“Lump of wood? It was a small splinter, lad. And those funny faces you were pulling, what were those all about?”
“I was holding back the pain, sir.”
“Gurning more like. Well, the less said about that the better. As I was going to say, before you interrupted, take these to Mr Mears. He’s waiting outside in the van to take you along to Mrs Biggins’ house. She was the kind lady who telephoned the ambulance and took care of you until they came. Run along now.”
Special Friends
“What can I do for you, Rhattigan?” asked Mr Sweet.
“I’ve come to see if I’ve any pocket money, sir.” I wasn’t hopeful.
“Pocket money? Let me see.” He pursed his lips as he ran a fat finger and a keen eye down the page of the house points ledger. “Hmm, just as I thought. You have the same as last Saturday.”
“I didn’t get any pocket money last Saturday, sir.”
“There’s a surprise.” He threw me a wry smile.
Saying nothing, I closed the office door and walked off along the corridor.
“Rhattigan!” Mr Sweet’s fat face was peering out from the doorway of his office. “Here, quickly. I want to have a word with you.”
As I entered his office, I noticed him flick the catch of the Yale lock, which didn’t bother me and I just assumed he wanted to talk to me without being disturbed.
“Sit there.” He gestured to the other chair near to his desk.
I sat facing him, wondering what he wanted a word with me about. Perhaps he’d found out that Donkey and I were loosening bricks on the exterior side wall of his office, which was hidden from view by tall green shrubbery. The fact that we’d either got no pocket money at all, or just a few coppers, had prompted us to take drastic action. And so, we’d meticulously planned our daring mission to dig our way through the outside wall into his office and rob the petty cash tin.
We’d worked out that any Friday was going to be the best time to do the robbery, because it was the day when all the pocket money and petty cash was brought in from the bank, ready to be paid out on the Saturday. We’d only been able to scrape out the dry, loose mortar around the bricks when there was no one in the office, so it had taken us a couple of weeks just to loosen and remove two bricks, only to find there was an inner wall behind the outer wall. We’d worked out that, at the rate we were going, it would take us at least two or three months to remove enough bricks from both outer and inner walls so we could crawl through into the office.
“What is your problem?” asked Sweet.
“What do you mean, sir?”
“You always seem to be in some sort of trouble?”
Because you’re all bullying bastards and you are always picking on me, sir! “I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t seem to make too many friends either. What’s that all about then?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“Is it because you can’t make friends? Or that you just don’t want to make friends?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t seem to know very much, do you?”
I know more than you, fatty! “No sir.” I gave a nonchalant shrug, though inwardly I was ecstatic that he hadn’t discovered the hole in the wall. Donkey and I had covered our tracks well and had replaced the bricks back into their original position before re-pointing the gaps with damp soil. The only way anyone would have been able to spot something amiss was if they went looking for it. And to look for it they had to know about it. And the fact that no one could possibly know about it meant they weren’t looking for it, which put us in the clear!
Never let the enemy know what you know or what you are thinking, was my motto. That way, you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone. I found it much easier to shrug and say “I don’t know” when I wanted to avoid people attempting to get inside my head. Granted, it made me look a bit less intelligent, but people are less expectant of dimwits, which was just the way I liked it.
“You know, Rhattigan, I don’t believe you are as bad or as stupid as you’re made out to be.” The corners of his mouth suddenly creased to form a slight smile, which was a first for him.
“I don’t mean to be bad, sir.”
“I believe you.”
Uh? Where was this going? “Thank you, sir.”
“So, if I gave you your pocket money right now, do you think you can be a good boy for me?”
“Yes sir!”
“Okay. Let’s see how good a boy you can be for me.” He suddenly put his dimpled hand on my bare knee and rubbed it up along my skinny thigh.
He seemed slightly nervous and I noticed a strange look pass over his face, while his eyes seemed to glaze over as his warm, sweaty hand continued to rub up and down my thigh. I felt my heart racing and an unusual thrill run down my spine, as his hand slowly crept up inside my trouser leg and fondled my goolies. I was unable to comprehend what was taking place and felt confused that it was happening. Even more confusing was the fact that I was doing nothing to stop it, as well as getting a stiffy, as I did when Mr Butterworth had done the same thing to me at Rose Hill.
“There. You see, you can be a good boy, can’t you?” Sweet suddenly stood up and unzipped his trousers.
“Yes sir.”
I knew what was going to happen. As well as my dim recollection of that night at summer camp with Mr Butterworth, I’d seen it happening many times between the boys at St Vincent’s. Only a few days earlier, when I’d pushed open the door of what I thought was an empty toilet, I saw Tony Palmer chewing on Dave McGuire’s banana-shaped mickey. A few of the older boys had tried to persuade me to let them bum me, or give them a gobble, or toss them off, but I had always resisted their advances. But now, as I watched Sweet pull out his long mickey and put it to my lips, I closed my eyes and automatically opened my mouth for him.
“That’s a good boy.” He moaned softly as he pushed himself deep into my mouth, moving his body in and out. And then, after what seemed like a minute or so passing, I opened my eyes but couldn’t see much because his large hairy frame was pressed up to my face. I had to put a hand out to prevent myself from almost choking as he began to roughly push himself to the back of my throat.
“Just suck.” He stopped moving and held a hand to the back of my head. “That’s it.”
He immediately began to make strange groaning noises and I had to stifle the laugh I felt rising inside me.
“Keep sucking.” He pressed my head firmly into his groin and moaned even more. And that’s when it suddenly dawned on me, those ghostly moans I’d heard going on in the toilet block had nothing to do with the spirit world after all. As the wave of salty liquid spurted into my mouth, I gagged and felt the tears welling up in my eyes. Sweet held my head tight into him for a few more moments before releasing his grip on me.
“This is our secret, just between me and you. Do you understand, Rhattigan?” he said as he did up his flies.
I could only nod in agreement as I attempted to swallow the taste away.
“Here.” He plucked half a crown out of the money box and placed it into my hand. “You and me can be friends from now on. Do you want that?”
“Yes sir.”
“And if you keep being a good boy for me, we’ll get on like a house on fire, you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded, not having the faintest idea of the consequences of my submission to him that day.
Allowed out on Saturdays to go down to the local sweetshop, I hurried out of the main gates of St Vincent’s, managing to catch up with Donkey and the rest of the gang piggy-back riding along the road. Squinty Cruikshank was on Donkey’s back and Norman Butler was riding on the back of Bunter Barnes. Stuttering Pete Collins was a few yards behind them, galloping on an invisible horse and neighing loudly as he vigorously whipped it!
I was toying with the i
dea of telling the others about what had just taken place. But the thought was only a fleeting one. And in any case, the biggest lesson learned to date was that secrets shared were no longer secrets. Also, if I did open my gob and tell them what had happened, I was worried that they, too, would look for a way into Sweet’s affections, such was our desire to be wanted and loved.
“Pete! Pete!” I called out to the horseless jockey whacking his own buttocks. Readying himself for me, Collins crouched down so I could jump on to his back and we galloped after the others.
Sting in the Tale
Every Saturday afternoon without fail, half the boys from St Vincent’s would cram inside the local confectionery shop, wanting to spend all their pocket money in one go before they either lost it or had it stolen from them. That was if they hadn’t already lost it or paid it out in protection monies. The other half congregated outside the shop and waited, pushing and shoving, until all the happy customers emerged with their sweets.
Mrs Appleby, grey-haired and miserable looking, stood on the other side of the counter, her eyes darting from one pair of thieving hands to another. She always held her walking stick aloft and would bring it down on anyone she thought might be pilfering from her. A big sign in the shop window, which, oddly enough, only ever went up on Saturdays, warned:
ALL CHILDREN MUST HAVE THEIR SPENDING MONEY IN THEIR HANDS BEFORE ENTERING THIS SHOP!
This, according to her, was to give us no good reason to be putting our hands into our pockets until we’d paid and were back outside.
Old Mr Appleby was always at the other end of the counter, weighing up the orders from the large jars of loose sweets on display. He was always cheerful and rightfully so, if the rumour was true that he had fixed the shop scales to give us fewer sweets per ounce, to compensate for the likelihood of us stealing their goods.
Rhubarb and Custard sweets were my favourites, with white Bon-Bons coming a close second. I helped myself to a jar of each and squeezed my way through the mob, pushing back outside amongst the other group waiting to come in.
Luckily for me, I’d quickly spotted the Panda car and the two policemen standing by it before I had pushed myself right out into the open, where I could have been caught red-handed. I pondered how I was going to get out of this one, and there were only two options open to me: either to slip back inside the shop and put the jars of sweets back on to the shelf, which probably would be the best thing to do, or take my chances and make a run for it.
As I wasn’t particularly bothered about doing the right thing, the only viable option was to make a run for it. But then another thought suddenly sprung to mind, prompted by the sighting of the ginger-haired idiot and biggest snitcher, Michael Burke.
He was standing just a couple of feet away with his back to me. Leaning over the shoulder of the unsuspecting moron, I dropped the jar of bon-bons into his hands, which automatically closed around it, bringing a wide smile to his face. The smile immediately vanished when I gave him an almighty shove and he stumbled out into the open. As the two coppers closed in on him, I took my opportunity to walk off up the road unnoticed, with my jar of Rhubarb and Custard sweets tucked up under my jumper. The jabbering snitch, meanwhile, attempted to convince the two coppers that it was someone else who’d handed the sweets to him, though he hadn’t seen who the culprit was. As if they were going to believe that!
Crossing over the main road further on up, I noticed the police car set off in my direction. I dropped the jar into the grassy undergrowth and stood watching as the cop driving the car gave me a quick once-over. I could see Burke sitting in the back with his freckly red face pressed right up against the window. He peered sadly across at me with his grotesque tearful face and I waved him on his way with a wide grin spread right across mine. Hanging around at the edge of the farmer’s field, waiting for the rest of the gang to get their sweets, I didn’t feel an ounce of remorse about Burke: he had snitched on us all so often and he had got what was coming to him.
Taking our usual slow walk along the edge of the ploughed field, we made our way along the wide pathway running along the back of the Approved School. This path was out of bounds to us, with a loss of a week’s privileges for anyone caught down there. But every Saturday we would take the shortcut and climb over the flint wall, dropping down into the vegetable gardens where, keeping low, we would make our way past the large greenhouses to the century-old brick-built stables, which were being used to store all sorts of old garden machinery.
Inside, we sat around and shared out a selection of our goodies before hiding the remainder of our loot in our usual place, behind some old rusting machinery.
“Ouch! I’ve been stung by a fuckin’ wasp!” cried squinty Cruickshank, holding his bare leg just below his short trousers, where we could see the sting already causing the skin to swell.
“Look, there’s a nest of them.” Donkey pointed towards a large pile of old fruit boxes. “Most of them look half dead, they’re all dopey.” Whoosh! The idiot started swatting the odd wasp with an old bamboo cane.
“Don’t hit them,” I warned him, “or yah’ll have the whole lot after us.”
Too late. “Ouch! Ughh! Ahh!” cried Donkey, the last out of the shed, as the swarm of supposedly half-dead wasps chased after us. Fortunately for the rest of us, Donkey didn’t follow us, but instead ran off in the opposite direction, leading the wasps away so we could make our escape, with only Bates and Cruickshank getting the odd sting.
A little while later, as we sat around in the recreation room, we could hear a low sobbing approaching along the corridor, before the overpowering whiff of TCP hit our nostrils. Donkey suddenly appeared in the doorway, aided by Matron. He seemed lost in a world of his own, as he walked painfully into the room. And if I hadn’t already known he’d been attacked by a swarm of wasps, I’d probably have assumed from the state of his red, swollen face that he’d spontaneously burst out in either chickenpox or acne.
He cried out in pain as Matron gently sat him down on the wooden chair.
“Keep an eye on him,” she said. “And if he gets any worse, or you think he might be going into shock, let somebody know right away.” She talked to the room, and not to any individual, leaving it to everybody to take on the responsibility. Not that anyone was likely to have been paying much attention to her.
It reminded me of the tale my Uncle Oliver had once told us, on one of his many visits to Stamford Street, when some of us were arguing about whose turn it was to bring up the coal from the cellar. “There were four soldiers called Anybody, Somebody, Everybody and Nobody. There was an important task to be done and Everybody was given the task to do it. When asked why the task hadn’t been carried out, Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.” The moral of the story: make sure you ask someone specific to take responsibility.
Not only had Matron not done this, she hadn’t even explained to us precisely what sort of shock we should be looking out for. I couldn’t imagine him looking any more shocked: did we look for lightning to come out of his fingertips? Would his hair stand up on end? Were we allowed to touch him if these things happened? I’d heard you could die of shock if you touched somebody who was dead or dying of shock.
“If he looks different, or you think he is acting unusual, just let a member of the staff know,” Matron instructed the room before trotting off in her high-heeled shoes. Since looking different and acting unusual came naturally to Donkey, I couldn’t see how this would give any of us reason to be alarmed.
Within a minute of Matron’s departure from the recreation room, everyone else drifted off outside. I did feel sorry for Donkey and sat with him for a minute or two. But my attempts to pacify him were doomed to failure. I asked him if he knew how many times he’d been stung by the wasps and he responded by upping the noise. I eventually got fed up with the sound of his constant Donkey sobs, even though he hadn’t a tear in his eyes, an
d I left him to wallow in his own self-pity while I went out to the playground.
No Smoke Without Fire
The next morning, Donkey was still smarting from the wasp stings, though his face didn’t seem as puffy. And the blank expression in his eyes seemed to be back to its normal state. The sobbing had also stopped, so things were looking up for the lot of us. It had been so bad on the Saturday night, Paddy O’Neil had rushed into our dormitory, swearing on his mother’s and father’s lives, including all his other family and relatives, that if we didn’t shut his gob up, he was going to throw Donkey out of the window.
There was nothing else we could do but take desperate measures, we put a folded blanket underneath each back leg of Donkey’s bed. And then, lifting the front legs off the ground, we managed to slide him quietly out of the dormitory and down along the polished corridor into the bathhouse, leaving him, and everyone else, in peace. It hadn’t been too difficult to convince the morning staff that, although he had no memory of it, Donkey had pushed the bed down to the bathhouse of his own accord.
It was my idea that led to Donkey setting fire to the stable block. I’d suggested to him he could have his revenge on the wasps by smoking them out of their nest. This, I thought, would make them dopier than they already were, which, in turn, would make them a much easier target for Donkey to whip to his heart’s content.
“Okay. Light the match and put it to the end of this,” I said, holding up the oily old piece of hessian sacking I’d found over in the corner of the shed. Donkey lit it and I blew out the flame, then handed the smouldering sacking to him. “Gently put it down between them boxes and quickly scarper back outside. It should only take a few minutes ta smoke the feckers out, if there’s any still in there.”
Having waited outside for a short while, Collins and I stayed put while Donkey went back into the stable block to see what was happening. Moments later, we could hear the whooshing sounds of his cane cutting the air, along with the sound of his demented, gleeful laughter. Walking to the open doorway, we stood looking in as he whacked out at the slightest thing that moved, prodding, slashing and then stamping his foot down on his prey.
Boy Number 26 Page 13
