Noisy at the Wrong Times Read Online Free PDF Page A

to knock off a policeman’s helmet with a football represented the pinnacle of daring, and the idea of stabbing him couldn’t have been further from our minds. Still, Matteo, a recidivist who could hit a copper’s lid from forty yards, as well as have the watch off his wrist from the same distance, was recurrently dragged off to the local approved school or borstal. Even tolerant policemen have to take action eventually.
    I recall feeling especially concerned that I shouldn’t ever be committed to the supervision of ‘screws’ at Stamford House in the Goldhawk Road, with its high fences surrounding the playground and its heavy locks. I’d seen it frequently enough, smelled the tobacco-bleach mustiness of its corridors andexperienced the chilling, lip-curled rigidity of its staff as I visited my brother. Being invited through a gate that needs unlocking, to see a sibling whose presence at home has become noticeably rare, demonstrates to even the youngest child that the place is out of the ordinary. His captors barked and marched around the rooms and environs like casually attired policemen, and they looked upon me, I was certain, as a future resident. They called Stamford House a remand home or a reform school or some such misnomer; what it really represented was short-stay prison for young teenagers, and character transformation was seldom the outcome. Its gates, grey close-meshed grills and contemptuous care were an option any of us might so easily have taken up. Stamford House or St Vincent’s (another such place) had space for any of us should we so desire it. Correction was the intention, but Matteo learned well the art of transgression behind those fences.

 
     
     
     
    FIGHT
    W oolverstone was different.
    Quite how different was made lavishly clear to me one afternoon as I returned to our Fulham estate and was met by the sight of a small crowd gathered in the space between the brick flowerbeds and bike sheds that dissected the blocks in which we all lived. Years later, in an act of vandalism, the council removed the flowerbeds but when we had first arrived in Fulham Court they were full of large rose bushes and shrubbery. Fulham was on the cusp of an affluent flowering that continues unabated to this day. Fulham Court was properly built on the site of an old brewery in the thirties, with old flettons and panelled sash windows, and there was no high rise – three floors at most. Among council housing, it was the pinnacle and not far off being elegant, but most of those it cosseted in faux opulence were far from that.
    It was a place where people had a sense of pride in their surroundings but had no idea how to make them, or themselves, much better. Throwing a bucket of disinfectant down the stairwell was keeping it clean for the old sofa that would soon follow it, teenage barbarism was still a marginal and rare concept and villains talked of respect and honour when they weren’t balancing half-pints of beer on their penises, as one celebrity criminal was wont to do in the local pubs. The estate was a genuine community at a period in time when such micro-societies did not hate and abuse themselves. Avarice was there, but it had not yet become rapacious, cold-blooded ormurderous. Material aspiration included the kind of bike you could afford to buy your child; the zenith was the “Chopper”. We could never afford one (Mum scraped together enough to buy us a small-wheeled bike that we shared), but we could always borrow one for a few hours until the rightful owner, tearful and desperate, discovered who’d taken it and we would give it back. Depending on who it was, we might even convince him that we were doing him a favour by returning it, which meant we could always legitimately borrow it for a few more hours in the future. It was a great system. We had become quickly absorbed into this varied community, drifting, as boys do, towards others of like mind and outlook. We were at home among these people, it