The Otterbury Incident

by C. Day Lewis

  The battle in Skinner’s yard

  Meanwhile, Charlie Muswell and three boys with air-guns had made a flanking movement over to the shed, from which they could cover the side door of the warehouse. No sooner had Peter got back across the yard to his detachment, when the livid face of Skinner appeared at one of the broken windows. A well-judged shot with a half-brick made him withdraw it hastily …

  Ted had been as startled as his captors by the smashing of the windows above, otherwise he might have got clean away from them while they were still cursing and swearing, which they did copiously. Then Johnny Sharp told the Wart to keep a grip on Ted till he and the man Skinner had found out what was happening. Ted knew, of course, that the breaking windows must be the start of an attempt at rescue, and that it wasn’t the police. If only he could get up to the floor above, he might have a chance to elude the gang. Asking the Wart to let go of his arm while he took out another handkerchief to mop his nose (which had actually stopped bleeding by now), he suddenly ducked away and rushed up the chute. The Wart caught him again before he could dash out into the yard, but at least he was in the warehouse now.

  He heard Skinner at the window, saying ‘Gaw blank my blank eyes! It’s a crowd of blank blank kids!’ – the blanks stand for unsavoury language with which the censor would not allow me to sully my page. And he saw Skinner jerk back his head, closely pursued by a half-brick.

  Johnny Sharp called out something about ‘the underground passage’. Skinner bawled that he was going out to settle those blank blank kids first. Then the door at the far end of the warehouse opened and Toppy stood there, with Nick just behind him.

  ‘Stick ’em up, the lot of you!’ he said. ‘It’s a cop!’

  Skinner, shaking his head like a maddened bull, turned upon him. Toppy pulled the hand-grenade from his pocket, pretended to take out the pin, yelled ‘Run, Ted, run for your life!’ and bowled the grenade along the floor towards the group at the other end of the warehouse.

  The Wart gave a high whimpering scream. He released Ted and hurled himself through the main door out into the yard, where four boys at once wrapped themselves round his legs, dragged him to the ground, and in a minute had him trussed up with a scout rope.

  The fourth man, the unshaven type, also lost his nerve. He dodged the rolling grenade and ran slap past Toppy and Nick before they could tackle him, out of the door by which they had entered. Charlie Muswell’s chaps saw him emerge from the side door of the warehouse. They drew a bead on him with their air-guns and Charlie shouted to him to stop. But the fellow seemed deaf and blind with panic. He swerved round into the front yard, three air-gun pellets whizzing past his ears, broke right through Peter Butt’s cordon, some of whom were engaged in sitting upon the Wart’s head and tying him up, and got away. He was captured by the police two days later, incidentally, because we were able to give an accurate description of him: Charlie Muswell and Ted attended an identity parade and at once picked him out from the row of ill-favoured types lined up there.

  Meanwhile, inside the warehouse, the situation had somewhat deteriorated. Before Ted had time to jack off, Johnny Sharp seized him and dragged him down behind the heap of old furniture. Skinner by no means lost his nerve. He bent down, fielding the rolling grenade, fumbled it, picked it up cleanly the next time and threw it out of the window.

  There was a moment’s involuntary pause, while he and Sharp waited for it to explode.

  ‘Sucked in again!’ shouted Toppy. ‘It was only a dummy!’

  Skinner turned, mad with rage, and dashed at him. There’s no doubt he’d have beaten Toppy to a pulp if he’d laid hands on him, for he was a desperate man by now. Toppy dodged the first charge. Nick tried to trip the man up, but was sent flying against the wall. Johnny Sharp, who still had a tight grip on Ted, didn’t improve his accomplice’s temper by calling out, ‘Can’t you get him, you blundering fool?’

  Skinner advanced upon Toppy again, more slowly now, his long arms dangling like a gorilla’s, the fingers curled. Toppy, who had taken something else out of his pocket, slowly retreated. For a moment or two they circled. Then Skinner, roaring, made a dash and grab at him. Toppy’s right arm came up. He flung the bag of pepper full in Skinner’s face. He side-stepped neatly, avoiding the flail of Skinner’s great arms. Skinner gave a howl of agony. He blundered on, his hands covering his face now, the fingers scrabbling at his eyes as if he would tear them out, so hideous was the pain of the pepper. He floundered blindly towards the yard door, felt the cooling air from outside, banged into the tail of the lorry, felt his way round it – and for some time felt no more: for young Wakeley, who had crept up into the lorry’s cabin and found a heavy spanner lying on the seat, saw Skinner groping his way along the side of the lorry, leant over, and brought the spanner down on his head. Skinner subsided like a deflating balloon. He too was tied up hand and foot.

  The rest of the main body came pouring through the door, in answer to the whistle which Toppy had been too busy to blow till now. What they saw was not pleasant. Johnny Sharp, his razor out, was forcing Ted towards the trap-door.

  ‘Hold it, you!’ he snarled at them. ‘If one of you moves, I’ll slash him. His own mother won’t know him. Put those toy guns down, or I’ll slash him!’

  He would have too. He was a menace, that Johnny Sharp – a cold, cruel snake – and the boys stood there, as if hypnotized by him, lowering their weapons.

  ‘Keep still, you, or I’ll –’ he warned Ted, who was writhing in his grasp. Ted went rigid. ‘Now, get down the chute!’

  At that moment, a small figure hurtled out at Johnny Sharp from behind a stack of furniture, and fastened upon his right arm. It was Nick who had managed to edge closer and closer, along the wall against which Skinner had flung him. On a day of heroic deeds, this was the most heroic. Seeing Nick struggling desperately to keep his grip on the wrist of Johnny Sharp’s razor hand, hearing the sobbing breath as he was swung and battered against the furniture, the rest of them, led by Ted who had wriggled free from the man’s grasp, got back their nerve and charged. It all happened in a few seconds. There was a clatter as Johnny Sharp let his razor fall to the ground. He shrugged his shoulders and went still. Nick, thinking he had surrendered, loosened his grip. The next instant he was sent flying against a packing-case, the edge of which cut his head open, and the trap-door was slammed in the attackers’ faces as Johnny Sharp dived down the chute.

  Ted kept his head well in this crisis. He told Charlie Muswell to stay behind with his men and look after Nick till the police turned up. The rest were to follow him in the pursuit of Johnny Sharp. They would try to get a message back to Charlie as soon as they made contact with the enemy again.

  So, when we arrived a few minutes later in the police car a dramatic spectacle met our eyes. Skinner’s yard looked like a battlefield. Bricks and broken glass everywhere. On the leather seat taken out of the lorry’s cab, his head tied up with bloodstained handkerchiefs, lay the still unconscious form of Nick Yates. A few yards away, very far from unconscious (they were swearing away as steadily as a stream of dirty water from a tap) lay Skinner and the Wart, lashed up in an absolute cocoon of rope, with three air-guns trained steadily upon them.

  ‘One of them’s got away,’ shouted Charlie. ‘Ted and Toppy have gone after him.’

  Inspector Brook wasted no time on routine questions. He strode over to Nick, gently felt his head, tried his pulse.

  ‘Have you sent for a doctor?’

  ‘No. Not had time yet. He’s our only serious casualty,’ replied Charlie.

  The Inspector sent a constable running to the telephone. He detailed another to keep an eye on Skinner and the Wart. Taking the third constable with him, he hurried into the warehouse. I followed them in, and down the chute. Inspector Brook gave one look into the crate which Toppy had forced open. He muttered something about ‘right under my nose – and it took a gang of kids to find out’. Then he went down the passage, stuck his nose into the coiner’s den, came out
again, ran up the steps and found the door at the far end ajar.

  ‘Suppose he got out this way. Come along.’

  Back in the yard outside, he took a brief look at the lorry. The men had had no time to unload it, of course: it stood there, stuffed with stolen goods for the Black Market, damning proof of their guilt.

  ‘Anything to say?’ asked the Inspector curtly.

  ‘It was that blank Sharp who put me up to it,’ growled the recumbent Skinner.

  ‘Well, that can wait. We’ll pick him up soon enough. Hello, what d’you want?’

  Young Wakeley had whizzed into the yard. ‘Message from the Commander,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Johnny Sharp – I mean the enemy – contacted in Dog Street – moving north-west – believed aiming to retreat across river.’

  The Inspector’s mouth twitched slightly.

  ‘Does your – er, Commander wish for reinforcement?’

  ‘You bet he does.’

  ‘Hmm. Seems to have done all right without them so far. However …’

  He told two of his constables to take Skinner and the Wart to the police station. Then we had to wait a minute or so for the doctor to arrive, and what seemed like an hour while he examined Nick’s head, and the third constable, at his request, rang for an ambulance.

  ‘Is he bad, sir?’ asked Charlie anxiously.

  ‘Not too bad. He’ll get over it, with a thick head like his.’ And he winked at Nick, who had now recovered consciousness.

  ‘Is Ted all right?’ Nick managed to ask.

  The Inspector, who seemed to have entered thoroughly into the spirit of the affair, bent over him and answered, ‘Yes, my lad, he’s all right. He’s just – er, mopping up the last pocket of enemy resistance.’

  Nick closed his eyes again, beaming all over his face with satisfaction.

  Somehow Charlie and his three men, young Wakeley, myself, and the Inspector all piled into the police car: the third constable took the wheel; and we accelerated hard for Dog Street and the River Biddle …

  Ted, leading the main party down the chute and across the vaults below, had been pretty sure that Johnny Sharp would try to escape by the door at the end of the underground passage – the one he himself had found locked. So they wasted no time in combing the vaults, but ran down the passage. Sure enough, the door was open now. Johnny Sharp must have been badly rattled or he’d have locked it again from the outside: or perhaps he thought we’d had enough, and wouldn’t try to pursue him any further.

  They bundled out through the door and found themselves in Pole Lane: this runs parallel with Abbey Lane, part of the oldest quarter of Otterbury. The leaders, looking swiftly up and down the lane, just caught a sight of the quarry before he turned a corner, just had time to see that he was holding his left wrist with his right hand.

  ‘Gosh, look, he’s wounded!’ exclaimed Ted, pointing at some blood-spots on the narrow pavement. ‘He must have gashed himself accidentally during the struggle with Nick.’

  ‘Come on, the bloodhounds!’ Toppy yelled, and the whole body surged off up the lane.

  ‘No shooting!’ called Ted, who is a law-abiding type for the most part. ‘It’s not safe in the streets. Just keep on his tail!’

  At the corner, they saw him again, about two hundred yards ahead – a high-shouldered figure walking rapidly away, still holding his left wrist, but jerking his head amicably at one or two passers-by just as if he were out for an innocent evening walk. Unfortunately, he glanced over his shoulder at this point, saw the vanguard of the pursuit, and dodged away into a side street.

  It was no use trying to shadow him unobserved any longer. Ted ordered his party to go flat out after the fugitive, blowing their whistles and kicking up all the shindy they could, hoping that the alarm would gather a crowd which might hold up Johnny Sharp’s retreat. But there weren’t many people this evening in these back streets, and those who were about seemed to think the boys were just a gang of kids making a nuisance of themselves, and gave them some black looks.

  Not that they noticed black looks. They were too busy trying to follow the trail of the blood-spots. Sometimes this trail disappeared; then, casting ahead, they found it again, just as they had found Nick’s chalk-marks earlier in the day. The blood-spots told a clear story. Johnny Sharp must have cut himself deeply, for every now and then the pursuers saw thick splashes of blood on the pavement, where he had broken into a run and the blood had come out faster; and next, when he had slowed down and tightened the handkerchief again over the wound on his wrist, the blood-trail ceased.

  Finally, the pursuers swung round into Dog Street – a long, narrow street with no side turnings, which leads to the allotments and the river, and comes out at the very place where we had caught the Prune fishing. Ted sent young Wakeley back to Skinner’s yard with the message. The rest of them passed on down the street, and spread out across the allotments, where one ancient man leant on a fork and shook his fist at them for treading all over his vegetables.

  Halfway across the river, in an ex-RAF inflatable dinghy like the one the Prune had used for fishing, sat Johnny Sharp, paddling frantically. The boys lined the bank. The boathouse was closed for the night now, padlocked. This dinghy must have been left out by accident – a stroke of luck for Johnny Sharp. It was too late to go back and cross by the bridge and cut him off. Lined along the bank, the boys began firing at him. Pellets fizzed into the water round the dingy, puckering it like a gust of rain. Johnny Sharp raised an arm to protect his face, and the dinghy slewed off its course. Then he started paddling again, his face strangely expressionless in spite of the snarl in which the effort to move faster had fixed his thin lips.

  ‘Which of you can swim?’ Ted snapped. He was seeing red all right. He’d really have jumped in and swum after that desperate criminal if Peter Butts hadn’t called out:

  ‘Just a mo! Let’s try this first.’

  He had taken the rockets out of his arrow-quiver, and stuck their wooden sticks horizontally into the steep river bank. Quickly aiming one at the enemy, he lit the fuse. There was a whoosh, and the rocket streaked away, high over Johnny Sharp’s head, The man’s face became convulsed with terror, as Peter, very carefully and deliberately now, adjusted the angle of his next rocket, sighting along it at the dinghy, which was now only twenty yards from the opposite bank. Johnny Sharp bawled something, nobody cared what. They were waiting in dead silence for the fuff and whoosh of the second rocket. It went for Johnny Sharp like a stab of lightning, skimming the water. He yelled, jerked away, overturned the dinghy, and disappeared under the water.

  Our artillery in action

  ‘Help, I can’t swim!’ he whined, his head emerging again.

  A figure shot past the boys and dived in. It was a constable. The police car had arrived.

  11. General Salute

  The next morning, at prayers, the Headmaster announced that the whole school was to assemble in the Great Hall at 11 a.m. I suppose we all had a sort of hangover from the events of the previous day: to me, at any rate, they seemed like a dream; and the Headmaster’s ominous announcement – because the whole school assembling in the Great Hall generally meant big trouble – didn’t strike a very reassuring note. A hideous thought shot into my mind: what if we were wrong all the time; suppose Skinner and the Wart and Johnny Sharp were in fact perfectly innocent, and there was some simple explanation for the apparently damning evidence found at Skinner’s yard? My word, we should be in the soup! We’d be in an absolute hell-broth of a witches’ cauldron.

  I put this notion to Ted, as we went in to the first lesson.

  ‘Don’t be so wet,’ he said. ‘The Inspector’d have clapped the lot of us in jail if – No, what I’m worried about is the window Nick broke. We still haven’t got the money for it.’

  At 11 o’clock we trooped along to the Great Hall. As you can imagine, rumours of what we’d done the day before were flying all over the school, many of them wildly exaggerated, and a number of silly asses greeted Ted and
Toppy with coarse gestures intended to represent the details of public execution.

  Presently the masters filed on to the dais in cap and gown, and sat down, trying to look dignified. Then the Headmaster swept in. With him, to our dismay, was Inspector Brook. The Headmaster put him in a chair on his right; then rose, hitching his gown up with his left hand, and presented to the school a countenance dark as a dust-storm looming up over a desert horizon. I swallowed hard. Toppy, I noticed, had his fingers crossed.

  ‘I have assembled you this morning,’ began the Headmaster, ‘for a – hum-ha – an unprecedented reason. Never in my long experience, both as an assistant master in various –’

  ‘Oh lord, he’s off,’ murmured Toppy. ‘Wake me up in an hour’s time!’

  ‘– have I heard such an extraordinary story as Inspector Brook told me last night. It would seem that certain boys in the Junior School saw fit to spend the week-end and the extra whole holiday in activities beside which the outrages of Chicago gangsters would look, would – er, hum, chrm’m –’

  The HM appeared to choke with indignation. I tried to catch Rickie’s eye, but he was leaning back in his chair on the dais, with his hand shading his face. The HM sipped his glass of water and started off again.

  ‘Not only did they virtually hold the town to ransom, by organizing various – er – side-shows and money-making enterprises – I am given to understand that shoe-shining, shoe-shining in public by King’s School boys, was one of these discreditable occupations –’