Eye of the Storm Read Free Page B

kitchen and a large scullery sink. My mother had a washing machine with a mangle on top, into which she hand-fed the clean wet clothes. The mangle rollers would squeeze out most of the water, which whooshed into the sink. Mum would then take the damp, flattened washing and hang it to dry from a wooden airer fixed to the ceiling, which could be raised and lowered by a rope that ran over pulleys. She spread newspapers on the carpet to catch the drips. On washing days we’d all sit watching television, peering round hanging clothes. Everything was dripping wet, and, coupled with the heat from the coal fire, the effect was like being in the jungle.
    We had a tiny back yard, half of which had been laid with crazy paving, while the other half consistied of a tiny patch of balding grass that backed on to the boundary fence and, beyond that, the playing fields of the primary school I attended. On that scrap of garden – you couldn’t dignify it with the word ‘lawn’ – my brothers and I built a den, which we used as the headquarters for a gang we recruited from among other kids in the street. Sometimes we broke into the school tuck shop and nicked packets of crisps, at others we went shoplifting biscuits from the corner store. It was not really badness. We just dared each other, as children will.
    We were bored a good deal of the time, too, and some of the traditional boys’ pastimes were closed to us. None of us was in the Boy Scouts. The scoutmaster was far too well aware of our collective reputation as tearaways to let us in; besides, we couldn’t have afforded the uniform. When the Scouts held a ‘Bob-a-Job’ week to raise funds, however, we went round the houses pretending that we were members of the local pack. We’d do the jobs all right, but we’d keep the money for ourselves.
    We got away with most of our light-fingered or dishonest activities through a combination of luck and guile. I came thoroughly unglued, however, when I was found to have been stealing from the collection box at the local Catholic church, where I was a trainee altar boy. Perhaps bothered by conscience, I took only a very small sum, but I made the mistake of buying sweets with it in one of the local shops.
    A particularly nosy neighbour of ours – curiously, I still remember her name, Kath Sykes – who lived about four doors away from us, was in the shop at the time. Next day she told my mother, ‘If you’d told me you had wanted something from the shop I would have got it for you.’ When my mother replied that she hadn’t needed anything, the eternally inquisitive Kath said that she’d seen me in there buying something at the counter. My mother knew that I had no money, and that therefore I didn’t have any reason to be in a shop unless she’d sent me to get something.
    Retribution wasn’t long in coming. When I got home Mum called me to her and asked me, ‘Peter, what were you doing in the shop?’ There was a note of sternness I didn’t much care for. I looked away and said, ‘Nothing.’
    Perhaps it was the result of a Catholic upbringing, but whenever I lied I used to go bright red. Now I felt my face and neck flushing. My mother took one look and said, ‘You’re lying to me. Now, what were you doing in that shop?’ So I told her that I’d bought sweets with money I’d found in the street on my way back from the church. Without a moment’s pause back came the answer, ‘You’ve stolen the collection money.’
    My denials were hopeless, for the more I protested the more obvious it became that I was lying. When she finally got me to own up she dragged me off to the priest. He gave me a terrible telling off, full of sin and damnation, and sacked me as a trainee altar boy. This had been a fairly good number because I could earn about ten shillings (50 pence) for helping him at weddings, of which there seemed to be quite a number. So I lost a good job for stealing threepence.
    I can still hear that priest telling me that I