by V E Rooney
The Boffin is the stuff of legend. Built sometime in the early 1960s in a traditional lounge and bar design, it was the cornerstone of the estate and was every bit as rough as its surroundings exemplified. Outside, the windows of frosted reinforced glass, which probably hadn’t been washed since the pub was built, were covered with wire mesh grills. A garish coat of orange all-weather paint coated the outside brickwork, layered with graffiti, residue from smashed pint glasses and fuck knows what else which had been smeared on it. To the rear was a car park with a tarmac surface that looked like it had been poured quickly off whichever stolen lorry had been commandeered, with no bay markings and plenty of broken glass scattered about. On the top of the Boffin, on the rear roof, cement had been laid around the top perimeter brickwork with shards of broken glass wedged into the cement to form a primitive anti-burglar defence, reinforced with a ring of barbed wire and a couple of ravenous Alsatian dogs on long chains prowling around and barking at anything that moved.
The insides were just as bursting with character. Fake pinewood panelled walls, a well-worn frayed carpet of no discernable colour which stuck to your feet as you walked on it, and an assortment of mismatched chairs and tables – wooden, plastic, vinyl-covered – were dotted about. A pool table, a dartboard, a few fruit machines and a couple of tellies bolted to the wall served as the entertainment, along with music from a jukebox that hadn’t been updated since 1978. Ashtrays everywhere. An ever-present stench of stale beer and ciggie smoke, and the accompanying low-hanging cloud of fumes hovering over the heads of the drinkers.
I spent many evenings in the Boffin as a kid, waiting for Janice and Mum to finish drinking while I nursed a bottle of cola and a bag of salt and vinegar. If it was good for anything, the Boffin helped to educate me on the nuances of life in a way that school never could. It all happened here, with me watching and wondering why grown-ups came to places like this night after night. It’s a laboratory of anthropology. I’ve always said us humans aren’t as special as we like to think we are. We behave the same way as apes – it’s that fight or flight thing again. We’re just apes who can talk. All these hundreds of thousands of years after our first ancestor, with a missing link in between, and here we are. Humanity. This is what we have evolved into.
There were the regulars, the small cliques of middle-aged shaven-headed or mullet-adorned men with big beer guts hanging over their belts chatting shit about the footie at the bar. The wives huddled together round one of the tables, trading gossip. The trio of middle-aged tarts rooted at the end of the bar with the peroxide hair and black roots and six layers of make-up. The young lads in knock-off Sergio Tacchini trackies with wet-gelled mullets and buzzcuts mooching around the pool table, engaged in a perpetual game of winner-stays-on for the sake of a few quid or a free pint. The girlfriends of the pool table lads sitting looking bored shitless as their boyfriends strut around goading each other. The solitary old man in the corner scrutinising a copy of the Racing Post with his mongrel mutt dozing at his feet. The scruffy pisshead in the other corner, downing pint after pint like he’s dying of thirst, not looking at anyone but occasionally emitting a grunt or a remark aimed at no one in particular. The footie men at the bar winding each other up, getting gradually drunker and louder, until one takes offence at something said in jest and swings at the offender. The lad at the pool table who’s just lost his week’s dole money in a bet and empties his pint over the gloating victor. The husband and wife arguing and fighting in the middle of the pub because the husband has just drunk the rent money, money which the wife was planning to spunk at the bingo. The girlfriend screaming abuse at the boyfriend because he was giving the eye to one of the tarts at the bar. The clique of wives taunting the tarts and threatening to glass them. The tarts taunting them back, cursing them down to the ground and calling them all the fat cunts under the sun. Scruffy pisshead in the corner standing up, pissing his pants and bursting into tears. All the men in the pub rushing outside with bottles and pool cues trying to chase down the carload of scallies who were barred the week before and who had come back to seek revenge. The landlord doing nothing, because as long as he’s getting money off the lot of them, he doesn’t care what they do so long as they don’t trash his pub. I learned a lot about human nature by sitting in that pub as a kid.
9. RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
It’s not like I consciously set out to be a dealer. I didn’t wake up one day and think that this was the perfect career for me. Nor would I be so glib to say that I was a product of my environment and that I had no choice, that I was sucked in without noticing. It’s not like Janice and Mum thought: “Ah, we have a drug-dealing prodigy on our hands. Let us teach her everything we know and we can send her out in the world to go forth and multiply our profits.” I was very pragmatic about the whole thing without realising just how detached I was from the implications of it, I suppose. In my adolescent mind, growing these plants, harvesting them, packaging the weed up and selling it on was a way to boost our pitiful incomes and afford the odd treat now and then.
It’s not like Mum and Janice were tooling round the estate in fancy sports cars, or dripping in jewellery and wearing expensive furs. Dealing dope was a way to pay the gas or lecky bill, to pick up some nice clothes from Freeman’s catalogue or afford the rent for the council. And believe me, even as a plucky little five-year-old, I’d gotten bored quickly with the hide-and-seek game we sometimes played when the rent collector turned up, involving me and Mum scurrying behind the couch (let’s play hide and seek...keep as quiet as you can and the quietest one wins) and laying low until he stopped slamming the letterbox, shouting threats, gave up and left. Paying for the necessities of life and having a bit left over to actually enjoy it was very welcome indeed and I really didn’t care about the means of having it. For me, the added bonus was that I got extra pocket money.
Compared to some of the other options available at the time, it was by far the most sensible option, at least in terms of risk and reward. Neither Mum nor I ever went stealing, unlike some people that we knew. Why go traipsing into town and go shoplifting in some tatty department store for some underwear or tops to flog for pennies down the market or to the neighbours? There was no guarantee you’d actually be successful in pinching anything in the first place, never mind selling it on afterwards. And if you were unlucky and got caught, like another woman off the estate who was nicked along with her eight-year-old daughter in Littlewoods, you would have social services and courts and stuff to deal with. Child protection authorities don’t take kindly to a mother stuffing silk scarves down her daughter’s shirt, or telling her to pretend to be sick as a way of distracting the shop assistants while mum lifts a few more items.
Having said that, the vast majority of people on the estate were honest and hard-working, when work came their way, that is. No matter how depressing their lives were, the majority wouldn’t even dream of going thieving, especially off people as poor as themselves. But different estate-dwellers who were unlawfully inclined had different ways of supplementing their incomes. Some went out and sold knock-off booze and ciggies. Some nicked car radios. Small-time stuff. Every so often a more foolhardy soul would rob an off-licence or a betting shop, but these were hardly master criminals, more like junkies who could only think about buying their next fix. I really didn’t fancy the violent side of options like those either.
I suppose naïve childhood logic kicked in again around this time. Growing and selling dope from the comfort of our own home seemed like the option that required the least effort and which was always guaranteed to have a financial return. It was piss-easy. With that in mind, I guess I became more interested in the overall picture. I was still only eleven years old, but already my childhood curiosity was driving me to want to understand more about what it was we actually sold.
I couldn’t go to the library and read a book on effective cannabis production techniques or ask the teachers in school. At home, I just watched and learned and soaked up everything
like a sponge. I asked Janice and Mum about how the plants grew, in the manner of a kid wanting to know how cars worked or why the weather changed from hot to cold or how to look after a hamster. I nonchalantly asked what was needed to feed them, what kind of heat and light they needed to grow, how many different kinds of plants there were. They would tell me, if only to get me to shut the fuck up so they could get on with things. I would listen to Janice and Mum talk about different weights and measures and how much to charge for each. I would watch how they dried the plants, picked the buds and leaves off and packaged them up. Day after day, I was taking it all in, watching, listening, learning and practising, like a kid learning to play the piano.
Cannabis plants come in three types – sativa, indica and rudereralis.
Sativa plants are those ones that grow into the fuck-off triffid-style plants that you see in places like the Caribbean or other hot climates, they can grow from between 4ft to 15ft so are obviously best suited to growing outdoors where you have plenty of space, naturally fertile soil and long periods of sunlight. Sativa plant leaves are thin and pointy with no markings.
Indica plants are the most common plants used for growing indoors as they typically grow to no more than 4ft, making them ideal for spare rooms, garages and lofts in temperate climates like the UK. Indica leaves are fuller and more rounded than Sativa leaves, that’s another way to identify them.
Rudereralis plants are roughly the same size as Indica, but aren’t really suited for selling because the high isn’t as good as is found in the others, so they’re kind of the runt of the cannabis world. Best not to bother with that kind.
Like most plants, cannabis plants can be male or female, and the male pollinates or seeds the female. The basic rule to remember is that the better highs are to be found in the female plants. Although you can smoke the produce of a male plant, the female plant produces larger amounts of buds containing THC, which is the natural chemical that generates the high.
When it comes to growing cannabis successfully, the main thing is to know the difference between seeded and unseeded female plants. Unseeded female plants produce way more flowering buds than either a seeded female plant or a male plant.
Seeded female plants do have THC but they also have more seeds, which grow at the expense of buds. It’s the buds that you need and it’s the bud quality which determines the high you get.
So for those reasons, Janice only grew unseeded female Indicas, and we harvested weed in bud form. Some people prefer resin but in small poky rooms like the ones we worked in, producing resin was just too much fucking hassle. We just wanted to pluck and roll up and sell it on.
How do you get high-grade buds? It depends on lots of things, like light sources, heat, soil type, and harvesting time. The main thing we needed to do was ensure that the top parts of the plants were cultivated properly – it’s all about generating the best high. Janice’s Indica plants were strong stuff in that you could smoke it and have a really good high, but it would also disable your legs and pretty much knock you out (hence my unfortunate first experience on the couch). Other dealers will produce varying levels of highs, from a bit floaty to full-on coma.
The rule of thumb is that Sativa plants are for mild highs, and Indica plants are for the heavy highs. It’s a generalisation, but on estates like ours, people want the knock-you-out highs. Sometimes people will try and cross-breed Sativa plants with Indica for varying levels of high but we didn’t have the time or resources for that.
Cannabis plants need soil that has pH of around 7 – very important this is, because too low or too high a pH level will fuck up the plant and stop it growing properly. For the soil, ideally you want something that sits between wet and dry but not too muddy. If the soil is too wet, it will drown and choke the roots and if it’s too dry, it will suck all the moisture out of the plant. We used standard NPK fertiliser with a ratio of 12-12-12. If you have a fertiliser with higher levels of P and K than N then the plant may not grow properly. Get the balance right, get the plant right.
There are three stages in the plant growing process - germination, vegetative growth and flowering, and it’s the last days of flowering when you need to get ready to harvest the buds.
Germination takes anything from 12 hours to three weeks as the seeds take root. Then you move onto the seedling phase. As the seedling grows, leaves are formed and grow upwards along with the stem. The seedling stage can last between one and three weeks depending on the plant species. At the end of the seedling stage the plant will have maybe four to eight leaves.
Then you move into the vegetative growth stage, which is where you need to lay on the light and feeding big time. The plant grows upwards with more leaves and it can take between one and five months before it is ready for pre-flowering, which is basically where the plant’s growth slows down and it starts to produce more branches and fills out with more buds – this bit lasts between one day to two weeks depending on the species.
Then at last, you get to the flowering stage where the plant keeps filling out to the point where you can start harvesting the buds. Harvesting times also influence the high. Basically, the later you leave the harvesting, the more THC is produced and the heavier the high in the buds.
Janice’s plants took round about two months to grow properly so we weren’t exactly rushed off our feet looking after them, as they only needed watering every other day. Douglas had sourced us some proper lighting set-ups, each comprising a sodium bulb, shiny reflector shield, ballast to hold the reflector, a timer and electrical inputs and outputs. Having a proper lighting set-up was crucial because British weather being what it is, it doesn’t make for satisfactory growing conditions, and also cannabis plants need a particular kind of light – the orange to indigo part of the light spectrum to really grow to the maximum. Sticking a plant on the windowsill during the summer may just work if you get lucky with the weather and you don’t have an artificial light source but it’s not recommended, not least because you don’t want the neighbours asking questions and blowing you up to the busies.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the stench of the things which is most likely to alert people to the fact that you may be growing more than just petunias indoors. I don’t think there is any way to 100% eliminate the stench, it’s a necessary evil and you’ve just got to work your way around it. People go to all kinds of lengths to mask the stench. I heard of one guy who had perfumed scents pumped throughout his flat 24/7.
Where we lived, it was too risky to run an extractor fan with a vent running outside as that would have alerted people straight away. Our set-up was that we placed the plants inside this cocoon of thick transparent polythene sheeting stretching from the ceiling to the floor in the middle of the room, almost like a self-contained plastic cubicle, and used another layer of sheeting on the outside of that to coat the walls, and we also taped up all the gaps in the windows and cemented over the air vent in the wall to stop the stench escaping outside. The door to the room had another layer of plastic sheeting on the inside which had been cut to ensure it covered the joins and gaps in the doorframe.
Of course, entering that room basically meant entering an airtight bubble of stench no matter which point in the growing process we entered, but at least we couldn’t smell it in the rest of the flat. It was the bastard summer months that killed us – those lamps on non-stop, us dripping with sweat inside a plastic bubble as we harvested the buds, then having to change our clothes once we’d finished because we were sweating the weed out as soon as we left the room. Yeah, that was not a pleasant part of the job.
There is also another important detail to remember, and you’d be surprised how many people overlook it. If you’ve got these grow lamps running all day and night along with stuff like fans and extractors and what have you, you can expect your lecky bill to go through the roof. So many times I’ve heard of dickheads who got pulled by the busies because the lecky company tipped them off about a sudden massive rise in usage. Janice managed to avoid this pro
blem by jamming a wire in the lecky meter to slow down the gauge so that it went into slow-motion mode and as far as the lecky company was concerned, usage was at a normal level. Simple but effective.
I’ve heard of other people running full-on bypasses through their meters, and some cheeky fuckers have even rejigged their wiring to piggyback onto the neighbours’ lecky supply. Too risky for our small set-up. If the lecky company doesn’t clock onto what’s going on, the neighbours will when they get a bill that’s 10 times higher than what they are normally paying.
My innocuous questions about growing the plants moved from the theoretical to the practical and soon enough I was lending a helping hand – I would weigh and measure and wrap alongside Janice and Mum. The twins never bothered helping out. They didn’t care about what Janice was growing and showed no interest nor inclination in getting involved, and their indifference inadvertently enabled me to become indispensable to our little cottage industry.
Many a night was spent helping Janice and Mum keep the production lines moving and they were glad of the help because it meant they could grow more and sell more. When I wasn’t helping Mum grow our stuff, I’d be nipping next door to Janice’s to help her out. I felt like a good little helper and was also glad of these unconventional bonding sessions with Mum. As mental as it sounds, it brought me and Mum a bit closer together because it felt like, finally, we had something in common. We even put a small transistor radio in our greenhouse and we would sing along to the Top 40, taking it in turns to sing as badly as was humanly possible and cracking each other up. Mum could do a boss Tina Turner impression, arthritic dance moves and everything.
So, aged twelve, I began earning lots of pocket money – certainly more than the couple of quid my mum previously scraped together to chuck my way each week out of her dole, which was enough to get a comic or a couple cans of pop. There were other benefits as well. Once I started on our little dope production line, my knowledge of fractions, weights and measures improved so much that my maths teacher proudly patted me on the back after I scored top of the class in a test, and said he would be sure to mention my progress to Mum at the next parents’ evening. Yeah right, like she’d ever waste her time going to one.
