MY OTHER, WILD FAMILY
Mum and I stayed at Pugh Road for a couple of years and I loved it. I loved the neighbours, I loved the area and I loved the family. It was very lively with the ten of us, and usually there’d be someone else round for a chat as well – perhaps a friend or Pastor’s sister, Aunt Maud, who lived down the road with her kids. We’d take turns eating our meals on our laps, as although there was a table, there wasn’t room for us all to fit around it.
My biological family was a little naughty at times but on the whole they were pretty well behaved. The Burrises, however, were absolutely wild. Every time we went outdoors it was an adventure. We would find hills to climb, canals to explore and people to chase us. We would often get into fights and come home dirty or with cuts and bruises. It was a very rough area. Trevor and Peter were fighting all the time. If somebody gave us racial abuse, we didn’t go home and tell the grown-ups, we’d get stuck in and have a fight. If somebody said something bad about a family member, we’d get stuck in and have a fight; even if somebody said something bad about Aston Villa, we’d get stuck in and have a fight. We liked fighting. And if we came home and told Pastor that we’d got into a fight and lost, he’d send us out again to have another go until we won. I fought one boy in Erdington four times before I managed to beat him, and when I finally triumphed, he shook my hand and said, ‘Well done.’
I was fighting all the time but I never really got the mob-fighting over football thing. My Uncle Simpson, on Pastor’s side, used to take me and Pastor’s sons to Aston Villa and put us on his shoulders, but we’d inevitably get racist abuse. I remember one match when Villa were winning 3–0 and the white fans were going, ‘You’re our mascot.’ Then, in the second half, Villa lost it, and it was, ‘It’s your fault!’ and the racist chanting would begin.
In later years, when we were older, Trevor and I would go to matches at the Villa. West Ham and Manchester United fans would always come and have a go at us. United’s firm once organised to meet Villa fans at Birmingham New Street Station for a battle. The route they took went right past our house, and Mum closed the curtains in daytime – something she had previously talked about doing only if someone had died. And I started thinking, Why am I going to fight these people from Manchester? If I lived there, I’d probably support them. I didn’t go to another match for years.
One of our favourite things was to leave the house and say, ‘Right, we’re gonna get lost.’ We would keep going until we got lost and were hungry, then the adventure was finding our way home, and if we really couldn’t find our way home (and that rarely happened) we would simply ask a policeman and, if he wasn’t helping an old lady across the road, he would sometimes take us home. Oh, the good old days when the bobby was on the beat and your dinner was in the oven . . .
There was one incident around this time that did involve the police but it didn’t involve fighting, and I guess it was the sort of thing that happened to a lot of kids. Trevor and me and a couple of others were playing in Aston Park one day when a boy about our age – eleven or so – came up to us and said, ‘Wanna see a wanker?’ So we followed him across the park to the toilets, which had those glass bricks that were used a lot in the ’60s and ’70s. One of them was broken, and we all craned our necks closer and saw this white guy in there down below, masturbating. Of course we made a load of noise, falling about, going, ‘Argh, look at him, he’s wanking’, not really understanding what it was, but knowing it was something ‘wrong’.
He heard us and looked up. ‘What you doing?
‘We’re just watching . . .’
He said, ‘Wanna go to the graveyard? I’ll give you a shilling each.’ That sealed it. So we said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ And he gave us each our shilling and we stood and watched him do it in the graveyard. He didn’t touch any of us, but at some point he mentioned, ‘When you’re having this kind of sex’, and I thought, Ah, so this is about sex. I don’t remember feeling scared. The only thing I was fixed on was the amazing pair of winklepinker shoes he was wearing. After that, we just giggled and went about our business.
A few days later the police came round with stern faces, wanting to talk to me and Trevor. So we sat round the table with Pastor Burris while the policeman tried to get the story out of us.
‘What happened?’
‘We went to the park and we saw this man. He didn’t touch any of us.’
He was really pushing us on this. ‘Well, we still want to speak to him. Tell us what happened.’
So we told him how events unfolded and then mumbled our way through the nasty business, muttering, ‘He started . . . doing it . . .’
‘Doing what, boys?’
‘You know . . . doing it . . .’
‘Doing what?’
Long silence. Me and Trevor looked at each other, then looked at the ground.
Finally Pastor Burris shouted at the top of his voice: ‘DOING WHAT??!!’
And we answered as quietly as we could: ‘Wanking.’
‘Right! Why didn’t you say that?’
There was another long pause, then Pastor asked, ‘What’s wanking?’
‘Can you leave us for a minute please, boys?’ said the policeman.
Me and Trevor left the room and were in stitches, creasing up behind the door. We were a bit scared about what might happen, but then we started imagining the conversation going on behind that door, between the cop and Pastor.
‘Is he gonna take it out and show him?’
‘Do you think the cop is gonna start wanking?’
We were bent over and could barely speak for stifling our laughter.
A couple of days later they caught the offender – because of the shoes. They drove around until they found him, like the burglar who’d robbed our gas meter in Farm Street. It was still all a bit like the Beano to me.
Pastor didn’t give us pocket money. If we wanted money we had to earn it. Sometimes we washed windows, sometimes we ran errands, but I then broke with tradition and got a job peeling potatoes at the local Chinese takeaway. All my friends had paperrounds and things like that, but I worked better hours and got a bag of chips at the end of it.
There was something about life back then that really helped me in my future years. I loved the way we were left alone and were encouraged to think for ourselves. Most of our toys were homemade or recycled. If we wanted a bicycle, we would get a frame, find a pair of wheels, then clean them up, get a chain and some brakes – although most of the time one brake was enough – and then we’d put them all together.
Trevor and me loved fixing things, and we started a little cycle repair business in the garden. It was nothing grand; we’d do jobs for a few pence, but we built up a reputation and lots of pennies made lots of pounds. We made sleighs at Christmas, we fixed prams and train sets and we made and mended go-carts. But our biggest earner was minding cars.
When Aston Villa played at home we would stake out a patch of a couple of streets, and as the drivers were getting out of their cars we would run up and say, ‘Mind your car please, sir?’ If they said yes we’d note the car and make sure no one messed with it. If they said no we would leave it. Sometimes car thieves would come and we would beg them not to touch our cars, but we’d turn a blind eye if the car wasn’t on our list.
We were learning how to work and survive. Although we lived in a house, we were really like street kids who were left to our own devices. Mum had gone back to nursing, working all hours, and us kids looked after each other.
We once made the local paper after a minor adventure not far from our house. There was a derelict pub at the end of our road that we used as one of our dens, where we would mess about and learn how to smoke cigarettes. One day a whole gang of us went in there and crept down into the cellar and, like a scene out of a kids’ adventure story, we found a couple of old-fashioned swag bags full of money. Somebody had robbed a post office and left three sacks of money there. Trevor and I took £20 in £1 notes, which to small kids back then seemed like a fortune. We ran down to the bicycle shop at Lichfield Road and spent the money decorating our bikes with transfers featuring red dragons and words like ‘cool’ and ‘easy rider’ and ‘speed monster’. We also got some fancy mirrors and horns and we felt pretty special riding back into town.
When we got home Pastor went mad and started to administer beatings to everyone. Poor Trevor got it the worst. Not because we took the money, but because of what we did with the money. He kept going on about this lawless family we hung out with, who’d been with us when we found the cash, saying, ‘You see what the white kids did. They took the money and gave it to their dad. You took twenty pounds and went to the bicycle shop! Look how poor we are. Next time bring it all to me.’
A lot of parents would have said, ‘You naughty children, you shouldn’t have taken that money.’ But we got into trouble because we didn’t take enough, and we didn’t bring it home. Pastor was like that. His approach was, if you’re gonna do it, do it good. That’s what poverty does to you.
The lawless family took much more money than we did. They bought clothes and food and presents for their girlfriends and gave the rest to their dad. Word spread, the police came, and the money was quickly removed. The next day that family had a big cake with their dinner, and their associated ladies came out onto the streets adorned in the nicest cheap dresses we had ever seen. We just had cool-looking bikes that we couldn’t ride because our bottoms were so sore.