The Boyhood of Burglar Bill (14 page)

Authors: Allan Ahlberg

Normally, from up in that tree you could see for miles. But today – what
time
was it? – it was like night, a brown and flooded night. Even as we entered the leafier spaces of the tree, a torrent of water was surging down the trunk. The rain like liquid rust, the sky washed clean, transferring its stains to our shirts and skins.

It was a joke at first, we told ourselves, Ha, ha! Getting down and out of the tree, urging Spencer to follow suit, seeing him stuck there. There was so much rain, like a beaded curtain before our eyes. Spencer up high in the branches was invisible almost; a patch of jacket, a smudge of face. We took a step or two along the path, calling to him. And a step or two more. And there was no sign of him now. (Oh, Spencer, my best true friend, what did I do?)

And we left him.

That night there was a knock at the back door. Dad opened it and presently came up and got me out of bed and brought me down to the kitchen. I was rubbing my eyes, bemused with sleep, half wondering where I was. Mr Sorrell, soaking wet, his dripping hat held in his hand, was hovering in the doorway. He was looking for Spencer. Had I
seen Spencer? They could not find him. I said something. We had been playing in the park. I had come home. I could not
believe
he was still up in the tree. Well, he wasn’t; around that time he was four or five miles away in the Dudley Guest Hospital. Later on, the story came out. How old man Cutler, madly working his swamp of an allotment, or smoking in his shed more like, had heard a sound, seen something.

Spencer had fallen from the tree down on to the spiked railings that separated the park from the allotments. (
Spiked
railings, between a park and a vegetable patch! What in hell were they protecting? Lettuces? Carrots?) Spencer’s arm, his left arm, was pierced by one of the spikes. He must have hung there for a while, like one of those rabbits on hooks in the butcher’s window. Mr Cutler had got him down and driven him off in his motorbike and sidecar to the hospital. Saved his life, by all accounts, having previously applied a tourniquet, his leather belt, to Spencer’s horribly torn and bleeding arm. (There was blood, they said, all down his leg, collecting in his shoe, overflowing it.) Yes, saved his life with that tight tourniquet – hooray for old man Cutler! But lost his arm.

25
Cheltenham

‘I’ve been a bad man.’

Burglar Bill
(1977)

The best and the worst of times, and the worst of the worst. A week later I visited Spencer in hospital. Mum came with me on a couple of buses. We took a home-made bread pudding, Spencer loved Mum’s bread pudding, and a Dinky toy, my most treasured possession at that time, an American army jeep complete with removable driver.

Spencer sat up in bed in his brand-new Dan Dare pyjamas, one sleeve pinned up. His face was pale, his expression mild, hesitant. Mum said hallo and started crying. She handed over the slab of pudding in its greaseproof-paper wrapping and went outside. I wished she’d stayed. It had not been my idea to come. I was scared and ashamed,
embarrassed and almost choked up with guilt. Then Spencer leant towards me and whispered. The boys in the beds on either side of his were both named Spittle! It was a common topic of conversation between us, the troublesome business of names. Any name with ‘bottom’ in it, for instance – Rowbottom, Sidebottom – was asking for trouble, not to mention Belcher. At the other extreme, the Smiths had named their baby Gerald. He’d suffer for it, in our opinion. Nudge was a name we were amused by, and Tickler. Ahlberg was a dodgy one at times, and, well,
Spencer
…

And so we talked and ate some of Spencer’s amazing stash of sweets from his bedside locker. Already he had perfected a one-armed technique for removing the wrappers. I needed to say sorry, confess my sins, blame Ronnie! But somehow I was tongue-tied. Spencer made no fuss and was as tactful as ever. I knew he’d told nobody what Ronnie and I – no,
me
and Ronnie – had done. This only left me more conscience-stricken than ever. Spencer, I now believe, climbed that tree (unprotestingly) simply to make amends, accept his share of the suffering, even things up. It was his instinct to do so. And he told no one about it afterwards, or forever as far as I know, because
he
felt guilty.

A nurse came up and gave Spencer some medicine. (A tourniquet, by the way, can be tied too tight, apparently. That’s what did it. Plus the infection, dirt and germs from the spiked railings, the rusty rain.) Mum came back with a couple of comics, and soon after we left. She put her arm around my shoulder as we headed off along some endless disinfected corridor. I wriggled free and turned my face so that she could not see it. It was raining when we got outside. Our bus was coming up the hill and we ran to catch it. I never saw Spencer again.

At the beginning of September, we left Cemetery Road, exchanging houses for the last time. My everquesting mother had found her holy grail, a council semi on Tat Bank Road complete with hot and cold running water, indoor toilet, upstairs bath. There was a patch of garden and permission to keep the hens. It was hardly a mile away from Rood End, the park and all that, but still another world. Yes, she moved me in, my mother, and she moved me out.

And off I went then, up the hill, in a blaze of blazers and ties to Oldbury Grammar School. Ronnie, Joey and the others descended to the Secondary Modern; Spencer, eventually, to another
grammar school on the edge of Birmingham, George Dixon’s I believe. A new life began, a fresh start, with separate brand-new notebooks for each exotic subject: Algebra, Physics, French! And there were ‘houses’, Kings, Queens, School, Trinity, and house competitions, sports days, swimming galas. And a school song, and a headmaster in a mortarboard and gown! And girls! Goodbye, Monica Copper; hallo, Norma Finch and Cynthia Richardson.

Our lives, of course, are weaves of lives, aren’t they? I don’t just mean our parents, brothers, sisters. My life has Mr Cotterill’s in it, old man Cutler’s, Archie’s. Yours, since you are reading this, has mine.

So it ended, or began to end, that boyhood of mine. I became a calmer, more self-contained person, more grown up. I stopped acquiring other people’s property, caught myself at it, as it were, even returned a couple of things. In a general way urgency and melodrama subsided. I also became a teenager, it’s true, but that’s a turmoil of a different kind.

And the years flew by and what became of us?

Tommy Ice Cream worked for his father and,
later on, his sisters, in the shop. Tommy Pye became a moderately famous footballer; Albert Pye a really famous one. Yes,
the
Albert Pye. Rufus and Albert Toomey were in and out of jail, asking for other charges to be taken into consideration, the break-in at Haywood’s, I believe, being one of them. Edna May, at eighteen, got married to – would you believe it? – Trevor. I like to imagine him (and her) riding along for the second time in his life, perhaps, in a big posh car. And me? I got a job at Accles’s for a while, went in and out of the army (another kind of jail), worked as a postman, plumber’s mate, school teacher. And began to write books.

In 1985, I think it was, I was invited to take part in the Cheltenham Literary Festival. I gave a talk to an audience of children and adults, and signed copies of my books afterwards. The queue of people at my signing table was gratifyingly long. I talked to the children, asking them what they’d like me to write, pretending to hold the books upside down, stuff like that. A woman with a pleasant face was standing before me with a boy. He was a medium sort of boy, ten years old perhaps, dark hair combed flat to his head with a knife-like parting; a mild, hesitant expression. It was Spencer.

I half expected him to smell of furniture polish.
But no, it was
Philip
, Spencer’s son. They’d heard about me from Spencer, that he and I had known each other thirty years before. (What else had they heard?) He, by the way, had been unable to attend that evening, his wife explained: a parents’ evening at the school, where he was head of English. (Did he teach Recitation, I wondered?) He was sorry to have missed me. And I him.

Well, we did talk a few times after that on the phone, and we send each other Christmas cards. But the years keep slipping by, and I still wander the worn-out Oldbury streets from time to time, the paths around the oddly shrunken park, and recollect the goals I scored, and see the tree, which is still there. But we have never met.

^∗Spencer on Ice
. Another picture, even as I write this,
slides
into my mind. (There are many pictures, innumerable pictures.) This one has Spencer poised in all his vulnerable stiffness in the playground, in the winter, in the snow and frosty air, on the ice.

Others approach more cautiously;
Denis for one (though he wouldn’t agree).
His wobbly style is unmistakable:
The sign of a boy who knows he’s breakable.

The Mighty Slide
(1988)

For Denis read Spencer.

^∗There has been much in the papers lately (2004) about the Huygens space probe visiting Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Much can be learnt, apparently, about the atmosphere of the early Earth by studying Titan’s atmosphere. Well, all I can say is, come back to Oldbury in 1953; there’s the early Earth for you: all the sulphur, methane and ammonia you could ever wish for.

^∗Total number of Toomeys
. There were two other brothers, as it happened, one married, one in Winson Green prison. Together with the baby, also a boy, that made… ten. Ten brothers, two parents, three grandparents, thirty-something uncles, aunts and cousins. Grand total, as anyone might reasonably conclude: too many.