Tales from Heaton Moor
Heaton Moor, Stockport, Manchester, 1948, 1960, 1950, Card
Games, 3 Card Brag, Pontoon, Heaton Mersey, Heaton Norris, Heaton Chapel, Terry
Ryder, David Hall, Teddy Boys, Bill Haley, Richard Hodson, Susan Froggat, Fylde
Lodge, Stockport Grammar, Monte Carlo Rally, St Winifred’s School, Big Fred,
Big Nellie, Peter-John, RUFC, Heaton Moor Rugby Club, Lewis’s, Market Street,
Deansgate, Manchester Cathedral, Osborne Bentley, St. Ambrose College, Mersey
Square, Stockport Baths, National Service, Tank Corp, Heaton Moor College,
Didsbury, Parrs Wood, Mauldeth Road, The Savoy, Biff Keegan, David O’Hanlon,
Paul Godfrey, River Irwell, Smithfield Market, Reddish, Susan Shrigley, Sylvia
Williams, Pauline Mallalieu, Michael Howard, Willy Mason.
TALES FROM HEATON MOOR 1947 TO 1961
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|||||
Tales from Heaton Moor
By Noel Hodson
copyright Oxford 2000-2004
Any resemblance to any
person, dead or alive, is miraculous.
These tales, as Douglas Adams said of the Hitch Hikers Guide, while containing
much that is inaccurate and much that is apocryphal, are largely true to the
spirit and character of Heaton Moor and its stoic inhabitants from 1948 to
1962. More historic Moor tales will be
added and existing ones extended or edited. But in the meantime – I hope
nostalgic readers enjoy these short stories.
Updated
1958 -
Terry Ryder – Buried Treasure.
1957 -
Michael Howard – The Dying Game.
1950 - Young
Richard Hodson – Leaping the void.
1950 - Bobby
– Burglary at Birch House
1947 - Gorsey
Bankers – Bridging cultures
1949 - Gerald
Lawless – The gymnastic headmaster.
1948-61 -
Edwin Hodson – The fastest man on ice.
1956 - Brother
Leonard – Cycles, Straps and Heathens.
1951 -
Liliana – Love Songs and The Laurels.
1956 - Graham
Fish – Razors and Races.
1957 -
David Hall – Heaton Moor Rugby Club
1955 - Marjorie Barlow – Blind Date.
1957 -
Pauline Mallalieu – Physical Education.
1960 - Paul Godfrey – Water Polo War.
1961 - Susan
Shrigley – Night Flights
1958 - Arthur
Jowell – Big Fred, Big Nellie, Big Eddie.
When not playing rugger, one of David Hall’s
haunts for his regular visits, probably his most frequented drop-in house, was
the Ryder’s. The Ryders were a large, handsome, generously hospitable, Catholic
family, with six children, Tony the eldest, Peter-John the third boy, then
Mary-Jo, Penny and Janine the three girls – and Terry.
Terry was the second child. All the Ryders were on
the small side. Terry was small, quick witted and disreputable. Where Tony dressed
like a Lord and conducted himself with haughty decorum and was a valued
Committee Member of Heaton Moor Cricket Club, Terry was simply – scruffy and
uncommitted. Where Peter-John dutifully joined his father’s building and
shop-fitting firm, Tompkin & Ryder, long established in Smithfield Market
in the centre of
But he could tell a good story. None better.
On the same summer evening that David Hall was
regaling the regular customers of Lillian’s Café with the touching scene of him
taking leave of his Headmaster, a story we’ll get to later in this book,
suitably accompanied on the jukebox by Johnny (Cry) Ray crooning ‘Just-a-Walkin’-in-the-Rain’,
repetitively selected from the stored 78 inch vinyl disks by a young tortured
soul with more silver sixpences than sense, Terry had recently been demobbed
from the British Army and was sprawling at a yellow Formica topped table with four or five pals, under Lillian’s shrewd
but tolerant eye.
As David eventually straightened up and giggled no
more; taking on an altogether more dignified air, Terry picked up the theme of
outraged authority.
“My… hee-hee-hee… My Commanding Officer…” Terry
chortled, already incoherent with laughter at his own memory.
Terry was, to his horror, just old enough, three
and a half years older than me, to have been in the last year of National
Service. Of all the none military types on the face of the planet, Terry, the
most non-military of all, had been called-up for two years into the ranks of
the British Army, still feeling victorious from the Second World War, fighting
in Korea and, rightly, jolly proud of their reputation – until Terry joined-up.
The service that was lucky enough to embrace him to their welcoming bosom,
after he had been taught how to walk, dress himself and speak to superior
officers, was one of the Tank Regiments. Terry was bright. Brighter than he
liked it to be known – and the army quickly spotted his potential and, despite
demolishing a few military structures with the tank’s gun barrel, which was so
easy to forget when turning corners, within a few months of training they had
elevated him to Tank Commander. Terry thought his promotion was a gas –
hilarious.
The tale Terry told us was set on Dartmoor, a high
expanse of trackless unfenced moors in the south part of Devon, famous for
impenetrable mists, The Hound of the Baskervilles in the Tales of Sherlock
Holmes, and infamous for its grim and inescapable prison – where ‘life’ meant
life and desperate prisoners were incarcerated behind forty foot granite walls.
The Moor was then owned by the Ministry of Defence, as it still is, and was in
regular use as a training ground and artillery range.
Terry’s tank with its crew of four good and true
men, along with twenty or thirty other tanks, probably the redoubtable
Centurion Tank, were ferried by road from their base in Yorkshire to an army
camp on Dartmoor, where the crews were given orders for their next training
exercise. Terry listened intently – acutely alert, with no need to take notes.
The Commanding Officer explained that they were to
rise at dawn the next day; groans greeted this order; and were to drive out
onto the moors, on a north-westerly bearing; then spread out and take their own
routes. The tank commanders would have to be especially careful of rocks,
troughs, pits, mine shafts, wild horses, civilians, trees, swamps, cliff edges –
and all manner of perilous obstacles which could endanger the vehicles – and
the crews; though the crews were replaceable and therefore expendable. Few
National Servicemen found this latter remark very funny.
Terry’s laughing, wide spaced, Irish-blue eyes
gleamed with interest. The Moors to him, a man from Heaton Moor, were no
different to the Peak District and the high, peat bog plateau of Kinderscout,
where as a youth he had often romped. Mists, fog, rain, muddy ditches, stone
embankments, sheep and other wild-beasties were meat and drink to a northern
lad like Terry. He just managed to restrain his right foot from lifting itself
up nonchalantly onto his desk, to display dangling laces and ingrained mud that
would have made a drill-sergeant-major explode.
“What is absolutely vital - chaps...” They still
said ‘chaps’ in those days as if officers and men were – comrades - pals.
“…is to realise this incorporates a map-reading,
orientation and navigation exercise… in strict radio silence…” the Commanding Officer
swept his gaze across the tank commanders, seeking keen, intelligent
understanding. He pressed on anyway – his boundless faith in the human race and
the brave British Tommy, only slightly diminished.
“…so decide between you who will go where, which
tank to which position, this evening, then tomorrow watch your compass, mark
your charts, read the heavens and make damn sure that you know exactly where
you are.”
Didn’t they have road signs in
“When you get to what you consider – this is a
test of initiative that will count towards promotion – chaps – what you
consider to be a strategically important controlling position over this
North-South route here…” he swept his hand over a large map of the moors and a
meandering faint pony trail, “… able to see the enemy coming, and lie
concealed, waiting for the beggars; then dig-in…”
“What!” reacted Terry – “I mean, what do we dig in
- Sir? What do you mean dig in - Sir?” at least he was listening, if not yet fully
comprehending. He wisely bit back a clever joke he could have made about enemy
ponies attacking thirty fully armed tanks.
“I want you all…” replied the commanding officer,
“…to camouflage your tanks…” he added, narrowing his eyes and firming his jaw
to show this was no longer a game – this was The Real Thing!
“…so that they can’t be seen from the ground, or
the air – and can’t be picked up on radar. We’ll be testing you from a
Spotter-Plane.”
“Permission to speak - Sir! Won’t radar detect any
metal objects the size of tanks – Sir?” snapped out tank commander Two.
“Whatever we do with nets, shrubs and the like? - Sir?”
The Commanding Officer smiled. It was an
‘I-have-got-a-trick-up-my-sleeve’ smile that the men found somewhat sinister
and disconcerting. “Not…” he confided, “…if you bury the tank… Eh! Hey! What!”
Terry’s eyes opened as wide and round as the
proverbial saucers. He couldn’t believe what he had just heard. Was this
Commanding Officer stark, staring mad? Was he an escaped loony? Had he ever
driven a tank? Had he ever even walked round a tank? Did he know just how BIG a
tank was? Had he the slightest idea what he was talking about?
“…All except the gun turret…” the utter loony was
saying as Terry began to recover from shock. “…we want the gun turret to be
free, able to turn and of course fire! So that has to be disguised –
camouflaged – and kept level. It’s up to you MEN how you do that.”
“Sir!” shouted Terry, never backwards in coming
forwards where work, demarcation, his comforts, rewards and well-being were
concerned. He had to find a non-impertinent way of putting this which would not
draw any hostility and blemish his record. It was an easier option
commanding a tank – that he could ride
in – than slogging about the country as an infantry-man, carrying all the
equipment needed to wage a major war – on his back. “Sir – a Centurion Tank is
a large item – Sir, and, er – do we have any special tools provided – to enable
us to bury it – Sir?”
“Good question Ryder…”
Terry let his jaw hang loose as he congratulated
himself on his good question and cheerfully waited for a sane answer to his
good question.
“No! – Standard kit only. Use just what you have
on the tank. The usual stuff. No special equipment.”
Terry’s jaw – and the mouths of several of his
co-commanders, fell open in theatrical disbelief and protest; which the
Commanding Officer could not fail to notice and correctly interpret. Their hurt
expressions kept just on the right side of a charge of insubordination.
The tank crews learned, as the Commanding Officer
wound up the briefing, that they were to locate their strategic positions by
lunchtime – twelve hundred hours - at the latest, dig the tanks in, up to their
turrets, just the five of them, by six o’clock in the evening, eighteen-hundred
hours, using the tank itself, the spades and shovels it carried – and their
hands, muscles, sinews and brains. Camouflage the turret, by nineteen hundred
hours, walk two hundred yards away from the spot – and check that the tank was
truly invisible; then secure the machine, pack their kits – and walk back to
camp in the dark – to arrive, if all went to plan, by ten o’clock, or
twenty-two hundred hours – at the latest.
What about the tanks? - asked several men in
unison - who will drive them back to camp?
They accepted the unwelcome reply in truculent
silence. The tanks would stay where they were – So they had to be sure to
immobilise them. They were to walk back; God knows how many miles, to camp that
night. Sleep if they could. And then the next day, up at dawn again, trudge
back across the bleak moors to dig their vehicles out – clean them off and
drive them back to camp by
“Bloody pissing hell…” said Terry to his crewmen
who, non-hero’s to a man, were not particularly willing to die for their
country – or even to suffer marginal discomfort. They did not relish the hikes
back and forwards. They spent the next few hours figuring out how they could
carry the least kit back to camp – and out again the next day – and how they
could take a position, separate from all the other tanks, to shorten the
walk. Terry went into a huddle with the
other tank commanders and came away satisfied that he had bagged a prime battle
position for his tank, with the shortest possible walk involved. He then
evolved a cunning plan for the burying process - involving a pretend sprained
shoulder, much brave and regretful wincing with heroically borne pain, and his
utterly fair and attentive supervision and useful advice as the other four crew
members wielded spades and carted rocks and earth, to hide the
two-thousand-five-hundred cubic feet tank, excluding the turret. From his
labouring experience on his father’s building sites, Terry reckoned that each
cubic foot would just about fit onto a size ten spade, which made
…two-thousand-five-hundred spade’s full, divided fairly between his four men –
was six hundred and thirty-three each. And somebody, namely himself, would have
to organise it. Thus counting, he was lulled into a deep and restful sleep.
The next morning the mists were thick, clammy and
wet on Dartmoor as twenty Centurion Tanks, cleaned, equipped, fully-loaded and
potentially lethal, roared off in the early pre-dawn light, long aerials topped
with small triangular flags waving with the motion, in a disciplined line some
forty feet apart – each guided by a smartly uniformed, helmeted and be-goggled
square-jawed, grim faced commander visible from the waist up in the gun turret.
As they passed the sentries, each commander saluted stiffly. The British were
coming. It was a sight that still managed to bring a lump to the Commanding
Officer’s throat.
That night, some very late that night, the men
returned on foot, ate ravenously and collapsed into their bunks. Another dawn
broke and the forces were up again, dubbin’ing their boots, adjusting their
webbing, buttoning up their battle dress against the insistent damp fog,
slinging their rifles and checking their charts and compasses. After a quick
and silent breakfast from their iron-rations they slipped away, one hundred
young soldiers, trained to deadly effect, disappeared out into the mist in
groups of five, following each another stealthily for the first miles, then
taking their own courses to recover their concealed tanks.
The Commanding Officer watched the
tail-end-Charlies evaporate into the early light then he turned towards the
officers’ mess to get himself a real breakfast. Shortly before lunch the first
tanks rolled into the camp, parked, were swiftly hosed down, oiled, refuelled,
the odd spot of paint applied to a flesh wound – and the crews made rapidly,
pleased with their successful mission – to the mess hut to have a large and hot
meal. The Commanding Officer counted them in one by one.
At
Close to
“Sir – Sir – We’ve found them Sir! All well Sir.
No injuries.”
‘All’s well that ends well’ thought the
Commanding Officer. He would have hated to lose men on his watch. He relaxed
with a sigh – it had been a long day.
“Very good Sergeant. You must be tired. Why not
turn in Sergeant. But I’d better just see the men first.”
The sergeant hesitated. He seemed to want to add
something. But then decided better of it. “Yes Sir. They’re outside Sir. In the
Land-Rover Sir.”
“Then get them in man. I’ll log their safe return
and we can do a full de-brief in the morning.”
Again the sergeant seemed hesitant. And he was a
man not given to hesitation. “…Er, Yes – Sir.”
The five men, the tank crew, led by Terry Ryder,
shambled into the office, clearly tired and dispirited. The Commanding Officer
was still basking in the reassuring knowledge that they were alive and well. He
decided not to be too hard on them tonight. But he was intrigued.
“Well Ryder. All present and correct?”
“Yes – Sir. The men are fine - Sir” snapped back
Terry; springing smartly to attention; but clearly with some great pain in his
left shoulder.
The Commanding Officer was touched and proud that
one of his men, after, what …nineteen or twenty hours in the field, had the
spirit and energy to respond so – so – militarily.
“At ease Men. Glad to have you all back in one
piece. We were beginning to worry about you.”
The men slumped a little, not meeting his eye.
“You are alright – aren’t you? No injuries. That
shoulder looks a bit painful Ryder.”
“It’s nothing Sir” said Terry, shrugging the
allegedly sprained shoulder bravely. “A day’s rest is all it needs – Sir”
“Good – Good. Well, why don’t we all turn-in
then...?
…Sergeant – dismiss the men.”
As the sergeant took a deep breath preparatory to
bellowing orders at the absolute bloody shower he had found wandering aimlessly
on a road heading vaguely towards
“The tank – Ryder – the tank. No damage there I
hope?” he asked narrowly. These new Centurion Tanks were bloody expensive and
it would be his neck if something hugely costly had got broken.
Terry, just turning to leave, sprang back to
attention, drawing himself up to his full five feet seven and fixing his Irish
eyes into their most honest and heroic gaze – as at a distant heavenly vision.
“No Sir – nothing wrong with the vehicle – Sir” he shouted reassuringly. The
Commanding Officer started to relax again. It really had been a long day.
“…As far as we know – Sir.”
The Commanding Officer whipped around. And almost
snarled, his gentlemanly languor and avuncular attitude gone in an instant.
“What the hell do you mean Ryder – As far as you bloody well know?” And he
leaned forward, threateningly – almost bullyingly.
‘Is he going to hit me?’ Terry wondered.
But rapidly reassured himself by visualising part of the Army manual
guidelines, which he had read, on striking, or more pertinently, not striking,
the lower ranks, including Corporals who have temporarily mislaid a tank.
He raised his two hands in the placatory gesture
he had used once before, to reasonable effect in as much as it had deflected a
blow to his head from a short plank,
when explaining to his father how he and his team had dropped the
uniquely curved plate-glass window they had waited seven months for, as they
fitted it into the frontage of C&A’s new Market Street store, which as it
dropped - onto the pavement – had shattered into a thousand, maybe even a
million, small pieces.
His hands thus raised pleadingly, he cocked his
head in another placatory gesture and opened his big eyes in innocent,
blameless appeal.
“Couldn’t find the tank – Sir!”
Then, as he saw the shock and horror his statement
had wrought on the previously sanguine features of his Commanding Officer, he
added hastily “…But the tank is fine Sir. It’s come to no harm.”
The Commanding Officer sank to his chair. Gazing
up with blank disbelief at this small northern, still cheerful,
National-Service man who had been sent by God to torment and destroy him.
The boys and girls in Lillian’s, as the sun sank
behind the odd white, marble, Grecian bus-stop shelter at Wellington Road
traffic lights, to a man were rolling with helpless laughter as Terry yelled
and giggled and hooted. Dave Hall slapped his huge hands time after time
against his thighs and did his silent double-bend dipping motions.
“You… …You
didn’t lose the bloody tank – Terry?” he guffawed rhetorically. “…You couldn’t
have lost the tank. Not a whole bloody tank?” and he slapped his thighs in
uncontained, unrestrained merriment; and bent double again.
Terry was grinning manically – ear to ear – and he
constantly fluffed his thinning hair as he giggled and giggled and giggled. He
could barely speak. His breath was in very short supply.
“We … We … never found it” he screamed, falling
across the ash tray on his table and beating the Formica with his fists. “Day after Day – I’ll swear to you – we
went looking for that bloody tank. Planes, helicopters, scout cars, platoons on
foot. It’s never been found…” and he hollered and hollered with laughter.
“But where is it?” someone had the sense to ask,
“You can’t LOSE a tank.”
Terry couldn’t answer – so we all waited, grinning
and giggling as he writhed in amusement. Eventually he drew sufficient breath,
“It’s still out there – somewhere. It’s yours if you can find it. If you want a
tank – get out there and it’s yours….”
“…I’ve still got the bloody key somewhere. Whoo!
Whoo! Whoo! Hee! Hee – Hoot! Hoot! Haw!”
And with this he was unable to say more, having to
be revived by being walked around the pavement outside until he regained enough
strength to light a cigarette and slump back at the table into a shoulder
giggling silent memory, a not altogether un-fond memory, of his Ex-Commanding
Officer.
Michael Howard lived with his canary, Cherub,
which was comfortably middle-aged, rotund and very yellow. Cherub sat quietly
and contentedly, observing its small world, on a perch in a wire bird cage of
no particular architectural merit, hanging above and close by the kitchen
table. This is Cherub’s tragic story. For readers with deeply sensitive souls,
who are easily disturbed by bleak tales of death and dishonour, you may wish to
look away now – skip this story and turn to the next chapter.
Michael also lived with his three-years older
sister, Rosemary, who kindly taught me, after I was rejected from the Osborne
Bentley School of Dance, how to Jive like Elvis Presley and Rock like Bill
Haley, a social skill that has served me well ever since; and he lived with his
father and mother, Mr and Mrs Howard, in a nineteen-thirties, semi-detached,
mock-Tudor, part timbered house, standing narrow and tall, on rising land,
behind the tree line, well back from the pavement of Priestnall Road, about two
hundred winding yards from the infamous and magnetic Fylde Lodge School for
Girls, whose buildings dominated the wooded crossroads at Priestnall Road and
Mauldeth Road.
Michael, like the house, was also narrow and tall,
sporting black hair, oiled with Brylcreem,
as were the coiffures of all male teenagers in those days, and illicitly
allowed to grow longer than the mandatory military short-back-and-sides, which
enabled Michael when safely out of parental sight, to flick his hair up and
back in pale imitation of and in secret homage to the dark, back-swept look of
Elvis. But, uncertain as was his admiration for the Teddy Boy style of the day,
it meant that he never combed his straight
locks quite determinedly enough for his hair to stay swept back for more
than a minute or two and, inevitably, his quiff fell limply forwards and
straight across his eyes, to be flicked back moment by moment with his fingers
– like a nervous tic – which the girls seemed to find quite attractive.
Taller than his pals, Michael compensated by
stooping slightly, sometimes lending him an anxious, hand-wringing appearance.
He was an amiable lad, more likely to negotiate than to challenge, with a
modestly reliable talent as a card player. My older brother Richard, who played
cards with professional skill and dedication, had established a fashion for
intensive, schoolboy games of three card brag, pontoon (blackjack) and five card
poker, often hosted, for hours and hours, in one of the many unused rooms in
Birch House, our haunted Victorian mansion on
The Game, which was played for real money and from
which Richard, winning often, was saving for a two-month Continental
hitch-hiking holiday, involved everybody, who was anybody, in the district. As
new players heard of it and joined in, The Game grew both in numbers and in
stakes. Vital pocket-money was won and lost, leaving some bereft of funds for
the coming week. One or two of the older lads had left school early at fifteen
and were earning wages, apparently giving them the power to outbid and out-brag
the others – but usually losing far more than they had imagined they might and
thus enriching the frugal but astute young scholars; giving the lie to the
street urchin’s taunt “If you’re so
clever Mister! Why ain’t ‘cha rich?”
Some of the young players were coining it in.
Wealthiest of all, wealthier than the legendary
Croesus (I was forty-five before I discovered the saying was not “As rich as
creases;” which never made any sense to me – but “As rich as Croesus”; you know
- the classical Greek millionaire) and more profligate than Timon of Athens,
(he’s from Shakespeare) was Willy Mason.
Willy was perhaps a year older than Michael and
me, which placed him halfway from our age to my older brother’s age, who in
turn ranked in maturity alongside local legends such as Terry Ryder. Willy,
painfully thin, faintly blue in the face and as tall as Michael, lived in a
large detached, mock Tudor house, on the opposite corner to Fylde Lodge.
The Mason’s garage at the side of the house was
directly across
Willy’s dad was very, very rich; so rich that he
gave Willy twenty-pounds a week pocket money – when the average respectable
young teenager would be lucky to be given half-a-crown. To translate this
amazing differential, there were eight half-crowns in a pound meaning Willy had
one-hundred-and-sixty times as much as his pals and as much as, for example, a
thirty year old office manager earned in Manchester. Willy not only had cash to
burn but his father let him, even as young as seventeen, drive his cars. Willy,
notoriously, crashed two Rolls-Royces in one year, destroying them beyond
repair. Terry Ryder claimed to have seen the wreckage of the Mason’s white
Rolls Royce, on Kingsway in Burnage, a modern dual carriageway into
“It was a total bloody mess.” Terry assured his
goggle eyed audience. “A smoking, smouldering ruin; A complete bloody
write-off; Nobody but nobody could have survived inside that car. It was a pile
of scrap squashed flat!” And he surveyed his captive audience satisfied that he
had them in the palm of his orator’s hand.
“It was completely silent. Nobody said anything.
Then something moved. A bit of tin shifted and fell off the pile onto the road
with a big clang. The only recognisable bit left of the whole car - the only
piece you could tell what it had been – was the exhaust pipe...”
Someone sniffed derisively.
“…No honest it was; just the exhaust pipe...” grinned
Terry “...There was this great crumpled heap of metal and steam and smoke – and
sticking straight up, like the mast on a ship – was the exhaust pipe…”
“…As God is my judge – nobody could have lived
through that crash. There was no room in the car left for anyone to be in it…”
“…then…”
Terry waited a moment as his audience shifted
inwards, nearer to him. “…And then – there was this little extra puff of smoke
came out of the exhaust pipe. Honest it did.
…and it formed a smoke ring that drifted up in the air…”
The collection of boys and girls were smiling,
anticipating the next twist in the tale.
“…And I sniffed it. This smoke. And I’ll swear to
God – on my mother’s grave (his dear mother was very much alive) – that it was
Turkish, Sobranie tobacco…”
The fabulously wealthy and ever so painfully thin
Willy only smoked Black Sobranie cigarettes, a brand which claimed to be made
in
“…and the exhaust pipe shifted – just a fraction.
And another smoke ring came up from it. …Honest it did. And then, from this
scrap yard of a car, out of the exhaust pipe…”
We all knew that only Willy was slender enough to
emerge from a car exhaust;
“…came Willy; Honest to God; as real and solid as
I am here.”
Terry offered his arm in an exercise of dubious
logic, for any doubting Thomas to hold or prod, in a pseudo scientific
substitution for the real Willy. But there were no doubters.
“…and he was unmarked. No oil, no bruises,
nothing. His hair was still waved like a girl…”
Willy had fair crinkly hair which he brushed hard
back on his pointed head where it crouched in unwelcome, small, harsh, blondish
waves.
“…and he was smoking; wearing his dog-tooth
jacket…”
Willy characteristically wore a Dunn and Company
black and white checked, double breasted jacket of the very best worsted – and
usually with a flower in his top button hole – and always with a colourful bow
tie.
Terry had his audience gripped; all grinning and
waiting to hear the dénouement.
“…But the extraordinary thing was…” said Terry,
his face at its most serious, credible and astonished, “…the ash was still on
his cigarette.”
Several lads guffawed, not entirely believing the
miracle that Terry had witnessed.
“No. As God is my Judge! I’ll swear that it was.
He rose up out of that exhaust pipe like a Genie out of a bottle. Not a mark on
him. Smoking a Sobranie – and there was a quarter-inch of ash still on the
cigarette.”
Before the year of the white Roller, when Willy
was too young to drive legally, his dad had an American car, a fabulous
Juke-Box of a car in pale pink and gleaming chrome, which Willy took on short
illicit runs up to the local shops. This behemoth wallowed on its soft American
suspension making it difficult to steer and manoeuvre and particularly
irritating to park in the garage at the side of their house – opposite the
Headmistress’s window. The crossroads were slightly offset in a dog’s-leg that
narrowed between the Mason’s and Fylde Lodge, forcing the Mason’s to slow the
pink blancmange vehicle to two miles an hour and reverse several times in the
street to bring it home to rest. It was more like docking an ocean liner than
garaging a car.
Willy found a quicker route. He adopted the habit,
before the headmistress, the local police and his father intervened, of
hurtling back to the crossroads, huge, pink and wobbling, ignoring the
necessity of the dog’s-leg, and looking to neither right nor left, as other
vehicles were statistically unlikely, not impossible but in those days
unlikely, to be on the roads, driving straight ahead into Fylde Lodge, through
the tall, thin privet hedge; hand-brake turning the ludicrous machine through
ninety-degrees on the Headmistress’s small private lawn, before bouncing over a
shallow rockery through the other hedge, down the kerbstones – straight across
the narrow road – into his garage; without, so urban legend reported, losing
the ash on his Sobranie cigarette, eternally perched, absolutely horizontal, in
the centre of his lips.
Thus did Willy’s reputation go before him and the
tales of his unlimited wealth and mediocre gaming skills, ensured he was
invited, politely press-ganged, into as many of the card games as possible.
Being impulsive, Willy played emotionally – and so lost. Willy’s immense losses
which made not a jot of difference to him, leveraged up the stakes of The Game.
No longer could my brother Richard command the arrangements of where and when –
and with whom – it would be played. Terry Ryder introduced a newcomer, Mike
Hobbs, a short, thickset and quiet boy, who played well – and won – and won and
won, as did Terry. Richard silently dropped out of games when Mike Hobbs
played, particularly those at Willy’s house, where Willy might lose ten or
twenty pounds – fortunes for teenagers – and Richard set up alternative games,
reverting to schoolboy stakes and to his winning strategy of imposing on the
players a form of sensory deprivation, locked in a darkened room for
uncountable periods of time, hunched over a card table with a single light and
chain smoking; inducing disorientation, dehydration, dizziness and ultimately
the will to live – or win - and not allowing anyone to leave the game until he,
Richard, was in profit – but he won fairly and squarely; he never cheated.
It was some months before Willy learned, and was
justifiably enraged, that the unreadable Mike Hobbs had a father on the stage;
a father who was a conjuror, specialising in card tricks. Willy stopped playing
cards and went off alone to write-off a few more cars. Without its financial
mainstay The Big Game sputtered to a halt. But as The Game splintered, other
youths saw the opportunity to play host and place themselves at the epicentre
of Heaton Moor society. Michael Howard, whose innocent and inoffensive parents
spent weekends away, offered his kitchen as a gambling den. Cherub, the canary,
cocked its little yellow head and watched from its vantage point perched above
the table, with one bright eye, as the white, black and red cards flashed
across the table top at the regular games.