For Bronwen
Also for my father, Thomas Walsh and my brother, Terry Walsh. The best men I’ve known are the first men I knew.
In memory of Sarah McCormack (1978–2006), a wonderful Pimlico Kid.
“Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take”
From Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue – October 1975
London: August 1963
Fabulous Flesh
Fish, Fags and Devil Cat
Back Seat Dreams
Strength, Thrift and Gigli
Comanche Spite
Size Matters
Jubblies, Pigeons and Lies
Beach Magic and Sunray Stories
Bikini Close-Up
Books, Empires and Dickens
Female Company
A Man’s Life
Indian Camp Raid
Front Row Touch-Up
Different Dads
Kissing Khrushchev
Fish Paste and Flaming Turds
Race Lessons
Drowning and Denying
Bodyline Cricket
Headlong
Truth
Promises
Teamwork
Friends
Shaking Hands
Revenge Deferred
Haircuts and Maltesers
Bargains and Casualties
Making Audie Proud
Blood
Aftermath
Revelation
Forgiveness
Losing and Finding
Last Request
Epilogue – October 1975
Acknowledgements
Coming in 2014 from Barry Walsh – Love Me Do
W6 Book Café
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Taunton 20 miles. The road sign slips past and another, listing local villages, glides towards me. One name stands out like my own on a guest list. A door into the past swings open and releases a locked-away ache. The car slows, behind me a horn blares. I pull into a lay-by.
Lower Sinton: part of an address written above two kiss crosses on a sheet of lined paper. I have never been here but I know it from what she told me: narrow lanes of pale yellow cottages; black window boxes crammed with flowers; main street pavements that rose three feet above the road. Her grandmother’s house stood next to the village post office and in the road outside her father’s black Humber gleamed. Beyond the back garden lay the wide meadow and further still there was the river. She spent her holidays here: where the sun always shone. When she returned to London, I marvelled at her golden skin and the extra light that had crept into her hair. It’s what happened in Somerset. It should have been Summerset.
I close my eyes. Back they come. First, as always, her face: bright, elfin, thanks to a short hairstyle, known at the time as Italian Boy. Beside her, my friend is making a circle with thumb and forefinger to tell me that everything is OK. And the other girl, with shining blue eyes, is hiding a smile behind her hand.
Scar reverts to wound. I tell myself, again, that we were children; that we couldn’t have prevented what happened; that when the most we might have been expected to deal with was a first kiss or a dying grandparent, we were undone by love itself, and violence – and that adults betrayed us.
Childhood love can endure but childhood promises are hard to keep.
High summer in Pimlico. After days of fierce sunshine, the meagre lawns of the prefabs in Grimsdyke Street are bleached and balding. A breeze churns the baked urban air and releases a faint, blended odour of street dust and dried dog shit.
In the afternoon heat, even the flying ants are walking. Rooksy and I have stopped moving altogether. We’re draped over the chest-high wall of Madge Smith’s garden, savouring the smell of wet soil in her hosed flowerbeds, and admiring her lush, watered grass.
I rest my head on my arms. It would be easy to fall asleep on the hard-sponge bricks, except that Madge is here. We pretend not to look as she bends to set down the large basket of washing on her terrace, which is an extension of the concrete slab on which the prefab stands. Rooksy props his chin on his hands. Sweat beads down his face in glistening lines. He sucks in air around his clenched teeth, and sighs. ‘Do you think Madge would show us her tits if we asked her nicely?’
‘Jesus, not so loud!’
Rooksy says thrilling things but he has sod-all volume control. Madge hasn’t heard what he’s said but her frown makes it clear that she wouldn’t have liked it. I ignore his question, but it’s got me wondering, again: what is it about tits? Hearing the word said aloud excites in a way that bosoms can’t. Mum has bosoms, so does my Aunt Winnie; hers are enormous and stretch her cream blouses and twin sets with more weight than push. Madge has tits.
How, and at what point, they become bosoms is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps they are tits that are no longer exciting? For now, imagining Madge naked from the waist up makes speech difficult and, not for the first time, Rooksy has conjured up images that I’ll be thinking about later.
He straightens up. ‘You know, I think she might. She must be so proud of them.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Rooksy.’
Madge will be doing no such thing. She’s little Jojo’s mum, and she isn’t much younger than mine.
He closes his eyes. ‘Oh the fabulous flesh.’
‘Rooksy, please!’
I turn away but he puts his arm around my shoulders and steers me back to stand alongside him as if we’re in a urinal. Madge glides to her back door where she lifts a cloth peg bag from its hook and returns to drop it on top of the washing.
Rooksy starts moving up and down against the wall, forcing me lower as he rises and shoving me up as he drops. I resist but after a few upward scrapes against the warm bricks, I’m moving under my own steam. A ‘love it, can’t bear it’ feeling grows in my groin and Rooksy’s tight smile makes him look as if he’s trying to whistle through a Polo mint.
Madge looks across at us and our bobbing figures freeze. Rooksy is down low and I’m at the top of my stretch.
‘What are you two doing?’
‘Whoops,’ says Rooksy.
‘You standing on a biscuit tin Billy? Or are you in a hole Peter Rooker?’
‘If only,’ he whispers.
‘What?’ says Madge.
We return to our proper heights and I speak up to stop Rooksy saying any more. ‘Nothing, Mrs Smith.’
‘You have grown though haven’t you Billy, filling out a bit too. What with those blue eyes, you’ll soon be …’ She winks.
My face burns. Thank you Madge. But soon be what? Please say what what is. I’ve started to grow, at last: a little taller, a bit less skinny. Mum and Aunt Winnie have said as much recently, but to hear this from Madge … who has tits.
Rooksy nudges me. ‘Ooh, I’d watch her.’
‘What’s that?’ says Madge.
‘Four nil,’ I say.
‘What?’ says Rooksy.
‘Four nil.’ I shrug as if it’s obvious. Football scores can divert the attention of those who’ve heard something they shouldn’t have. It hasn’t worked; Madge is frowning again. Please Madge, don’t change your mind about me; you’re my only fan with tits. Her eyes narrow but she relents and gives me the smallest of smiles.
She picks up the basket and carries it to the far end of the clothesline, using the top of one thigh to provide extra lift with every other step. At the far end, furthest from prying eyes, she begins pegging out the family’s underwear. First, her husband’s and Jojo’s Y-Fronts, then her whiter, more slender knickers. Knickers: a word as potent as ‘tits’. Could those she’s hanging out be the kind she’s wearing right now? I swallow hard.
Even fully clothed, Madge looks wonderful. A red headscarf squeezes her dark hair into a ponytail. She’s wearing a sleeveless white frock with buttons all down the front. Each time her suntanned arms reach up, her breasts stretch the fabric either side of the brown V of her chest. When she bends down to the basket, they settle back and her cleavage narrows and darkens.
‘Oh, definitely tits.’
‘Without a doubt Billy,’ says Rooksy.
Blimey, have I really said that out loud?
Rooksy jogs me with his elbow and starts whispering a commentary like the mad woman on telly who jollies ladies through health and beauty exercises.
‘That’s it Madge, bend and stretch, bend, sort, pick and stretch.’
One of the pegs fails to close over a shirt and slips down the front of her dress. As she picks it out, Rooksy groans and Madge glares at him.
The clothesline rises as it reaches the pole near us, forcing her to stretch higher. Rooksy can’t help himself. ‘And stretch up … Oh Billy look at them.’
I’m looking, I’m looking!
‘And down …’
Closer now, she stoops to rummage in the remaining washing, allowing us to see further into the ‘happy valley’ – another Rooksy term.
‘And feel …’
Madge’s bum pushes out before she straightens up. Oh god. I should leave now but my legs aren’t up to it. I cling to the wall.
Rooksy is covering every movement. ‘And stretch …’
Now that the basket is lighter, she shoves it along the ground with the outside of her foot. This highlights the curve of her thigh and widens the unbuttoned split of her dress to let us see higher up her suntanned leg. Too much for Rooksy, who puts a forearm over his eyes. ‘Oh, fabulous.’
‘Rooksy, please.’
He grins. ‘What? What have I done?’ A bubble appears and collapses on his shining white teeth.
He knows what he’s done, and he’s doing it from his favourite position: within earshot and out of reach. Rooksy is almost fourteen, only six months older than I am but he knows things that I’m still guessing about.
He’s a ‘dirty bastard’, which is what his cousin called him when she caught him watching her dry herself after a bath. He happily admits that this is exactly what he is.
It’s all very well being a dirty bastard in private but Rooksy makes it public and takes things too far. Some of the parents in our street say he’s been spoiled because he’s an only child. However, if having more money, better clothes and amazing confidence is being spoiled, what’s so wrong with it?
‘Hello Madge.’ His voice is a poor imitation of Humphrey Bogart but his smile is real Errol Flynn – except that saliva has collected at the corners of his mouth and stretches like bubble gum between his lips as he speaks. Above his brown eyes, fair hair sweeps back in glossy waves. Like Kookie in 77 Sunset Strip, he grooms it constantly with a comb, which he tracks with his other hand to smooth down or push up where necessary. And he stares ahead so intently that you’d think he was looking in a mirror.
‘Don’t you Madge me, you cheeky bugger. Mrs Smith to you.’ She puts her hands on her hips. ‘Billy Driscoll, what are you doing hanging around with the likes of him?’
‘Nothing much, Mrs Smith, is Jojo around?’ Like mentioning football scores, asking your own questions can help to change the subject.
‘Over East Lane Market with his dad.’
‘Can I give you a hand Ma— isis Smith?’ says Rooksy.
‘Give me a hand, you dirty bleeder? You’ll get my hand around your ear if you come it with me. Go on, out of it. Why can’t you play football like other kids?’
Football? Rooksy? On the rare occasions he joins in our street matches, his short-lived efforts range between bored wandering about and surprisingly aggressive tackling. We play ‘first-to-ten’ and when one side reaches five, we change ends. This is when Rooksy sods off.
‘Sorry Madge, I mean Mrs …’
Blasted by her fierce look, we turn and squat down behind the wall. Rooksy cowers, ready for her to lean over and aim a clout at him. When she doesn’t, he sits back, closes his eyes and starts rubbing his crotch, whispering, ‘Oh Madge, fa-abulous flesh.’
I want to run away but sit tight rather than let him know I’m a bottler, especially as I’m now looking into the grinning face of the one person who does know this. I’ve forgotten that John is with us. My younger brother is crouched by the kerb and smiling, not so much at Rooksy’s antics as at my ‘scared face’. His eyes widen as he opens and closes his mouth like a goldfish. He claims this is how I look when I’m frightened. I haven’t seen this face myself but I suspect that it’s a fair description. John has his faults but he rarely tells lies. I’d like to show him what his scared face looks like but he hasn’t been frightened often enough to develop one. As far as I know, he has no interest in Madge or the differences between bosoms and tits. This should make me feel more grown up than he is, but it doesn’t.
He turns away and, with his fingers, starts killing the winged ants that are filing suicidally in columns along the gutter. We all kill crawlies but John uses bare hands to squash large spiders and beetles that we would only tread on. As he presses down on the ants, his back broadens into a smaller version of our dad’s, and the sight of John’s flat shoulder blades moving under muscle has me straightening up.
On our sideboard there’s a photo of me, taken a couple of years ago by a beach photographer at Brighton. I hate it but Mum keeps it because, she claims, she likes my smile – not because it’s a big print and the only one that fits her favourite silver frame. I’m standing on Olive Oyl legs and wearing woollen swimming trunks that sag from non-existent hips. My arm is raised in an embarrassed wave that accentuates the white hoops of my ribs.
Skinny arms may have given me a whip-like throw but they’re no good for the important skills, like fighting or looking good in short-sleeved shirts. However, things are getting better at last and there are clear signs that I am going to have biceps after all. Others have noticed too, not least Aunt Winnie, who has stopped putting her arms around me and John to present us as Charles Atlas before and Charles Atlas after.
Rooksy, eyes closed, is chanting softly while pretending that he’s wanking ‘… ninety-nine, a hundred, change hands, don’t care if I do die.’
I shuffle away from him and settle for just thinking about girls and what nestles under bras and knickers. I often ache, really ache, to see breasts close up on women like Madge – or girls like Christine Cassidy, who sticks hers out in case you don’t notice them. Some chance, she’s built like a young Aunt Winnie. I’d still love to know what they feel like. I’ve seen naked women on a pack of Rooksy’s playing cards but the pictures were disappointingly indistinct in areas where I’d have welcomed more detail. When you flicked through them, the women cavorted about, arching back or bending over, while always managing to look as if they were about to give you a kiss. Of course, I made the appreciative noises that Rooksy expected but closer examination revealed that there weren’t fifty-two different women but a hard-working half-dozen. Viewed one at a time, there was nothing happy or sexy about their smiles and, although I didn’t mention it to Rooksy, their flesh was far from fabulous.
The best pictures are in my head. Lying in bed, eyes shut; I can picture girls I actually know, without their clothes. These images are hard to hang on to and my brain could do with a ‘vertical hold’ button to stop them sliding from view. But no matter how fleetingly they appear before me, at least their flesh is fabulous.
‘You still here?’
Madge’s face looms over us like God’s on the church ceiling.
Rooksy rolls to one side, pulling his hand from inside the top of his trousers. Madge notices but she focuses on me. ‘Get out of here, Billy Driscoll, now, and don’t think that what he’s doing is clever, ’cos it’s not!’
‘No, Mrs Smith’.
Rooksy catches my eye. His smile disappears and I wince at having betrayed the shameful truth that I agree with Madge.
As he scrambles to his feet, he makes the mistake of pushing down on John’s shoulders. John spins around, fists clenched. ‘Get off me.’
‘John!’ Madge screams. John freezes. Rooksy’s smile returns as he holds up his hands. Madge points a finger at him. ‘And you, Peter Rooker, next time you’ll be sorry.’
‘Sorry … Cheerio then Madge.’
‘What?’ She scoots after him as far as she can along her side of the wall.
He jogs away laughing.
Before she goes indoors, she flashes me an angry glance. When I look at John, he gives me the gasping-fish face.
I’m sitting, feet up, on the bench in the shady corner of our backyard. Lord of the Flies is face down on my knees while I picture the dead parachutist swinging in the trees.
I’ve just come to the uncomfortable conclusion that if I were one of the boys on the island, I’d soon be exposed as less than heroic. For relief I ponder the easier subject of how quickly the dead parachutist’s face would rot in heat like this.
‘Billy, ducks, run and get us a packet of Weights and a bit of fish for Chris will you?’ Ada Holt is leaning out of her kitchen window above me. What could be her last fag is hanging from the corner of her mouth.
‘Up in a minute Mrs Holt.’
Ada lives on the ground floor. Getting to her flat involves going up to the street and in through the main front door. It’s never locked because no one in the flats upstairs wants to answer knocks that might not be for them. Our street is made up of large terraced houses that were once Victorian family homes but have now been carved into flats and single-room lets. The houses are fronted by iron railings at street level from where stone steps dogleg down to the ‘areas’ belonging to basement homes like ours. In another era, our front door would have been opened only to tradesmen.
On the wall at the top of our steps, the cheap cream paint fails to cover the words AIR RAID SHELTER and an arrow pointing down to our two coal cellars. During the War, they were damp, distempered refuges from German bombs. Ada cowered in one of them the night her house next door was firebombed. Today she lives on the same floor in our house with only a party wall between her and the charred shell of her old home. Twenty years on, it remains open to the weather and when it rains, damp seeps down through to our flat and glistens on the passage wall. In winter, John and I can play noughts and crosses in the condensation.
Only one cellar is used for coal. The other is used as a storeroom, where all the things that Mum won’t throw away, ‘just in case’, are packed in. She went on at Dad for ages to seal the manhole cover above it. He finally got around to it, and did a thorough job, the day after a new coalman opened it to pour in five hundredweight of best anthracite – proving Mum right, again, about doing things straightaway. Being right isn’t her most endearing trait.
Ada does her crushed-slipper shuffle to the door.
‘Hello ducks, come in.’ She’s wearing her quilted ‘all-day’ housecoat that, in Ada’s case, could be described as ‘all week’.
‘No thanks, Mrs Holt, think I’ll get going straightaway.’
Wafting past her is one reason for staying outside. Our house has its own smell; the main ingredients are cabbage and cigarette smoke. Ada’s flat is a prime source. A second reason crouches behind her, glaring at me, tail twitching. Chris is a black-and-white tom that terrorizes other cats, most dogs and me. A real sour puss, his mouth is already open in full feline snarl. Only Ada is allowed to stroke him and even she waits until his mealtimes. Get within range and he slashes like Zorro at exposed skin, and he’s undeterred by gloved hands or trousered legs. His lair is by the fire, inside the fender on the scored brown tiles – an ingrate in the grate. Because Chris hasn’t been ‘seen to’, he adds a bitter edge to the distinctive smell of Ada’s flat and of Ada herself.
She calls his malevolent behaviour his ‘funny little ways’ and carries the livid lines of his affection on hands, wrists and legs. She deems most of them ‘he’s only playing’ scratches. But she has deeper wounds from his ‘you little bugger’ attacks, usually provoked by absent-minded attempts to brush cigarette ash off his back as he snoozes beside her.
Ada squints at me through smoke rising from the fag that clings to her bottom lip. ‘Just ten Weights and a tanner’s worth of whiting please, ducks.’ Her right eyebrow arrows up above her open eye and the left crouches around the one that’s closed. It makes her look as if she doubts everything she sees.
She takes a deep drag, which pulls her jaw to one side and gets her goitre on the move. The cigarette rises and falls like a railway signal but fails to dislodge the lengthening ash, which also resists the buffeting of her speech. Only when it’s longer than the unsmoked bit does Ada notice. She taps it into a cupped hand and goes inside to cast it vaguely towards the fireplace and provokes an acid spit from Chris. She returns with a string bag and, with a nicotine-stained index finger, stirs the money in her purse to find the right coins. ‘Here you are, ducks. Keep the change.’
Ada isn’t the nicest of old dears but she’s not tight, and errands to get fish for her devil cat always bring a bit of pocket money.
‘Oh, just a sec,’ she says with an irritated lift of her chin. ‘I think her ladyship upstairs wants you to get her something.’ She’s referring to Miss Rush, who lives on the first floor. Ada doesn’t her like because of what she claims are her posh, hoity-toity ways. But she dislikes her most because everyone else does like her.
Miss Rush opens the door just enough to frame her tiny body. She tucks a duster into a full-length floral pinny; I’ve caught her ‘mid clean’. She’s bright-eyed and her rosy cheeks seem out of place on her bony face, which is haloed by a perm of white hair. Miss Rush neither smokes nor, as far as anyone can tell, does she ever eat cabbage. The smell emerging from behind her is a blend of Mansion floor polish and Sunlight soap. Her passion for cleaning extends to polishing the lino outside on the landing; a practice that Ada thinks is showing off. Miss Rush’s home must be spotless but no one knows for sure because, unlike Ada, she never asks anyone in.
She has run out of Bournvita. ‘Very kind Billy and that’s for you,’ she says softly, and hands me a threepenny bit extra. Like Ada, she tips in advance. Mum encourages me to be especially polite to Miss Rush because she’s a ‘lady’. Whenever neighbours indulge in raucous behaviour or use bad language, Mum says, ‘What will Miss Rush think?’ But Miss Rush doesn’t seem to mind and she’s the only tenant who manages to stay on good terms with everyone. She isn’t all that genteel either because she reads the Daily Mirror and calls lunch ‘dinner’. She’s old, clean and speaks quietly. It doesn’t take much to be a lady in our street.
‘Won’t be long Miss Rush.’
Before closing the door, she nods towards the rope blocking off the stairs to the second floor and the empty top flat. ‘Terribly sad.’
Old man Fay died of TB and his flat is waiting to be fumigated before it can be re-let. He was ‘a right stinker,’ according to Ada, who could have run him a close second. Mr Fay rarely washed and he had a strong smell, even out in the street. He was also deeply religious and did weird things, like laying crosses made of two matchsticks on the pavement and asking people to mind where they walked.
Our landlord, Mr Duffield, found him lying naked in bed, eyes open, staring in terror along an outstretched arm to where his fingers curled around a large wooden crucifix. Scores of empty matchboxes were piled in the corner of his bedroom and matchstick crosses dotted the floor like tiny Christian land mines that had failed to protect him. When they took him away, the sooty outline of his body was stained on the bedclothes. Mr Duffield joked that, unlike the Turin Shroud, Mr Fay’s sheet bore only a rear impression.
It’s exciting to have known someone who has died and I’ve been embellishing Mr Fay’s death with tales of strange noises coming from his empty flat at night. When John hears these stories, he shakes his head but, like most of our friends he wants to believe that spooky things can happen in our street. For the little kids, Old Man Fay is becoming a bogie man.
Mum and Dad are desperate to move to a flat on the new estate by the Thames. However, they’re a long way down the waiting list. The home they want most of all is on the back of Shredded Wheat packets. The Swedish-style ‘dream house’ stands bathed in sunshine above a sloping lawn. By the garden gate, a man, his wife and a boy are waving while a younger girl crouches to pet a Scottie dog. They’re all smiling, even the dog. The house could be ours if we can come up with a winning description for a Nabisco breakfast. Mum has had several attempts, each one sent off with its three packet tops and a catchphrase. She thinks her latest try is a potential winner: ‘Shredded Wheat, your morning treat’. We’re not holding our breath.
If this one doesn’t win, Mum says it will be her last try and she’s already eyeing the matching kitchen cabinet, table and chairs that are up for grabs on the back of the Corn Flakes packet.
Dad is an even more committed competitor and he’s convinced that sooner or later he’ll predict eight draws on the Football Pools. When he does finally line up his ‘Os’ against the right games in the coupon’s little squares, he says we’ll all be on the pig’s back and able to buy the Swedish house outright – Scottie dog and all. Mum tells him to get away with his nonsense but pays secret attention when he checks the results in the Sunday paper.
Back in the street, I run into John who is bouncing a tennis ball on a cricket bat as he makes his way home.
‘Where you going?’
‘To get stuff for the old girls.’
‘Sharesy.’
‘Yeah.’
We share whatever is earned from running errands. It’s one of Dad’s rules that covers most things we do, even when there’s no real money at stake. We’ve never finished a game of Monopoly because as soon as one of us runs out of money, the other lends him enough to carry on.
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