The Magnificent Two

Petham Green, Twydall: I put the phone down feeling very pleased with myself. At twelve years old I’d worked out the complexities of button A and button B, and made my first ever phone call, to Peter Burtenshaw. We agreed when school broke up that I’d visit him during the holidays and now that we’d arranged it, I only needed to cadge the bus fare off my mam.

Burty and I had clicked from the off and I looked forward to see his big grin again. For someone on the small side he had a sizeable head and an enormous jaw, for which I likened him to Griswald, a dog under the control of Officer Dibble in an episode of Top Cat.

Home for Burty was the Anglo Saxon pub on the corner of Saxton Street  and Lock Street where he lived with his mum, dad and big sister. Outside of licensing hours, the run of the pub was a normal everyday thing for him but for me, it was a step into another world.

I’d never seen a bar billiard table before. Though I grasped what was required and tried my best, a gift for knocking pegs over gave Hotshot Burtenshaw multiple opportunities to demonstrate how it’s done. 

In the pub’s back yard Burty suggested we have a game of French cricket.

‘What's that?’

‘It’s like ordinary cricket ‘cept your legs are the stumps. Pass me the bat and I’ll show you. Right, you bowl the ball at my legs.’

So I bowled the ball at his legs… and Burty batted it away, as he did again and again.

‘Right, it’s your turn to bat. You need thirty seven to win. Are you ready?’

‘Yes’

‘Out!’

‘Git!’

Four losses in a row taught me that people with long lanky legs should not play French cricket with sly little short arses.

When he wasn’t beating me at one game or another, Burty kept me supplied with crisps and bottles of Pepsi. And when we went for a stroll up the High Street, he treated me to a milkshake at the snack bar. I’d had Nesquik before and liked it, but the milkshake they made in that snack bar was extra special.

Further up the High Street we had a mooch around WH Smith’s, where I gazed at the Letraset panoramas whilst working out how many months it was till Christmas.

Burty spotted an Alf Garnett paperback on our way out. He took a copy from the shelf, just to check the price. ‘Three and six… not bad,’ he said. Though he put it back on the shelf, he was still thinking about it when we'd left.  ‘I think I’ll get it;' he said. 'And when I do, you can read it after me.’

Not surprisingly, I was back at Burty’s the following weekend.

‘What the heck’s that?’

‘It’s a greyhound. It belongs to one of the regulars. We’re looking after it while he’s on holiday. It fell out of a window and broke its leg. Now it’s getting better he wants me to give it some exercise.’

So it came to pass that me and Burty should cross Marlborough Road and wander onto The Lines with a recovering greyhound. After turning it loose and letting it run free for a while, Burty suggested we set up a chase. ‘You can be the rabbit,’ he said.

While he held the dog, I strode up the track that veered left of the memorial. At around 500 yards the cry went up. Burty turned the dog loose and I started running.

For an animal still on the mend, it closed the gap rapidly. Each time I glanced over my shoulder it seemed to have doubled its size and that was alarming, because until then I hadn’t considered what might happen when the bloody thing caught me. Passing the memorial I shot over the rise and hit the downward slope, where a huge expanse of nettles loomed that I couldn’t avoid. Propelled by momentum and gravity I went straight through the lot, yelping all the way till I burst clear on the other side and applied the brake with a self inflicted trip that sent me tumbling. Shaken, breathless and stinging, I’d no sooner sat up when the dog, having circled around the nettles, appeared at my side and started licking my face.

  
We went to the Odeon that afternoon.

The film was very good. So too, were the hot dogs and the Pepsis we bought. And after seeing the trailer for the film the following week, we agreed we’d have to see that too.

Once again we enjoyed the film… and the hot dogs… and the Pepsi Cola. And once again the film advertised for the following week looked too good to miss.

I spent a lot of time at Burty’s that summer. Between strolling around the High Street, going to the pictures, and watching The Golden Shot on Sunday afternoons, we wandered the Lines.

A leisurely stroll around the grounds of the memorial became competitive when we started counting Burtenshaws and Lynch’s. There were few of either, but that didn’t stop us scanning every plate.

Elsewhere on the Lines… thin branches stripped of leaves made excellent swishing sticks, perfect for wading into long grass and decapitating enormous weeds. We just had to watch out for bees. Then Burty found an empty bottle and a new challenge arose – catching a bee in the bottle. He succeeded too, but then he needed something to seal the bottle.

‘Done it!’

‘Have you? Let me see. What did you use?’

‘A bit of dog shit.’

‘Urgh, you dirty sod!’

Those carefree days with Burty were amongst the happiest of my life, but behind them lay a shameful secret; a secret that came out when Mam asked outright if I’d taken money from her purse. I couldn't deny that on successive Friday nights I’d stolen up to three half crowns to fund my weekend adventures. Tears of shame turned to tears of terror when I thought about the consequences. I begged her not to tell Dad. If stealing from her purse didn’t get me murdered, it’d surely get me half murdered and cast out with my meagre possessions wrapped in a spotted hankie on the end of a stick.

‘I’ll see,’ she said.

Twenty four nerve jangling hours passed before the red alert subsided and even then, I was subdued for days. I never touched Mam’s purse again. Just the sight of it filled me with dread.