A Pocketful of Holes and Dreams (8 page)

There was no doubt about it, Dad could sell. And I could see the effect his charm and good looks had on the female customers – and how they looked at him. I’m sure if I’d understood half the things they said to him, I would have been shocked. But I was only eight. I’d mention what they said to Mum when we got home, but she would just laugh and say, ‘They can look at him all they want as long as they keep on buying.’

Before we started, I’d been told how important my job was. I had to kneel down on the ground in the doorway next to the open suitcase and pass the stockings up to my Dad for each customer. Above all, I was to do what I was told. If Mac saw a policeman, he would give Dad a warning nod, then Dad would tell me and I was to close the suitcase and casually stroll into the store, drawing as little attention to myself as possible. Afterwards, I was to meet him at the side entrance and we’d join Mac in the café across the road until the coast was clear. Then we’d take up position again and continue trading.

We soon got into a routine, and after a busy Saturday’s trading, we’d head to the café at about five o’clock. Dad ordered a large pot of tea, and he and Mac talked to the other traders. Dad would empty his pockets and split the money with Mac, passing any left-over small change to me as my wages. Dad always stopped off at the pub on the way home for a couple of pints, while I waited outside with the obligatory bottle of lemonade and a packet of crisps.

In the run-up to Christmas, we started selling wrapping paper too, and everything was going well. We were eating good food and we had warm clothes. We also had enough money for coal and even the occasional treat. We felt very proud of ourselves – the Pearces were coming up in the world!

Then, one Saturday morning, I got a nod and a kick from Dad. There was a policeman heading towards us, and I panicked. I snapped the suitcase closed, lifted it over my head and dashed into the store. All that would have been visible to the shoppers inside was a large suitcase on top of a pair of skinny little legs running straight at them.

Due to my mad dash, a path quickly opened up, like I was Moses parting the Red Sea. But my escape abruptly ended when I collided with the large belly of a man wearing grey trousers and dirty boots – all I could see of him. The suitcase bounced back off his stomach, flying through the air. When I looked up, I saw the angry red face of a store detective staring down at me.

He grabbed me by the arm, picked up the suitcase and frog-marched me to the manager’s office. I kept trying to pull away, but the more I tried, the redder his face would become and the tighter his grip. Hauling me into the office, he plonked the suitcase on the floor and turned to the manager sitting behind the desk.

‘Here he is, sir, one of the culprits who sell right outside our shop.’ Lifting the suitcase on to the desk, he went to open it, as if I had just robbed the Bank of England and he was going to find hundreds of pound notes inside. The manager looked first at the large suitcase, then at me. I could tell he was thinking I was small enough to fit inside the case myself.

He had just begun to ask me who my accomplices were when the door was thrown open with so much force it nearly flew off its hinges, and Dad appeared. He looked like a cross between Hopalong Cassidy and Flash Gordon as he burst into the room. ‘That’s my son,’ he yelled, lifting me up with one hand. ‘And that’s my suitcase,’ he added, grabbing the case up off the desk with the other. ‘I will thank you to leave them both alone!’

The store detective leapt forward as if to stop him, but Dad swung the suitcase in his direction, making him retreat to safety behind the manager’s desk. The manager started shouting at Dad: ‘We don’t want you outside our shop selling. Not
ever
 … you got that?’

Turning his back on the two men, Dad merely replied, over his shoulder, ‘I’ll make a note of that. And you know what I’ll do with it then … don’t you?’

Nobody ever bothered us again. That corner entrance to T. J. Hughes department store became Dad’s pitch. And he sold his wares from there, chatted up ladies and successfully avoided the bizzies for many years to come.

9. Silver Blades

I was now eleven, and it was time to move up to the seniors. I wasn’t looking forward to it, and neither were any of my classmates in Band C. The only saving grace was that I was not going to be alone this time. My mates and I would be together. We had shared our lives for four years in the juniors and knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We knew we could rely on each other. What’s more, for the first time, we could wear long trousers, something which certainly set us apart from the littl’uns, and made us feel more like men.

The other thing that made all the difference was Mr Beesley, the sports teacher; he was an inspiration to hundreds of pupils. He knew how to get the best out of us all, finding a strength in each individual child, making each one of us feel that he had something worthwhile to contribute. He was a small man and looked so young he had to wear a moustache so as not to be mistaken for one of the pupils. He drove a little yellow three-wheeled Reliant, and would take us to matches and sporting events in it. With three boys crammed in the back, another boy sitting next to him in the front, and the boot and any spare space stuffed with our sports kit and equipment, we would chug along to our destination.

It was amazing how much we could fit into that car. But it was vulnerable to wind, and the slightest gust would catch under the front, raising the front wheels off the road and the bonnet up in the air so that all that could be seen through the windscreen was the sky. Whenever this happened, Mr Beesley would call out to us, ‘Lean forward, boys! Lean forward!’, so we’d do as he said, until the front wheels bumped back down on to the road again. It must have been quite a sight in a gale-force wind – a little car bouncing up and down as it drove along, full of schoolboys bobbing about inside.

Mr Beesley organized all types of sporting activities, and many of them meant you missed classes. As a result, he had many keen sportsmen, me being one of them, signing up for anything we could.

I loved swimming, and we were fortunate to have a pool in the school basement, which the swim team used every lunchtime for training. It was quite small, but it enabled us to build up our technique and speed, which paid off once we started swimming against other schools. We won more and more.

Occasionally, Mum and June would come along to watch and support me. Mum was always proud of me, no matter how poorly or well I did, but of course she loved it when I won. We would walk home laughing and talking about the competition, with me narrating every second of my race and June tagging along, listening with a big smile on her face.

After one of these occasions, another boy, Paul Cole, started to tease me in the playground. He had a reputation for being a ‘hard case’, which translated into being a good fighter. ‘Who’s a mummy’s boy then?’ he taunted. ‘I saw yer last night, walking home with your mummy!’ His friends were all laughing and teasing me, shouting out ‘Nancy boy’ and ‘Mummy’s pet’, and nasty things about my mother. I could take his taunting me, but bringing my mother into it was a different matter!

I saw red. Without stopping to think, I ran straight at him, hitting him in the stomach, knocking him to the ground. Landing on top of him, I continued to hit out, and within seconds we were rolling around on top of each other. Suddenly the school bell rang. And as the other boys pulled us apart and we got to our feet, he shouted, ‘I’ll have you at four o’clock, Pearce.’

The school grapevine worked fast: within a couple of hours the whole school knew that Cole and Pearce were having a fight at hometime. I didn’t want to fight Cole, but there was no way out. He had laid down the challenge, and unless I wanted to be looked down on as a coward, I would have to face up to him.

Our crowds of supporters started to build, splitting the school in two. Both sides wanted blood. Cole was ranked as fourth ‘cock’ of the school, i.e. the fourth-best fighter. As for me, I was just a nobody.

As four o’clock drew nearer, my supporters were crowding round to give me advice. From the way they were going on, anyone would have thought they were professional trainers, but I couldn’t recall any of them having been involved in a fight themselves. They were filling my mind with nonsense, my stomach was churning with nerves, and there was nothing I could do except put on a brave front as the minutes ticked away.

When the school bell announced the end of the day, almost as one, hundreds of boys burst through the school doors, swarmed across the playground and out to the ‘field of honour’ – a wide alleyway nearby. Any teacher watching must have realized that there was something afoot, but as soon as we were out of sight we were out of their minds.

I was swept along, surrounded by my supporters, pressed in on all sides by helpful advisors. Cole and his crowd were ahead of us, and the lads kept on turning back to continue their taunting. When we got to the alleyway a circle started to form, one half made up of Cole’s followers, the other half mine. Hands were pulling off my blazer, and the advice came thick and fast. ‘Cole is going to
kill
Pearce,’ someone shouted. ‘Cole is history. He’s a wimp,’ came the retort from my side. ‘Pearce is gonna knock him out!’ ‘Pearce is dead!’

While the two crowds hurled abuse at each other, I stood there almost paralysed, staring at Cole, who was punching the air with his fists, looking like a professional featherweight. I wanted to turn and run. I wanted to say to them all, ‘I’m sorry, lads, but I have to go and do Mrs Gilbert’s shopping.’ But by this stage, there was obviously no chance of that working.

If they had wanted blood before, they really wanted it now. And they didn’t care whose it was. There was no way I was going to risk disappointing them. To chants of ‘Oooh, Oooh, Oooh’ and ‘Fight, fight, fight,’ I found myself being pushed into the middle of the circle, face to face with Cole, a few inches away. I knew he was two years older and was bigger than me, but it was his reputation that was scary. I’d been in a couple of small scraps before, but nothing like this. This was my first real fight, and it would determine my whole future at school. The adrenaline was rushing through my body, and I found myself feeling exactly the same as I had when I was on the back of Dad’s wagon, or standing in front of the wash house guarding the prams.

Barry’s words rang through my head, as clearly as if he was standing next to me: ‘Attack, Jeff. Attack is the best form of defence.’ Then I just steamed in, hitting Cole as many times as I could in the face, the ribs, the chest – anywhere I could land a punch. As my knuckles made contact with his nose, pressing it flat against his face, I felt the warm stickiness of his blood on my fist. It spurred me on, and I continued to lash out until suddenly he fell to the ground, curling up in a ball to protect himself, his arms around his head.

‘Kick him! Kick him!’ the spectators urged. ‘Kick him hard, Pearce!’

But Cole had had enough and was crying out, ‘No more! No more!’ The fight was over. Out of breath, I stood there, looking down at Cole on the ground. I couldn’t quite believe it – it really was all over! I was unscathed, not even one punch hitting me, while Cole lay in a small huddle at my feet. My supporters crowded around me, raising my hands into the air, as if I was the victor in a world-title fight.

After defeating Cole, I automatically replaced him in the pecking order as fourth cock, but although I liked the title, I didn’t want to have to fight every other day to keep it, preferring to keep my head down. I got into enough trouble, both in and out of school, and I wasn’t planning on looking for any more!

One thing that really did save me from getting into trouble was ice skating. Dad’s oldest sister, Aunty Doris, worked at the Silver Blades ice rink, which was about three miles from our house, and one afternoon she came by with two free tickets for Sheila and me. The following Sunday, the two of us entered a whole new world, and we both fell in love with it. Seeing how much we enjoyed it, after that, Aunty Doris tried to get us tickets as often as possible. It certainly stopped me spending so much time just hanging around on street corners with a gang of lads, just looking for something to do.

The poorer areas of Liverpool, like any big city, were also the roughest, where crime flourished. Smaller boys were encouraged to follow in the footsteps of the older lads, starting with petty theft before graduating to more serious crimes. It was almost an accepted part of growing up, and the lads I knocked around with were no exception. We started off with unlocked cars and the backs of lorries, on the lookout for anything worth nicking, then it’d be small shops. If you managed that, it meant promotion to the more profitable targets – people’s houses.

I was pulled in too, on a couple of occasions, but I had a permanent sick feeling at the bottom of my stomach whenever we were up to no good. I liked my friends and wanted to be accepted as part of the gang, but this wasn’t the way it was going to happen. It just wasn’t for me. If the truth be known, the prospect of being found out and punished by my mother was far more terrifying than being bullied by the kids on the street for not joining in!

Sheila and I started to make new friends at the ice rink, which made going there even more fun. I teamed up with a boy called Bernie Snagg who, like me, had been on the verge of falling in with the wrong crowd. He and I would meet up there on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday nights. I still kept all my jobs, running errands for Mrs Gilbert every afternoon after school and working Saturday mornings at the wash house. Even if I had wanted to, with all this going on, I wouldn’t have had time to get into trouble!

We would have skated all day every day if we’d had the money, but because the ice had to be resurfaced and refrozen at intervals throughout the day, there were three sessions at weekends and during school holidays, so to skate all day, you had to pay three times. It took us a while, but we came up with a plan.

There was a balcony on the first floor that ran the whole way round the rink, and Bernie and I had found a door at the back of it leading into an old changing room. There was hardly ever anyone on the balcony and the room was only used by the speed-skating team, on Tuesday and Thursday nights, so we decided to hide in there between sessions and hopefully remain undiscovered.