I walked by the hedge, keeping well down till I got to a gap. It was dim and cool in the wood, and so lonely that I’d have been frightened if I hadn’t a pocketful of paper and matches to keep me company. Bushes were covered in blackberries, and I stopped now and again to take my pick, careful not to scratch myself or eat too many in case I got the gut ache when I went to bed at night.

It was long and narrow, not the sort of wood you could go deep into, so I jumped over a stream and found the middle quick enough, a clearing, more or less, with a dry and dying bush on one side that looked just ready for a fire. I worked like a galley slave, piling up dead twigs and leaves over my bit of paper that soon you could hardly see. I wondered about the noise but what could I do? and anyway soon forgot my worry and went on working. I knew it must be past dinnertime when I stood back to look at my bonfire heap. Sweating like a bull (though nothing to how them trees would be sweating in a bit, I grinned) I measured the chances of a fire-engine fire: the bush was sure to light and so would the two small trees on either side, but unless there was a good wind the main trees would be hard put to it.

The first match was slammed out by the wind that blew strong over my shoulder as if it had been lurking there specially; the head of the second fell off before I could get under the paper; the third-time lucky one caught a treat, was like a red, red robin breaking out of its shell, and I soon had to stand back to keep the burning blazes off my hand. I wanted to put it out at first: the words nearly choked me; ‘Stread on it. Kick it to bits.’ I twisted my hands up in front of me, but couldn’t move, just stood there like the no good tripehound dad often called me (and which I dare say I was) until the smoke made me step further back — and back I went until my head scraped into a big-barked tree. The noise of the fire must have been what frightened me: it was as hungry as if it had got teeth, went chewing its way up into the air like a shark in Technicolor. A stone of blood settled over my heart, but smoke and flame hypnotized me, stood me there frozen and happy, rubbing my hands yet wanting to put it out, but not being able to any more than I could kill myself.

I didn’t know fires could grow like that. My little ones had always gone out, shrunk up to black bits and flew into the air when I set half a breath against it. But then, that was only true with a scrap of newspaper on an asphalt yard. This was in a wood, and fire took to it like a kid to hot dinners: it was a sheet of red flame and grey smoke, a choking wall and curtain that scared me a bit, because I was back to life, as if big hands would reach out and grab me in for good and all. Like my uncle had said hell was — though I never believed him till now.

It was time to run. I sped off like a rabbit, scratched and cindered as my ankles caught on thorns and sharp grass. The hammer-and-tongs of a fire-engine were a long way from me now, and I was a ragged-arsed thunderbolt suddenly tangled in a high bush, stuck like a press-stud that fought a path out, and went on again lit-up and cursing. At the edge of the wood I slowed down, and halfway to the lane looked back, expecting to see a sheet of fire and smoke bending out over the trees with flags flying and claws sharp.

But nothing. I could have burst into a gallon of tears. Nothing: not a butterfly of smoke, not an ant of flame. Maybe I’m too close to see, I thought. Or should I run back and stoke up again, blow it and coax, pat and kick it into life? But I went on. If the wood caught fire, as I still hoped, who’d get the fire-engines? And if nobody did would I hear and see them? Being as how I’d caused the fire I had to get miles away quick without being spotted, so how could I poke my nose in at the nearest copperbox and bawl out there was a fire in Snakey Wood and not risk getting sent to an Approved School for my good deed? I wished I’d thought of this already, but all I could hope for now was that some bloke at the local sawmill or a field-digger from the farm would twig things while I wasn’t too far off and get the fire-engine on its way so’s I could run and see it.

By the lane I turned, and there it was: no fire yet but a thin trail of smoke coming up like a wavy blue pole above the crowded trees. I’d expected it all to be like it was on the pictures, boiling away and me having to run for my life, with a yellow-orange carpet of flame snap-dragging at my heels, but it just showed how different things were to what you expected. Not that I didn’t know they always were, but it still came as a shock I don’t mind admitting. The wood was burning, which was a start, and though I couldn’t see any flame yet I didn’t wait for it either, but dodged under the hedgebottom and crossed the open field to the big outstanding arm-beam of a canal lock. I puffed and grunted to get it shut, then crept across on all fours — using it as a bridge — to the towing path on the other side. Nobody saw me: a man was humped over the bank fishing a bit further down, but he never even turned to see who was passing. Maybe he ain’t got a licence to fish, I thought, and no more wants to be seen than I do — which I can easy understand.

The wind blew stronger and the sun still shone but I daren’t look back towards my pet wood which I hoped by now was crackling away to boggery. Walking along I looked like a fed-up kid out for an airing who was too daft and useless to have been in mischief — but because it seemed as if butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth didn’t mean I hadn’t set a fire off in which butter wouldn’t stand an earthly. I didn’t want anybody to twig anything though, as I walked up to the main road and into a world of people and traffic where I wasn’t so noticeable any more.

Back along the canal, far-off thick smoke was going up to the bubble-blue sky, black low down as if from an oil-well, but thinning a bit on top. It was burning all right, though people walking by didn’t seem to think much was amiss. I sat on the bridge wall, unable to take my eyes off it, rattled a bit that people didn’t turn to open their mouths and wonder what I was looking at. I wanted to shout out: ‘Hey missis, hey mester, see that smoke? It’s Snakey Wood on fire, and I done it’ — but somehow the words wouldn’t come, though God knows I remember wanting them to.

I started off towards home, one minute happy that I’d brought off my own big fire, and the next crippled by a rotten sadness I couldn’t explain, hands in pockets as I walked further and further away from the column of my fire and smoke that, if you think about it, should have made me the happiest kid in Radford.

From this changeable mood I was neither one thing nor the other as I went downhill towards the White Horse — almost home, having nothing else in my head but a shrill-whistled Al Jolson tune. Then into my ears and brain — through the last barbed-wire of my whistling — came the magic sound I’d longed all day to hear. The air went blue and electric, as it sometimes does before a terrible sheet-ripping thunderstorm, and cars at the crossroads stopped and waited, drivers winding their windows down to look out. My mouth opened and I stared and stared, the only picture in my mind for the next few seconds being that of the last Bonfire Night but one, in which I’d wandered off on my own up Mitchell Street and come across the best fire I’d ever seen. It was already twice as high as any man, and impossible to stoke anything else on top. A pile of mattresses still had got to be burned and a couple of big lads dragged them one at a time up on top of a chapel roof by whose side-walls the fire had been lit. When all of the two dozen bug-eaten mattresses were stacked high on the slates, the lads swung each one out, perched up there like demons in the blaze of the rattling flames, and let them crash down one by one into the very middle of the red bed. Everybody said the church would go, but it didn’t, and when I saw that it wouldn’t I walked away.

My eyes were open again on broad daylight, and from the top of the opposite hill sounded the bells I remembered hearing that very first time as a kid when downtown with mam. But this time there were more bells than I’d ever heard; a big red engine, fresh out of the vast sheds of town and coming between the shops and pubs, shot the crossroads as if out of a flashgun, all bells at full throttle so that two blokes talking outside the pub couldn’t make themselves heard and stopped till it had gone by. But they still couldn’t start talking again, because another engine was almost right behind.

My legs trembled and I thought my ears would fall away from my head. One of the two men looked so hard at me that his face swam, and I thought: What’s he making himself go all blurred like that for? — but when my ankles became heavy as lead and my legs above them turned into feathers I knew it was my eyes swimming, that I was about to cave in again like I’d done that long time ago with mam. I took a step forward, screwing my eyes and opening them, then held on the window ledge for a second, until I knew I’d be all right, and was able to stand another engine bursting in and out of my brain; then another.

Four! No sooner could I have shouted with joy, than I found it hard to stop myself letting the tears roll like wagons out of my eyes. I’d never seen four fire-engines before. The whole wood must be in flame from top to bottom, I thought, and was sorry now I hadn’t stayed close by to watch, wondering if I should go back, because I knew that even four engines wouldn’t get a fire like that down before tonight or even later. All that work and walking gone for nothing, I cursed, as another engine broke the record of the last one down the hill. I waved as it shot by, yet felt as if I’d had my fill of fire-engines for a long while.

Six passed altogether. By this time I was sobbing, almost stone-dead and useless. ‘What’s up, kid?’ one of the two men said to me.

‘I’m frightened,’ I managed to blurt out. He patted me on the shoulder. ‘There’s no need o’ that. The fire’s miles away, up Wollaton somewhere, by the look on it. It wain’t come down ’ere, so you needn’t worry.’ But I couldn’t stop. It was as hard to dry up as it had been for me to start, and I went on heaving as if the end of the world was just around the corner.

‘Do you live far?’ he asked.

‘I’m frightened,’ was all I said, and he didn’t know what to do, wished by this time he’d left me alone: ‘Well, you shouldn’t be frightened. You’re a big lad now.’

I walked towards home along Eddison Road, my eyes drying up with every step, the great stone in my chest not jumping about so much. Six fire-engines made it a bigger day than Christmas, each red engine being better than a Santa Claus, so that even after my fire-bugging I never got over red being my favourite colour. When I went in through the scullery dad looked happy, and such a thing was hard for me to understand.

‘Come on my old lad,’ he said. I’d never seen him so good-tempered. ‘Where’ve you bin all this time, you young bogger? It’s nearly tea time.’ He pulled a chair to the table for me: ‘Here you are, get this down you. You must be clambed to death’ — took a plate of dinner out of the oven. ‘I thought you’d got lost, or summat. Your mam’s bin asking for you.’

‘Is she all right then, dad?’

‘She’s a bit better today,’ he smiled. ‘I expect we’ll pull her through yet’ — which I was so glad to hear that it made me twice as hungry, as if the fire had burned a hole in me as well as Snakey Wood, because a whole load of food was needed to fill it. Dad brought in the teapot, and I drank two mugs of that as well. ‘My Christ,’ he said, sitting opposite me with a fag on and enjoying the sight of me eating, ‘I heard a lot of fire-engines going by just now. Some poor bagger’s getting burned out of house and home by the sound of it.’

Nobody knew who started that big fire all them years ago, and I know now that nobody will ever care, because Snakey Wood has gone forever, even better flattened than by any fire. Its trees have been ripped up and soil pressed down by a housing estate that spread over it. As it turned out I only burned down half, according to the Post, and though everybody in our yard knew I was a bit of a firebug nobody thought for a minute it might have been me who set fire to Snakey Wood. Or if they did, nowt was said.

In the next load of weeks and months I lost all interest in lighting fires. Even the sound of a fire-engine rattling by didn’t bother me as much as it had. Maybe it was strange, me giving it up all of a sudden like that, but I just hadn’t got the heart to put match to paper, couldn’t be bothered in fact, after mam got better — which happened about the same time. I expect that big fire satisfied me, because whatever I did again would need to be bloody huge to get more than six engines called out to it. In any case there was something bigger than me to start fires, for after a couple of years came an air raid from the Germans and I remember getting out of the shelter at six one morning when the all-clear had gone and standing in the middle of our street, seeing the whole sky red and orange over the other side of Nottingham — where, I heard later, two whole factories were up in flames. They burned for days, and I wanted to go off and see them but dad wouldn’t let me. People said that fifty fire-engines had to come before that was put out — spinning into Nottingham from Mansfield and Derby and all over everywhere.

And not long afterwards I was fourteen, went to work and started courting, so what was the use of fires after that?

The Magic Box

The Bike

The Easter I was fifteen I sat at the table for supper and Mam said to me: ‘I’m glad you’ve left school. Now you can go to work.’

‘I don’t want to go to wok,’ I said in a big voice.

‘Well, you’ve got to,’ she said. ‘I can’t afford to keep a pit-prop like yo’ on nowt.’

I sulked, pushed my toasted cheese away as if it was the worst kind of slop. ‘I thought I could have a break before starting.’

‘Well you thought wrong. You’ll be out of harm’s way at work.’ She took my plate and emptied it on John’s, my younger brother’s, knowing the right way to get me mad. That’s the trouble with me: I’m not clever. I could have bashed our John’s face in and snatched it back, except the little bastard had gobbled it up, and Dad was sitting by the fire, behind his paper with one tab lifted. ‘You can’t get me out to wok quick enough, can you?’ was all I could say at Mam.

Dad chipped in, put down his paper. ‘Listen: no wok, no grub. So get out and look for a job tomorrow, and don’t come back till you’ve got one.’

Going to the bike factory to ask for a job meant getting up early, just as if I was back at school; there didn’t seem any point in getting older. My old man was a good worker though, and I knew in my bones and brain that I took after him. At the school garden the teacher used to say: ‘Colin, you’re the best worker I’ve got, and you’ll get on when you leave’ — after I’d spent a couple of hours digging spuds while all the others had been larking about trying to run each other over with the lawn-rollers. Then the teacher would sell the spuds off at threepence a pound and what did I get out of it? Bogger-all. Yet I liked the work because it wore me out; and I always feel pretty good when I’m worn out.

I knew you had to go to work though, and that rough work was best. I saw a picture once about a revolution in Russia, about the workers taking over and everything (like Dad wants to) and they lined everybody up and made them hold their hands out and the working blokes went up and down looking at them. Anybody whose hands was lily-white was taken away and shot. The others was OK. Well, if ever that happened in this country, I’d be OK, and that made me feel better when a few days later I was walking down the street in overalls at half-past seven in the morning with the rest of them. One side of my face felt lively and interested in what I was in for, but the other side was crooked and sorry for itself, so that a neighbour got a front view of my whole clock and called with a wide laugh, a gap I’d like to have seen a few inches lower down — in her neck: ‘Never mind, Colin, it ain’t all that bad.’

The man on the gate took me to the turnery. The noise hit me like a boxing-glove as I went in, but I kept on walking straight into it without flinching, feeling it reach right into my guts as if to wrench them out and use them as garters. I was handed over to the foreman; then the foreman passed me on to the toolsetter; and the toolsetter took me to another youth — so that I began to feel like a hot wallet.

The youth led me to a cupboard, opened it, and gave me a sweeping brush. ‘Yo’ do that gangway,’ he said, ‘and I’ll do this one.’ My gangway was wider, but I didn’t bother to mention it. ‘Bernard,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘that’s me. I go on a machine next week, a drill.’

‘How long you been on this sweeping?’ I wanted to know, bored with it already.

‘Three months. Every lad gets put on sweeping first, just to get ’em used to the place.’ Bernard was small and thin, older than me. We took to each other. He had round bright eyes and dark wavy hair, and spoke in a quick way as if he’d stayed at school longer than he had. He was idle, and I thought him sharp and clever, maybe because his mam and dad died when he was three. He’d been brought up by an asthmatic auntie who’d not only spoiled him but let him run wild as well, he told me later when we sat supping from our tea mugs. He’d quietened down now though, and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, he said with a wink. I couldn’t think why this was, after all his stories about him being a mad-head — which put me off him at first, though after a bit he was my mate, and that was that.

We was talking one day, and Bernard said the thing he wanted to buy most in the world was a gram and lots of jazz records — New Orleans style. He was saving up and had already got ten quid.

‘Me,’ I said, ‘I want a bike, to get out at week-ends up Trent. A shop on Arkwright Street sells good ’uns second hand.’

I went back to my sweeping. It was a fact I’ve always wanted a bike. Speed gave me a thrill. Malcolm Campbell was my bigshot — but I’d settle for a two-wheeled pushbike. I’d once borrowed my cousin’s and gone down Balloon House Hill so quick I passed a bus. I’d often thought how easy it would be to pinch a bike: look in a shop window until a bloke leaves his bike to go into the same shop, then nip in just before him and ask for something you knew they hadn’t got; then walk out whistling to the bike at the kerb and ride off as if it’s yours while the bloke’s still in the shop. I’d brood for hours: fly home on it, enamel it, file off the numbers, turn the handlebars round, change the pedals, take lamps off or put them on … only, no, I thought, I’ll be honest and save up for one when I get forced out to work, worse luck.

But work turned out to be a better life than school. I kept as hard at it as I could, and got on well with the blokes because I used to spout about how rotten the wages was and how hard the bosses slaved us — which made me popular you can bet. Like my old man always says, I told them: ‘At home when you’ve got a headache, mash a pot of tea. At work, when you’ve got a headache, strike.’ Which brought a few laughs.

Bernard was put on his drill, and one Friday while he was cleaning it down I stood waiting to cart his rammel off. ‘Are you still saving up for that bike, then?’ he asked, pushing steel dust away with a handbrush.

‘Course I am. But I’m a way off getting one yet. They rush you a fiver at that shop. Guaranteed, though.’

He worked on for a minute or two then, as if he’d got a birthday present or was trying to spring a good surprise on me, said without turning round: ‘I’ve made up my mind to sell my bike.’

‘I didn’t know you’d got one.’

‘Well’ — a look on his face as if there was a few things I didn’t know — ‘I bus it to work: it’s easier.’ Then in a pallier voice: ‘I got it last Christmas, from my auntie. But I want a record player now.’

My heart was thumping. I knew I hadn’t got enough, but: ‘How much do you want for it?’

He smiled. ‘It ain’t how much I want for the bike, it’s how much more dough I need to get the gram and a couple of discs.’

I saw Trent Valley spread out below me from the top of Carlton Hill — fields and villages, and the river like a white scarf dropped from a giant’s neck. ‘How much do you need, then?’

He took his time about it, as if still having to reckon it up. ‘Fifty bob.’ I’d only got two quid — so the giant snatched his scarf away and vanished. Then Bernard seemed in a hurry to finish the deal: ‘Look, I don’t want to mess about, I’ll let it go for two pounds five. You can borrow the other five bob.’

‘I’ll do it then,’ I said, and Bernard shook my hand like he was going away in the army. ‘It’s a deal. Bring the dough in the morning, and I’ll bike it to wok.’

Dad was already in when I got home, filling the kettle at the scullery tap. I don’t think he felt safe without there was a kettle on the gas. ‘What would you do if the world suddenly ended, Dad?’ I once asked when he was in a good mood. ‘Mash some tea and watch it,’ he said. He poured me a cup.

‘Lend’s five bob, Dad, till Friday.’

He slipped the cosy on. ‘What do you want to borrow money for?’ I told him. ‘Who from?’ he asked.

‘My mate at wok.’

He passed me the money. ‘Is it a good ’un?’

‘I ain’t seen it yet. He’s bringing it in the morning.’

‘Make sure the brakes is safe.’

Bernard came in half an hour late, so I wasn’t able to see the bike till dinner-time. I kept thinking he’d took bad and wouldn’t come at all, but suddenly he was stooping at the door to take his clips off — so’s I’d know he’d got his — my — bike. He looked paler than usual, as if he’d been up the canal-bank all night with a piece of skirt and caught a bilious-bout. I paid him at dinner-time. ‘Do you want a receipt for it?’ he laughed. It was no time to lark about. I gave it a short test around the factory, then rode it home.

The next three evenings, for it was well in to summer, I rode a dozen miles out into the country, where fresh air smelt like cowshit and the land was coloured different, was wide open and windier than in streets. Marvellous. It was like a new life starting up, as if till then I’d been tied by a mile-long rope around the ankle to home. Whistling along lanes I planned trips to Skegness, wondering how many miles I could make in a whole day. If I pedalled like mad, bursting my lungs for fifteen hours I’d reach London where I’d never been. It was like sawing through the bars in clink. It was a good bike as well, a few years old, but a smart racer with lamps and saddlebag and a pump that went. I thought Bernard was a bit loony parting with it at that price, but I supposed that that’s how blokes are when they get dead set on a gram and discs. They’d sell their own mother, I thought, enjoying a mad dash down from Canning Circus, weaving between the cars for kicks.

‘What’s it like, having a bike?’ Bernard asked, stopping to slap me on the back — as jolly as I’d ever seen him, yet in a kind of way that don’t happen between pals.

‘You should know,’ I said: ‘Why? It’s all right, ain’t it? The wheels are good, aren’t they?’

An insulted look came into his eyes. ‘You can give it back if you like. I’ll give you your money.’

‘I don’t want it,’ I said. I could no more part with it than my right arm, and he knew it. ‘Got the gram yet?’ And he told me about it for the next half-hour. It had got so many dials for this and that he made it sound like a space ship. We was both satisfied, which was the main thing.

That same Saturday I went to the barber’s for my monthly DA and when I came out I saw a bloke getting on my bike to ride it away. I tagged him on the shoulder, my fist flashing red for danger.

‘Off,’ I said sharp, ready to smash the thieving bastard. He turned to me. A funny sort of thief, I couldn’t help thinking, a respectable-looking bloke of about forty wearing glasses and shiny shoes, smaller than me, with a moustache. Still, the swivel-eyed sinner was taking my bike.

‘I’m boggered if I will,’ he said, in a quiet way so that I thought he was a bit touched. ‘It’s my bike, anyway.’

‘It bloody-well ain’t,’ I swore, ‘and if you don’t get off I’ll crack you one.’

A few people gawked at us. The bloke didn’t mess about and I can understand it now. ‘Missis,’ he called, ‘just go down the road to that copperbox and ask a policeman to come up ’ere, will you? This is my bike, and this young bogger nicked it.’

I was strong for my age. ‘You sodding fibber,’ I cried, pulling him clean off the bike so’s it clattered to the pavement. I picked it up to ride away, but the bloke got me round the waist, and it was more than I could do to take him off up the road as well, even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t.

‘Fancing robbing a working-man of his bike,’ somebody called out from the crowd of idle bastards now collected. I could have mowed them down.

But I didn’t get a chance. A copper came, and the man was soon flicking out his wallet, showing a bill with the number of the bike on it: proof right enough. But I still thought he’d made a mistake. ‘You can tell us all about that at the Guildhall,’ the copper said to me.

I don’t know why — I suppose I want my brains testing — but I stuck to a story that I found the bike dumped at the end of the yard that morning and was on my way to give it in at a copshop, and had called for a haircut first. I think the magistrate half believed me, because the bloke knew to the minute when it was pinched, and at that time I had a perfect alibi — I was in work, proved by my clocking-in card. I knew some rat who hadn’t been in work though when he should have been.

All the same, being found with a pinched bike, I got put on probation, and am still doing it. I hate old Bernard’s guts for playing a trick like that on me, his mate. But it was lucky for him I hated the coppers more and wouldn’t nark on anybody, not even a dog. Dad would have killed me if ever I had, though he didn’t need to tell me. I could only thank God a story came to me as quick as it did, though in one way I still sometimes reckon I was barmy not to have told them how I got the bike.

There’s one thing I do know. I’m waiting for Bernard to come out of Borstal. He got picked up, the day after I was copped with the bike, for robbing his auntie’s gas meter to buy more discs. She’d had about all she could stand from him, and thought a spell inside would do him good, if not cure him altogether. I’ve got a big bone to pick with him, because he owes me forty-five bob. I don’t care where he gets it — even if he goes out and robs another meter — but I’ll get it out of him, I swear blind I will. I’ll pulverize him.

Another thing about him though that makes me laugh is that, if ever there’s a revolution and everybody’s lined-up with their hands out, Bernard’s will still be lily-white, because he’s a bone-idle thieving bastard — and then we’ll see how he goes on; because mine won’t be lily-white, I can tell you that now. And you never know, I might even be one of the blokes picking ’em out.

To Be Collected

Donnie came out of the snackshack in Heanor marketplace, paused to wipe crumbs from his mouth with a damp sleeve of raincoat. ‘Belt-up, you rag-bags,’ he shouted, to his two brothers beckoning from their government surplus lorry.

He ploughed into waterpuddles, socks and flesh soaked. ‘Can’t you see I’m coming? Now look at what they’ve made me do!’ Curses ate into him like a corkscrew — ‘I’m wet through now. I’ll catch me death o’ cold. You poxed-up bastards,’ he raved, a fist pushed further into his groin pocket when he’d like it to be out and slamming them. He broke his tirade to grin at a couple of wide-eyed shopping women who thought he might have less dirty talk. ‘Can’t you wait a bit? You must have drainpipes, not guts, swallowing scorched tea like that.’

Tall Dave leaned out of the cab. His rawboned face, and grizzled-grey hair topped by a faded cap, jutted over a little boy pushing a tricycle. ‘There ain’t all day. We want to get cracking to Eastwood, see what we can get’ — his voice raised but reasonable. Back inside he lit a cigarette, shifted to the middle: ‘Hudge up, Flaptabs wants to park hissen.’

Bert, foot on the clutch and revving up loud, pressed himself against the door. He was the driver so, though the youngest of the three brothers, held the balance of which-way-turn and what-snackbar-stop decisions. He’d worked some time at the pitface, but too many changes of temperature, dampness and water, had marked him with pleurisy, menaced him with TB. Illness was shameful and unmanly, neither to be tolerated nor surrendered to, so he opted while sound for an outdoor life. This situation made him even more violent and morbid, see-sawed between pessimism, and hilarious pipedreams which came to nothing because he was so busy earning a living, though at the same time they enabled him to face making one.

‘It’s pissing down,’ Donnie observed, installing himself in the warm, smoke-filled cab.

‘Do you good,’ Bert said, changing gear, ‘get you a wash.’

‘You can’t beat a drop o’ rain,’ Donnie said, ‘keeps ’em home for when the ragman calls.’ He’d been involved in the last few days, in sporadic argument with Bert, though he’d given signs of wanting to pack it in without losing pride: ‘I ’ad a wash this morning before I came out, which is more than yo’ did, our Bert, you blackfaced bastard’ — he grinned from his perished, intense face.

Dave hated argument: ‘Why don’t you two stop fucking-well needling each other? I’m not kidding, but you’re driving me off my bleddy nut, day in and day out.’ Neither took him up on this so, map reading, systematic and sharp for detail, he said: ‘Left at the market then, out o’ these crowds. Watch you don’t hit that post office van — or you might accidentally knock-off a few thousand postal orders.’

‘If I did it’d be enough to keep us for a year at the wage we mek.’ Bert took Dave’s directions smoothly, as if thinking them out for himself.

As the eldest Dave felt it his right to give orders, though he was careful to modify his voice and phrases when doing so. ‘Get round this corner and we’ll head for Eastwood. We’ve got to call at them houses we left hand-bills at this morning.’ An old man, macless and without umbrella, shuffled off the pavement. ‘I’ll run that old bastard down,’ Bert said. ‘Can’t see a foot before ’im.’ He cupped a hand to his mouth: ‘Get off home and DIE!’

‘Less to feed,’ Donnie laughed, no longer the butt-end of their fun: ‘Don’t hit him, though.’

‘Listen at old soft-heart,’ Bert jeered.

Dave agreed: ‘Wappy bleeder’ — scornful because they obviously wouldn’t run the man over, and because Donnie’s sympathy reminded them that they daren’t. Able to cross between studs, the old man held his pace and shambled towards safe pavement. ‘Join the army,’ Bert shouted. ‘They’re crying out for blokes like yo’, dad!’ The man turned. A worn white death-mask of a starvo face opened into a smile. He shook his fist and stood on the pavement laughing.

They waved back. They all laughed, and the lorry shot forward. Shop awnings were pelted by violent rain: ‘Whose idea was it to come out today?’ he moaned, a side-glance at Donnie. ‘Shaking it down in buckets and nowt between us and getting into debt but the price o’ five fags and a gallon o’ petrol. What a life. Out on the road in all this weltering piss.’ He grumbled with a deadpan face, drew back his gears to the pitchdown of a steep hill, going fast between houses and towards a railway on the valley bottom, scarves of mist and black smoke boiling from pit-chimneys and train funnels. ‘I wouldn’t live out ’ere for a pension.’

‘Go on,’ Donnie cried, the optimist who, even in the most terrible glasshouse of the British Army, averred that things might have been worse in a German deathcamp, and that pigswill was better than no swill at all. ‘We might strike lucky at Eastwood, with an old copper or a mangle. Or an old firegrate. A few stone o’ woollens. You never know.’

‘All we’ll get,’ Bert prophesied, ‘is a couple of bugged-up bedticks that a consumptive man and wife have just pegged out on. We’ll be lucky to get eighteen pence the two: a cup of tea and a bun each.’

‘That wain’t keep my gang o’ kids,’ Donnie put in. ‘But we’ll get more than that though, yo’ see.’

‘I don’t know why you have so many kids, Donnie. I don’t, honest. You know you can’t afford to keep ’em.’

‘They don’t tek any bread out o’ your mouth.’ Donnie’s family was a great consolation to him, and though he could understand why it was made a joke of by his brothers, he had never been able to see the justice of it. His face steeled hard: ‘And I do keep ’em though, don’t I, eh?’

‘Well,’ Dave killed the joke before it went too far, ‘even me and Alice don’t get enough to live on.’

‘You might just as well put your head in the gas-oven and be done wi’ it,’ Ben said.

‘That wouldn’t do, either,’ Donnie smiled. ‘You’ve got no right to talk like that. No use dying, is it?’ Bert’s eyes half closed at Donnie spinning things out to such a dead-end conclusion and, turning a corner, he roared into his ear:

‘Wrap up. Brainless bastard’ — so loud that even above the engine noise a policeman heard its subhuman command and glared into the cab to see what was the matter. Dave’s eyes flashed out a picture of what possessions sprawled on the open back: a coil of rope, heaps of sacks, and a folded tarpaulin that covered nothing because it had been fine when they set out. Everything soaked. But nothing for the copper to get big ideas at either. The eyes of the law swivelled out of sight. ‘You want to be careful what you say,’ Donnie called. ‘I’m a few years older than yo’, you know.’

Bert became solemn, then melancholy, and gave himself up to grandiose dreams as he held the lorry fast to an uphill shove into Eastwood. ‘I’d like to build eight machine-guns into this vehicle — into the bonnet — and blast my way through owt as stood in our way,’ he said with a laugh, slowing at MAJOR ROAD AHEAD. ‘To blast coppers, that’s what I’d use it for.’

‘What about the Blackshirts?’ Donnie said. ‘They’re coppers, aren’t they?’

‘Who’s talking about Blackshirts? Shurrup.’

‘Course they are,’ Dave told him.

‘One ’ud put his hand out to get my licence’ — Bert went on, grinning, ‘six on ’em at a roadblock, and I’d slow down a bit, as if I was all for the law and going to stop.’

‘To give ’em a Woodbine out of the ten thousand we’d got in the back?’

He pulled a face at Donnie. ‘So I’d press this specially built-in button, and hear them bullet-belts starting to move under our feet, and the road in front would get churned up and go all grey and black, and the lorry would go bump-bump over the rubble we’d made of everything, and we’d all laugh together at six coppers snuffing it behind.’

‘Well,’ Dave said, winking towards Donnie, ‘you’d get summonsed then if you killed ’em, I know you would.’

‘That’s what used to ’appen in Chicago though,’ Bert put in. ‘Like in them old pictures, with James Cagney and George Raft.’

‘Well’ — from Donnie — ‘it don’t ’appen anywhere now.’

‘Not even in Russia,’ Bert laughed. ‘Like it did in that revolution.’

Donnie turned serious: ‘If you did such a thing there now you’d end up filling saltbags, in the geranium mines.’ And their laughter exploded, louder than any bomb or gunfire.

Eastwood was wetter than Heanor. They ascended the hill, patrolled rows of drenched uniform houses, desolate and scruffy at the backs, scruffier when TV aerials lifted Martian claws above slate-roofs and chimney stacks. Children were in school, and no one else seemed out on such a day. ‘Pull up,’ Dave rapped out. ‘Let’s get cracking on a couple o’ these streets.’

‘Maybe somebody’s left a crust o’ bread for us, or a claprag,’ Bert scoffed, drawing into the kerb. ‘I’ll bet we don’t see the sweat off a gnat’s knackers — nor even as much as an old gas-stove.’ Donnie caught on to this further wave of descending gloom, kept his monkey-face glum and silent. The lorry stayed by the kerb before any of them had the stomach to get out: the smell of their cigarettes and bodies made an atmosphere of homely warmth that they were loth to leave for wet unwelcoming backyards. ‘It ain’t all that bad,’ Dave retorted to Bert’s bitter weighing-up of their prospects, reaching under the steering-wheel for a pack of newly printed handbills. ‘Before the war it was, but not since. Course, everything still looks the same.’

‘And smells the same.’

‘But all the colliers is on full time.’

‘For a bit, anyway.’

Bert laughed. ‘Everybody’s got dough but us, I know that much.’ For a moment their thoughts and voices had met in harmony, but drew away again when Donnie demanded: ‘We got the lorry, ain’t we?’

‘Well’ — Bert turned as if to rub the nub-end into his face — ‘we wokked for it, din’t we?’ It was impossible to deny this triumphant assertion, and all three brooded for a minute on the months of monstrous overtime in the summer as brickies’ labourers on the new estates — heaving high-loaded hods on bony shoulders, unstacking fresh-baked bricks from lorry-backs and hosing them down, lugging cement bags in the sun, lips cracking under hot tea and the blinding heat of shaving fires — a nightmare that nevertheless made a good memory in this wet daylight of a Monday morning — and which ended each with a hundred pounds to club-in for their rag-and-bone lorry. Dave glared savagely at the top handbill:

‘A lot o’ bleeding good that does us,’ Bert said, digging at Dave, whose idea the handbills had been. ‘If we don’t start making some money I’m going back to labouring.’

Dave groaned. They had discussed chucking it in before, but he prevailed on optimist Donnie to wield the casting vote that kept them at it. What’s up with you? We made ten quid a-piece last week. You can’t expect to get a millionaire’s whack the first few months can you? Or p’raps you like working for a bleeding gaffer? I don’t. I’ve ’ad enough o’ that. You’ve only got to pull out a fag and you get your cards. Or see whether or not you backed a winner at dinner-time. You can bogger that for a lark. I’m not going to chuck it yet. I’d give it a longer try and see what we can do.’ He reached for the map: ‘We’ll try Bolsover next week. The trouble with these places near Nottingham is they’ve allus bin done by some graballing bastard half an hour before; but up there, nobody ever bothers.’

‘Like that place last week,’ Bert thought, cheerful at having egged Dave to go on justifying and encouraging for so long — which was one of the few ways he knew of getting him to talk.

‘If we make a living wage,’ Donnie put in, ‘what does it matter?’

Dave steered them back to work: “Ark at ’im — bin listening to the Conservatives. Thinks he’s got a right to a living wage. Come on, let’s stop boggering around, and get cracking.’ At which they alighted onto the pavement, took up their particular sacks, and spread in three directions into rainshot streets.

Such free-lance fending had sharpened Donnie’s powers of reconnaissance. Each backyard — from dustbin to lavatory, clothes-line to wooden palings — was assessed for articles of value: a thrown-out bicycle, a zinc bathtub on the wall, a sack-covered mangle waiting for washday. He noticed blinds down for a funeral, milk bottles on doorsteps and, on entering a street or terrace, immediately looked for what chimney-stacks sent out no smoke in this land of mineral plenty. Not, of course, that he would walk off with anything that didn’t belong to him — his thieving days had ended during the war, when to go on living demanded a definite long spate of thieving — but to remove some backyard eyesore of mildewed pram or stack of scrap copper or ripped up firegrate would be a favour he couldn’t be bad tempered enough to deny anyone. Hadn’t a woman pleaded with them only the other week to shift stuff they knew they wouldn’t get five bob for?

His roped-together mackintosh was darkened by rain. The wind rose, couldn’t make up its mind which way to scatter the floods. He’d collected nothing. Locusts and desert, he thought. Every crumb scratched and scraped — and saw himself in the same mind maybe as those poor enormous animals in prehistoric times come to the end of their tether because the sun had dried up the earth — which was better than this wet.

He knocked at a back door and, after a prolonged rattling of bolts and latches it was pulled violently inwards, irritation sounding even in the squeak of its hinges. A tall, thin, middle-aged collier stood there, still in his shirt-sleeves from the night shift. His deep grey eyes flashed:

‘What do yo’ want?’

Donnie usually spoke first, making his request against a blank stare. But this time he was stopped dead by abrupt rage in the collier’s face as if, should it turn out he had been dragged from his breakfast for nothing, he would swing the hand from behind and wield a pick over Donnie’s head, ready to bring down a well-aimed prostrating blow.

‘Any old rags, mate?’

The collier’s scarred features took time off to consider. Then: ‘Ar,’ he bawled, ‘tek me’ — and slammed the door at his face.

He wondered whether his brothers were having better luck. A whippet, entombed in some distant kennel, howled dismally at the general condition of the rheumatic world. Rain belted down, yet the sun shone in Donnie’s brain of day-dream and optimism, illuminating the sudden find of lead-rolls outside some half-built church he would never pray in, laughing like mad with his brothers as they set upon the gold-find with axe and crowbar, stuffing sack after sack which would weigh on their shoulderbones till they felt sick with lugging it to the lorry. A raindrop running down to his ear caused him to scrub away the itch of it. He missed half a dozen houses due to his daydream. The collier’s rebuff seemed so comic that he thought to tell it later to his brothers for a laugh.

He knocked at another door, and a woman opened it, a cherubic tow-headed kid making an aeroplane out of the collection leaflet. She held an old brass kettle: ‘If you’ve come for scrap, you can tek this, my lad.’

‘How much do you want for it?’ he said, thinking it better than nothing.

‘Nay, lad, I’ll tek nowt from thee, seeing as tha’s had such a lot to put up with in the war, while many a one was staying at home.’

He looked modestly into the kitchen beyond. ‘That’s the way it is.’

‘It’s a bleddy shame they don’t look after you better when you’ve been all them miles away fighting for ’em, it is and all.’

‘Well,’ Donnie said, ‘as long as they fill their own pockets. I was in a Jap prison camp seven years. I’ve still got scars all over me, and one of my lungs is gone. I don’t like to think about it. There’s many a night I wake up all of a groan and sweat. And what did we get when we come back? Twenty-six bob a week. No good to a living soul. But I’ve got eleven kids now, so I suppose I’m good for something.’ He stuffed the kettle into his sack, left his thanks as the door closed. He heard her going through the parlour muttering loudly to the uncomprehending kid: ‘Seven years! Poor bogger. Seven — that’s funny, though.’

At the end of the street stood a red-bricked chapel, a body-snatcher guarded by railings and fronted by wide steps leading to the principal door. It was a chapel no longer, but a get-together of shabby drill-hall and dead-beat billiard saloon. Donnie found a nub-end pinned under the crossband of his cigarette case. Maybe they’re clearing the place out, he thought, for it looked as if it were about to fall flat on its face. He pushed open a side gate and walked up the entry. The backyard hadn’t seen sunshine since its walls were built. Windows were wooden-barred and barbed-wired. Broken bottles spiking the top bricks turned it into a well-defended backyard of the house of God. Donnie noticed a row of dustbins, each caved-in or holed, which several experienced kicks showed to be empty. He grunted at the dampness, a dispiriting waterlogged atmosphere more tied to an outlaw’s heart than any other smell and feeling.

He glanced back for a last check-up. Under an awning of corrugated tin stood a canvas kitbag tied at the neck. He went over and, giving it an immediate kick, expected the unresistant cave-in of cardboard and paper, but was not surprised (already suspecting that it looked too good for any old rubbish) when his boot hit against some kind of metal. He thumped it for being so puzzling, closed his fingers over corners of whatever was inside. Undo the string, you silly bogger, and have a look — an irritating and unrewarding job, for his fingernails broke at the first try. He stood back a moment: the cord was knotted and double-knotted, and shrunk and solidified in the damp air.

He was bemused, at what a kitbag meant to many but had never meant to him. Gunner Donnie Hodson — you didn’t keep your kitbag long: came on leave one day and never went back — stayed by the fireside in a long paralysis of fear and rage, smoking what fags you could cadge until your mother chucked you out and told you to get some money or clamb. Them was funny times. One day he was at the kitchen table when knocks — back and front — sounded from the wide-awake street. He was hungry for his tea, holding a sharp knife and not knowing whether to cut his throat or a slice of bread. His mother did what was needed of her. Donnie ran up to the attic, coolly setting the skylight down when once on the roof. And there he was, hanging out on the slates like Monday washing, under the summer sky and counting German planes that slid over low and let rip with machine-guns. Shellbursts like dirty wool seemed to be exploding not many feet from his head. The sirens were moaning like a runover cat, and it was hard to imagine anyone in his right mind out on the roof — so the coppers must have thought. But Donnie wasn’t in anybody’s mind except his own, which turned out to be right enough, and his instinct told him one sure thing, that it was better to risk a bullet from German planes than go back through that skylight and get parcelled off to the army again. ‘What did mam do with them two full cups of tea she’d just poured? Did she sling ’em in the sink before the coppers could see ’em?’ — were his sole speculations as shrapnel (from AA shells he would have been firing had he not been where he was) zipped viciously by like petrified dead sparrows onto the slates, breaking some, others ricochetting, one piercing the skylight window that finally stopped the coppers’ courage from thinking he was out there.

Looking back on this one uncomfortable glory of his life, he couldn’t help but laugh. Nothing from the past was sad, no matter how awful it might have been at the time. Only the present was classifiable into good or putrid, but every incident that he could remember was laughable for the simple reason that it was past, and that he had survived it without mortal damage. While Donnie was sitting on the rooftop with shrapnel and bullets pissing all around, his mother was being questioned by coppers and redcaps, unable to speak out where he was, yet wanting to in order to get him off that dangerous roof.

They got him in the end, cornered as a rat by bigger rats in a cul-de-sac one dark night, a suitcase of plundered whisky at his feet. Dave had got away, rattled his longer legs among streets at different angles to Donnie’s, until dark distance drew him into a maw of safety. Donnie was pounced on by a couple of stalwart Specials and manhandled to the police station: ‘We’re helping our country’ — bump — ‘and trying to do our bit,’ — bump — ‘but you blokes are worse than the bloody Germans’ — bump-thud. ‘You want bleeding-well exterminating, then maybe we could get this war finished’ — crash. No bail (the black eyes and cuts had disappeared by quarter-sessions time). Twenty-two cases to be taken into consideration, sir. Three years, then. And let that be a lesson to you. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

That was the only way to get the war over. Go and fight, they had said. What for? Show me what I’ve got to fight for, and then I’ll go. You can’t though, can you? There’s nobody in this bloody country can show me that. ‘You’re a pacifist,’ Dave dinned into him. ‘Like me. See?’ It was still the middle of the war when they let him out of jail and turned him over to the redcaps, so he hopped it a second time, and uniform number two burst into paraffin-flame from the bedroom grate.

In 1945 the redcaps collared him for the final bout, made him pay for having kept out of the war as successfully as they had by declaring on him a private and spiteful war of their own. Even that terrible time was laughable. He had wakened up one fine day to find himself between the clean sheets of heaven. ‘A mental home,’ the man in the next bed grinned. Marvellous. No more bread-and-water, cells, packdrill, kicks and punches and buckets of freezing pond-scum splashing against thin denims. You had to laugh, at what men who should have been your own mates in factory or on building site did to you. You just couldn’t help laughing, though you could bet that some bastards had put them up to it as well. Such a grin gave you toothache on the lips. It was funny, too funny even to tell anyone about, and so Donnie had a reputation for being soft, almost daft and, unlike his brothers, slow in ways of self-preservation. He was also reluctant with his speech, dense it was said, often unable to make his opinions fit the subject under discussion, or make them influence it when they did. His family and friends began to think that such attitudes had been there from birth, to be pointed out and taken advantage of.

The rain was a mere drizzle, easier to accept and fight, and he shook himself to regard the actual physical bulk of the kitbag. This one stored rubbish — a useful purpose to what most carried. He searched for another cigarette, but found none. ‘I’ll ask Dave to lend me one when I get back. I’d better start moving, or they’ll wonder where I’ve got to.’

He pulled the bag forward, held it from the ground by unyielding strings. It weighed heavy and, replacing it, a piece of cardboard finished its journey and slid onto the stones behind. Torn from a shoebox and crayoned on the white surface, the words he held up were: TO BE COLLECTED.

His heart bumped. By who else but him? A find, it looked like. Who’d have thought it in all this drenching rain? It was meant for the scrapman to pick up and relieve whoever had left it of an unwanted rubbish-burden. It felt like old metal against his boot, a mixture of bits and bobs no doubt, that would need sorting but hadn’t been considered valuable enough to sell. It was no use sorting it now: he pictured his brothers doing that like vultures later, cursing him, he shouldn’t wonder, because the stuff — after his dreams of a unique find — wasn’t worth much after all. Still, it was marvellous to get something. He spat on both palms and honed them well, lifted the bag onto his broad shoulders and lugged it out into the street, a miracle that such a light heart supported it.

Most of their time back at the lorry had been spent cursing Donnie — ‘the dilat’ry bastard’ — for dawdling, when from their vantage point of the high cab they saw him staggering along the street with what looked like a treasure of a load. Old rags didn’t weigh that much, for Donnie was a carthorse, a man of iron never known to flinch or tire under the most back-breaking weights. So what could it be and where had he clicked to be shouldering such heavy responsibility?

‘Trust old mental to get all the luck,’ Bert said. A grateful feeling lurked somewhere behind his scowl, though he could only show it by feeling envious. ‘We didn’t even get a bleddy claprag between us. Where did you find it?’ he bawled.

‘From a church.’

The metal was all sharp elbows, dug corner after merciless corner into the muscle of Donnie’s shoulders. The pressure had now passed aching point, become pain — fiery and unbearable. At Bert’s abrupt question, though only a few yards from the lorry, he let the sack roll over his head and crash logwise on the wet pavement. It pulled his new cap off: ‘Can’t you bleddy-well wait till I get to the lorry?’ he shouted angrily at Bert. Dave was helping him to carry it there.

Bert hung back, opening and closing the blade of his jack-knife. The crash sounded tinny, like kids’ toys hammered together to take up less room — but Donnie wouldn’t know the difference. Old wool-nut thought all metal a miracle of gold and silver, and only leapt into life at the noise it made. Which perhaps was a good thing for a bloke on this job, for look how he’d toted that sack from God knew where. Bert slid to the pavement when all work was done, snapping strings with his razorsharp knifeblade.

‘Steady-on,’ Donnie cried. ‘Give me a chance to get the bleddy thing down. You’ll slice my finger off if you aren’t careful.’ He stood back, sullen while they ravaged his prize. Bert started to unthread the cord through each eye-hole, but was beaten to it by nimble, systematic Dave. All three fixed their eyes on it at the same time.

Dave held it as he must at some time have been taught to during his various brief stays with the army: left hand under the barrel a little behind the spout, arm out at a sufficient angle to give rest to the magazine — which he instinctively slotted on; right hand at the trigger; and skeleton-butt under his arm. Then it swivelled downwards, mouth pouting to the pavement.

‘Christ!’ he said, all breath shocked from him. Bert balanced a slender tin casing of magazine on his palm. It was full of bullets. ‘What sort of a chapel did you say you got it from?’ He was amused, as much at Dave’s tight-set face seeing prison and death and all the discomforts that oscillated between for possessing such a thing, as at the sight of the Sten machine-gun he unwillingly toted. Donnie was the least surprised or perturbed, still thought of it as scrap, guns and magazines to be sledge-hammered into solid unrecognizable slabs and flogged at the junkyard. Nobody would know. It had been done before; and they might be as much as a quid each to the good.

Dave turned on him: ‘You barmy bleeder. You crazy bastard. Bringing things like this!’

Maybe he was putting on a rare joke, though the pained face made Donnie suspect him in earnest. ‘What do you mean? What are you calling me like that for?’

A woman, carrierbags hooked to each hand, came around the corner from the main road. Dave rammed the gun under cover and they talked about last night’s film. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you found ’em in a dustbin next?’ he demanded when she had passed.

‘They was near a dustbin,’ Donnie explained, hurt at such ingratitude. ‘A card was on top of the bag saying: TO BE COLLECTED. Somebody meant it for us, I’m dead sure o’ that. It’s government surplus maybe, that’s all.’

Dave’s anguished face showed he was nowhere convinced. He set the bag down a yard from himself: ‘Carry ’em up the street again.’

‘Not me. Yo’ can do it if you like.’

‘We’ll get ten years each in bleeding jail if you don’t.’

Donnie climbed into the cab and slammed the door on himself. ‘That’s the bleddy thanks I get for struggling all that way with it.’

‘He might get nicked taking ’em back,’ Bert said. ‘We’d better dump ’em on the lorry and get shot on ’em when we come to a lonely place.’

The whole day boggered, Dave plainly saw. Would you believe it? That was the worst o’ working with batchy bleeders like Donnie. His narrowed eyes, grizzled hair and creased forehead gave an impression of forcefulness that would never break. ‘It’s looney,’ he said, yet saw reason in Bert’s advice. He slung the sack on the lorry-back. ‘All right, Bert’ — giving unrepentant Donnie a black look — ‘let’s get cracking out of here. We’ll drop ’em in a reservoir somewhere.’

Bert drove to the main road as if to go quietly from the pitch of their crime, filtered through the traffic of Hilltop and descended into the valley, eager to put distance between them and Eastwood. ‘I expect it’s only scrap though, you know.’

‘Course it is’ — a desperate note in Donnie’s voice — ‘They wouldn’t ’ave put it there if it worn’t. I don’t know. All this bother over a few bits o’ junk.’

‘You mental bastard,’ Dave cried. ‘You think it’s scrap — with ammunition? It might have been army surplus but we worn’t supposed to tek it. Anybody with a bit o’ sense would have known it. I expect you thought they put it there for us, specially? “Perhaps somebody’ll want to start a revolution,” I suppose you thought they said. “Or maybe somebody’ll want to do a bit o’ target practice at the rent man, or knock off the odd copper or two?” Christ!’ He banged his fist against the lorry door, emphasizing a decision that needed no democratic majority to force it through: ‘We’ll get rid of it somewhere past Ripley, then beat it back to Nottingham. I only hope nobody gets onto us about it, that’s all. If they do, I’ll brain you. You might want to get away from your ten kids for a few years, but I don’t.’

‘It’d be better if we could sell it though,’ Bert said. ‘I know an IRA bloke who’d give his right arm for stuff like this. Happen we could dump it somewhere, and then let him know where it is, at a price.’

Fields, hedged by mounds of stone, rose from either side of the road. Towns were left far behind. Dave turned to his brother: ‘Look, nut, if you think I’m going to get twenty years, you’re wrong.’ His hand went to the door: ‘I’m getting out.’

‘I was only joking,’ Bert said, though slowing down in case Dave really wanted to get out. But he pulled the door to and they drove on in silence, three factions as much as three brothers.

Beyond Ambergate lay tranquil countryside, low cloud and rainmist on purple inhospitable hills around the Matlocks. The road contoured into another valley, and no one spoke. Such wild land kept words penned in. Donnie’s normal face was one of open good-humoured speculation as to whether the day would yield fair loads and a living wage, but his triumphant find at the chapel (‘It couldn’t have been a chapel,’ he told himself now) gave it a self-importance that his brothers would not acknowledge; at which his face gave way to gloom, like some forlorn box-headed terrier that retrieves a succulent rabbit for its poaching master but feels it change into a rat while the smile of achievement awkwardly persists.

Rain hung, a carbide sheet of blue above grey-green rolling hills around. Trees were bowed down by the weight of water, bare twigs shining silver with it, the soaked smell of the green and soily earth more extreme and frightening than the rancid stink of protective streets. Hopeful Donnie assumed that every wayside house was a missed opportunity of a brass bedstead or heap of iron and lead. But Dave sat immersed in the webbed roads of his map, and Bert’s eyes showed only a flat concern for his firm motionful steering along the highway.

Dave grunted them into a by-road and Bert silently obeyed, putting the lorry at grinding first gear for a steep incline. The high-roaring life of the engine plunged Donnie’s memory back to another faraway lorry that, in the depths of a smoke-screen, increased speed regardless of what might be in its way. He was going on foot through a paraffin midnight, each quiet step betrayed by a choking cough, delayed by a case bulging with silk stockings snaffled from a shop hidden within the bull’s-eye of a few dozen shrouded streets.

On the boulevard a woman screamed, and Donnie jumped (the first time afraid that evening) thinking she was under its double wheels. He was close enough to touch her. ‘Where are you, duck?’ he called, as the unheeding vehicle thundered away. ‘Are you all right?’

The voice that answered sounded young and sweet, even behind such swearing laid on at the unthinking driver: ‘The bleddy swine might a killed me.’

‘Tek my arm,’ Donnie said. ‘I’ll see you ’ome. Did you miss your last bus?’

‘Aye,’ she answered, quick off the mark, ‘I did.’

‘What a shame,’ Donnie said, leading her along, and thinking that most likely some chap had ditched the poor gel.

Her name was Dora and, talking readily, they made a harmless couple passing the copper propping up the labour-exchange in the artificial fog. They went home to Donnie’s, and slept a sinful sweet kip together. From his attache-case Dora thought he was a nice young man, a commercial traveller perhaps (which he was but not in the way she thought) and fairly well-off when he opened the case in the morning and gave her a dozen pairs of fully-fashioned stockings; and Donnie, when they decided that same day to live together (‘I’ve got a house in Cuckney Terrace just down the road,’ she told him) deduced her to be living alone because her husband was in the Forces. Both, thinking they were on to a good thing, were disappointed. Dora found soon enough that Donnie was on the run and thieving for a living; and Donnie discovered even sooner that Dora already had four children in the house (floors and faces well-scrubbed though to receive him) and that she was separated from her husband because he was in jail. Such disappointments cancelled out, and they were happy together. Donnie stole hard to keep her and the kids, liked being the master of his house and having something to go steady for. Dora loved him and bred well so that there were three more kids by Victory Day. ‘We’ll buy the silly bleeder a dartboard, or a game of ludo,’ Dave said. ‘He thinks there ain’t owt else to do in the world but that.’

‘You’d do better to whitewash his cellar out and knock a few bunks together,’ Bert answered. ‘If it worn’t already full up.’

One of the children could not have been Donnie’s, not well enough synchronized with his spells in prison, but he accepted it just the same. This, he found, lowered him still further in the eyes of his brothers: ‘She’s done it on him, the poor bogger. If she was my woman I’d paste her from one end of Hyson Road to the other,’ he heard Bert say once when he came in from the bookie’s because he’d lost his money sooner than intended. ‘I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if none o’ them kids are ’is,’ his mother was saying. ‘She’s an old bag, and nowt else,’ Dave said sternly as Donnie came in through the scullery. ‘How else could she have lived, though, while he was in clink?’ was the final verdict.

Riding along with a load of hot guns, all silent because they’d share a life sentence if caught, Donnie felt they were ripping away his credit for what could be a profitable find. His grievance came from the memory of his desperate yet strangely happy years during the war, and of what he had overheard after his bad luck on the horses which only now did he relate to himself — and so long ago, he thought, beaming his mortally injured sight on the set visages of Dave and Bert.

A sun blade made the road shine like a roll of liquorice. Clouds moved above wooded spurs and crags of the lonely Pennines whither Dave had guided them by constant reference to his magic map. ‘They have wicked weather out here,’ he said. ‘Only a month ago the snow nearly covered the telegraph poles. I’d rather be in streets.’ It was a long time since they passed a house, and none were now in sight. The woods seemed dead and February bare, yet when Bert stopped the lorry under a hill bushes showed spring buds like the green tips of novelty matchsticks.

They got down, stamped their feet morosely against wind and the smell of open country beating up their limbs; it felt clean and agreeable to the stale stink of cab and backyards. Dave led them over a five-barred gate and down a bank. Bert carried the kitbag to a large pool of stagnant water, hurled a stone towards the middle that landed with a healthy penetrating sound: gluck! ‘It’s deep. Be good enough to swim in, if it worn’t so cold.’

Dave, slashing the bag with a penknife, looked at Donnie as if he would slash him next: ‘All we want now is for a copper to come by. Think of the time and petrol we’ve lost on this stunt.’

Shirtsleeves rolled up, Bert rubbed the beneficial ointment of wind into his white heavily veined skin. ‘It’s like a holiday. Leave Donnie be,’ he said. ‘We know how you feel by now.’

Donnie stood by the rising ground, feeling the injustice of their so-called democracy. His great effort of the rain-soddened morning had come to this! — slung into deep and muddy water, sunk out of sight when they had stood to make a fiver each — which he for one could do with, Dora being pregnant and soon to leave for the hospital. He’d often thought how this ragman job was too low paid, having such a mob of kids to look after, but the family allowance helped, and it was better than working for a gaffer no matter how low the money. He had been the one brother reluctant to part with his hundred pounds, giving in eventually because without it there’d be no business — something they had willingly forgotten. And now they’d got the sort of find often imagined with glowing eyes and pints suspended they were chucking it away, just like that. ‘Come on,’ Dave cried. ‘Give a hand to get rid o’ this stuff.’

Donnie couldn’t move. ‘I’m for keeping it. What about yo’, our Bert?’

‘I’m snatched,’ Bert said, struggling back into his coat. He turned to Donnie: ‘I don’t know. Honest to God, I don’t.’

Dave picked out the top Sten gun. ‘I do. It’s got to be slung away. If it ain’t I’m not getting in that lorry again. I’d rather walk back to Nottingham.’ His words burned with righteousness, and of all three he had the clearest ideas of right and wrong (though he didn’t always abide by them), which made him a hard man to argue with. At election times Donnie never voted; Bert sometimes dragged himself between one pint and the next; Dave always did, being at heart a simple political man and swearing at others whom he suspected of not having bothered. With him an idea once expressed stuck until a new one took its place, causing the old one to fuse with the hard core of his personality.

Bert turned to Donnie: ‘I reckon we’d better sink ’em. They aren’t any good to us. Too risky to keep, as well’ — an opinion sending Dave into action before Donnie tried once more to swing the vote. The first gun sailed to the middle of the water. It sank. Another followed. Bert joined in, threw a gun and tailed it with a hollow magazine.

Donnie strolled casually over and picked out a gun, as if to help, then sorted through rusting magazines until he reached one that was loaded. He clipped it onto his gun, the sound hidden by resplendent waterspouts caused by the hard work of his brothers. ‘This is what they should a done in the war,’ Dave said.

‘I thought that was what yo’ did,’ Bert laughed.

‘I mean everybody though.’

‘Maybe they will in the next one.’

‘There wain’t be a next one, or time to do this if there is’ — Dave spun the last weapon as high as it would go, the two of them drawing their heads back — seeing bordering rocks, treetops and a gulf of cloud — to follow the upward and downward flight. ‘A bull’s-eye,’ Bert shouted, blinking at its impact. ‘Chock in the middle.’

Dave gave in to a rare bout of self-praise. ‘I can’t help it if I’m a crackshot!’

A savage, sharp explosion burst through the air, a needling crack of white fire directly connected with the chip that flew from the moss-covered rock a bare yard from Bert’s foot. The shot itinerated every crevice-point of the hills, came back again and again, each time with diminishing vigour.

The sight of Donnie holding the machine-gun, as if he had been a professional guerilla all his life, sent a pain through Dave’s feet that seemed to come from the soil he stood on, fastening him to earth and shrubs like a charge of electricity high enough to cause a rheumatic pain but not to sling him a dozen yards away. He was afraid to move, to try and rid himself of it in case it would increase — or for fear a bullet from Donnie’s gun would strike him all unbeknowing — smack in the guts. He stared at the apparition of his brother, was startled by Bert calling: ‘Drop it, Donnie, you daft sod. Come on, knock it off. You’ll do some damage if you aren’t careful.’

‘That’s right,’ Dave said, and to Bert: ‘You should a kept your bloody eye on him.’ The derogatory tone, stabbing through to Donnie’s incensed brain, brought forth a further terrifying shot. Dave and Bert scampered towards different boulders beyond the pool. ‘Why don’t you mind what you’re saying?’ Bert hissed across to Dave. Then in a commanding yet considerate tone: ‘Donnie, put that bleeding gun down. I’ll get mad in a minute.’

Donnie’s fallen cap lay at the edge of the pool, half in and half out of the water like a turtle emerging for a breath of air. His face was rigid, all lines and muscles clamped into place by the grip of his teeth. His hair blew in the wind. ‘You bastards’ — a tearful implacable roar — ‘you rotten lousy bastards.’

‘What’s bitin’ you?’ Bert shouted. ‘What ’ave we done to you?’

‘I’ll kill you both,’ he responded loudly, his brain shut hard against the wind, and all their talk. ‘You’ve ’ad it your own way too long. I’ll show you whether I’m kidding or not. That’s what Dora’s allus telling me, that you put on me. Only I ain’t believed her up to now.’

‘Pack your game up,’ Dave said reasonably, ‘and let’s get cracking. We’ve lost enough time as it is.’

‘Chuck that gun in the water,’ Bert ordered. ‘Or I’ll get mad, our Donnie.’ The sun came out and, standing between them, gave Bert confidence to move nearer Donnie. He knelt at the kitbag to fold it: We’d better tek this with us and burn it. We don’t want anybody to find it.’

‘I suppose not,’ Dave winked.

‘You bastards,’ Donnie said. ‘You think you’re the bosses and can get away with everything.’ His eyes were set on them, unmoving, as hard as the spout of the ever-pointing gun. ‘You should a kept them Stens and not thrown ’em away. You’ll be sorry you wasted ’em like that one day.’

‘I told you it was dangerous,’ Dave said. ‘Our Bert said so as well. You don’t want to go to clink for ten years, do you? I don’t, anyway, I know that much. What would Dora do if you got sent down? Eh?’

Donnie pressed a foot forward. ‘I don’t give a fuck for owt now. I’ll do you both in.’

‘Put it away,’ Dave shouted. ‘You cranky sod.’

Bert eyed him coolly: ‘If you do owt daft, you’ll swing.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘You will. Wain’t he, Dave?’ — nonchalantly.

‘Not much he wain’t. He’ll get my fist as well when I catch hold of him.’

Bert was nearer now, pushing the spacious kitbag over his boots in a kneeling-down position and easing his feet forward while he talked: ‘I know a bloke in the army had his arm shot off, only by accident, but the bloke who done it got ten years. I reckon he deserved it though: an arm’s an arm, and a pension’s no good to anybody. I don’t like guns being pointed at me or Donnie, so you’d better drop it; it brings my cough back, and I feel bad for days then. I get laid-up and earn no dough, so stop it.’

‘You never listen to what I say,’ Donnie complained, crashing in on Bert’s monologue. ‘You think I’m daft. Two on to one. That’s how it is all the time. I’ve only got to say: “Let’s do this,” and you two rotten bastards allus vote it down. But my share in this lorry’s the same as yourn, you know. You forget that, you do an’ all.’

‘I never say it ain’t,’ Bert reassured him. ‘You know I don’t’ — forward again, still closer. Dave, watching, wondered how it was going to end — ‘I’m allus on your side, but you forget that as soon as I see fit to vote with Dave once in a while. Don’t he, Dave?’

‘That’s what I tell him.’

‘You remember that time you wanted to tek Dora and the kids on an outing to Gunthorpe, and Dave said we couldn’t afford the time, and that we should collect some stuff from Derby instead? I voted with you then. So you won, and all your tribe had a smashing day by the Trent.’

Dave backed him up: ‘Course they did. He’s a madhead though, wain’t listen to anybody.’

He was deeply hurt, accused of disloyalty. ‘Yes I do,’ was all he could think of.

‘No you don’t. If you do, put that gun down and prove it. You’ve already made enough noise to bring all the coppers of Derby onto us, and I don’t want to see yo’ nor any on us copped. Come on, I’m clambed to death. Aren’t yo’, Bert?’

Dave imagined a reasonable tone would now creep into their discussion, then: ‘I’m going to count to seven,’ Donnie said slowly, ‘and when I’ve counted seven I’m going to empty this magazine into the pair of you. Then we’ll see who’s got a vote and who ain’t. One, two, three’ — loud like bullets already flying, a supercharged tone of voice he had often heard ordering him about, but had never been able to use himself.

Bert broke in. ‘Donnie, you rat’ — and moved closer, covered by his ruse of the kitbag. Dave stood, graven.

‘Four, five’ — slow and definite, each echo overriding Bert’s plea, moving the gunspout now in a circular pointing motion that, though not making for accuracy, gave fate a chance to operate and seemed more menacing. ‘Donnie, chuck it,’ Dave yelled. ‘You can have the bleeding lorry, but drop that gun.’ Bert had stopped moving, was fastened by Donnie’s eyes.

‘Six, Seven!’

Nothing happened. ‘Who are you kidding?’ Bert said, standing up.

Donnie grinned. ‘You thought I meant it, didn’t you? Well I do. But if you think I’m going to do it when you expect it though, you’re both bleddy-well wrong.’ Bert’s senses were fixed hard between guile and humour, and he said with a smile: ‘Drop that rod, and I’ll strip stark naked and swim in to get them guns out, one at a time — then we’ll flog ’em to the IRA. Eh? What do you think o’ that, then?’

It made no impression against Donnie’s maniacal stare. Without warning, his arms lifted for the aim.

Bert fell to the ground, flattened like a spread-out frog. Dave followed, keeling over like a post, low-current electricity of fear moving like a threat through his limbs. Donnie’s arms spun like propellers working in competition, and after several illogical movements both gun and magazine somehow parted and leapt free of his swinging arms, falling into the water. On lifting their heads — a broad margin of some seconds after the splash — they saw Donnie widely grinning.

‘Oh you should a seen yer! Christ, you should a seen yer! Frightened to death, the pair of you. What a treat! Never in all my born days …’

They ran at him, wild for vengeance, and before they reached him Donnie knew it was no use making out it had been a joke. Gaiety withered on his face.

‘You swine,’ Dave screamed, gripping his waist and dragging him down. He had wanted to smash Donnie’s life out, had promised himself the marvellous vicious treat of it while petrified by the Sten in such crazy hands — but a relatively harmless grip was all he could give now that the time had come. Bert found Donnie’s head from out of the scuffle, and thumped him between the eyes in a business-like way, hard. ‘You cranky bastard, doing a thing like that.’

In spite of smoke-stacks and colliery headstocks the distant landscape was clear: sun out to stay and clouds lingering only to the cold watery north. Bert manoeuvred the lorry like a madman, light hearted now that their incriminating load had been cast off. The lorry, it seemed, was a sort of zip mechanism causing the road to fasten-off the hills behind them as they descended. Dave sang snatches of songs they had beaten out together in last Saturday’s pub, the map crushed and stained under his muddy boots. Donnie sat between them, smiling, his face dirty, hand at last taken from the swollen eye sustained in the final settlement at the pool. Dave put an arm around his shoulders, pulled him close, hugged him: ‘Old barmy sod. Old madhead’ — yet with a certain deference that Donnie was too happy, and Bert too careful at the corner before Tipley, and Dave too close to it, to notice.

Donnie pulled away. ‘Less of the barmy,’ he threatened, as if still holding the Sten.

‘Hark at him,’ Dave sang back. ‘Scarface. Al Capone. It’s a good job we got rid o’ them guns, or he’d a bin down at Barclays tomorrow asking for a loan.’

‘Bogger off,’ Donnie retaliated, though laughing with them at such a Robin Hood picture and grateful that it saved him feeling foolish for having stuck them up. ‘I wouldn’t do owt as daft as to rob a bank.’ Here was a story they could talk and laugh about for ever among themselves, without being able to tell it to another and so mock Donnie with.

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Dave said. ‘In a way maybe we should a kept one o’ them guns. If there’s a war and they come to call us up we could take to the hills with it. Mow down a few Civil Defence bastards on the way. All three on us, wi’ the lorry. We’d never get caught.’

Donnie was indignant. ‘Now hark at who’s talking. Christ! That’s what I was trying to tell you back there. It’s too bleddy late now.’

Dave’s imagination drew back, having touched on some too open wound. He was the calm and thoughtful leader once more. ‘Forget it. I’m only kidding.’

‘Perhaps we should ’ave though,’ Bert said, feeling for the crumpled kitbag between his legs, aiming punches that swerved the lorry from one side of the house-lined street to the other. ‘We could a kept two or three. Donnie was right.’

‘No he worn’t,’ Dave said, but quietly. ‘And I’m telling the pair of you — that you don’t know owt about no guns — that you’ve never seen any. Forget ’em, see?’

‘They’ll never find ’em,’ Bert said.

‘What a bloody time we ’ad though,’ Dave laughed, nudging Donnie.

‘I wonder if Dora’s had her kid yet?’ Bert asked, spitting out of the window. ‘I can see owd Donnie ending up better off than any of us. He’ll be sitting back like a sheik while his twenty kids bring their wage packets back from the factory every week.’

‘It’s not due for a day or two,’ was all Donnie said. Drab windswept houses funnelled them up the hill, and dinner could be detected journeying from gas-ovens to tables of waiting children home from school. ‘It’s only one o’clock,’ Bert said, stopping at the marketplace, ‘but I feel as if a week’s gone by since this morning.’

‘Shall we eat here, or in Heanor?’ Dave wanted to know. Smells from a snackbar drifted over the cobbles as a bus conductor opened the door and stood fastening his silver-buttoned coat over a just-fed belly.

‘Here,’ Bert opted, ‘I’m clambed.’

‘I reckon we should go to Heanor,’ Donnie said. ‘It ain’t far off.’ Bert said they could eat just as well where they were, so Donnie turned to Dave: ‘What about yo’? At that place in Heanor you can get a big plate o’ stuff for a couple o’ bob.’

Bert pulled the door shut. ‘Let’s make our bleddy minds up.’ Cigarettes were lit to relieve the strained atmosphere of voting. Fingers drummed hard on the drumsounding door. Dave’s long face made up its mind, yet no sign was showed of a decision: ‘Heanor.’

Even on the second syllable Bert had given in and pulled out the choke, and they were rolling down the hills again towards Eastwood. Once a majority vote was reached it became a unanimous decision. A hard wind drove tension clear of the cab. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ Donnie said. ‘It was a scream.’ He laughed until Dave told him to get on with it then. ‘Well, I went to this house at Eastwood, before I found the guns, and a collier comes to the door, a great big bastard still in his helmet and pit-muck, his trousers patched and his vest in tatters. “What do yo’ want?” he bawls out at me. I thought he was going to smash me with the pick he’s got in his hand. So I says: “Got any old rags, mate?” and he looks at me for half a minute, then says, “Ar, TEK ME!” and slams the door in my face.’

It was the best joke in years: three crimson faces choking behind the windscreen of the descending lorry. Bert pulled into the side of the road and switched off, tears flowing from all but Donnie, who knew it was a good story, but wasn’t paralysed by it. When the lorry started again he felt happy — in spite of the half-soaked cap (rescued at the last minute from the pool) whose damp side ate through to his hair — singing to himself because Dora might have another boy. He still didn’t know why he’d insisted that they eat in Heanor because, all said and done, it didn’t matter to him where they ate, as long as he was able to fill his aching guts with something.