THE WEEKEND Part 3 - Saturday 'Stowaway'
By Albert-W
- 554 reads
THE WEEKEND
3
Saturday - Stowaway
The seven year-old Greg first met the ten year old tough nut, Ken Woodward, one Boxing Day. The older boy was roller skating in the street when he spotted a kid pedalling his new scooter, dressed in a navy blue school mac over short trousers, face obscured by a green hand knitted balaclava. Ken made the first approach. “You a boy or girl?”
“Boy.”
“That’s all right then. Let’s go round the block.”
Greg called for Ken a few days later, only to learn that he had gone back to a reformatory at Weybridge following the Christmas break. It was where he spent most of the next year, though Greg didn’t know why and was never told. But what he did discover, from quite early on, was the advisability of keeping on the right side of the boy, not getting into fights with him like the countless others he came to see nursing their broken noses. He saw Ken when he could, when he was home, and they seemed to hit it off.
By the time they were teens Ken had finished his stint of detainment, though not his stint of crossing the authorities.
There was this spotty girlfriend of Greg’s called Jeanette, and Ken fancied her something rotten. So when Greg threw her over in favour of something less acne’d, Ken was straight in, and immediately besotted. The relationship started only days following his commitment to join the Navy and he was all signed up. He never got as far as a ship, let alone the sea; his service didn’t last beyond basic training. He persuaded his malleable father to buy him out.
Jeanette lived in the same road as Ronnie Horsefield. Though nowhere near as fanatical as Wilfred, her parents also had religion; regular churchgoers, always worshipping on Sunday mornings, and gathered around the harmonium in their parlour after lunch for a spot of vocal praise. As they worked their way through their repertoire, Ken would be upstairs working his way through their daughter, week in, week out; a routine that came to an end on the day Jeanette’s father stopped playing and heard the bedsprings that his squeaking bellows treadle had been masking.
The old man saw to it that there would be no more such trysts so, desperate for some excitement in his life and with ill-considered haste, Ken enlisted in the Army; the paras. He said that some of the blokes on his training were nutters who’d only gone in to give vent to their killer tendencies. “Fancied carving up a few Yemini,” one told him. Another liked to dress up as Hitler, shouting Nazi slogans and singing in a cod German accent, goose-stepping up and down their billet. ‘Zere iss a land across zee ocean, and zey call it Ingerland... Ingerland!’
One day, Ken managed to obtain a Browning pistol and live rounds for the madman in exchange for a fifty tin of Senior Service cigarettes, and that weekend Adolf went AWOL. By the Sunday night he was in police custody having marched into a West End bar, demanded cash then registered his displeasure at the barman’s refusal to oblige by shooting him through the forehead.
Ken wanted out of the Army soon after wanting in. He was desperate to get back to Jeanette who had written saying that things had cooled down at home. He had already done seven of the eight jumps he needed to secure his qualifying Wings, and managed to persuade his superiors that the Parachute Regiment would be better off without him by getting airborne for the last one, refusing to jump and refusing to say why.
But things were not quite what he was expecting when he got back. Jeanette was right when she’d said the atmosphere was cooler. She’d not said, however, that it was she who had developed the thickest layer of frost and had lost interest in him. Ken was bereft; unable to tempt her to resume where they had left off with their rutting relationship, though believed she would change her mind if he could get her back into bed.
There was this bloke they called Mingus, a bearded beatnik-type jazz freak who wore Jesus boots and popped pills. He could always lay his hands on stuff from the lab where he worked. Ken asked for, and got, chloroform.
It was bitter cold on the night between Christmas and New Year when he shinned up the drainpipe to Jeanette’s bedroom. The noise woke her but she refrained from calling out when she recognised him. He pleaded to be allowed into the bed and she refused, saying that he ought to pull himself together and get on and find a new girl. That was when he soaked a cloth and forced it under her nose. She wasn’t out for long, though when she did come to, Ken was in the bed, naked - as she now was - and on top of her. She resisted him, threatening to call for help, so he soaked the cloth, heavily this time, and knocked himself out, hoping it would kill him.
It didn’t.
Another bloke in the street, Brian, had a New Year’s Eve party. Jeanette declined her invitation, concerned that she’d run into Ken and another scene. He was there, propping up a wall, drinking heavily, totally morose; telling everybody that he would leave on the stroke of midnight, get on his brand new motorbike and drive it at full pelt down the turning opposite her house to end it all by hurtling through the front room window. Few took him seriously, but Greg did. He had spotted Ken’s bandaged wrists hidden by his shirt cuffs.
The strains of Auld Lang Syne provided a sombre accompaniment to the sight of the dejected lover leathering up and attempting to kick-start the bike. Greg had switched round the plug leads earlier and knew that Ken would be too pissed to realise. It wouldn’t start and he wandered off into the night. Ronnie found him some time later, tearful and throwing up into a hedge, discharging the evidence of yet another doomed suicide attempt; a myriad of part-dissolved Anadin tablets downed with Scotch.
Ken wouldn’t try again, Greg was sure, and let him sleep it off right through the whole of New Year’s Day, though he didn’t count on him departing early the next morning and not coming back.
After school on the following Friday, Greg was watching TV when a black chauffeur-driven Austin Princess limousine drew up outside - its passenger a fur-coated lady who said she was a reporter from the Daily Express and wanted some background information on Ken who had been detained on board the Queen Elizabeth in New York Harbour as a stowaway. The liner and prisoner were now steaming back for Southampton and she was certain that there must be a story in it, something juicy.
“Not that I know of,” Greg lied, well aware what interesting reading the affair would make - as well as what trouble once Ken got back. Denied a scandal, the paper’s coverage of him being handed over to the authorities was subdued, their photograph blurred, almost unrecognizable. A follow-up piece said that he had been given three months in one of Her Majesty’s detention centres.
A week later, Greg got home to find the sod sitting in the kitchen drinking tea.
“What ho Greg,” he beamed with his sparkling blue eyes.
“Christ mate,” Greg choked, “what are you doing here? You broken out or something?”
Nah,” he said. “Got the sentence changed to a fine, didn’t I.”
His solicitor had appealed on the basis that the recent paratrooper training - which had been ‘reluctantly’ given up for deeply personal reasons - made the correction centre look like a kindergarten. The magistrate was persuaded and amended the custodial sentence to a ten pounds fine.
“What about the bike?” Greg wanted to know. He couldn’t believe Ken would have easily parted with the gleaming white and chrome Royal Enfield Turbo Twin for which his well-meaning and daft father had stood guarantor.
“It had gone when they booted me out. The HP company snatched it back.”
How about the trip, what was it like, how had he done it?
“I went up some steps and got on one of the decks. Nobody was about at first, so I just nosed around. A crew bloke comes along and asks if I’m a passenger and I say yeah; but he guessed I wasn’t. He showed me a rope locker where I could kip and brought me leftovers every day.”
“Why didn’t you stay in America?”
“’Till the bloke told me, I didn’t know I needed papers to get off. I would have tried to sneak away but it was bloody cold; snow everywhere; and I only had me leather jacket.”
“How’d you get caught?”
“Well, I was knackered and I’d had enough of that freezing locker so, on the way back, I dossed down in the crew’s quarters. Some geezer woke me up and asked what watch I was on. I didn’t know what to say and I told him the third. He said OK and went off. I thought I’d cracked it. Then he comes back with two officers and they lock me up in a cabin.”
“What about food? Surely they had to feed you.”
“Oh yeah; got three proper meals a day then, and after the first day they let me mix with the crew ‘cos I kept picking the lock and getting out, so they got me to promise that I’d keep away from the passengers. It was fair enough. They were good blokes really, and I met Rock Hudson when he come down from first class to meet the lads. He said he’d never met a stowaway, and he sent in some fags for me.”
Greg was wondering about the Jeanette business. “What about her?” he asked.
“Hmm;” Ken shrugged nonchalantly, seemingly cured by his experience, “fuck her.”
* * *
© Albert Woods (2014)
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