The Boyhood of Burglar Bill

by Allan Ahlberg

  When I recall my mum, I often picture her as Pansy Potter, the Strong Man’s Daughter in the Dandy, out-removing the removal men with her mighty forearms. She had, as they say, an arm like a leg. Her anger, though, was like a compass needle that all too often swung to violence. This was not all bad. On one occasion the Toomeys chased us, me and Spencer, down the entry. We barricaded ourselves in the wash house, where they discovered us and banged on the door. Mum came out and drove them off with her bare hands. Only then, losing her Boadicea image somewhat, she did the Toomeys’ work for them and clouted me herself.

  My mother had a tiny birthmark high up on her forehead, almost in her hair. It resembled a bunch of grapes. She was partially deaf in one ear from a blow to the head received in childhood from her mother. She had her own distinctive smell: washing and ironing, the minty aroma of her medicine, and Bible scent-cards.

  Bits of my mother, aspects or versions of her, have appeared in other books of mine over the years. She was the mother, for instance, in some of the Please Mrs Butler (1983) poems:

  Our mother is a detective.

  She is a great finder of clues.

  That was her.

  I did a bad thing once.

  I took this money from my mother’s purse.

  Yes, Mum again – her purse – and me. Anyway, here she is, my old mum, with a part to play in this story. She moved me into it, as I have said, and will move me out when the time comes.

  4

  Squealing Pigs and Too

  Many Toomeys

  Saturday morning was a scramble. By lunchtime we had three-quarters of a team and had handed in our entrance form plus five-bob fee at the town hall. The money was mostly mine and Spencer’s at this stage. I earned money doing jobs for Mrs Moore, collecting pennies on empty beer and pop bottles taken back to the Malt Shovel, and helping Stan Pike on occasion with his paper round. Spencer got pocket money.

  We needed a name for our team to put on the form, and the name and address of our ‘club/school/team’ secretary. Spencer put his dad’s name down for that. As for the team name, that was a subject for discussion. Ronnie came up with Cemetery Rovers, guaranteed in his opinion to petrify the opposition. Spencer said Rood End Rovers. I wanted something with Albion in it.

  ‘How about “Odds and Sods”?’ said Joey, Mr Cork’s usual name for us. ‘Odds and Sods United.’

  ‘You can’t have “Sods”,’ said Trevor. ‘They’d not allow it.’

  ‘How about something with Albert Park in it?’ said Graham. ‘Or Tugg Street?’ where he lived.

  By and by, but only because we had to get the form filled in, we settled on Malt Shovel Rovers. There’d be no other team with a pub in it, we reckoned. Not for the under-twelves.

  In the afternoon we continued our search for players. We needed a goalkeeper, an unsought-after position for most boys. You’d get fifteen centre forwards on the bottom pitch with hardly a goalie in sight. Billy Shakespeare was proposed – ‘Shakespeare in goal!’ – but proved unavailable. Snapped up already by the Cubs.

  Then Spencer had a brainwave. There was a man named Ice Cream Jack. He kept a shop – Capinelli’s – at the top of Tugg Street which sold loads of stuff, including his own home-made ice cream. He also travelled the streets in his horse and cart selling cornets, wafers and such from a milk churn. Anyway, Ice Cream Jack had a son, another Tommy as it happened. He was big and slow-witted, never went to school; never talked much either. Now and then he’d wander into the park and join in a game, if he felt like it. And he was a goalie; sort of.

  ‘He’s too old,’ said Graham.

  ‘No, he’s not. He’s younger than you. I heard Mrs Milward telling somebody.’

  ‘He’s too big,’ said Joey.

  ‘Yeah, and Tommy Pye’s too little.’

  ‘Add ’em up and divide by two,’ suggested Spencer. ‘Take the average.’

  ‘That’s fair,’ said Ronnie.

  ‘Pickin’ a team by weight!’

  ‘He’d fill the goal, though,’ Graham said.

  So on we went through the day, knocking on doors, bumping into boys in the street, rushing off home to do jobs for our mums, charging out again with biscuits, bread and jam and stuff. Feverish, intense, scalded really, with life. Up for it. Getting a team up.

  Here’s a thing that may surprise you. The players that we already had, not to mention those we still had hopes of getting, were good. Some of them, me for instance, were potentially brilliant. Give me a ball and try and get it back. I was like a slippery eel. The ball stuck to my foot like glue. We owed it all, I realize now, to Mr Cork and the bottom pitch. The boys on the bottom pitch, a great soup of boys, a swamp of them… played football. In September when we started none of us were much good. Otherwise we’d have made it to the top pitch. But six months later, by Easter, it was a different story. Evolution it was: the survival of the fittest. If only Darwin could have seen us, he’d have worked his theory out a whole lot sooner. To get hold of the ball, even for an instant, to get a kick even, you needed determination. To hang on to it, dribble with it, score… well.

  Sunday was a wasteland. Everywhere shut up. Sunday school (they had a team up) in the morning. A visit – three buses! – to Great-Aunt Phoebe’s over Brierley Hill in the afternoon. A cup of her lethal tea, brewed so long it was like liquorice. A trip to Brierley Hill cemetery. Flowers on Mabel’s grave. The squealing of the pigs in Marsh & Baxter’s sausage factory. A clip round the ear from Mum for something or other. Home on the buses. Bed.

  By Monday morning back at school we had ten players, including Tommy Ice Cream, Tommy Pye and both the Prossers. We got our final player at playtime: Arthur Toomey. There’s something else here I should explain. All those boys, you’d think we’d be spoilt for choice. But it had also to do with where you lived, which streets you lived in: territory. It wasn’t laid down, there were no boundaries marked. Only some sort of early knowledge that kids, boys especially, acquired, not long after they could walk and toddle off somewhere.

  Arthur Toomey was, I suppose you’d say, the white sheep of the family: an easygoing, scruffy of course, dirty even, boy who rarely if ever punched other boys or acquired their possessions. He didn’t have many friends in the school, but, being a Toomey, no enemies.

  There were too many Toomeys, an entire dangerous tribe of them living in a pair of knocked-together (and knocked-about) council semis behind the Malt Shovel. An intimidating, lawless crew who settled their quarrel with the world collectively with clenched fists.

  Where we lived in those days, the people were poor, all of them, all the time. Even so there were degrees of poverty. Think of all the shades of green, say, in a paint shop. The Sorrells, Spencer’s family, were respectable. Mr Sorrell wore a jacket with a collar and tie and worked in a wages office. We were poorer but respectable too. The insurance man called once a week. We saved regularly in two clubs for bedding, clothes and Christmas. The unrespectable poor, the Skidmores for example, spent too much time in pubs and too much money on the dogs. As for the Toomeys, Mr Toomey mostly did not wear a shirt. Their garden resembled a bomb site. On the only occasion I entered their house, there was a newspaper on the table for a cloth and jam-jar cups.

  At dinnertime – bulging with meat and potato pie, carrots and gravy, little squares of bread, semolina and jam – we had our first team meeting. Games of tick’n’release, horses and riders, marbles, buttons and the like were going on all around us. Amos was up to his usual tricks in the toilets. Mrs Harris was on duty.

  We talked about team selection, training and the money Spencer and I were owed.

  ‘A tanner each, I make it,’ I said. ‘Ice Cream Tommy won’t pay.’

  ‘He should, though,’ said Trevor. ‘His dad’s got loads.’

  ‘What about me?’ said Tommy Pye. ‘I’m only seven.’

  ‘Ask your mummy,’ said Joey, laughing. ‘Give her a cuddle.’

  Then Wyatt joined in. He was eager to tell us how he had had a bath
last night and trimmed his toenails. Wyatt was one of our later acquisitions. A tall, thin boy, with ears set sharply at right angles to his head. He looked like a wing nut. He was a good player all the same, good-natured and with a touching belief – fostered no doubt by his loving mother, grandmother and four sisters – in the intrinsic interest of his entire life to everybody he ever met.

  Presently, as though on a prearranged signal, Mr Reynolds and Mr Cork came striding down the steps, across the playground and into the toilets. They hauled Amos and two or three others out of there and marched them off.

  The bell rang and we all lined up in our classes. As he departed to join his line of first-year tiddlers, Tommy Pye tugged Spencer’s sleeve.

  ‘The shirts,’ he said, in his little piping voice, ‘’ave they got numbers on ’em?’

  5

  Edna May Prosser Arrives

  The match was played till after dark

  Till gates were closed on Albert Park

  By shadowy boys whose shapes dissolved

  Into the earth as it revolved.

  Friendly Matches (2001)

  The shirts. The shirts! I blame that application form. No mention of shirts there, team colours or anything. Of course, they were expecting school teams mostly, teams already kitted out. It was a cock-up in the Parks and Cemeteries department. This competition, this cup, was a bit of a rush job. Somebody’d had a bright idea and not followed it through. All the same, there we were, an established named team, with melodramas of suspense and triumph blossoming in our heads, commentaries already in rehearsal, whispered aloud in the privacy of lavatories and bathrooms. ‘It’s Wyatt now, the ball glued to his foot…’ And no shirts.

  Spencer, Ronnie, Arthur Toomey and I sat in the sheds again – more rain – and contemplated our situation. Ways of obtaining the shirts were proposed.

  ‘We could get our mums to make ’em!’ Spencer.

  ‘Each of us get a shirt and dye ’em!’ Me.

  ‘Nick ’em.’ Ronnie.

  Meanwhile, Arthur was digging away with his penknife into the scarred boards of the shed without speaking. He was listening, though.

  Spencer had a bag of chips and batters which he was passing round, cautiously. He’d cover the bag with his free hand, allowing you just room enough to secure a single chip or batter. Archie, the Purnells’ lop-sided dog, lop-sidled up. He could smell a chip a mile off. Joey Skidmore arrived. So could he.

  Other members of the team appeared, some non-members too. It was early evening and Tommy Pye was there. No Tommy Ice Cream yet. The rain had eased. Coat goals were set up and a game began. Spencer stayed out of things, attending to his few remaining chips. Archie, unable to choose between the ball and food, darted irresolutely back and forth. In between the surges of the game – the ball in the pond for a while – in the street! – we kicked around this business with the shirts. The best we came up with, Joey’s idea, was just to turn up anyway and expect to play.

  By and by the first of the mothers arrived, Mrs Pye. She removed her tiny son from the pitch. To compensate and console him, and shut him up, she stuck a lolly in his mouth. Tommy Pye, the prodigy with a ball, deceiver of boys twice his size, destined for fame in years to come with Aston Villa, departed holding his mummy’s hand. Mrs Glue was next. She said not a word but stood with her hands on her hips till Graham reluctantly acknowledged her existence. And he departed.

  No other mothers appeared that evening, though their influence was felt. Trevor left, off to the hospital again. Edna May Prosser arrived with a message for her brothers from their mother: Come. Home. Now. Edna May, a bold girl with a liking, it was commonly supposed, for Joey Skidmore, joined in the game, dispossessing her brother (Malcolm? Patrick?) and charging off down the wing with the ball. She hit a decent cross into the middle which Joey himself, as it happened, bundled in.

  Tommy Ice Cream arrived in his usual ankle-length coat, worn in all weathers. He ambled on to the pitch, shrugged off the coat and revealed one brand-new bright green goalie’s jersey. He made no comment, wearing also his usual expressionless expression, but occupied the nearest goal. He had new boots too, his trousers tucked in his socks. In the distance, Ice Cream Jack himself in his long coat could be seen hovering near the gates, checking out Tommy’s reception. Was his horse and cart outside, I wondered? Was his ice cream?

  At seven o’clock the park bell rang. Mr Phipps rode up on his bicycle inviting us, in his amiable way, to clear off out of it. Out in the streets darkness was falling, gathering around the yellow street lights. The air was smoky and damp, old man Cutler’s latest still smouldering defiantly after the rain. He himself was off to the pub. Street lights, like everything else, were different in those days. Less light, but more colour. Bottle-green privet hedges, rosy-red house bricks and garden walls, the fading purpling sky itself. Spencer and I went home, Tommy Ice Cream accompanying us part of the way. Well, sort of. He was with us in his fashion, that is, silent and two paces to the rear. If you spoke to him, he pulled his head down deeper into his coat. If you waited for him to catch up, he waited for you to keep going.

  At the corner of Seymour Road he went his own way. Spencer was telling me a tale that Wyatt had told him. Not about haircuts or toenails, but a body. A dead body, Wyatt claimed, had been found in the toilets up in the cemetery. It was all muddied up (like us!) but wearing a suit. We speculated about this body. Was it a murder? Had somebody just gone in there and died? Had some body been dug up? I suggested we walk up Cemetery Road, which conveniently divided the cemetery in two, and see what we could see, a police car perhaps. Spencer was enthusiastic at first, but it was pretty well night now and both of us thought better of it. A dog chased a hissing cat right out in front of us, which made us jump. Edna May came bowling along on her bike – no lights – looking for Joey maybe. I felt low, miserable really, thinking about those nonexistent shirts. Outside Starkey’s in the glow from the window I spotted a Turf packet on the pavement. It was fairly dry, protected under the awning. Turf cigarettes had pictures of footballers in them, fifty in the set. Not cigarette cards exactly, not separate, but part of the packet itself. (My dad preferred Woodbines, though he’d smoke Turf sometimes at my request.) I snatched the packet up. It was a player I already had, but useful for swaps. I felt a sudden surge of joy.

  A few days later, early on a Monday morning, Spencer lifted the latch of their back veranda gate, which opened on to an entry, and fell over a large object. It was a parcel: brown paper, roughly wrapped and held together with string. No name. No address. No stamps. There were dirty hand prints on the outside and what looked like tea stains (or, Ronnie reckoned, blood). But inside, crisp and new and folded beautifully, as Spencer found, inside there was a set of shirts.

  6

  Spencer Sorrell and

  Ronnie Horsfield

  ‘That’s a nice tin of beans, I’ll have that.’

  Burglar Bill (1977)

  Cat on a Wall. Spencer Sorrell was my best true friend, not that I would ever have told him. We had known each other about a year. He was a medium sort of boy, dark hair combed flat to his head with a knife-like parting. He sometimes wore two pairs of socks to make his legs look thicker. He had a mild, hesitant expression and smelled of furniture polish. (Everything in Spencer’s house gleamed from his mother’s relentless attentions.) Yes, a true friend. I remember when I was ill in bed one time and he came round with a present. He left it on the step; my mother scared him, she scared most people. It was a tomato, picked from his own plant, with a little face stuck on it.

  Spencer was tactful. Early on in our friendship he witnessed at close range one of Mum’s mad explosions with me sent flying across the yard, and made no comment, nor did he subsequently pry. Despite the sunray treatment he regularly received, his face was pale. He had spent some months away in Malvern at an open-air school or sanatorium. There was, my mother informed me, ‘a patch on his lung’.

  Actually, most faces in Oldbury were pale then, or dirty
at best. Sunlight struggled to penetrate the town’s protective shield. Spencer attended his sunray clinic on Tuesday mornings. After a time and a bit of badgering, he told me about it. He had to wear blue goggles and sit in a circle with other children around this special lamp, a dazzling column of light. Most of the others were younger than him; all of them, him included, were just in their underpants or knickers. Now and then they joined hands and moved around.

  Spencer revealed all this, wished he hadn’t and swore me to secrecy.

  ‘Don’t tell!’

  ‘I won’t. Do you sing songs in that circle?’

  ‘On y’mother’s grave.’

  ‘Do you dance?’

  ‘Promise.’

  The love of Spencer’s life was his cat. He came home from school for his dinner on certain days, mainly, in my opinion, to play with her. Her name was Minnie and she was older than him. She would roll on the floor to have her tummy tickled. In her youth, Spencer recalled, she would leap like a goalkeeper to catch a ball of silver paper tossed in her direction. In old age she was more sedate. Spencer called her ‘Mrs Furbag’.

  I learnt much about cats from Spencer. We’d had a cat in Stone Street. Watching Spencer with his, I felt ashamed of what I’d done with ours, rolling it up in the bedclothes, terrorizing and then forgiving it. When we moved, it ran off. Who can blame it?

  Spencer’s dad was as soft as he was. Sometimes when Minnie was up on their high wall, he and Spencer joined forces to bring her in. Mr Sorrell would bend down below the wall, Spencer would pat his back and call to the cat. Sometimes he’d position a cushion to protect the cat’s paws from his father’s bony spine. And down she’d jump.