The Guv'nor by Lenny McLean Read Free Book Online Page B

up there was £69.00. We could easily afford a taxi to get home if we could find a phone or a village.
    We were just heading for some bright lights in the distance, with all the money in our pockets, when a jam sandwich pulled up beside us; that’s what we called a white police car with a wide red stripe down the side. We kept walking, pretending we hadn’t noticed it, until another one, coming from the other direction, cut in front of us and we were lifted.
    Because we were so young, they didn’t put us in the cells, just stuck us in an office while our parents were sent for to take us home. Later on, we were found guilty at the court in Hertfordshire for stopping the train and for robbing the garage. Being first timers, all of us got probation, which was no big deal.
    Though we were warned by our parents to keep away from each other, we did meet up at school and we compared the good hidings we’d got. I envied the smacked legs and bums the other two got. I had been punched and kicked, and sometimes now when I’m shaving, I can’t help looking at the scar above my left eye. A nice little reminder of that time.
    Still, it wasn’t long after that that two incidents cheered me up and kept me smiling for ages – and one of them made me feel I’d got my own back.
    I was sitting in the front room, flicking through the News of the World , waiting for my Sunday dinner, when an argument started in the kitchen. Jim Irwin had come home pissed and had laid into my mum. She was screaming and my little sister was crying. I ranthrough and he had Mum over the table, banging her head in the food she was getting ready. I was so wild I wasn’t thinking. I ran straight in and punched him in the back shouting, ‘Leave her alone, you big c**t … if you want to fight, fight me.’ My punch hadn’t made much of an impression because he just turned round and said, ‘Oh yeah … you’ll do,’ and hit me four times in the face. Left, right, left, right, and I ended up in the passage, spark out. Well, nearly spark out, because I could still hear him, as though from a distance, shouting, ‘Come on, tough guy … get up if you wanna mix it.’
    The fight had been knocked out of me, but …at least he’d stopped hitting my mum. She put a plaster over my cut eye, gave me a cuddle and said, ‘He didn’t mean it, son, he’s just had a few too many.’
    See what I mean? Mum loved us all, but she still blanked the way that animal treated us.
    Â 
    About a week later, Nan Campion was round for a cup of tea. Jimmy Spinks was dead by then. We were in bed but she came up to see us. When she saw the cut on my head she just shook her head and said, ‘You’re just like your uncle, always fighting.’ ‘I ain’t been fighting, Nan,’ I said, ‘Jim Irwin gave me a belting.’
    Down she went, and I laid there listening to her and my mum arguing and shouting. Irwin was out, so poor old Mum was taking some stick for trying to defend him. I found out what happened next from Billy Hayes from Godwin House, who was in the same pub when our nan came steaming in the door. She was a typical East End nan, a big strong woman who could’ve taken on Rocky Marciano.
    Irwin was at the bar with all his mates. As the door burst open, he looked round and Nan punched him smack in the face. This big coward went white and tried to duck round the stool to get out of her way. As he turned his back, she picked up a big glass ashtray from the bar and did him right over the back of his head, splitting it wide open. It’s a wonder she didn’t kill him. She was hustled out, he was taken down the hospital, and the law was never involved.
    When Billy told me all this it put a grin on my face as though I’d been razor cut from ear to ear. And every time I looked at Jim, I could see those ten stitches in the back of his nut, and I thought, ‘Good