A Gambler Born and Bred 7

At sixteen, I spent the summer holidays farting about in Guildford. It felt great knowing that I was free to do as I wanted again.
My sisters had all moved out. Sara was married, Jane was at Manchester Poly and Lucy was in Brighton.
Mum didn’t like the new house, which was a brand new Charles Church semi in Merrow. She explained that it was the only one in her price range, having settled for 50% of the old house as the divorce settlement.

I started going to Godalming College to do my A levels, but I was incapable of learning. When I wasn’t dreaming in the art room or hidden away in the library, I’d be out in the smoking area making new friends and listening out for parties. Most of the time, I wasn’t there at all.
On the way to college, there was a greasy-spoon café with an old but playable fruit-machine.
It was called ‘Gino’s Café’ and I’d spend hours either playing or watching someone else play the machine, meeting with a friend who was just as hooked as me. Neither of us knew how to stop, and it seemed only right to wait for a jackpot, even if it didn’t come.
Funnily enough, this friend later went on to become the youngest ever member of the Stock Exchange at the age of twenty-two. He’d made something out of his gambling.
We always put ‘The Ace of Spades’ by Motorhead on the jukebox. Lemmy’s lyrics were made for me.
I went there every day, with or without money.

Mum had started to give me some pocket money and Dad was sending twenty pounds a month for me. To top that up, my hands returned to dipping into Mum’s purse twice a week. I felt terrible shame each time I scurried off in search of the purse, but it could never outweigh the thought of not having money for fruit-machines.
Mum never once broached the subject, so it became a habit again.

Thinking back, I can imagine that she was just grateful that I wasn’t coming home red-eyed from glue, booze and drugs. At least with gambling, there were no signs of physical harm. Although Mum was a nurse, she was no psychotherapist.

There were a lot of public school dropouts at college. Most of them had left for the same reason as me, divorce, so it wasn’t hard to strike up conversation. We all wanted to explode inside.

By spring, I was expelled for truancy. I can’t even remember which subjects I was doing.
I was seventeen by then.
It was boring doing nothing at home so I got myself a job as a petrol pump attendant at a garage that sold Ferraris in East Horsley.

Soon enough, I was back to my old thieving ways.
Funding my gambling without having to steal from Mum was my biggest priority, apart from gambling.
On the forecourt, the level of the pumps’ reservoir was regulated by a meter that was readable in a row of six numbers, which I would note at the start and end of each shift. This allowed the boss to monitor sales of petrol.

One day, whilst filling someone’s car up, I noticed that the reservoir reading wasn’t increasing, so I called Mum and told her to come and fill her car up.
This operation blossomed into a nice earner.
I had to be careful not to blow the whistle too late, because the reservoir may have been on empty and dried up, in which case my cover would be blown.
So, when a meter got stuck, I’d fill up cars and pocket the cash for about an hour or so. Then, I’d race in to the manager’s office and report the broken meter.
If the meter didn’t break down for a while, I’d hit the pump’s casement and wash it down more than usual to see if condensation might seep in under the glass window and encourage it seize up.

Aside from that, I had a scam going with the cigarettes and sweets that I sold from the counter.
By making slight errors in stocktaking, and reporting incidents of petty shoplifting, I realised that the manager hadn’t noticed any significant change in his readings, so I’d pocket a small portion of the profit.
At the end of my shift, I’d make sure all the Ferraris were locked away nicely. Sometimes I’d sit in the driving seat and imagine that I was on the road to Monte Carlo.

Mum and I went halves on a Yamaha 50cc moped.
This gave me the freedom to visit friends from college, who mostly lived on the other side of Guildford.
Being a working man with tricks on the side, I had a fair amount of money compared to my friends, who were all still at college and doing part-time work at the weekend.
With friendship, gambling was pushed further into the background. I’d play machines in pubs but there were usually friends to ward me away and encourage me to sit with them.

If I was in a pub alone, I could lose a week’s earnings in a day. Again, this all seemed natural enough to me, a sort of penance for my daily sins.
I knew that the crimes I was committing were wrong and that I had cunningly devised all of them in order to feed fruit-machines, but it would never have justified my actions if I was nicked and put before a court of law.

In those days, an obsession with gambling would not have been considered as justification for my crimes.
Gambling would have been seen as the reward, but, perhaps crucially, not the reason for my thieving ways, and I’d have been punished, which would have added to the problem.
Being addicted to the machines wouldn’t have entered into a judge’s mind in evaluating my case. They didn’t understand that gambling was tearing my life apart, that I was the victim just as much as society for my crimes. And that gambling itself was the sole reason for my crimes.
Like I said, I’d never ever been caught for stealing.
When I wasn’t working, I’d find a pub that had fruit-machines if there were no friends around.

I discovered acid and hash at this time, and my friends slowly dropped out of college. It became a game to see who would face the axe next.

As luck would have it, Mum found a little semi in Shalford and we moved in the summer of 1982.
Shalford was where most of my friends lived, so I was very happy. I left the petrol pump attendant job after six months, which remains to this day a record as my longest ever full-time job, and became a punky hippy.
The DHSS (renamed DHS, then renamed again as The Jobcentre and now known as Jobcentre Plus) was full of lost Larrys. They were all like me; leather jackets and badges, determined not to work for ‘the system’ we all hated so much.

The world was changing, closing down and becoming more accountable, less flexible. With CCTV, we were watched. With computers, our whereabouts were monitored. The whole hippy/punk thing was about breaking free of these new chains. Was the human race so bad that we had to be seen as guilty before proven innocent?
I was. I was a gambler, and I’d do anything to gamble.

I hated being unemployed and, after two only weeks, they signed me off when I was held responsible for nearly causing a riot in the dole office on the day of my signing.
The fortnightly sum I’d received the Friday before had been spent in one day at the King’s Head. I’d won the jackpot early on, went for a stroll around town, got bored and returned, putting the lot back in. I’d left penniless, with no petrol or roll-ups for the week.

I found a job working at the local farm shop in Shalford. The old couple that owned it were very kind to me and took me under their wing. Their own son had recently been killed in a motorbike accident and they were still mourning. I’d often catch them praying in the tea-room when I needed to know the price of something.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I’d say and walk away as if I’d seen a ghost. I hated prayer and God in those days. It just didn’t seem right that some people were born to win while others were destined to lose.
Soon enough, I was up to my old tricks, stealing up to £100 a week by either not putting items through the till or ringing them in wrong. The till wasn’t itemised and the old couple had let the place go a bit.

I felt awful stealing from these lovely people. Like the old couple at the farm shop in Colwyn Bay, they were like an extended family to me; the parents I never had, always teaching me things about life.
But it only went through one ear and out the other. I was in no state to listen. I was, after all, a gambler first and foremost. Everything else was a means to it.

Most weekends, our gang, consisting of between five and fifteen depending on who was around at the time, would go to the Sea Horse and play pool and Pacman in the games room at the back. We’d listen to music on the jukebox. At about ten, someone would light up a joint and we’d all giggle our heads off.
I didn’t drink in those days. I drank Coca Cola. Booze didn’t taste nice and it didn’t mix with drugs.
When I saw the old blokes moaning at bars, it made me wonder why they drank in the first place if all it did was make them moan and groan about their job, the world, the wife and kids.
I vowed never to turn out like that.
When the pub closed, we’d go to the river and light a fire. We took acid almost every weekend that summer, and, unlike the rest of the gang, I was getting into speed with a more hardcore lot in Guildford. People started to exclude themselves and some went potty for a while but the main gang, about four of us, kept on going, searching for new colours, crazy thrills and world-changing ideas.
We went to gigs and free festivals all over south England. I used to go and see Killing Joke and the Undertones at the Hammersmith Palais on my own, because the gang preferred The Beatles, Hawkwind, Gong and Here and Now. I loved all music, so long as it was good, but punk was my musical master.

I’d worked four or five months at the farm shop when, early one Monday, I was asked to leave by the old couple. The lady had a tear in her eye but the man had a sterner face.
I didn’t ask why they were letting me go because I could see in the old man’s eyes that he was very angry with me.

Finally, I’d been caught.
As usual, I escaped punishment.
My addiction had shattered the love freely given by these most caring of hearts, laying their hopes to waste, their faith to fear.
It was no wonder that Thatcher was in power with people like me around. We had to be stopped somehow.