The Guv'nor by Lenny McLean Read Free Book Online

discovered.
    Sometimes, when Ronnie Knight had a bit of business with my stepfather, he’d bring his wife to our house. He was married to Barbara Windsor then, who’d just started in the Carry On films, and was on the way to being a big star. I only met her the once, because I always seemed to be at school when they turned up, and then I was so nervous of Jim Irwin digging me out in front of them that I stood behind the settee like a big dummy. I might only have been a kid, but I was knocked out by how beautiful she was with that long blonde hair and how friendly and ordinary she seemed – not a bit stuck up like you’d expect from a film star. I bragged about it at school for weeks afterwards. How we chatted and laughed and how she gave me a big kiss when she left … I wish. Most of the lads thought I was the dogs, but some of them needed a smack in the head before they believed me.
    Years later, Ronnie and me met up and became friends, but as he and Barbara had divorced I never did get to know her. Funny, really, I used to look at Ronnie sometimes and think to myself, ‘How could you have been mates with that bastard Irwin?’ Then, one day, I came out with what that beast had done to me and the others. He just looked at me and said, ‘Lenny, you’re joking me.’ I showed him the scars on my head, legs and arms and he swore he never had a clue about what was going on then. If he’d known, he would’ve had the bastard done away with. I believed him because Ronnie’s one of your own. Too late, by then, but it was nice to know he would’ve been there for me.
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    At home, Mum had my little sister Sherry and I loved her to death.Never mind that half of her was an Irwin, she was a little smasher and I never gave it a second thought. Funny, isn’t it, that he hated me because I wasn’t his, but I thought the world of his daughter? He spent fortunes on her, and still nothing on us, but I didn’t mind.
    I was about 13 then and knocking about regularly with a little firm of kids. There was Tommy Green, Andy Bradshaw and Joe Kyle. What a team. For starters we were just into the sort of thieving most kids get up to. Over the wall at the back of the sweet shop, pass over a dozen empty lemonade bottles, then nip round the front and collect the threepence deposit on every one. The same thing worked with off-licences as well. Because I was the biggest, I was always the one who was shoved to the front to do the business. One day, the others gave me a leg up over an 8ft high wall, and then to get out all I had to do was unbolt the back gate and bring out the gear. I dropped down, and within a few seconds found the gate padlocked from the inside and a huge great Alsatian looking at me with a big grin on its mug. I thought, ‘Before I’m halfway up the wall this bastard’s going to turn me into dog meat.’ So I chucked this empty crate at it, opened the back door of the shop, shot through the storeroom, over the counter, and away. I can still see the look on the face of the little bloke who owned the shop. Never had time to open his mouth.
    â€˜Jump ups’ was another good earner. We’d wait until we saw a lorry pull up outside a shop, let the driver take his first delivery inside, then we’d be up and in. You grabbed the first thing you set eyes on; it didn’t matter what it was. In those days most of the lorries just had a big sheet down the back, not the metal doors they have today. We never got big stuff – it was mainly fruit or meat, but once we got about sixteen pairs of ladies’ shoes. Anything like that, or full boxes of peaches or grapes, we’d fence off to an old character down the Nile. I won’t mention his name in case he’s still working, but if he is he must be about 90 now.
    The trouble was nothing that was nicked could ever be taken home, and the money we earned had to be spent so that it didn’t show.