‘We got back safe, telling how the Germans had attacked in such numbers that we couldn’t help but piss off out of it. Three of us got a medal for that brave job, but I kept a long way from exploding shells for the rest of the war. Even the pilots who blasted the village got a pat on the back for wiping out attacking Germans who were nowhere to be seen. My brain swims when I think of it, which I don’t, any more. I was twenty-three at the time, but felt fifteen because, after all, it was a childish throwback sort of game, playing at war, a fact which everybody realized at the time, though nobody said as much.
‘Later on, I was out of it, and my medal went over the side of the boat coming back to Southampton. At home I found I had one brother in the Army, another at work, my sister in the family way, and my mother in a mental hospital. Within a few weeks I was back in prison, and feeling as if I’d been born there. Those months were so black in my mind that I don’t even remember what I got sent down for. I was haunted by the looney-bin look on my mother’s face; which it seemed she had always had, but I hadn’t noticed it before. I never want to be twenty-five again, that’s all I can say. I breathed a sigh of relief when I was twenty-six, determined that from then on my life would take a turn for the better. To make sure this happened I did two things which made sure it never could: I got a job, and I got married.
‘We met in a pub, Jane Shane and me. Her middle name was Audrey, which she favoured most, Tawdry Audrey from Tibshelf, who got off the bus one Saturday night in Worksop market place. During an hour of comfortable drinking I saw she had smoky short black hair and diamond eyes, pale cheeks and thinnish lips, a real beauty until she opened her raucous chops. She’d had a baby by another man, but I wasn’t to know this until after we were married, and in those days I thought an agreement with a woman was something you couldn’t break no matter what the other party had done. After a quiet wedding at the registry office, she brought her kid to live at our house. My mother, now out of the looney-bin, went absolutely soft over the little boy, so that he soon loved her far more than his own mother who, in fact, totally ignored him except to kick and shout whenever he unluckily crossed her path.
‘Getting married seemed a good thing to do, but it wasn’t long before I got to Cuckold’s Cross, so one day I didn’t go to work but took a train to London instead. There were plenty of odd and casual jobs there, but they didn’t pay very much. One day I met a man who asked if I’d knock a car off for him, and take it to a certain garage in Bermondsey. There’d be a good load of money in it for me, but on delivery, he said. I asked what sort he wanted. We stood side by side in an arcade pumping tanners into a slot machine. He laughed because I’d given him a choice: “Get me a Jaguar.”
‘“I suppose you want it for a job?”
‘“Shut your mouth,” he answered.
‘“I’ll deliver it late tonight, then. Tell them to expect me.”
‘Back in my room at St Pancras I put on my best clothes. Then I bought a couple of window-cloths from a bucket shop, and put myself on the Northern Tube. It was a rainy day, spring, so I had my mac on and walked the streets and lanes of Hampstead with eyes wide open. I spotted two or three likely ones, but waited at a corner till I saw a well-dressed bloke get out of a flash Jag, a real beauty, and walk to a block of flats down the road. With a bunch of flowers and a parcel, he looked set for a long visit, or so I hoped. I started cleaning the windows of his car with my new orange cloths. A side window was half an inch open, so I took the newspaper from my pocket, smoothed it as flat as a board, and by sliding it through and then down was able to press the button that released the latch. I could get in whenever I liked, but showed no hurry. Even if the owner came back I could say I was down on my luck and only wanted to earn a bob or two by polishing his glass. Who could object to that?
‘But the time came to act, so I lifted the bonnet and started the engine. I snapped it down, got in, and was off, moving from the kerb and turning for the opposite direction to the one I’d seen its last owner vanish in. Like a newborn fool I’d left the dusters on the bonnet, just under the windscreen, and when I stopped the car to get them in, the engine stalled. Sweat roped off me, but I fixed it again, tightening the wires and burning my fingers. This time I was definitely away, taking the ring road and getting into Bermondsey from the south.
‘When the garage door closed behind me Claud Moggerhanger came out of a cubby-hole office and tapped the car at certain vital places. “Last year’s. I’ll give you fifty quid for it.”
‘I didn’t like the face of him because he looked not only all brawn but all brain as well, middle-aged, half-bald, a man who’d had enough prison and so much good living in his life that he’d kill you rather than argue. “It must have cost fifteen hundred quid,” I said.
‘“Take off the purchase tax, wear and tear, and the fact that it ain’t yours, and you’re lucky to get forty.”
‘My blood was up: “You just said fifty!”
“Its value goes down by the minute,” he smiled, while the three other blokes behind him laughed. “Thirty now.”
‘I gave in: “Fifty, then, and I’ll clear out.” He nodded, and I looked at the fivers to check on the silver thread, and make sure the head wasn’t upside down, or that the ink was dry. Even then I wasn’t sure. A couple of experts were unscrewing the number plates and dragging out spraying equipment, as if they really had a rush job on. Moggerhanger glared at me for hanging around, so I went away, spitting and cursing.
‘I got work with a group of blokes washing cars in St James’s Square, which in good weather drew in about twelve quid a week. I didn’t tell a soul about my fifty quid, but stitched the whole of it into my jacket to save till I was in need and no one could wonder where I’d got so much money. One day I was washing an Austin, and the rough Geordie who was more or less in charge told me to go to the other side of the Square and scrub down the Daimler that had just come in, a rush job for a regular and generous customer. It was a warm day so I took off my jacket and laid it on the car next to the Austin, then went over right away to do the Daimler. When I came back, an hour later, it was gone. I looked at the empty spot and a black wave floated over my eyes, going away just as quickly. I leaned against the car, then jumped into a frantic search in case I’d moved it at the last moment and forgotten where. I found Geordie, and asked if he’d seen my jacket. “No,” he said. “I’ve got one.”