A Gambler Born and Bred 2

Summer of 1972, New Brighton

At seven years of age, I found myself in the enviable position of being the youngest in a big family, living in a big house, my mother’s little golden boy.
The only male of four children, my sisters were busy with their own lives. They were much older than me and had boyfriends, part-time jobs, exams and choices to make. My mother worked at a centre for backward children and Dad was always abroad, or at the university.

Being taught right from wrong went by the by, I suppose, but I wasn’t complaining at the time.
As compensation for the little parental guidance that I received (I think Mum and Dad had tired of children by the time I came along), I was given carte blanche to do as I pleased. No one asked where I went of an afternoon, any afternoon, and very few introductions were necessary for me to join in with other children in the neighbourhood.

Kids were everywhere in those days; playing football or cricket or rounders in parks, bike-riding, on the prom, just messin’ about.

I remember arguments when Dad was back from his travels. I’d sit at the top of the stairs and listen while Sara, my oldest sister, tried to separate them like a referee in a boxing match. I knew nothing of what they were fighting about. All I knew was that they didn’t like each other very much, and that the shouting made an awful noise in my head and made my stomach feel uneasy.

As far back as I can remember, I made a pact with myself never to marry. It was a sham, and I would have no part in it.
‘In sickness and in health?’
My folks did all but kill each other!
When they weren’t fighting, all I can recall is a silence, an eerie silence, like calm before a storm. That’s what it was like in my house; black or white with no middle ground.
When he was away, I remember a more peaceful silence. It was without threat when Dad was away, not that I blame him. I hardly even know the man.
When he was there, I still can’t remember one fatherly chat.

Maybe I’d already upset him with my wayward behaviour. Perhaps he had given up on fatherhood. He was an eminent researcher and it seemed that all his brains were in his work. That’s how it felt to me.
I can’t say that I learnt much from Dad.
He never smacked me but he didn’t say much, either.

So, during that summer, I started to ride my bike down to New Brighton promenade.
Within a matter of weeks, my best friend, Ian, was banned from seeing me by his parents after I convinced him that it would be a good idea to steal some change from his mother’s purse. She had scolded him.
They’d probably noticed a change in his behaviour since hanging around with me and decided to nip it in the bud before it stood a chance of spiralling out of control.
I didn’t blame them. This was the parental guidance I needed.

It was very easy to blend in at The Bright Spot, which was by far the biggest amusement arcade on the prom. There were plenty of tearaways with time on their hands in those days and there were no laws to stop us from frittering money on the vast array of machines. If you’re wondering how I managed to put the money in the slot from the age of seven, I should tell you that the slots were a lot lower in those days, and I was quite tall for my age.
The owners of the arcades weren’t stupid. They knew where the money was coming from and they didn’t care how they, or we, came by it. All that mattered to management was that they profited from our loss.

It quickly became obvious that my thieving from Mum’s purse was going unnoticed.
Even when I took more than usual, she never once said a word about it, even to this day.
On one occasion, I found myself at the arcade and in need of more money before it was time to go home, so I raced back on my bike and swiped my sister Jane’s post office book, which I’d seen in her bedroom.
This had her savings from working at John Lewis in Liverpool every weekend.
Without any questions from the cashier, I withdrew four pounds and returned to The Bright Spot to re-submerge into the madness.
Jane, my sister, never said anything about it. Maybe she had a pact with Mum.
This, and Mum’s purse, became an easy way for me to feed my habit.

After a short while, though, Jane decided to hide her post office book and no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find it.
This called for drastic action.

Bob A Job was well known as an honest way for little toe-rags like me to earn a few quid and help an old lady around the house. My intentions were plain to see, and it was only a matter of time before I was reported to the police for stealing money from various households disguised as lovely little Oliver Twist.
My parents were informed and I think I may have been grounded for a day or two, but that was as far as punishment went.

When I was eight, I convinced a new friend whose parents ran a pub that it would be a good idea to steal the contents of the pub’s safe. We got away with one hundred and seventeen pounds and, for a few days afterwards, I was on top of the world.
The paltry sums that I’d stolen before were nothing compared to this haul, and my antics at The Bright Spot became a surreal joke.

I was in a parallel universe. The moment I stepped inside the arcade, my life took on a filmic quality. I was there but, in a way, I wasn’t there at all. It was someone else.
Money had no value. Each note was just a piece of paper that gave me the coins to put into whichever machine I fancied.
If I won a large amount on a Penny Falls or a fruit machine, I wouldn’t cash it in to see if I’d made a profit. I would gamble faster, changing machines, searching for the ultimate win.

I now realise that the ‘buzz’ of what I was doing was never about winning; it was about getting away with it. I knew that I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. None of the money was mine, so I couldn’t qualify its value.
The buzz was, I suppose, getting caught, but try as I might, nobody seemed to want to step in and teach me a lesson.
I suffered no or little remorse for orchestrating the theft. While my friend petrified himself thinking about the consequences, I felt fine.

It was all too easy, that is, until my new friend got the beating of a lifetime from his father and my parents were asked to pay back half the amount stolen from the safe. They paid the money back, after which my friend told me in front of both sets of parents that he could never play with me again.
‘That’s OK,’ I thought to myself. ‘Plenty more fish in the sea.’
But that was the problem, and it didn’t take long to dawn on me that not everyone had the combination to a safe with hundreds of pounds inside.

I soon realised that if I was to gamble (ie. losing loved ones’ hard earnt cash), I had to start thinking of other ways of getting it.

If I couldn’t find money on a bright and sunny day, I would go out and vandalise a building site or just smash some windows somewhere. I was a dab hand at stealing sweets from shops, but trying to sell them on was a drag. Some kids laughed at me.
‘Who do you think you are?’ one of them said as I showed him my stash. ‘Al Capone?’
I wanted to hit him but my hands were full of sweets, my only source of income.

I have always had a wild imagination and a self-destructive streak. Of all the films I’d seen up till then, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid was the best.
For a while, after seeing the film, every time I went out of the house through the front door, I would imagine that I was about to be shot by an army of men, as in the film’s final shot, when the image of Butch and Sundance is frozen and given a sepia finish.
With imaginary guns blazing from both hands, I’d sprint down the steps from the porch to the driveway and hurl myself into the bushes by the gate.
Only when I realised I was still alive could I casually pick myself up, get on my bike and leave for the arcade.
I was always acting out some character from the telly by myself.