Twisting My Melon Read Online Free PDF

there and you could even get away with literally carrying them out. So we did. We ended up using some of that stuff when we were first trying to get a band together a few years later.
    One of the few places we never robbed, funnily enough, was the clothing firm Henri Lloyd, which was based just next to our estate in Little Hulton. Henri Lloyd is now quite popular with young lads in Salford, but back in the mid-70s we didn’t even know it was a clothing label, we just thought it was an office of some type. If we’d known it was full of clobber we would have been in there, I can assure you.
    I had plenty of different places where I used to stash stuff I’d nicked. There was a hidden gap underneath the chest of drawers in my bedroom, which was quite handy, but I had to be careful about stashing stuff at home because my mam would catch on. She’s not stupid and she became a bit of a rooter after a while. If she thought I was up to something, she’d have a look around while I was out of the house. So I started to stash stuff in the fields behind our house and on the railway banking, and even on the roof of my nana’s bungalow. It had a pitched roof, and if you pulled away a few tiles there was a hole underneath where I could hide stuff like money and digital watches. I don’t think my nana knew I used to do that, but she may well have done. She turned a blind eye to a lot of things.
    I would make sure I left stuff that I couldn’t explain away, like a nicked bike for instance, at other people’s houses. I would even keep clothes, like trench coats or more expensive shoes, at someone else’s so I could leave our house in one set of clothes, nip down to a pal’s and get changed.
    Given that I was often up to no good, it was a bit ironic that when I got nicked for the first time I hadn’t really done anything wrong. I was riding my bike down the road by Fountain Square, near Swinton precinct, and a copper beckoned me over with his finger. I rode over the road, up on the pavement and over to him.
    ‘Name?’ he said.
    ‘Why? I’ve not done owt.’
    ‘Riding your bike on the pavement.’
    ‘But I wasn’t riding on the pavement.’
    ‘You’re on the pavement now.’
    I thought, ‘You cunt.’ He obviously just needed to make up his arrest numbers or something, so he nicked me for riding on the pavement. I had to go down to court with my dad a couple of weeks later, and I got a small fine and a criminal record. My dad wasn’t that angry with me because it was so obvious that the whole thing was an absolute farce. This wasn’t the last time I got in trouble, though, and I ended up down the cop shop a couple of times over the next few years, or they would come round the house if I got caught setting fire to something or accused of robbing, but usually I would just get let off with a talking to or a warning.
    Me and Our Paul once robbed a couple of hundred quid off my grandad, Bill. We knew where he stashed his money in his wardrobe and we found £200 in there, so we just had it away. I don’t know how we thought we would get away with it. That was a lot of money back then, in the mid-70s, but I spent my half quite quickly on booze and clothes. We got rumbled for it, and I got a good hiding for that from my dad, but I took the blame and kept Our Paul out of it. I was supposed to pay Bill back, and I did try, but £200 was a lot of money. About a year later, Our Paul turned round to me and said, ‘Oi, knobhead, look at that,’ and chucked a post office account book at me. He’d only gone and opened an account with his half of the money and he still had £75 left, the cheeky bastard. Not only had I taken the hiding for him for it, but he was always pestering me for dough – ‘Our Kid, lend us a fiver will you?’ – and all the time he had £75 in the post office.
    Our Paul was up to almost as much mischief as me. He did a lot of the same stuff that I did, but he never got caught, and I never grassed on him. I