That Xmas I went to bed with my older brother plus an oven shelf, wrapped in a sheet, and dreamed of what Santa would bring me. I wanted a new bike, a Meccano set, an eight inch sheaf knife and - if possible - a 9mm sub-machine gun. The oven shelf had cooled and I knew it was time to rally. I turned to where my brother should have been and found that he was missing. He must have sneaked downstairs like a thief in the night to get at the sweets and oranges. I wasn’t bothered about the oranges as much as the sweets because they were still on ration through a war or something. We thought the Germans were real bastards. I mean, fancy denying us poor bairns sweets!
I leapt out of bed like Flash Gordon when Ming was after him, clearing the old creaky treads, three at a time. As I turned into the back room I found our young’n waffing the sweets that Santa left. I asked him where my presents were. He could only splutter and cough, due to the fact that his gullet was jammed with half my bloody sweets. I ignored the black-clocks as I searched for my presents. The black-clocks were always in foreshift, spending their days breeding like...like black-clocks. Then during the night they would crawl around or sit by the fire chewing the fat.
I asked our Derek again where my presents were. He pointed to a tinsel-wrapped parcel near the cracket. I ripped it open, under the 40Watt bulb with the three year old flypaper holding on to the many generations of flies in various stages of decomposition.
I was in a frenzy as I tore open the box. In side was a pair of nickel-plated revolvers. The gun belt was out of thick leather and well made. Every six inches or so it was held together by chromed steel rings. (Incidentally I wore the same belt on the coal face, ten years later. Talk about over-engineering).
I rushed out into the still dark back street, lit only with the yellow streaks of light which came from the scullery windows. The light spread over the dirt road and revealed dozens of kids running around the netties, shooting each other with their cap guns and showing each other their presents. Shrill voices broke the silence as more of them poured out of their back yards. We blasted away at each other, till the air was thick with the smell of cordite, briefly out- smelling the whiff of the netties.
The girls walked around in their nurses uniforms, tending the wounded. When they couldn’t find any, they would hit some kid on the head with a brick so they could use their bandages. I thought it was innovative of them, in a sort a sadistic way. Keeping well away from the nurses from hell, I shot all my caps off, trying to kill my mate, big Norman Robinson. I couldn’t miss but he denied being hit. I knew he was lying because I was only a few inches from his ample chest, but then he insisted it was only a flesh wound! I only stopped mouthing off when he threatened me with his new sword. Eventually I became hoarse, shouting, “Bang!”
When it became light Norman and me went round to see what Santa had left our friends. We were getting bored, till we knocked on Snots’ door. As we walked into his house we got the feeling that he was hiding something. Being evasive was not one of Snots’ talents so he cracked and told us that Santa had left him an airgun. That’s when my belief in Santa started to fade. Our friend wasn’t safe with a table tennis ball let alone an airgun!
We went in to see it, and there it was: Shiny hardwood stock with blued barrel. While we were being dazzled by its sheer wonderment, we barely listened to Snot’s mother in the background, lecturing us on how he should realise that it was a dangerous weapon and under no circumstances was it to be used other than on the cardboard targets, which had been supplied with the gun. The woman must have had a tatie short on her plate.
With me being his best friend, (at least till the slugs ran out) I had the first shot at the cardboard target. Then when the targets had more hole than cardboard, we asked permission from the commanding officer if we could take the gun out of the confines of the yard and into one of the partly demolished houses at the bottom of the street.
She gave us another lecture on deaf ears and we set up a sniper’s liar in one of the empty bedrooms, and proceeded to decimate half the starling population in Sunderland Street. The starlings realised that their loved ones were being reduced at an alarming rate and started to skulk behind the chimney pots. We wondered if it had anything to do with the blood-spattered remains of their relatives, which lay in the snow in a fifty feet radius from our position. The ground was baited with stale bread. The starlings ate half and Snots had the rest.
“Doesn’t taste stale,” he said, “Tastes salty.”
It had a bloody good right to taste salty. Half the contents of his nose went down with it.
We settled down to a Woodbine a piece, sitting on the floorboards, under a gap where the window had been. When we were all nice and dizzy, (and believe me, three-month old dumps rolled into full cigarettes made you dizzy) we heard the bark of a dog. Our ears pricked at the thought of such a big target. But dare we?
It was the local butcher’s dog, Monty. He would let it roam the village at will, where it fought other dogs and chased us kids, just because we threw a few little stones at it. The butcher had been warned several times about its behaviour, but all protests had been ignored. Apart from being vicious, it was sex-mad, and as a result every other dog in the rows had Monty’s face.
We quietly argued over who should be the dog’s sniper, while Monty sniffed the air, trying to sort out the smell of the netties and dog shit. (A truly remarkable feat).
At the risk of sounding cocky, I reminded them that I was the best shot: 38 starlings, 5 crows, 3 cats, 2 tin baths and the bottom half of a scullery window, along with the spuggy which was sitting in front of it.
“Look, it’s ganna gan if ya piss about much langa.”
It worked and the gun was handed to me. I dug the rifle’s butt into my right shoulder. I closed my left eye and stared down the blued barrel. Nestled in the ‘v’ sight was the bulldog’s rump.
Dad had been in the Great War and always used to say, “Take aim, take a deep breath then gently squeeze the trigger. I silently followed my old hero’s instructions. It would have been silent, that is, if Snots hadn’t taken another sniff and drawn another pail of mucus back where it came from.
The dog’s ears shot up. I had to take my chance. The .177” pellet spun out of the rifled barrel with a ‘spat’. We were puzzled, as there was no immediate reaction. But a split second later, when Monty’s rump nerves reached his brain, he reared like Roy Roger’s Trigger. Accompanied by an ear splitting scream, he took off as if been fired from a giant version of our youngn’s catapult. Monty’s legs became blurred as he galloped over the railway lines. He overtook three cars, going to Langley Moor. Soon he was only a dot on the horizon, before disappearing in a flurry of snow as he went over the ridge of the pit heap.
We all looked at each other at the enormity of the act.
Snots, as usual, broke the spell with, “Why, that’s shuffled his fuck’n knackers.”
When Monty and the pellet returned three days later, the butcher tried to find out who did the deed. Fingers pointed at us, but we blamed a lad down the street whom we didn’t like. Monty recovered, but always growled when he saw us.
On rainy days the air raid shelters were used by us rag arses as flea pits, taking turns to sing or attempting short plays. Experimenting with the opposite sex was also common in the darkened, concrete caves. ‘Hospitals’ was the cover-up. Girl nurses would bandage the boy’s legs, while the boy ‘doctors’ always insisted that the girls had ‘tummy trouble.’ Or as Mam would explain whilst discussing the problems about another woman, who’d been to the surgery, “Things are not right down below.”
We even hired Monty to perform once, enticing him with a bone. We caught an unlucky bitch in heat, to be part of a double act. There was a full house on the opening day of the matinee. Monty pulled the house down. However, we got a little worried when Monty’s pup maker refused to disentangle itself from Mrs Robinson’s whippet bitch. Somebody, (who obviously had prior knowledge) went to fetch a pail of water. This only seemed to panic the dogs and they howled in pain. We tried to reassure the ‘patrons’ that it was all part of the act, but the audience grew restless. Some even wanted their money back, only calming down when a Craven ‘A’ was handed round. After a while the dogs parted and the kids filed out of the shelter and staggered home.
When the last pair of ragged sandshoes cleared the doorway, we decided to count the takings. It came to 3 shillings and 7 pence and a halfpenny, one three quarter inch galvanized washer, two milk tokens (out of date), and four plastic pennies, which were covered in solidified HP sauce. We thought that this was a puzzling total, until we realized that we had unwittingly put Jeff on the door. His explanation was that he did get confused with the sight of all that money. Anyway, we all went to Mattie Waddles and smoked ourselves into a coma.
The pups were cute and cuddly, except for the fact that they all had Monty’s face. Big Jim, Mrs Robinson’s husband, however, took an instant dislike to them, and before they could open their eyes to see our weird and wonderful world, he drowned them in the poss-tub.
So all in all, it turned out well in the end, except for the pups, that is. Monty never recovered from his debut in the bomb shelter. I thought that it was a severe bout of stage fright, but the thought was cancelled out, when we saw him stuck into somebody’s bitch one Sunday morning in amongst a Sally Army band. They were so embarrassed, they sang at the tops of their voices in order to drown out his grunts. As Monty grew older he lay outside the butcher’s shop, with one paw over the other and his head resting on top. He seemed to add another furrow to his brow by the week.
© Ron Gray, 2008
