by Dave Wallis
“What’s left of it, you mean,” said Ernie.
They all started dancing a form of all-in Twist which had developed just after the Crisis had come out into the open.
The rooms became warm and all the windows were opened. From time to time a couple panted to the sill and paused, arms round waists, and thigh to thigh; and leaned out. Far below a few late travellers, banded together in twos or threes against the prowling night-birds, stumbled along the darkened streets. All street-lamps had long ceased to function. The beams of torches wavered over the rusting hedges of abandoned cars and cast huge angular shadows up against the walls. In the distance the music of a stranger’s party pulsed through the damp night air, the gong beat of the pops pierced by the odd cymbal crash of breaking glass and the trumpet trill of a scream.
After a time only Ernie and Kathy were dancing. The couples scattered into corners, went in search of beds in other flats or stretched and writhed among cushions on the floor.
Something would not let Ernie stop. Kathy grinned and gasped as a stitch burned her side and rested, still with her toes tapping and her hips swaying slightly to the beat. Ernie swung and twisted before her, drugged by rhythm. The Twist was becoming imperceptibly modified by more violent and boastful warrior gestures, imitative of street fighting and survival in the new age.
He was plainly building up to the final swing and grabbed her hand. Seeing that there was only a moment to go she forgot her pain and exhaustion and leaned to his strong circle of movement. Her response gave him just the final energy he needed and they both lifted to it like leaping salmon to the curve of the falls, through the spray of sound. At that moment the power failed and the tune died on a rasping moan. The remaining lights went out.
Kathy went limp and felt sick. Her stitch came back. Ernie switched from the lithe violence of the dance to an ugly, enraged stamping. “More juice!” he screamed. “Put the juice back, or so help me, I’ll go down the power station and do up every oldie left alive.” He leaned out of the window, so far that Kathy gasped and clutched at his waist. He shrieked for electricity. The noise roused others from the floor and beds. “Look, Ernie,” said a boy’s voice. “All the lights are out. We were up on the roof when you . . . when it happened, and all the lights of London went out at once. Not just round this district.”
There was no answer. Ernie had dropped to the floor. He was rasping out, “Oldies, may they rot in hell, burn all the oldies, burn them” over and over in a muffled voice, as if his throat was full of hot blood.
Kathy knelt beside him. “Go away,” she said. “Go away. Leave us.”
They obeyed. “I don’t reckon the lights’ll ever come on again this time,” said the boy’s voice.
BOOK TWO: I’m The King of The Castle
7
These were the golden days, for ever after to be remembered like a dream of childhood, but they came with squabbles for a greater share of plenty. The supply of food and petrol seemed endless. The problem was not how to grab it but how to best enjoy yourself at the same time. All central government ceased with the collapse of NATBINCO’s barter system. Faced with the Board’s ultimate sanction of a cutting off of supplies and an exclusion from the Bingo Halls defaulters had simply shrugged or wept and then done it. Apart from a few madmen and hermits it was now a teen-age world.
The leaders of the Seely St. mob held court in the dust-thick lobby of a deserted cinema. The whole stucco Babylon had been built to stop anybody getting in for nothing in the first place and, with the steel screen down, was now easily guarded.
Ernie was urging an all-out attack on Windsor Castle. “The whole of the stock that NATBINCO fiddled is there,” he said. “All the food and all the petrol, clothes, sheets, shirts, nylons and girls’ dresses and that, medicines, guns, spare parts for every make of car and bike, the lot. Once we get hold of it there’d be no more worries.”
“Who’s worried?” asked Charlie.
“You only want to take it to get your revenge,” said Kathy. She glanced at Charlie, expecting him to support her but he said irritably, “Ernie’s right.” He often disagreed with his friend, but over matters of detail. They never questioned each other’s motives. That was a girl’s way. “Ernie’s right,” he said again, “The stuff’s there all right. The question is, can we take it? We don’t really know how big the gang is that holds the castle and we don’t even know what might happen between here and Windsor. I’ve heard there’s a mob living in the lounge at London Airport and holding you up to ransom on the A.4.”
“That’s right,” put in Robert Sendell, who had become the gang’s head of intelligence. “They burn up aviation spirit in their bikes. Even if you get through the road-blocks they can catch you.”
“These kind of stories,” said Ernie, “are put about to scare you. We’ve done the same, making out we’ve got machine guns on the roof here and so on. Throwing a scare into the other side is half the battle.”
Kathy thought, “That’s one of the reasons he is the leader of our gang, thinking out things like that.”
The council chamber was lit by two pressure lamps which had once hung over a whelk stall outside the “Red Lion”. Enormous silhouettes of the heads of the talkers wavered among the dusty cornices, high above the curling stills of forgotten stars.
A silence fell. The gathering were all between fifteen and nineteen years of age. Their main motive was to act out the part of a General Staff or Privy Council; but, all the time, each knew that this was not play-acting. The world was theirs.
Ernie stirred on his throne so that the spindly gilt couch creaked. He lurched forward and started to harangue them. At that moment Kathy shifted her own perch so that her legs distracted him. The effort of putting his mind back to the business at hand irritated him. He put on his old film-gangster voice. “All right, all right, I never said I was going to do it without going into it all first, did I? I’ll hear from Bob Sendell in a minute. To listen to you lot anyone’d think that I was saying we ought to go down there this minute, the six of us, and take the place on our own.” He paused. Robert Sendell was looking down at the smudged and spotted carpet. Charlie had slung one leg over the arm of his wobbly foyer chair. He studied some scribbled notes held loosely in his long hand. Only Kathy looked straight at him, and this seemed to be in the same teasing way that drove him half crazy when they were alone and ready for it.
“I suggest,” said Charlie, uncurling his leg from the chair arm and looking up from his papers, “that we let Bob’s Intelligence department find out more. How about it Bob?”
Robert Sendell started to stammer out a reply about the difficulties.
Kathy rescued him, “I think it’s silly sending anyone. There’s all gangs between here and Windsor. He’d get captured and made into a slave or something like that.”
“I’ll go myself,” said Robert Sendell, “I, I . . .” Charlie looked at Ernie and winked. It was very plain that their Head of Intelligence was trying to impress Kathy.
“O.K.,” said Ernie. “Look, don’t get in any fights. We want the gen, see?” Faint memories of countless spy films affected his manner. He was about to say, “Good luck!” when he caught Kathy watching him.
They went on to discuss the plans for that week’s supply raids. Their gang controlled quite a wide area of streets but was already having to forage farther for supplies, particularly of petrol. On such expeditions they met other gangs on the prowl from their own areas.
Packs of orphaned children attached themselves to the gangs. Youths and girls who had had experience as monitors or prefects organised them loosely into combing squads. Combing or flatting were among the names given to the fairly systematic search for food. A pack would take a block of flats, start at the top and work down, jemmying the doors and ripping off the crumbling C.B. seals. In most larders there were tins of some sort and jams and other preserves. These were carried down and brought to the back of the foyer of the “Regal” where a bored girl monitor sat, re-r
eading a tattered copy of the magazine “BOYS! BOYS! BOYS!”
“Baked beans there, by the door of the Ladies, tinned fruit under the picture of Montgomery Clift. What number, in what street is it all from? You were told to remember! Go back and find out or no dinner today for you. . . .” Houses and blocks reported as completely ransacked she listed and later blacked out in pencil on a large scale map of the borough which a raiding party under Charlie had found in the abandoned office of the local C.B.
The council meeting broke up and Kathy, whose province it was, led Robert Sendell to the supply dump to pick up food for the journey. “You’d better take enough for two or three days,” said Kathy in a brusque, efficient fashion. “You never know what might happen. If you fell in with some gang that took your motor-bike and you had to walk all the way. . . . Then, I suppose you’ll want at least a day there.” She chattered on in an impersonal manner because his hopeless doting devotion still embarrassed her slightly.
A crowd of young children gathered round them at the food depot and the girl in charge, seeing two of the leaders, put down her greasy magazine and stood up. She pulled her over-tight, over-short skirt straight and fluttered at Robert. “Food to carry on a combing? or battle? How many of you? There’s everything you want here,” she added archly flickering her eyelids at Robert so that Kathy grinned a trifle. The children started to press closer and ask questions.
“Where are you going, Robert?”
“Where’s he going, Kathy?”
“What’ll we have for dinner today? Kathy, tell her to let us have bangers out of the tins with our beans. Why not?”
“Go on Kathy, tell her to, please.”
Robert collected his stuff and Kathy initialled the monitor’s stock-book. They waded their way back through the children. The stock-monitor clapped her hands and shouted, “Come here! Back to your combing. Leave the leaders alone. Stop fussing!” They dropped away as Kathy and Robert neared the sacred door still lettered “Manager’s Office.” “Come here this minute!” shouted the stock monitor, “or no dinners for you today,” she added in a bored and failing voice.
“Did she say to let us have bangers?”
“She smiled at me. She knew my name. She never knew yourn.”
“She did not.”
“She did. And that Robert did.”
“He didn’t.”
The stock-girl threw down her shredded magazine. “That settled it,” she shrieked. “I’ll tell Ernie to send you all off to work for another gang. I can’t stand it. Shut up! No dinner for you today.”
A silence fell.
“They, they ought to, to b . . . to b . . . To have proper training,” Robert brought out.
“Training for what?” asked Kathy.
Robert opened the door. As they entered there was a gasp and a flash of white and of pale bronze stocking-tops. Their chief ducked behind a chair and then stood up. “Knock when you come in, can’t you?” he snarled.
“I . . . I . . . We’re sor . . . s . . .” began Robert.
Kathy just said, “There’s a time and a place, Ernie.”
As if there was nobody else in the room Ernie said, “You set me off.”
“I never noticed. Why didn’t you say?”
“No time.”
“So I see.”
A flushed blonde girl of sixteen who had deserted her own gang and boy that week slid round to the exit still straightening her wide belt and holding her shoes in her hand. Robert stood back and opened the door for her. “Thanks, Bob,” said the girl. Their eyes met as if they might have some concealed thing in common.
“Bob’s ready to go,” said Kathy in a very businesslike tone.
Ernie had recovered himself and spread a large map of London across the desk. “We’ll all turn out and take you as far as Heston or Hounslow, somewhere west like that. Then we’ll have a look round, maybe a scrap with the local gang, if there is one, and then you can slip away farther west whenever suits you. We all go back with a lot of noise and the rumour’ll just go out that some gang from the East End came out and then went back again.”
“Why b . . . b . . . why go out in strength at all?” asked Robert Sendell.
“Make an outing,” said Ernie. “Besides we’re going to have to move right away from this area soon. It’s pretty well combed clean. We might as well have a look round.”
“O.K.” said Robert briskly. It was the one phrase he could snap out and so he favoured it although it did not fit the rest of his manner.
They consulted maps in their best war-film style until they heard one of the cooking duty children shouting, “Come and get it.”
A row of new primus stoves, recently ransacked from the “Army and Navy Stores”, were set up on the former ice-cream and chocolate counter in the foyer. At midday tinned soups and stews and baked beans were heated in saucepans by girls, under a rota system organised by Kathy. The younger children sat on their haunches round the walls and scooped up their warm helpings from cardboard plates which were later burnt on a bonfire in the car-park.
The Seely St. gang colours flew from the flag-pole of the cinema. These were a white ground of plastic curtaining with motor-cycle jacket transfers of an electric orange and yellow, a tiger’s head and two skull and crossbones and the letters A.T.S.T.Y. – “And the same to you!” – done in stick-on licence plate lettering. The device was modified in various ways for badges but only Ernie himself was allowed to sport the plain tiger’s head on the back of his leather jacket.
After eating, the cavalcade set out. Ernie and Charlie rode at the head on new 650cc Nortons they’d wheeled out of an abandoned showroom.
On local raids, or visits to scrambles and joustings along the North Circular Road, the girls rode pillion, but for these formal troopings and displays of force they packed into a van at the rear, along with the first-aid supplies and spare petrol tins. Kathy drove.
The Seely St. flag whipped and fluttered from long rods made of car aerials snipped off at the roots and soldered to chassis and body-work.
The younger children, bean-and-banger stuffed despite the threats of the stock-girl, turned out to watch the parade form up.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, and another six and another two, fourteen scooters and twenty motor-bikes, not counting Ernie and Charlie’s. . . .”
“Motor-bikes is best.”
“Scooters are best.”
“They’re not!”
“They are.”
“Ernie rides a motor-bike.”
“Look at Kathy driving the van. She smiled at me.”
“She didn’t.”
“She did.”
The ranks of knights, six abreast, across the roadway, fiddled with their petrol taps and ignition switches and waited for a signal from Ernie, who sat looking straight ahead in a purposeful fashion with his black jacket collar turned up and the orange tiger’s head glowing in the watery English afternoon sunlight. Ernie turned in his saddle. “Slip back along the line, Charlie. Tell them I don’t want any scraps along the route but every time we cross a borough boundary or get into a new gang territory they’re to sound all the hooters and rev up by de-clutching, quick, see? no dropping speed.”
Charlie rested easily astride his bike, feet in elegant pointed fur-lined boots well apart. His fingers were tapping at the bright enamel of his petrol tank. He stopped this and stroked the surface caressingly, looking down at it as if it were a girl’s thigh. He suddenly looked straight up at Ernie. “Tell ’em yourself,” he said.
The two were very close. “You’ve done as much,” Ernie replied. “The Council meeting was over, sentries on the gate O.K., not even time for dinner yet. What’s eating you? You’re worse than Kathy. That bit’s got a lovely arse on her. I’ve fancied it with her ever since she come over to us from Dalston last week.”
“You’re the chief, Ernie.”
“Seems like it!”
“Just don’t get ideas that you can carry on like some
Roman emperor, that’s all.”
“Lectures is what you used to get from oldies. They should’ve lectured themselves a bit more. They’d all still be with us then.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“They’re all watching us, Charlie boy. I’m sorry I made it sound like I was giving you orders or something. Just do it now please or we’ll get off to a bad start, with ‘low morale’ and all that caper, like that Captain Anderson used to talk about at the cadet camp, when he wasn’t busy trying to feel up the juniors’ shorts.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Go on, tell ’em now, Charlie. They’re all watching. They can’t hear anything, but they can see there’s something wrong.”
“O.K., but I want a proper sort-out with you later, no time now. It’s just that if we all start carrying on like the oldies, only worse, and covering up and giving out orders to your mates as if they were slaves or something, then we’re all going to go the same way too before we’re thirty. I know it.”
He lifted his left leg over the high stacked blanket and battle equipment and the wide panniers, with the grace of a ballet dancer and slouched off down the roaring and spluttering line of scooters and motorbikes, repeating the order of the day. This done he swung himself back into the saddle, Ernie raised his arm and waved forward and the strange cavalcade moved off through the empty litter-thick streets.
The West End had been held for a long time by a strong gang from Paddington but once the hotels had been combed of tins of paté and chicken in aspic and Swan & Edgars stripped of its stock of blankets, shoes and nylons, the Pads, as they were called, had gone. Shaftesbury Avenue, down which the Seely St. column now swept, was deserted except for a few young whores in search of new gangs to which to attach themselves and five lunatic oldies who had not been sane enough to do it.
Some first year medical students who ran a barter payment clinic in the vast empty wards of St. Thomas’ Hospital across the river, had announced that the first typhoid cases of the growing London epidemic were probably those who had drunk from the stagnant water-tanks of the West End hotels. This news, repeated and distorted by rumour, had led to the whole area being regarded as somehow infectious and unhealthy and the gang revved and roared through it without slowing down. The lunatic oldies gesticulated and screamed and the young tarts first waved hands then shook their fists. Eros, bone dry and plastered in decaying cigarette cartons, newsprint and tatters of forgotten C.B. warning posters, swung past the riders and seemed to lean out to them as they banked. They plunged off down Piccadilly to the West and to territories where they had not ventured since before the Crisis.
