I was never a scrapper and avoided fights like the fucking plague, but that didn’t keep me out of them. It was a good month that only featured a couple of punch-ups.
Me and my friends had to get out of the house in order to smoke cigarettes and swear, and since none of us ever had any money we used to mooch about at the bowling alley, or more often than not we’d just head into the centre of Manchester, a twelve-minute power walk past Strangeways jail, boarded-up wholesale warehouses, cash and carry outlets, and a Salvation Army men’s hostel, its immediate vicinity haunted by meths-drinking tramps and newly released prison inmates, all of them demanding money with various degrees of menace. They weren’t the biggest problem, however. There were at least three pubs to every parade of shops, and their pissed-up all-male client base made them a seething cauldron of hatred for the likes of us that was both violent and incomprehensible. Was it the cut of our clothes or our knockabout humour that so enraged them? In any case, that short stroll was an invitation to a thrashing.
There was aggression everywhere in Manchester, but I was used to that. It wasn’t the kind of art centre it is today: it was a heavy-industrial town, and most working people got belligerent drunk of a weekend.
The aforementioned Jimmy Dynes had recently bought a Norton 650, swapped his drape coats and poo-mashers for winklepickers, a leather jacket, cheap T-shirt, and dirty jeans, and seamlessly morphed into a Greaser. As a Greaser you didn’t really need an extensive wardrobe: maybe a Montague Burton suit for court appearances. Apart from that, everything you had would last you for the rest of your tragically foreshortened life (see ‘Leader of the Pack’ by The Shangri-Las).
Jimmy was a good-looking kid. He had brown hair, which he slathered in Brylcreem just to make it look black. I know I’m always comparing people to movie actors, but no doubt about it, he had the look of Mickey Rourke, hard as nails, with that dirty blond Eddie Cochran quiff, the tattooed knuckles and all that.
Jimmy went for a drink on his own one night and his pretty face went to hell when he was glassed by a gypsy. Later on, the scar only added to his bad-boy allure, but at first it was shocking to see him so disfigured. We thought he was finished, and women were heartbroken: a handsome lad like that. I ran into him a few months later and learned that he had recently exacted his bloody revenge.
Having tracked his attacker down, Jimmy gave him the kicking of a lifetime. Apparently Constable Truelove, usually his archenemy, had given him the nod and then looked the other way. In Jimmy’s own words, ‘God knows, me and Mr Truelove have had our differences, but he came good on that occasion.’
In my neighbourhood, gang- and/or alcohol-related violence was just one of any number of potential threats to life. The area seemed to house a disproportionately large number of the criminally insane. For a while, Jimmy and a couple of other Greasers hung out with a truly terrifying individual called Terry Elgin. Terry was a real embittered nutter, known to everyone as Lemonhead, although no one would have dared call him that to his face – it was ‘Yes, Terry, no, Terry, three bags fucking full, Terry.’ Not only did he have alopecia, but because of a malformed palate or something (I’m not an expert) he also had a speech impediment which made him whistle whenever he pronounced the letter ‘S’.
Lemonhead was such a psycho that even his own gang decided enough was enough and somehow extricated themselves from his company. I don’t know how Jimmy shook him off, but after a very short time, if he was asked, ‘Seen owt of Terry?’ his reply was always the same: ‘What? That lemon-headed psychopath cunt?’ Followed by a look of panic, and the question, ‘He’s not around, is he?’
Lemonhead went completely rogue, and finished up on a piece of waste ground in Higher Broughton called the Cliff, where mining subsidence at Agecroft Colliery, together with the River Irwell, had eroded one side of the floodplain creating a landslide, hence its local name, the Lanny. The road had collapsed, leaving a one-sided parade of uncharacteristically middle-class semis perched perilously close to its vertiginous edge. You could still see the partially submerged tramlines, mangled, twisted, and knotted like steel spaghetti. Below was a pestilential tangle of semi-uprooted trees, out-of-control weeds, and poisonous foliage, girders, rubble, mudslides, and at the bottom, that ‘melancholy stream’, the River Irwell.
No other river made a greater contribution to the industrial strength of the nation than the Irwell, such was the concentration of industry along its banks. On a fifty-mile stretch, countless cotton mills, paper mills, coal mines, tanneries, slipper factories, bleach works, gas works, paint works, and dye works spewed a million gallons of grotesquely coloured effluent into its waters. There was Clayton Aniline, Tootal, Macphersons Paints in Bury, all pumping chemical-rich poison into the stream. Every day it was a different colour. Sometimes the rancid scum on its surface was so thick that birds could walk on it. God help you if you fell in – one mouthful and you would have been dead on arrival.
Horror stories understandably grew up around the Lanny. There were said to be venomous snakes, poisonous lizards, treacherous swamps, rank hazardous mires, quicksands even. Why, a bread van was reportedly pushed over the edge and to this day has never been found. There were super-piranhas that were immune to the industrial poisons of the foetid Irwell. All these hazards and more awaited the hapless saunterer. It was like going into the fucking Congo. Plus, there was the possibility of sliding to your death down some slimy, precipitous ravine.
Now, to make things worse, the ultra-alienated Lemonhead had got hold of a .22 rifle from somewhere and had taken to squatting in a particular tree in the Lanny, an unseen position from which to take potshots at any passing citizen, and in so doing attained the folk-devil status of the indiscriminate sniper. Although neither I nor any of my friends would have gone out without the requisite railroad knife, what good would that have been in these circumstances? The situation brings to mind the memorable pronouncement by Ramon in A Fistful of Dollars, ‘When a man with a knife goes against a man with a rifle . . . then, the man with the knife is a dead man.’
Lemonhead was the worst, but there were other nutters who would invite themselves into our company and by virtue of their nuttiness were never gainsaid. We just had to put up with them. When Ernie Heaton was around, for example, there was always a genuine risk that we’d end up getting into trouble with the police.
Ernie had a glass eye; something to do with a pair of scissors and the scraping of gloss paint off a door, one of many chores undertaken for his mother. Poor Mrs Heaton, she probably blamed herself for her son’s consequent insanity. He told us the story many times, with increasing relish. There he was scraping away, scrapity, scrapity, scrape, and then whammo, boing, schlurk!!! Right in the fucking eyeball. He was forever removing his prosthetic. Horrible.
‘No, I don’t want to see your empty eye socket! Put it back, you daft cunt,’ I would have said if I’d had the nerve.
If Ernie caught you in the street it was advisable to avoid all eye contact (which was pretty difficult, considering he was in a position to actually sling one of them in your direction). He was dangerous, a real fucking head-the-ball, and violent with it. Nutter. And when I say nutter, I mean nutter.
He went for karate lessons three times a week, and would demonstrate his expertise by dropping the nut on lamp posts, brick walls, or any hard, fixed, inanimate target, including trees. ‘Fucking impressive, Ernie. Fucking impressive!’ You had to keep him sweet, that was the thing. Who would come off the better: Ernie or the tree? You could maybe nut a wall down, if it was badly maintained, but a tree is going nowhere, what with the extensive root system.
Another local psycho was David Vardin. I only met him once. He had ginger hair and impetigo – his face was a terrifying mask of freckles and gentian violet. He lived down Back Roman Road, a narrow dirt track that ran between Frank Wong’s chip shop and the County cinema. Once, when I strayed into his manor, he relieved me of my movie money at the sharpened point of a ratchet screwdriver. Back Roman Road was a five-minute walk from our backyard, but with a busy main road in between, thankfully, it was easy to avoid.
What with him, Ernie ‘The Nut’ Heaton, Lemonhead, and the hazards of the Lanny, it’s a wonder I lived beyond sixteen.