Le Dejeuner

Like many grand criminal master plans before it my foray into forgery and deception was doomed to failure.

The school I attended, a grammar that was only a short step away from being a public school judging by the number of sound thrashings and buggerings meted out behind the bike sheds had an interesting method of dispensing exercise books. When a book was running out of pages either through being filled with material of educational worth or games of hangman and speed knobs the subject teacher would sign the back page and off you would run to the school bursar, show him the signature and be issued with a new, pristine book to cover with rampant male body parts and maybe a bit of learning as well. Thus it was that having gained the signature of Mr Wilton our French master I learned with a few weeks practice to turn out a reasonable facsimile of said scribble. Just being able to do this was, on its own a pretty pointless exercise unless I fancied landing the teacher in it by scribbling ‘Mr Jones is gay’ signed Mr Wilton on the back of the staff toilet doors. However, it did have one very useful purpose…

Like many schools we had staggered lunches so that pupils on games that afternoon got in first then the other years in turn. Presumably this was to ensure that those on games had time to digest their lunch so that the games lesson did not descend into a hundred or so boys throwing up in the bushes after our sadistic gym master sent the participants on the customary five warm up laps of the playing fields. The ground staff frowned on mass puking as it made the Rhododendrons wilt. The only other people who could get onto first lunch were teachers and those who were receiving extra tuition over the lunch break. Thus if you were not one of those you faced the likelihood of soggy chips, burnt pizza and congealed gravy…or it might have been custard, it all looked and tasted the same. Anyhow, having discovered a talent for forging the French masters signature I used this to sign the back of dinner tickets, for a small fee of course, which enabled fellow pupils to get into first lunch by claiming they were having extra tuition. The profits were not too bad, averaging between £5 and £10 a week which was a good sum back then and certainly kept me in Panini stickers and Mars bars. The only problem was that like most of these things it got a bit out of hand as more pupils discovered my talent.

I suppose I should have noticed but I was too busy separating my fellow pupils from their pocket money for the privilege of avoiding the leftovers that nobody else wanted. The jingle of filthy lucre brought to me by my skilled forging had blinded me to the fact that this particular week I had spent most of the morning breaks and the periods moving between classes signing dinner tickets. At one point a queue had even built up outside the boys toilets where in competition to Adam and his porn empire I had set up shop in one of the stalls and was banging out strips of tickets at the rate of two a minute. In fact it did not dawn on me right up until the moment Mr Wilton stormed across the playground, grabbed me by the collar and hauled me up to the headmasters office.

My criminal master plan had come undone the moment almost the entire third and fourth years had turned up in the dining hall demanding to be fed because they had extra French tuition, not that the school had a classroom that could hold some two hundred pupils all wanting to chant “Jean-Paul est dans le jardin de Marie-Anne”. The school cooks faced with having to try to shift an industrial amount of chips and pizza over the counter had immediately closed the hatches and refused to budge and as a result trouble was brewing. The head cook, a truly scary woman whose resemblance to Giant Haystacks was uncanny had gone in search of Mr Wilton, the apparent cause of the chaos clutching a steak tenderiser and on finding him had threatened to do something unspeakable to his nut clusters. Thus alerted that it was something to do with him he set about finding the culprit and someone, pissed off at being denied their pizza and chips had ‘dobbed me in’. Now I found myself up in front of the headmaster with an apoplectic French teacher virtually demanding that I be summarily executed in front of the whole school for daring to forge his signature. Luckily for me the head had obviously just received the bill for the last firing squad and decided that 2000 lines and confiscation of profits was a more just punishment. The only problem was that confiscation of profits meant an increased likelihood of a swift buggering or worse behind the bike sheds when I could not reimburse the irate lynch mob that was forming in the playground.

It was lucky then that I had also learned how to forge the Geography masters signature as well and was able to fob most of my fellow pupils off with that in a strictly controlled manner of course. So apart from the 2000 lines which I had bribed Nicko to do with a promise of a months worth of News of the World stolen from next doors dustbin that he could cut the glamour adverts out of it all ended quite well. I avoided severe pain and a sore arse and I even managed to recoup my profits from forging the Geography masters signature and increasing my used tennis ball business, the latter of which, oddly ended in pain and disaster as well but that’s another story.

Funnily enough, shortly after that I was suddenly demoted from Mr Wiltons top French set to what would now be known as the ‘remedial’ set. Not that I minded at all as it was taught by the far more pleasant and definitely more pneumatic Miss Lessing.

I never did find out who grassed on me though.

Jemima

We were never quite sure where Jemima came from. She may have escaped from a local farm after killing everyone and tunnelling under the wire or had possibly found her way from the local nature reserve after being barred for bad behaviour and mugging a cormorant or two. Wherever she was from they were probably glad to see her go. Jemima you see was a duck but not any ordinary duck. Jemima was the Hannibal Lecter of the duck world, a veritable psychoduck, a ninja trained duck assassin of the highest order and one day we found her bobbing about on the pond outside the back door.

It was dad that first discovered her and she discovered his leg with a well aimed ninja duck peck only seconds later sending him hopping around the patio saying a few words that my seven year old self filed away for future reference and to repeat to my mates in our gang hut. This was the beginning of a ritual that would occur every time Jemima was around and an adult showed their face in the garden. From out of nowhere there would come a “QUACK!”, a flurry of white and their ankles would be viciously pecked. Other people kept dogs to deter burglars, we had somehow acquired an attack duck whether we wanted it or not.

Strangely if I was out in the garden Jemima, the duck avenger was calm and placid and I think it was only this that saved her from being served up with a nice plum sauce. I know I caught my father surreptitiously reading the sections of mums’ recipe books that involved cooking poultry in interesting ways. If there was any suspicion that she might be hiding under the Hydrangeas I would be propelled out of the back door at the end of a broom, clutching a stale scone with which to placate her so that whatever adults were in the house could make their escape un-pecked. As far as I was concerned though Jemima was a fantastic pet, a bit like Gnasher to my Dennis the Menace.

At the time my father was something of a keen gardener and my mother held dinner parties as was the fashion of the 70s so if my father wanted to impress one of his colleagues I would be banished to my room early whilst mum served dinner and dad took the guests on a tour of the runner beans. Hardly swinging suburbia but this was the edge of a seaside town that had only just crawled out of the 19th century and throwing your car keys into a bowl and getting hammered on Blue Nun had not reached that far yet although the couple four doors down had planted a large clump of Pampas grass outside the front door so maybe it was closer than we thought.

So it happened that on this particular late summer evening I had been sent to my room early whilst mum fussed over her soufflés and dad regaled his visitors, on this occasion a business client and fellow garden enthusiast, with tales of how well the marrows were doing. Perhaps the glass of wine he had consumed had dulled his memory or maybe mum had put the wrong sort of mushrooms in the Vol-au-Vents but dad decided to take his client on a tour of the garden. From my perch in my window where I was playing with my Airfix soldiers I saw them emerge onto the patio. I also had a grandstand view of what happened next.

From the foliage that bordered the pond there came an ominous “QUACK!” of doom and like a white feathery Exocet Jemima burst through the leaves at genital height. Fed up with the taste of ankles she had obviously decided to up the ante a little. Dad, seeing what was about to happen desperately tried to steer her off course but was not close enough and with an audible thump she ploughed into the client who let out a strangled yell as he toppled backwards over an ornamental urn and into dads prize marrows with a deranged duck now attempting to savage his trouser parts.

“ARGH!” said dad.

“QUACK!” said Jemima.

“EEEEP!” said dads’ business client whilst probably thinking “That bastard isn’t getting a penny out of me having lured me to his house to be cruelly abused by a psychotic waterfowl before the soufflé course!”

It was probably the sight of dad advancing on her with a garden spade but Jemima had by now realised that it was time to make herself scarce and taking one last peck flapped off over the fence and perched on the neighbours shed roof. Below me the garden looked like a scene from the Somme, well it would have if they had been using marrows as targets instead of people in 1916. Dads’ client lay amongst the wreckage of crushed vegetables and fallen runner bean poles as dad stared darkly at Jemima on the distant roof and muttered something about Duck a l’Orange.

Perhaps wisely after that she moved away as dad took an unhealthy interest in the shotgun section of mums Trafford catalogue and was seen browsing in the local sporting goods shop for duck calls. However, she was still somewhere nearby as every once in a while on a quiet summer evening I heard a distant quack followed by the sounds of tortured screaming.

Snow Patrol

It was 1974 and the summer holidays were drawing to a close when Toby moved into the next street. As if that wasn’t bad enough when my friends and I returned to school we discovered that he was in the same class as us. It wasn’t that he was the fat kid who smelled of wee or the school bully. Neither was he as dangerously deranged as Clive who tried to set fire to the temporary classroom block and who had entered a glittering career as the local arsonist by the time he reached his teens. No, Toby was “mummies little precious” that could do no wrong and looked down on us lesser mortals from the pedestal upon which his family and a few deluded teachers had placed him. Oh and he was a snitch that made the Metropolitan Police supergrasses look like rank amateurs. Out of the sight of his parents and our teachers he made our lives a misery and was not averse to helping himself to the stock in the local corner shop that was run by the exceedingly deaf and partially sighted Mr and Mrs Graves. In short, in the opinion of us eight year olds he was someone that can only be described in words that are unprintable here lest he now be a high-flying lawyer whose favourite words are “I intend to sue”.

It wasn’t as if we didn’t try to tarnish his reputation but he seemed Teflon coated. Blackmail attempts were doomed to failure after he bought fellow classmates off with more Spangles and space dust than the rest of us could ever hope to amass and the one time we had tried to push him into a muddy ditch on the way home from school had ended up with most of us receiving a bollocking from our parents after he snitched to his mum and Dave who had done the pushing being grounded for a month after he ended up in the ditch instead of our intended target. Even worse, he soon had a posse of sycophantic hangers on due to his generosity with sweets purloined from the corner shop. All that was to change though and it happened that winter.

Due to the climatic vagaries of where we lived snow was not a regular occurrence so a decently heavy snowfall brought us out ready to bombard anyone we could with snowballs so compacted they were little more than very large ice cubes and the best place to do that was “up the field”. The ‘field’ was just that, a field that ran up to the edge of a steep hill and which was the scene of many scary bike rides down said hill providing the owner, a local farmer was not grazing his cows and a great place for us to go tobogganing in the winter if snow happened to grace us with its presence. This day however, Toby and a couple of his followers had beaten us to it and had already built a sizeable snow ‘fort’ right in the middle of our planned toboggan run. This was just not cricket as we considered the field ours and ours alone. What was worse, they had ruined our chances of any decent toboggan action that day and we told them so…and were met with a barrage of snowballs and derision. Stung by words and chunks of ice we slunk off up the hill plotting our revenge.

We tried throwing snowballs from the top of the hill for a while but could not get the distance, at least not without cutting down a few trees and making a trebuchet which was a bit beyond our engineering capabilities and anyhow none of us had brought a saw with us. Hoots of laughter met our every attempt until Paul, suggested a scheme worthy of the great Wile. E. Coyote himself. Why not make a giant snowball and push it down the hill. Quality idea!

Hidden from view at the top of the hill we put our plan into action and after a bit of a struggle had soon fashioned a snowball about three feet across. Pushing it to the lip of the hill we gave it a final shove and sent it on its way to wreak bloody revenge on the class snitch and his chums. It was about a second after we pushed it that we realised the consequences of our actions. A lump of snow that size rolling down the hill and picking up more snow as it went could actually do some serious damage if it hit someone. Filled with remorse we began shouting and Toby’s two friends took notice and fled. Toby himself simply stood and stared at the oncoming ball of snow with mortal terror.

Like a bomb, albeit a very snowy one the ball smashed into the snow fort. Luckily for Toby and our chances of escaping a murder charge it had been quite well constructed but as the fort and snowball disintegrated our view of him was obliterated by a cloud of snowy shrapnel. In a panic we scrambled down the hill and when we reached him he was still standing in the same place, white as the snow about him as we demanded to know if he was okay. It was then we noticed the faint whiff of something reminiscent of the school toilets that hung around his vicinity. It might have been a cow pat given the usual occupants of the field but the true answer came as Toby whimpered,

“I think I’ve pooed in my trousers!”

With a massed “EWWWWW!” we hurriedly backed off until Paul, yes he who had suggested the snowball idea in the first place, perhaps showing the charity and compassion that would later see him take up a career in the priesthood took pity on him and took him back to his house to get him cleaned up…but not before we had blackmailed him into never snitching on us again lest every pupil in our school, his sisters school and every school between us and John O’ Groats got to know of his ‘little accident’ that day.

Papa

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, wandering off at a tangent and starting on about remembering when all this was fields, penny chews cost a ha’penny and “I fought at Wipers y’know!” there was a time when kids did not have to rely on a box of electronics beneath the television for their entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, games consoles are great but to save us from becoming fat bastards back in the 70s we had the great outdoors to run around in, bombsites to play on and …er…Dean to scare us witless.

Dean was the local hard nut and if you were unfortunate enough to attend the same school as him then he was the school bully as well. Unfortunately several of us did. About a year older and twice the size of most of us he made Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Kenneth Williams. Despite his Flashman tendencies however, there was no way he could be described as the sharpest tool in the tool box but what he lacked in brains he certainly made up for in brawn. When you saw him coming you not only ran but spent what was left of your pocket money on a ticket for the first plane out of the country too. Most of us had felt his fists at some point and more than a few had contributed to what he called his ‘Grub fund’ with their dinner money. Suffice it to say most of us did not count Dean amongst our circle of best mates.

One day John, Mark and myself decided to take our airguns up to the waste ground at the back of the print works. As mentioned in a previous post it was a great place to hang out being a mixture of abandoned allotment, bombed out buildings and industrial refuse tip used by the printers and back in those days three lads with airguns did little to excite any interest whatsoever. Nowadays we could expect four vans of the local finest and an MP5 stuck in our ears by a black clad member of SO19 just in case we were Al-Qaeda (under 12s division).

For an hour or so we were happy plinking away at rusty tins set up on a piece of wall then growing bored we began to scout around for better targets. Our searching led us to the printers rubbish pile and we discovered a whole load of empty aerosol glue cans. Now, having already almost been blown up by what we found on the printers refuse heap in the past you might have thought we had learned our lesson but no! The glue cans were duly set up on the wall and we retreated to a safe distance to begin our marksmanship again. John had a decent .22 calibre rifle as his parents were pretty well off and he had stolen it from his older brother. Using this we were rewarded with a few decent pops and fizzes as the cans punctured under our concentrated barrage. Then we got more adventurous when Mark found some spray paint cans on the tip and we remembered the scene from Kellys Heroes when Oddball and his tank crew fire paint rounds “because they make beautiful pictures”. Time to make some art we thought.

This time though the cans were made of stronger stuff and stubbornly refused to burst and in our attempts to create ‘art’ we failed to notice the arrival of Dean until we were interrupted with “Whatchoo doin’ then?” from behind us. This was followed by “You poofs ain’t doin’ it right!” as he pushed past us and snatched Johns air rifle out of his hands. Perhaps unfortunately for Dean the rifle was loaded as if it had not been his life might have carried on as normal from that point. Without a pause he marched up to the row of cans on the wall and at point blank range he took aim and fired. Time seemed to stand still and the resulting ‘POP’ and “FWOOOOOOSH!” seemed to take bullet time proportions as the half filled, pressurised can of blue paint ruptured covering Dean from head to toe.

The three of us were in something of a quandary, openly laughing at Dean in his presence could see us beaten to a pulp but to see him standing there resembling a Smurf just cracked us up. In the end we solved the dilemma by delivering him home, as straight-faced as possible, knocking on the door and leaving him on the doorstep for his mum to find whilst we legged it down the road as fast as we could, which wasn’t very fast as we were laughing too much. A kid who lived next door to him later told us that Dean had been escorted into the back yard by his father and scrubbed with turpentine to get the paint off. Deans yelling and screaming had apparently lasted almost two hours but in spite of his fathers’ best efforts, for the next few weeks whenever we saw him he had a faintly blue tinge about him that soon earned him the reputation destroying nickname ‘Papa’.

This tale previously published in condensed form in Retro Fusion #1. Retro Fusion (c) Pendragon Media