Eye of the Storm Read Free Page A

left me alone in that cell for about half an hour, though it seemed like forever. Then the sergeant unlocked the door and gave me a hell of a bollocking. He told me that if I didn’t stop thieving, I would wind up spending most of the remaining years of my life in a cell like the one I’d just left. Looking back, I could see that my father must have arranged the whole charade with the police. Nevertheless, I was so terrified by the experience that it stopped me from stealing – well, for a time, anyway.
    During the Second World War, my father had served in the Royal Navy as a signals operator in destroyers. I remember him giving me a Morse key for my birthday one year. He never tried to teach me the code, however – not that I wanted to learn it. He just wanted to practise his own Morse at home.
    He had received all sorts of medals for his war service. He was not in the least militarily minded and never took any great care of his decorations, simply leaving them lying around in the bottom of a drawer. Given to foraging anywhere in the house where I thought there might be something – especially cash – that I could use, I soon came upon them.
    As these things go, they were nothing very special, just campaign medals of the kind awarded to someone just for having been there, like the Atlantic Star. It was not until much later that I realized what being on the Atlantic convoys must have been like, and how courageous my father, and all the sailors who did that job for up to five years, when life expectancy for any of them was often measured in weeks, had been. By then, however, it was too late to undo the damage.
    I had found a pawnbroker who bought medals. Well, not exactly found, for I had actually been looking for one like him for some time, but once I had located him I became, for a time, one of his most regular customers. I used to take the medals, one at a time, down to the pawn shop, where the owner would give me a half-crown (12½ pence) for each of them. I never redeemed them, and no doubt they were sold on to some collector when the time limit for their redemption expired. I spent the money watching Manchester United play, telling myself that the medals were being used in a good cause.
    My father never knew where his medals had gone. Probably he thought they had been lost during one of our dozen or so house moves, for my mother, who had something of the gypsy in her character, was always swapping council houses and flats with other people. She’d answer adverts from similar-minded people and we’d just exchange houses. It was always within a radius of about ten miles, but we moved so often that I sometimes forgot where we lived.
    By 1958 we were halfway through this housey-housey cycle and living in Wythenshaw, a rough, sprawling council estate on the southern outskirts of Manchester. Outsiders reckoned that council-house tenants in Wythenshaw were so savage that the weak were killed and eaten. It wasn’t that bad – but it was pretty bad.
    In those days, even in rough areas, many working-class households kept a ‘best’ room set aside like a shrine in their houses. We were no exception, maintaining what we called ‘the parlour’ even though desperately short of space. There we were, a family of seven crammed into a three-bedroom terraced house. I had to sleep in a bed with my brother, my two sisters slept in another room, and my younger brother, who was at a school for the deaf and only came home at the weekends, also slept in our bed. An extra room would have made an enormous difference, yet we only went into our parlour, the ground-floor room at the front of the house, at Christmas, Easter or Whitsun. It was pristine – so spotlessly clean that you could have performed brain surgery on the floor. Meanwhile, when we weren’t asleep in bed my mother and father and the rest of us all lived in the back room like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. It was complete bedlam.
    The back room also contained the