by J. Thorn
Don’t ask me to tell you about how that place was back then, I spent a grand total of twelve months there, oblivious to the world as all newly born are, before my aunt took me all the way to London to live with her new husband, and that city is where I spent most of my childhood, most of my life, really. The town I was born in, and how it was before the war, is a very vague memory, and it would be so many long years before I went back there once more.
I do remember that my father didn’t stay around for very long after I was born. I like to think he loved my mother too much to be able to cope with facing me once she was gone, but honestly, from the small amount I’ve been able to gleam about him, from odd tales that I’ve discovered in passing conversation with people who once knew him, I think that he just up and went, and was glad to see the back of the both of us.
Before my aunt died, when I was five years old, she told me that my mother was probably the nicest, happiest person that ever graced god’s earth, and that I was an almost identical image of her. I never knew her, and I don’t even remember her face, hell, I only shared this planet with my mother for barely a few seconds, but I do know I never heard of anyone that people liked more.
I do have a picture of her, a very old one that has become worn and faded over the years, but the face looking back at me doesn’t trigger any memories.
During my early years I was a trouble maker of the worst kind. I had an attitude, to say the least. Where that came from I don’t know. Maybe one of those psychiatrist types would have an idea, but all I know is I was an angry child, always on the look-out for trouble. And I can tell you this, that when you go around looking for it, as I did for most of my early life, you certainly find it.
I spent most of my younger years, the ones that followed the death of my aunt, hopping from one home to another, obliviously moving from one family to the next, and leaving a trail of destruction behind me. I didn’t pick up many friends along the way, only a big, long line of folks who were probably glad to see me gone, and not just a few that might have liked to have seen something bad happen to me. It wasn’t until the safety of a home and a family was taken away that my ways changed.
One afternoon, not many days before my eighth birthday, in December of 1908, my life changed. It happened so fast that it took me a few days just for my head to catch up. One moment I had been happily sitting there, thinking the random thoughts of a child, and the next, a world far darker had descended upon me. It was the first time I had ever had to run for my life. It certainly wouldn’t be the last, but at barely eight years old you are neither expecting such a thing, nor are you prepared for it.
It was a year of bad weather where I lived at the time, just south of London in a town called Hilmoor. I remember the snow blizzards as clearly as if it had happened just yesterday, they seemed like they were ten feet tall, though I doubt that was the reality.
I was living with a family who were related to me in some way, I think they were distant cousins, though I couldn’t be sure of that. I was never told.
For the first time I seemed to have settled in quite nicely. I got on well with their two sons - both of them were a few years older than me, but I tagged along and joined in with whatever games they decided we were going to play each day, and they didn’t seem to mind a little kid following them around.
The game they liked to play the most was called "who did it", a tricky game for a child of my age, I thought, and don’t know which of the boys invented it, or if they had learned it from someone else, but I had never played it before.
It involved everyone sitting on the ground, facing each other with a bunch of objects placed in the middle, just within reach. It didn’t matter what they were so long as they were small enough to fit in your hand. Rocks, pencils, apples, twigs, a small toy car, anything was game.
You had to sit quite close to each other so that everybody could touch the knees of those around them, and on a count of three everybody had to close their eyes.
Next came the part I couldn’t get, at least not at the start. You see the whole point of the game was to take stuff, and to take it without anybody noticing you had taken it. If you noticed someone taking something, you called out their name and said "put that back!" and everyone would open their eyes, and you put back whatever you had in your hand. When everything was gone from the middle, you counted up what you had taken, and the person with the most won.
I took me a long time to figure out that both the other boys didn’t close their eyes all the way, they were just squinting. Every time I took something I got called out and every time they took something I never noticed. I didn’t suspect at all that they might be cheating, but then I hadn’t figured out that the whole point of the game was to fool the others. It was all about deception.
We played that game most days, for hours sometimes, and somewhere along the way I started to notice things. When one of the brothers would move to take something there was a rustle of clothes, or I’d feel the air move. I started to call them out. The more I played the game, the better I got at taking stuff. But I learned to fool them in a different way. When I took something I took more than one thing, and when I got called out I put one thing back and dropped another thing neatly in the pile behind me.
Deception has many forms.
Soon I began to win every game, and the brothers started to get irritated by that. I loved that game so much, I found myself cheating so that I would lose and let them win.
I think I learned some of my most valuable lessons sitting on the ground out in the back yard with the brothers, playing that game. How the mind could be tricked so easily if you just thought a little out of the box, how you could make someone notice something with the slightest of gestures.
The week before my ordeal it had snowed so hard that we couldn’t find a patch of ground dry enough and we had to find something else to do. So we made an igloo. Well, at least they called it an igloo. In truth it was really just a hole in the snow, with the sides made hard by patting them down with our gloves. We had borrowed a few pairs of their father’s work gloves for the job, though I’m not sure he knew about that. Anyway, we dug into the snow about five feet, and made ourselves a little snug den in there. We tried putting a roof of snow on it but it kept on collapsing in on us.
You know that just a few months ago I watched a television programme about Eskimos, and how they make their homes, those real igloos. Well, I laughed until I cried as it reminded me of the igloo we made, and I wondered if the Eskimos really lived in those igloos, or if it was just something traditional that had turned into an art form. Wish I’d known about making snow bricks way back in 1908.
Alexander, who was the older of the two brothers, found a piece of wood to lay on the floor, and some sack cloth from their father’s workshop, and we laid out the place like a little house, and sat playing trumps for hours on end.
The house was just on the edge of the town, which wasn’t very big anyway, and the yard led to a dirt track that ran for about a quarter of a mile behind the back yards of the other houses in the same row, with tall trees and hedgerows along both sides. Our little igloo was about a hundred yards over the back fence and down that track.
I didn’t learn what it was that their father did for a living until the day after we made that igloo. He seemed to meet a lot of people in his workshop, which was a brick-built affair, right at the bottom of their yard, with a sheet-metal roof that was rusted and near to collapsing in. We were never allowed in that workshop, though the folks he dealt with often arrived in a wagon, or on foot, to meet him at the back gate and head into the workshop to discuss whatever it was they talked about.
Most of the time they left carrying some case or sack, and looking quite happy with themselves. But on rare occasions, if you hung around outside the yards, in the alleyway you could hear them haggling over money, or arguing about something.
The boys’ father, who I was told I had to call Mr Holcroft, was a harsh man with a taste for whiskey, and
you could smell it on his breath pretty much all of the time. I don’t think he liked me very much. He always complained about having another kid to feed, and how they barely had the money to pay for their own kids. I heard him and his wife arguing occasionally about it. He was usually complaining, and she was telling him that it wouldn’t be for long, she was just helping out her friend in the city for a while.
Truth was, over the months I was there, the conversations that I heard changed somewhat. She started off on the defence, but eventually she began agreeing with him, and then the conversations stopped entirely. Though I felt as settled as I had ever been, I was aware that my stay there would not be a long one.
Over the week before, there was a lot of business being done out of that back yard. I think that Mr Holcroft had chosen the wrong bunch of folks to try and deal with, not that anyone he dealt with was the right type, because the afternoon of the day after we made the igloo, while his two sons were out with their mother, and I was the only other person around, things got a little out of hand.
I was sitting up at the top of the yard, just outside of the back door, whittling away at a piece of wood with a knife I had found in an old toolbox that summer. Some of the ground was still covered with snow, but much of it had melted over the last couple of days, and although it was cold, I still preferred to be outside than stuck in the house. I was amazed how quickly the snow had come and gone.
All over the yard was a mass of junk. There were old skeletons of machinery tools, and boxes of old metal parts of some kind. I had guessed that he liked to tinker with machinery, because he made a lot of drilling noises in that workshop. At the time I just assumed that all the stuff in the yard was just old bits that he never got round to using on his machines, or whatever he made.
Mr Holcroft didn’t seem to mind us poking around in any of the stuff in the yard, so long as we never once tried to get into the workshop. One of the things I had found was my knife, stuck in the ground underneath a rusted old bucket around the back of what I think had once been a coal shed. I was surprised that neither of the other boys had found it, and kept it to myself, hidden in my boot, or at the bottom of the dresser next to my bed.
That knife had a wicked-looking blade with a bone handle. At least I think it was bone. It certainly looked it. The blade was curved in a way that I had not seen before, almost like it was made the wrong way round. It had a thick, cracked leather holder that even had a hook to attach onto a belt, if you had one, and along one side of the wickedly sharp blade were small curved serrations cut out of the metal. I was as careful as anything with it, because of the way it cut through wood as though it was just a piece of fruit. I had it in my mind that it would cut through my skin just as easily.
I was trying to carve a toy knight, just like one of those medieval ones I had seen in one of Richard’s comics.
Richard was the youngest son of the two, and was definitely the favourite. He was a clever kid and had taught himself to read pretty quickly, while his older brother was lazy, and could barely make out his letters. I don’t think Mr or Mrs Holcroft were the slightest bit interested in the fact that I could read and write better than either of them.
Anyway, I had just finished carving what I thought looked a pretty good likeness of the helmet that the knight on the front cover of the comic wore, when the argument started down in the workshop.
Two men had arrived about an hour before, and they met Mr Holcroft at the bottom of the yard. On the way into the yard they were all smiles and handshakes, though they looked a little nervous.
One of them was a huge man with a barrel of a chest and a beard that could have been tucked into his trousers. His head was bald although I don’t think he was really that old. I just remember the winter sun almost glaring off that polished head.
The other man could best be described as a weasel. He was a small, wiry man, much older I thought, and his hair was long and greasy, slicked to his skull like wet grass. His clothes were baggy, and his trousers were far too big for him, making him look almost comical when he walked.
They weren’t outside for long, and although there were words spoken, from where I was sitting I couldn’t hear them too well.
About an hour passed while they were in the workshop, talking. I could make out the drone of their voices, but not what they were saying. There was also that click, click of machinery noises that seemed to go with Mr Holcroft showing anybody something.
Then there was a lot of shouting. Voices started getting raised. Now I could hear the conversation quite clearly, and the two visitors weren’t just arguing about the price.
"Don’t you try and pull one over on me Holcroft." It was the voice of one of the visitors, though until they stepped outside I wasn’t able to make out which of the pair was doing all the shouting.
"I’m not trying to, Remy, if you’d just let me explain this, then we can clear it all up."
"Clear it all up? Like the hell we can clear it all up, that’s a pile of crap and broken."
"It just jammed, they do that occasionally."
"What? They do that occasionally? I haven’t seen one jam before. You’re pulling one on me. Look my blood is all over the place now, cut my hand on the damn thing."
"You just need to get used to them."
"Just need to get used to them? I’ll show you about getting used to the damn thing."
My heart was beating at double the pace by now. There had never been trouble in Mr Holcroft’s yard before, not like this. I heard a great deal of banging, and smashing of things inside the workshop, and then the doors burst open and Mr Holcroft, his clothes ripped and blood coming out of his mouth and a cut on his forehead, came running up the yard.
"Get inside boy, quickly," he shouted, to which I panicked, stuffed my knife into my boot, and then tried to scrabble into the back door, but we met in the doorway, and I was bowled over into the hallway of the house, landing flat on my back.
I turned to try and get out of his way, because it didn’t seem like he cared what it was that was stopping him from escaping, only that he got away, and I was just another obstacle.
I didn’t have to worry about being shoved another time, because just as he got his first foot in the door there was one almighty bang and Mr Holcroft’s face exploded all over the room. I felt a warm splattering of fresh blood, and god knows what else, speckle all over my face. It covered a lot of my clothes too. I wiped my eyes and lay there on the floor barely yards from him, watching how his body seemed to still be trying to carry on, even though his head was now almost completely blown away. It hovered there for a few seconds, his legs stumbling, and I would swear both arms reached out to break their fall when the body finally pitched forward and hit the hallway floor, sending a cloud of dust up into the air along with more of his bits, all across the wooden floor boards of the hall.
Behind him, as the dust cleared, stood the big fellow, with the first smoking gun I ever saw in my life held in his hands.
"Hey Remy. This thing works pretty good actually," he said, blowing the smoke from the two barrels and holding it up to examine it.
"Well I’ll be damned. I guess Holcroft wasn’t lying so much after all, too bad."
Remy, who turned out to be the gangly, little weasel fellow, peered into the hallway and grimaced at the mess that was the remains of Mr Holcroft.
"Damn, that’s nasty," he said, and put his hand to his mouth, coughing.
Then he noticed me, sitting in amongst the carnage, covered in dust. I was probably looking like a frightened rabbit, but he just smiled at me, showing just two teeth on his bottom jaw and nothing else but gums.
"Are you still alive boy?" He was laughing now. "Guess you were lucky you’re down there."
He was looking up at the wall behind me. I looked back, my ears still ringing, and saw that there was barely anything of the wall remaining. The shotgun blast had torn clean through the wooden panelling, even after it had gone through Mr Holcroft’s head. I realised then that
if I hadn’t stumbled and fallen on the ground, I would have been torn apart like his head was. I would probably have been part of the mess.
"Christ Eddie, look at the damn mess you made now."
Eddie shrugged.
"What we going to do with the kid?" said the big guy. He was looking at me with his head cocked to one side.
"Go and fetch the wagon, and fast, someone might have heard."
He glared at me for a moment.
"We can’t leave him here. He’ll just snitch on us."
"Right, I’ll be right back."
Eddie ran off down the garden in the direction of the back gate.
It didn’t take them long to steal pretty much everything in Mr Holcroft’s workshop, maybe ten minutes or so. Remy tied me up, just like a turkey ready for Christmas dinner, and bundled me into the back of the wagon, which Eddie had parked out in the lane, and I was soon sitting amongst piles and piles of shotguns and rifles, all taken from Mr Holcroft’s workshop. I guess he did make machines after all, just not the kind that I thought he made.
It was the first time I ever remember being in a wagon, certainly in the back of one anyway. It started bumping along the dirt track, draw by two weary-looking horses that looked like they were about fit to die. I wasn’t sure I liked being in a wagon very much. I could hear the two thugs in the front discussing it all. The guns weren’t the only thing they were discussing.
"So what do you reckon we should do with him? The Warehouse?"
"Hmm, we could do, or we could take him down to the east side, and sell him there."
I could make out the difference in their voices easily now, and Remy didn’t just look like a weasel, he sounded like I imagined a weasel would sound too.
"Serious? To the Scrubber's place maybe?"
"Why not? They’re always after new kids. They pay a good price for a healthy one like that too, at least that’s what I heard."
"I never liked those idiots though."
"What are you talking like that for? You just blew the brains out of a guy because one gun jammed."
