We got away all right, and had a good feed into the bargain, because we’d been clambed to death and couldn’t wait long enough to get our chops ripping into them thin lettuce and ham sandwiches and creamy cakes.
Well, I’ll always feel during every bit of my life like those daft kids should have felt before we broke them up. But they never dreamed that what happened was going to happen, just like the governor of this Borstal who spouts to us about honesty and all that wappy stuff don’t know a bloody thing, while I know every minute of my life that a big boot is always likely to smash any nice picnic I might be barmy and dishonest enough to make for myself. I admit that there’ve been times when I’ve thought of telling the governor all this so as to put him on guard, but when I’ve got as close as seeing him I’ve changed my mind, thinking to let him either find out for himself or go through the same mill as I’ve gone through. I’m not hard-hearted (in fact I’ve helped a few blokes in my time with the odd quid, lie, fag, or shelter from the rain when they’ve been on the run) but I’m boggered if I’m going to risk being put in cells just for trying to give the governor a bit of advice he don’t deserve. If my heart’s soft I know the sort of people I’m going to save it for. And any advice I’d give the governor wouldn’t do him the least bit of good; it’d only trip him up sooner than if he wasn’t told at all, which I suppose is what I want to happen. But for the time being I’ll let things go on as they are, which is something else I’ve learned in the last year or two. (It’s a good job I can only think of these things as fast as I can write with this stub of pencil that’s clutched in my paw, otherwise I’d have dropped the whole thing weeks ago.)
By the time I’m half-way through my morning course, when after a frost-bitten dawn I can see a phlegmy bit of sunlight hanging from the bare twigs of beech and sycamore, and when I’ve measured my half-way mark by the short-cut scrimmage down the steep bush-covered bank and into the sunken lane, when there’s not a soul in sight and not a sound except the neighing of a piebald foal in a cottage stable that I can’t see, I get to thinking the deepest and daftest of all. The governor would have a fit if he could see me sliding down the bank because I could break my neck or ankle, but I can’t not do it because it’s the only risk I take and the only excitement I ever get, flying flat-out like one of them pterodactyls from the ‘Lost World’ I once heard on the wireless, crazy like a cut-balled cockerel, scratching myself to bits and almost letting myself go but not quite. It’s the most wonderful minute because there’s not one thought or word or picture of anything in my head while I’m going down. I’m empty, as empty as I was before I was born, and I don’t let myself go, I suppose because whatever it is that’s farthest down inside me don’t want me to die or hurt myself bad. And it’s daft to think deep, you know, because it gets you nowhere, though deep is what I am when I’ve passed this half-way mark because the long-distance run of an early morning makes me think that every run like this is a life – a little life, I know – but a life as full of misery and happiness and things happening as you can ever get really around yourself – and I remember that after a lot of these runs I thought that it didn’t need much know-how to tell how a life was going to end once it had got well started. But as usual I was wrong, caught first by the cops and then by my own bad brain. I could never trust myself to fly scot-free over these traps, was always tripped up sooner or later no matter how many I got over to the good without even knowing it. Looking back I suppose them big trees put their branches to their snouts and gave each other the wink, and there I was whizzing down the bank and not seeing a bloody thing.
II
I don’t say to myself: ‘You shouldn’t have done the job and then you’d have stayed away from Borstal’; no, what I ram into my runner-brain is that my luck had no right to scram just when I was on my way to making the coppers think I hadn’t done the job after all. The time was autumn and the night foggy enough to set me and my mate Mike roaming the streets when we should have been rooted in front of the telly or stuck into a plush posh seat at the pictures, but I was restless after six weeks away from any sort of work, and well you might ask me why I’d been bone-idle for so long because normally I sweated my thin guts out on a milling-machine with the rest of them, but you see, my dad died from cancer of the throat, and mam collected a cool five hundred in insurance and benefits from the factory where he’d worked, ‘for your bereavement’, they said, or words like that.
Now I believe, and my mam must have thought the same, that a wad of crisp blue-back fivers ain’t a sight of good to a living soul unless they’re flying out of your hand into some shopkeeper’s till, and the shopkeeper is passing you tip-top things in exchange over the counter, so as soon as she got the money, mam took me and my five brothers and sisters out to town and got us dolled-up in new clothes. Then she ordered a twenty-one-inch telly, a new carpet because the old one was covered with blood from dad’s dying and wouldn’t wash out, and took a taxi home with bags of grub and a new fur coat. And do you know – you wain’t believe me when I tell you – she’d still near three hundred left in her bulging handbag the next day, so how could any of us go to work after that? Poor old dad, he didn’t get a look in, and he was the one who’d done the suffering and dying for such a lot of lolly.
Night after night we sat in front of the telly with a ham sandwich in one hand, a bar of chocolate in the other, and a bottle of lemonade between our boots, while mam was with some fancy-man upstairs on the new bed she’d ordered, and I’d never known a family as happy as ours was in that couple of months when we’d got all the money we needed. And when the dough ran out I didn’t think about anything much, but just roamed the streets – looking for another job, I told mam – hoping to get my hands on another five hundred nicker so’s the nice life we’d got used to could go on and on for ever. Because it’s surprising how quick you can get used to a different life. To begin with, the adverts on the telly had shown us how much more there was in the world to buy than we’d ever dreamed of when we’d looked into shop windows but hadn’t seen all there was to see because we didn’t have the money to buy it with anyway. And the telly made all these things seem twenty times better than we’d ever thought they were. Even adverts at the cinema were cool and tame, because now we were seeing them in private at home. We used to cock our noses up at things in shops that didn’t move, but suddenly we saw their real value because they jumped and glittered around the screen and had some pasty-faced tart going head over heels to get her nail-polished grabbers on to them or her lipstick lips over them, not like the crumby adverts you saw on posters or in newspapers as dead as doornails; these were flickering around loose, half-open packets and tins, making you think that all you had to do was finish opening them before they were yours, like seeing an unlocked safe through a shop window with the man gone away for a cup of tea without thinking to guard his lolly. The films they showed were good as well, in that way, because we couldn’t get our eyes unglued from the cops chasing the robbers who had satchel-bags crammed with cash and looked like getting away to spend it – until the last moment. I always hoped they would end up free to blow the lot, and could never stop wanting to put my hand out, smash into the screen (it only looked a bit of rag-screen like at the pictures) and get the copper in a half-nelson so’s he’d stop following the bloke with the money-bags. Even when he’d knocked off a couple of bank clerks I hoped he wouldn’t get nabbed. In fact then I wished more than ever he wouldn’t because it meant the hot-chair if he did, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody no matter what they’d done, because I’d read in a book where the hot-chair worn’t a quick death at all, but that you just sat there scorching to death until you were dead. And it was when these cops were chasing the crooks that we played some good tricks with the telly, because when one of them opened his big gob to spout about getting their man I’d turn the sound down and see his mouth move like a goldfish or mackerel or a minnow mimicking what they were supposed to be acting – it was so funny the whole family nearly went into fits on the brand-new carpet that hadn’t yet found it’s way to the bedroom. It was the best of all though when we did it to some Tory telling us about how good his government was going to be if we kept on voting for them – their slack chops rolling, opening and bumbling, hands lifting to twitch moustaches and touching their buttonholes to make sure the flower hadn’t wilted, so that you could see they didn’t mean a word
