Authors: Calvin Wade
LUKE ‘BOFFIN’ BOOTH – September 1986
It is 2012 now and when I look back on my childhood, it is not with any sense of pleasure.
My Dad died in ‘77, in a motorbike accident on the M6. I’ll always remember there were Union Jack flags everywhere and people having street parties because of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and whilst everyone else in the road was celebrating, Mum just cried and cried. I was four years old. People who knew her before the crash say Mum was never the same again. Not only did she have to cope with losing my Dad, she also had to raise three young boys on her own and she just couldn’t cope. We were never the easiest boys to deal with. We went looking for trouble at every opportunity. Mum just drank herself silly. She died in 1998 of renal and liver failure, which the Doctors said was due to over twenty years of alcohol misuse. I don’t miss her. She was never really here, not in a motherly sense anyway. Throughout our childhood, she was just a demented bitch.
When Mum died, it made me think back to ‘86, back when I was thirteen years old. Up until then, I had never really thought much of the woman. She had never been a doting mother more a foul mouthed, verbally and physically abusive one. She always said it was her nerves, as Matthew, Mark and I were always up to no good. We were given Biblical names, but we were no saints. I’m guessing Dad died before John had an opportunity to be conceived.
In 1986, one of the kids I used to hang around with, a little tearaway called Colin Strong drowned in the Leeds-Liverpool canal. He was only ten years old. Lancashire Police were all over it, as police always are when a kid dies, especially so in this instance, as the circumstances were deemed to be suspicious. Apparently, there had been loads of people who had spotted Colin with an older kid, just before he died. The police suspected that the other kid was me. Clever blokes coppers. Anyway, a couple of them came around to our house a couple of days after his body was found in the canal and I’d told them then that I had been in all day the day he died. I told them Mum had grounded me, but as more people came forward suggesting I was with Colin, the police came back to our house again, to check my story out with my Mum. Luckily for me, Mum was sober the morning they called for her and had no great love for coppers. She gave them a right earful, told them that they had no right to question what I’d already told them and sent them packing. Once they’d gone, as was often the case in our house, everything kicked off.
“Right Luke , you owe me one lad,” said Mum sweeping her hand through her untidy, grey hair and looking proud of herself, “I’ve no fuckin’ idea where you ended up the day that little lad died, but I know one thing’s for certain, you weren’t grounded by me.”
“I was grounded. You were probably too pissed to remember.”
“How could you
be grounded? I never ground you. That’s something that happens to American kids. Why would I ground you? I want you out from under my feet not hanging around driving me mad.”
She talked crap. I wouldn’t even have been under her feet if Paul Simon had put diamonds on her soles.
“Ok, if you must know, I was out.”
My Mum smiled at first, as her assumptions were right. She had terrible teeth when she smiled. She never smiled for long though, until she had poured her first drink anyway. Her normal scowl soon returned.
“Out with that little kiddie who died?”
“No, I was on my own.”
“Yeh, right, Luke. Pull the other one.”
“I’m telling you, I was on my own in that derelict house on the way up to Co
ppull. I don’t want the police knowing that, they’ll do me for trespassing or something. Anyway, they wouldn’t believe me. They hate me those coppers.”
“They hate
you ‘cos you’ve got form, Luke. They already know you’re a lying little get.”
“No, I’m not!”
Mum laughed. She had a smokers laugh, a real cackle like a witch who had inhaled too much smoke from her cauldron.
“You must think I was born yesterday, Luke. You’re a born liar. You were never at that run down house!”
“I was.”
“No you weren’t! You think I don’t remember nothing, ‘cos of the drink, but I remember that little lad calling ‘round and I remember you going off out with him. What happened, Luke? You can tell me, son, I’m your mother.”
“Mother! Why would I tell you? You’re a shit mother!”
“Piss off! You weren’t saying that five minutes ago when I was saving your arse from being hauled down to the station by them coppers.”
“Normally you are. What, apart from that, have you ever done for me?”
“I keep you fed and clothed, you ungrateful little rat.”
I could tell she was starting to lose it. She could probably tell that I was starting to lose it too. No-one ever kept calm in that house.
“We get shit clothes from the charity shop and crap food ‘cos you can’t cook.”
“What do you expect, you knobhead, I’m skint. Do you expect me to be dishing out Roast dinners with the amount I get from the dole?”
“You seem to be able to afford your drink.”
“You kids drive me to drink. Anyway, this isn’t a fucking ‘bout me. It’s about you, you and that dead kiddie. What did you do to him, Luke? Push him in?”
“I didn’t touch him, Mum! I told you, I wasn’t even there. He came here, I walked up the road with him, he went towards Chorley, I went towards Co
ppull. That was it, never saw him again.”
“I don’t believe you, Luke.”
“I don’t care whether you believe me or not, that’s what happened!”
“It’s not though, is it, Luke? We both know it’s not. Did you kill that little kiddie, Luke?”
“How many times do I have to tell you, I wasn’t with him!”
“Does that derelict house in Co
ppull have a swimming pool, Luke?”
“What are you on about, you?”
“Does it have a swimming pool?”
“No, it doesn’t have a swimming pool. You’re a nutter, you are.”
“Well the clothes you crept back in wearing that night were soaked, Luke. You just left them in a plastic bag next to the washing machine because it was broken. If you’re going to lie, lad, make up a proper story.”
“It was pissing down that Saturday.”
“It didn’t smell like water from the clouds, it smelt like canal water.”
“How do you know what canal water smells like?”
“I just do. They’ll catch you if you killed him, Luke.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me that.”
I went straight up to her. We were similar heights at the time, so we were almost nose to nose. I looked her straight in the eyes.
“I didn’t kill him! Satisfied?”
“Not really, I’m not convinced, son and if you can’t convince your own mother, God help you if the police don’t buy that pile of crap we told them, ‘cos if you can’t persuade me, son, you’ve got no chance of persuading them!”
I lost it then. That bitch was driving me up the wall. I launched myself at her, with both fists flying. I know they say you shouldn’t hit women, but most women aren’t hard as nails like my mother was. She fought back. It was just like fighting against my brothers, like one of those cartoon fights when both parties whip up a whirlwind of punches. Mum eventually pulled back, nursing a bloody lip. I had scratch marks down my cheek that took a week or so to clear. She dabbed her cut with her top.
“That’s one hell of a guilty conscience you have there, Luke. That’s all I’m saying. One hell of a guilty conscience.”
SIMON – September 1986
Pretty often it poured down during the school summer holidays. Early July and September were always guaranteed to be tropical, whilst we were at school, but when you wanted constant sunshine, when you could play out every day, that was when the rains would come. I don’t recall 1986 being any different to the norm. I remember being back at school, after the summer holidays, the sun constantly shining, cries of ‘Jasper’ and all the lads chasing dying wasps around the playground.
One Friday night, in late September, after a particularly sunny school day, I remember coming around the back of our house, as you could enter the back garden via a gate and then walk up a little crazy paving path to the back door. I opened it and, not unusually, Mum was sat at the table with a load of old photos of Colin and me spread across it, sobbing her heart out. Once she saw me, she tried to compose herself.
“Hi, love, good day at school?” she asked in a voice that was far from composed.
“It was alright,” I replied lobbing my school bag down on the floor and heading over to the cupboards in search of chocolate biscuits.
“What are you after?” Mum asked.
“Biscuits,” I asked as I opened a couple of empty tins, “have we not got any?”
“No, I’ve not had chance to go to the shops today, love. If you go over to the bread bin, my handbag’s next to it, bring it here and I’ll get you a couple of pounds out of my purse, you can nip up to Spar and buy us some.”
I did as I was told, took the bag over to Mum and she began rooting for her purse. Since Colin died, there had been a lot of days that Mum hadn’t had chance to do things or had said she couldn’t face them. There had been a growing number of days that she hadn’t got dressed and the occasional day when she wouldn’t even be out of bed when I arrived back from school. This day, although Mum had been in tears, had obviously been a decent day, as Mum was up and dressed.
“Here you go,” Mum said, handing me a five pound note with the Duke of Wellington staring back at me, with his arms folded, “can you get me a pack of Club Oranges and a packet of Trios. Get yourself a bar of chocolate too and if you wouldn’t mind getting me a packet of ten Benson and Hedges too, that would be lovely.”
Mum used to smoke. When she met Dad, she was a smoker with a twenty a day habit. Once Mum found out she was pregnant with me, Dad said she put her cigarette packet in the bin and did not light up again until Colin died. She was back to smoking more than twenty a day now, she had obviously smoked her way through twenty already this day, hence the reason she wanted me to go and get her another ten.
“Mum, I’m thirteen. They won’t sell cigarettes to me! Y
ou have to be sixteen.”
Mum frowned, “Oh, of course you do. They wouldn’t want you to start smoking, it’s a dirty, disgusting habit. I’ll pack in again once I get my head straight, you know that, Simon, don’t you?”
I didn’t know. All I knew was that Mum was finding it increasingly difficult to come to terms with Colin’s death, so to envisage a future world where she was happy, contented and not smoking seemed difficult to imagine. She was sad enough though without me adding to it, so I just told her what I thought she wanted to hear.
“Yes, Mum, of course I know you’ll pack in.”
Mum smiled half-heartedly which at the time was as much as she could muster. She held her arms out to me.
“Come and give your Mum a hug...you know how much I love you, don’t you?”
We hugged. I told Mum I loved her too and then I headed off to Spar feeling as though I had at least done my bit to raise her spirits. There were a few positive signs that she was starting to slowly return to some sort of normality. A couple of weeks earlier, I would not have been encouraged to walk up to Spar, Mum would have suggested that I wait for Dad to come back from his window round and he would run me up to Spar in the car. She had begun to accept that I could not be wrapped in cotton wool forever. This did mean that I wasn’t treated to as many ice creams at Fredericks, but I knew my bulky frame was not benefitting from our regular visits anyway.
It was a glorious day for a walk, as the route was basked in sunshine. I bought Mum the Trios and Club Oranges and bought myself a Texan bar. I was walking back through the council houses on St. Mary’s Gate, by Euxton library, when a voice called out to me,
“Simon! Simon!”
I turned to look in the direction that the voice had come from and saw a smiling old man, washing his Mini Metro.
“Hi Ernie!” I replied with a smile and walked over to have a chat. I hadn’t seen Ernie for a couple of months. He was a spritely gentleman in his mid-eighties who always wore glasses that looked like they should have been used by Benny Hill on a comedy set. The lenses were thicker than a cricket bat. Ernie had been in the fire brigade for much of his working life and then, once he had taken a pension from there, he had become a driving instructor. He retired from that too when he hit eighty, but since the Second World War he had always performed in the Working Mens Clubs and Social Clubs, playing his ukulele or singing songs from the Old Time Music Halls.
I first met Ernie one day as I was walking home from Primary School at Euxton CofE. I was probably about nine and was walking our Colin home. Mum and Dad had always warned us to be wary of strangers, a view re-enforced by the
television adverts when Kenny Everett’s Charley would tell me not to go off with strangers. So, when Ernie approached carrying a couple of plastic bags, I was on high alert and grabbed Colin’s hand.
“Do you boys like Meccano?” Ernie had asked.
I wasn’t sure whether we should answer. We had been worried about men asking us if we’d like sweets or to go and see their puppies, Meccano may have been another evil plot.
“Simon does,” Colin blurted out whilst I was still dithering.
“Oh, good. Do you want this little lot then?”
Ernie opened the plastic bags up a little to reveal masses of Meccano. I peered in excitedly but still had some concerns that it was a trap.
“Why don’t you want them any more?”
“My daughter has emigrated to Australia with her two young sons. I had bought the Meccano for them, for when they came around to my house, but as they aren’t around to play with it any more, I wanted to find someone who would make use of it. Take it if you want to.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, which was a stupid question as it wasn’t as though he would miss it.
“Of course, take it, it’s yours.”
“Thank you very much!”
After giving us his Meccano, we saw Ernie frequently. He used to walk a two mile route every day to try to keep fit and if Colin and I ever saw him, we would stop and chat. His walk normally took him past our house, so it seemed strange that I hadn’t seen him for a while.
“It’ll rot your teeth that!” he said gesturing at my half-eaten Texan bar.
“It’s nice though,” I replied with a chocolate smile.
“I’m eighty six years old and I’ve never had a filling!”
“I’m thirteen and I’ve had three.”
“See, that’s what I mean!”
“Have you been away, Ernie, I’ve not seen you for ages?”
“Yes, I’ve been to Brisbane, Australia to visit my daughter and the grandchildren. It’s winter over there and it’s still warmer than here!”
As he was speaking, I could hear a dog barking next door and I was immediately aware I recognised the voice of the boy talking to it.
“Drop it, you stupid mutt! Just let go of the bloody thing, will you?”
“Australia! Very nice. Ernie, who lives next door to you?”
“The Booths.”
“Luke Booth? How come you didn’t give them your Meccano.”
“Meccano! To them lot? The only thing those boys will get off me is a thick ear.”