safe through the streets with that money-box up my jumper. Because he’d clapped it into my hand as soon as we’d got to the main road, which might have meant that he’d started thinking as well, which only goes to show how you don’t know what’s in anybody else’s mind unless you think about things yourself. But as far as my thinking went at that moment it wasn’t up to much, only a bit of fright that wouldn’t budge not even with a hot blow-lamp, about what we’d say if a copper asked us where we were off to with that hump in my guts.
‘What is it?’ he’d ask, and I’d say: ‘A growth.’ ‘What do you mean, a growth, my lad?’ he’d say back, narky like. I’d cough and clutch myself like I was in the most tripe-twisting pain in the world, and screw my eyes up like I was on my way to the hospital, and Mike would take my arm like he was the best pal I’d got. ‘Cancer,’ I’d manage to say to Narker, which would make his slow punch-drunk brain suspect a thing or two. ‘A lad of your age?’ So I’d groan again, and hope to make him feel a real bully of a bastard, which would be impossible, but anyway: ‘It’s in the family, Dad died of it last month, and I’ll die of it next month by the feel of it.’ ‘What, did he have it in the guts?’ ‘No, in the throat. But it’s got me in the stomach.’ Groan and cough. ‘Well, you shouldn’t be out like this if you’ve got cancer, you should be in the hospital.’ I’d get ratty now: ‘That’s where I’m trying to go if only you’d let me and stop asking so many questions. Aren’t I, Mike?’ Grunt from Mike as he slung his cosh. Then just in time the copper would tell us to get on our way, kind and considerate all of a sudden, saying that the outpatient department of the hospital closes at twelve, so hadn’t he better call a taxi? He would if we liked, he says, and he’d pay for it as well. But we tell him not to bother, that he’s a good bloke even if he is a copper, that we know a short cut anyway. Then just as we’re turning a corner he gets it into his big batchy head that we’re going the opposite way to the hospital, and calls us back. So we’d start to run ... if you can call all that thinking.
Up in my room Mike rips open the money-box with a hammer and chisel, and before we know where we are we’ve got seventy-eight pounds fifteen and fourpence ha’penny each lying all over my bed like tea spread out on Christmas Day: cake and trifle, salad and sandwiches, jam tarts and bars of chocolate: all shared alike between Mike and me because we believed in equal work and equal pay, just like the comrades my dad was in until he couldn’t do a stroke anymore and had no breath left to argue with. I thought how good it was that blokes like that poor baker didn’t stash all his cash in one of the big marble-fronted banks that take up every corner of the town, how lucky for us that he didn’t trust them no matter how many millions of tons of concrete or how many iron bars and boxes they were made of, or how many coppers kept their blue pop-eyed peepers glued on to them, how smashing it was that he believed in money-boxes when so many shopkeepers thought it old-fashioned and tried to be modern by using a bank, which wouldn’t give a couple of sincere, honest, hardworking, conscientious blokes like Mike and me a chance.
Now you’d think, and I’d think, and anybody with a bit of imagination would think, that we’d done as clean a job as could ever be done, that, with the baker’s shop being at least a mile from where we lived, and with not a soul having seen us, and what with the fog and the fact that we weren’t more than five minutes in the place, that the coppers should never have been able to trace us. But then, you’d be wrong. I’d be wrong, and everybody else would be wrong, no matter how much imagination was diced out between us.
Even so, Mike and I didn’t splash the money about, because that would have made people think straightaway that we’d latched on to something that didn’t belong to us. Which wouldn’t do at all, because even in a street like ours there are people who love to do a good turn for the coppers, though I never know why they do. Some people are so mean-gutted that even if they’ve only got tuppence more than you and they think you’re the sort that would take it if you have half the chance, they’d get you put inside if they saw you ripping lead out of a lavatory, even if it weren’t their lavatory – just to keep their tuppence out of your reach. And so we didn’t do anything to let on about how rich we were, nothing like going down town and coming back dressed in brand-new Teddy boy suits and carrying a set of skiffle-drums like another pal of ours, who’d done a factory office about six months before. No, we took the odd bobs and pennies out and folded the notes into bundles and stuffed them up the drainpipe outside the door in the backyard. ‘Nobody’ll ever think of looking for it there,’ I said to Mike. ‘We’ll keep it doggo for a week or two, then take a few quid a week out till it’s all gone. We might be thieving bastards, but we’re not green.’
Some days later a plain-clothes dick knocked at the door. And asked for me. I was still in bed, at eleven o’clock, and had to unroll myself from the comfortable black sheets when I heard mam calling me. ‘A man to see you,’ she said. ‘Hurry up, or he’ll be gone.’
I could hear her keeping him at the back door, nattering about how fine it had been and how it looked like rain since early this morning – and he didn’t answer her except to snap out a snotty yes or no. I scrambled into my trousers and wondered why he’d come – knowing it was a copper because ‘a man to see you’ always meant just that in our house – and if I’d had any idea that one had gone to Mike’s house as well at the same time I’d have twigged it to be because of that hundred and fifty quid’s worth of paper stuffed up the drainpipe outside the back door about ten inches away from the plain-clothed copper’s boot, where mam still talked to him thinking she was doing me a favour, and I wishing to God she’d ask him in, though on second thoughts realizing that that would seem more suspicious than keeping him outside, because they know we hate their guts and smell a rat if they think we’re trying to be nice to them. Mam wasn’t born yesterday, I thought, thumping my way down the creaking stairs.
I’d seen him before: Borstal Bernard in nicky-hat, Remand Home Ronald in rowing-boat boots, Probation Pete in a pitprop mackintosh, three months clink in collar and tie (all this out of a Borstal skiffle-ballad that my new mate made up, and I’d tell you it in full but it doesn’t belong in this story), a ’tec who’d never had as much in his pockets as that drainpipe had up its jackses. He was like Hitler in the face, right down to the paint-brush tash, except that being six-foot tall made him seem worse. But I straightened my shoulders to look into his illiterate blue eyes – like I always do with any copper.
Then he started asking me questions, and my mother from behind said: ‘He’s never left that television set for the last three months, so you’ve nowt on him, mate. You might as well look for somebody else, because you’re wasting the rates you get out of my rent and the income-tax that comes out of my pay-packet standing there like that’ – which was a laugh because she’d never paid either to my knowledge, and never would, I hoped.
‘Well, you know where Papplewick Street is, don’t you?’ the copper asked me, taking no notice of mam.
‘Ain’t it off Alfreton Road?’ I asked him back, helpful and bright.
‘You know there’s a baker’s half-way down on the left-hand side, don’t you?’
‘Ain’t it next door to a pub, then?’ I wanted to know.
He answered me sharp: ‘No, it bloody well ain’t.’ Coppers always lose their tempers as quick as this, and more often than not they gain nothing by it. ‘Then I don’t know it,’ I told him, saved by the bell.
He slid his big boot round and round the doorstep. ‘Where were you last Friday night?’ Back in the ring, but this was worse than a boxing match.
I didn’t like him trying to accuse me of something he wasn’t sure I’d done. ‘Was I at the baker’s you mentioned? Or in the pub next door?’
‘You’ll get five years in Borstal if you don’t give me a straight answer,’ he said,
