Jog On Fat Barry (24 page)

“I don’t go in for pets or parasites,” he said, “And I’d cut off my own ears and eat them in a sandwich before I’d sell a Londoner that. And anyway, business is doing just fine with its pork chops, legs of lamb, and steak & kidney pies, thank you very much.”

Sometime around 1952, Alfie Bath got flattened by a heifer in a field at Micklepage Farm, a mile or so southwest of Sedgwick Castle. The field hand who found him told police the cow’s skull had been smashed in. Wallace said Alfie had hit it earlier that morning with a sledgehammer, like he usually did. Only somehow it fell on him. It was dark; Alfie might have stumbled, but there was nothing Wallace could do: the cow was too heavy for him to shift, and its crushed-in skull gave the game away. So he had it on his toes quick smart, before Farmer Giles filled his arse with shot.

Wallace started to take his son Jack out with him after that. And if a job was ever too big for the two of them to do on their own, Albert sent me along. Jack and me were the same age and soon mated up. He was my exact opposite, physically: a gifted footballer that could monkey up any drainpipe no matter how high it went. Wallace taught us how to drive the van and siphon petrol; said he’d show us how to swing the sledgehammer next, but then the government went and ended restrictions on the sale of meat and bacon, and with rationing done and dusted, Wallace ended his life of crime to become a conductor on the trolleybus.

Since there was no more sneaking about in the dead of night with Wallace, Jack and me started to do little things on our own. We robbed poor boxes in the local churches and stole eggs and cheese from the United and Express Dairy milk floats. We even robbed the trolleybus that Wallace was working on using the Walther PPK pistol my dad brought back from the war—after we’d agreed to divide the money with Wallace, that is. Jack and me left school the following year, five days before Ruth Ellis was executed at HMP Holloway. It only took the jury fourteen minutes to find Ellis guilty of murder, but my mum said she only shot David Blakely after he’d kicked her in the stomach and caused her to miscarry. And everyone in the butcher shop agreed with her.

“She should’ve said nothing when they asked her if she’d meant to do it,” Albert said. “Because there’s no point in telling the truth when telling the truth only gets you in trouble.”

By the time summer came to an end in 1956, Jack and me were working at Battersea Fun Fair and beginning to build a reputation for ourselves in North London. Albert suggested I learn a trade, and said he knew a bloke who knew a bloke at the bus depot in Chalk Farm. And for two pigs and half a lamb that Albert had dressed, the bloke took me on as an apprentice Fitter & Turner. But all I ever did was make the tea, and wash buses, and sweep floors, and place bets at the bookmaker’s for conductors and drivers. So I packed it in and went back to work with Jack.

Jerry Winston and his brother Alvin operated the Big Dipper and Rifle Range, and Jack and me worked with one or the other until just after Easter. That was when Jerry went home unexpectedly one Tuesday afternoon and caught Jack in bed with his missus: Jack had been giving her one since Christmas. Jerry said he was going to teach Jack a lesson, but it was Jerry who got taught. Jack kicked him down three flights of stairs, along Anhalt Road, and right over Albert Bridge, while Mrs. Winston followed every step of the way in nothing but a negligee. She begged Jack to stop, and things might’ve been all right if Jack had done, but he forced Jerry to jump into the river, even though Jack knew Jerry couldn’t swim. And Jack would’ve been up for murder, if a bargeman on Codogan pier hadn’t pulled Jerry out just as he was going under for the fourth and last time. And that is word for word what Jerry told the police later that evening when he was sitting up in hospital. Of course, Jerry made his wife tell the court Jack had forced himself upon her, and the magistrate, having believed every word that Mrs. Winston said, sentenced Jack to two years, for being a menace to women and for grievous bodily harm.

In June 1957, while the Medical Research Council was making itself busy alleging that smoking caused lung cancer, Albert bought himself an Austin A40 panel van, and my dad took a turn for the worse. He had never really said that much after the war, but in 1957 he stopped talking altogether. He also refused to get out of bed, even when he had to use the toilet. Mum tried her best to cope, but it got too difficult and Dad had to be sectioned under the Mental Deficiency Act. Mum locked up the prefab, rented a small bedsit in North Finchley, and started to work at a cafe near the asylum they had sent him to. I moved in with Albert above the butcher shop and continued building on the reputation that Jack and me had begun. I did small payroll robberies and stole televisions from storage warehouses. The hairdresser in Primrose Hill made me a Tony Curtis, and a few weeks later, I met a girl named Carol from the Priory Green Estate near Chapel Market. Carol was two years older than me and worked in the perfume department of Fenwick in New Bond Street. She wore a different fragrance every week and looked like Kay Kendall did in
Genevieve
. We did it the first time on a Tuesday night while Albert was at Highbury watching the Arsenal give Bolton a hiding. I was all fingers and thumbs, and Carol had to help. Worse still, it was over before it even started. But we had another go after a cup of tea, and Carol said that I was, if nothing else, very determined. Most nights after that, I’d wait for Carol outside the Fenwick staff entrance, and when she stepped out, we’d practise our love making in the back of Albert’s panel van. Before too long Carol was up the spout, and discussing marriage, and suggesting that we move in together. And Albert was all for it, because Carol reminded him of Auntie Val.

“I’d be well pleased if she had a boy,” he said.

Mum seemed pleased too. Then again, Dad was on electroshock treatment and probably anything would’ve cheered her up.

“Lock up your daughters, Albert,” Wallace said as he shook the snow off his coat. “Look what the cat’s dragged in.”

Albert glanced up from the window display to see Jack standing beside his father.

“My word,” Albert exclaimed, hurrying around the counter to grab Jack by the hand. “He went away a boy but he’s come back a man!”

Wallace wore a huge grin standing beside the son who towered over him. Jack waited a few moments before asking after me, and an hour later, we were all in The King Edward. The barmaid put our drinks on the counter. As Albert and Wallace walked to their usual table, they passed through the cloud of cigarette smoke that always hung in the air, and Jack watched the flickering daylight cutting through the haze for a moment.

“I missed this place,” he said, smiling.

Jack had always liked The Edward, and would tell anyone willing to listen that one day it would be his. It was where Wallace always drank; where Albert always drank, and where my dad always drank before the war caught up with him. Jack said he had been sorry to hear that Carol lost the baby.

“For awhile there I didn’t know what to do,” I told him. “And sometimes I still don’t.”

When I put the bag on the table, Jack looked at it and asked what it was. I said it was his; that I’d been holding it for him. He opened it up and got this puzzled look on his face.

“What, haven’t you seen £300 before?” I asked.

“What’s it for?” he asked back.

I told him it was half of what the firm had made while he was banged up—his half of
our
firm. Tears welled up in his eyes and he looked away. For a moment I thought he was going to cry. Then he said there was something he had to tell me: the reason he had ended up doing three years instead of the original two he got sentenced to.

“There were these lads at Fennamore,” he said quietly. “Big lads. Got me in the shower block… and, while they were… while they were… the screw just watched. Just stood there and fucking watched.”

Jack said the governor moved those boys to another borstal after the incident, but not the screw. So Jack put a shiv in the cunt. And that was why he did the extra year. I glanced at Wallace and Albert sitting at a table scrutinizing the racing form in the back of the
Evening
Standard
. A Teddy Boy stood at the bar flirting with the barmaid. The room was thick with the smell of sweat, and tobacco, and beer. Jack drew a heavy breath and held it in for as long as he could. And then he expelled it with a nod, as if to say, the time had come to put the past behind him.

Parliament passed the National Service Act in July 1947, and from the beginning of 1949, every able-bodied man between the ages of 18 and 26 was expected to spend twelve months in the Armed Forces, followed by five years in the Reserves. But the Cold War, the Malaya Emergency and other money problems led to the National Services Amendment Act in December 1948. The period of service was increased to eighteen months followed by four years in the Reserves. The Korean War saw the length of active service increased to two years, with time in the Reserves reduced to compensate. Thereafter, the length of service remained at two years until National Service officially ended on 31 December 1960. By that time over two million men from Britain had done their National Service: the majority of them serving in the Army. Men from Northern Ireland were excluded, and, even though no official policy exists to prove racial discrimination was at play, very few blacks were ever conscripted despite high levels of immigration during the 1950s.

Dad passed away two days after Christmas. Mum sent a telegram and the purser delivered it: “Dad died Sunday. Funeral tomorrow.” I was up on the promenade deck of the
Queen Mary
; it was snowing, and the Statue of Liberty was towering above Liberty Island in New York’s Upper Bay. I stared at those five words on the telegram for a few minutes. I wondered what my dad might’ve been like before the war. Mum never talked about him, but Albert always said he had loveliest joined-up writing. Dad was a signwriter, and Albert told me a Royal College of Art lecturer once saw something Dad had done with coloured chalk on a pavement outside the National Gallery and offered Dad a scholarship on the spot. But events sent Dad down a different path: Mum got in the family way; Germany invaded Poland, and something happened in the POW camps that not only changed him forever, but also destroyed whatever chance there may have been for me to know the man who fathered me. Jack glanced at the telegram and said we should return to England. The transatlantic crossing had been his idea. It was a send-off, if you like. Carol and me were getting married, and Jack and me were about to start our National Service: two horrible years of polishing boots and marching up and down horrible squares. Jack thought us getting away would be a nice little holiday. Only now, with Dad being dead, Jack said enjoying ourselves wouldn’t be right.

“There’s been a death in your family,” he said. “And the dead must be mourned.”

But Jack was wrong. He was dead wrong. My dad had died years ago… behind some barbed-wire fence in Germany. The man going into the ground tomorrow was a complete stranger to me. I’d already done all the mourning a son who never knew his father could be expected to do. Jack was about to say something else. But just then this rush of wind snatched the telegram out of my hand. We watched as it rose upward, then fell, and rose again, twisting and spinning in the breeze, and Jack ended up saying nothing.

When we finally got to Regan’s, I told Jack we should’ve taken a taxi, or caught the blooming subway. The bar was on Broadway, just past 111th St. on the Upper West Side, and we walked all the way from Battery Park—seven blinking miles—just because Jack wanted to see the city.

“Not out the window of a car,” he had said. “But from the ground up, mate. From the blooming ground up!”

It never stopped snowing. Bits of ice as big as halfpennies fell out of the sky. And the wind was so bitter it felt like someone was sticking needles in my eyes. Not only that, if I tried to speak, the wintry air sent pains shooting through my teeth. But it was lovely inside Regan’s.

The minimum drinking age in some states was 21, which was mad when you thought about it. Because if you could get married, have children, and do your bit on the killing fields for your country, it only seemed right that you should be able to walk into a bar and have a drink when you felt like it. But the drinking age in New York, however, was 18, and Jack and me had a drink whenever the mood took us. Manhattan was nothing like London, it was open all hours, and something was always going on. We saw
West Side Story
at the Winter Garden; Donald Byrd at The Blue Note, and The Rockettes at the Radio City Music Hall. We ate
linguine alla vongole
in Little Italy;
chuletas
with mashed
batata
in Spanish Harlem, and
zá suì
in Chinatown. I still remember what the tiny slip of paper inside my fortune cookie read: ‘Help, I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery.’