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old-fashioned and tried to be modern by using a bank, which wouldn’t give a couple of sincere, honest, hardworking, conscientious blokes like Mike and me a chance.
    Now you’d think, and I’d think, and anybody with a bit of imagination would think, that we’d done as clean a job as could ever be done, that, with the baker’s shop being at least a mile from where we lived, and with not a soul having seen us, and what with the fog and the fact that we weren’t more than five minutes in the place, that the coppers should never have been able to trace us. But then, you’d be wrong. I’d be wrong, and everybody else would be wrong, no matter how much imagination was diced out between us.
    Even so, Mike and I didn’t splash the money about, because that would have made people think straightaway that we’d latched on to something that didn’t belong to us. Which wouldn’t do at all, because even in a street like ours there are people who love to do a good turn for the coppers, though I never know why they do. Some people are so mean-gutted that even if they’ve only got tuppence more than you and they think you’re the sort that would take it if you have half the chance, they’d get you put inside if they saw you ripping lead out of a lavatory, even if it weren’t their lavatory – just to keep their tuppence out of your reach. And so we didn’t do anything to let on about how rich we were, nothing like going down town and coming back dressed in brand-new Teddy boy suits and carrying a set of skiffle-drums like another pal of ours who’d done a factory office about six months before. No, we took the odd bobs and pennies out and folded the notes into bundles and stuffed them up the drainpipe outside the door in the backyard. ‘Nobody’ll ever think of looking for it there,’ I said to Mike. ‘We’ll keep it doggo for a week or two, then take a few quid a week out till it’s all gone. We might be thieving bastards, but we’re not green.’
    Some days later a plain-clothes dick knocked at the door. And asked for me. I was still in bed, at eleven o’clock, and had to unroll myself from the comfortable black sheets when I heard mam calling me. ‘A man to see you,’ she said. ‘Hurry up, or he’ll be gone.’
    I could hear her keeping him at the back door, nattering about how fine it had been and how it looked like rain since early this morning – and he didn’t answer her except to snap out a snotty yes or no. I scrambled into my trousers and wondered why he’d come – knowing it was a copper because ‘a man to see you’ always meant just that in our house – and if I’d had any idea that one had gone to Mike’s house as well at the same time I’d have twigged it to be because of that seventy quids’ worth of paper stuffed up the drainpipe outside the back door about ten inches away from the plain-clothed copper’s boot, where mam still talked to him thinking she was doing me a favour, and I wishing to God she’d ask him in, though on second thoughts realizing that that would seem more suspicious than keeping him outside, because they know we hate their guts and smell a rat if they think we’re trying to be nice to them. Mam wasn’t born yesterday, I thought, thumping my way down the creaking stairs.
    I’d seen him before: Borstal Bernard in nicky-hat, Remand Home Ronald in rowing-boat boots, Probation Pete in a pitprop mackintosh, three months clink in collar and tie (all this out of a Borstal skiffle-ballad that my new mate made up, and I’d tell you it in full but it doesn’t belong in this story), a ’tec who’d never had as much in his pockets as that drainpipe had up its jackses. He was like Hitler in the face, right down to the paint-brush tash, except that being six-foot tall made him seem worse. But I straightened my