Danny & The Rebel Boys

One short-trousered summer, the sun red but still high, the gang, Danny, Jimmy, Wolfie, Ziggy and I, painted a goal, nets and all, on the wind-weathered york stone of the wall around the Red Rec. From the proud crown of the playing fields – nothing is truly flat in Yorkshire, apart from old mens’ caps – you could see Halifax. Zbigniew, who claimed his grandad had been on one of the RAF’s Polish squadrons in the war, had nicked the half-tin of paint from his dad’s van. On one of those long hot summer evenings we all remember but cannot date, we assembled next the wall. Ziggy (what else would we have called him?) wasn’t sure what kind of paint it was. There had been so much of it slopped over the side of the tin you couldn’t read anything. We got it open with Wolfie’s penknife, one of those with the white and black, fake-bone handle. It was blunt anyway. Wolfie had once threatened someone in the playground with it and they’d laughed. Wolfie still carried it 'though.

I don’t know where The Rebel Boys tag came from. For sure, it was something Danny came up with. He read some funny stuff for an eleven-year-old. I read Look and Learn when my parents were watching and Battle Picture Library when they weren’t. I swapped my comics with other friends.

The paint was gloopy and the brush had alopaecia. The first attempt at the posts and the crossbar looked like they had melted. There was some scaffolding up at a house across Hullen Edge. Two of us, I forget who, only it wasn’t me or Danny - let’s say it was Ziggy and Jimmy - came back with two long planks. We used them as rulers. “Lets draw the net on!”, Danny said, putting a finger in the paint and drawing a thin line along the rough stone. We took turns dipping fingers into the paint, marking the long thin lines of the net was like running a finger along very coarse sandpaper.

The sky was reddening as the sun fought to stay aloft. We had finished our masterpiece. We lay on the grass admiring it.

‘Let’s come back every year,’ Danny said. ‘Maybe touch it up.’

I never did. At summer’s end, I went to the grammar, wore a cap, played rugby, made different friends.

I heard things, of course, in the years since. You always do: even if you live on the other side of the world. I heard Ziggy fell from a roof of the disused factory slap in the centre of town. His dad sold the business as there was no-one to leave it to. Jimmy went to a different kind of finishing school, the Borstal at Wetherby, where he did well enough to go to jail. Wolfie is a local councillor in the town we all went to primary school in. He probably still has that pen-knife.

Danny is famous. He’s an artist. A bit like that bloke from Bristol. Maybe I’ll go and look at that wall one day. Maybe Danny does come back once a year to touch it up. You never know.