Thicker Than Water

He broke Ronnie’s leg once with a rough tackle during a game of street football, and then made Ronnie tell their dad that he’d fallen off a wall.

But the weird thing about all these incidents was that they never made much of a difference to our day-to-day customs and practices. All the kids of Arthur Street and of neighbouring Florence Road did pretty much everything together. Whether we were taking over the street with our huge sprawling games of kick-the-can, stealing from the allotments in Waltonushnts in Hall Park or making one of our frequent raids on the kids of the Bootle Grammar School, we moved en masse.

At these times Kenny was our psychopath: he was much valued both for his ability to handle himself in a barney and for being one of the privileged few who could decide what we did next and actually make it stick."

"One raw day in Whitsun week, the year I turned thirteen, he decreed an expedition to the Seven Sisters, those ponds that marked where the bombs had fallen on the railway line forty years before.

It was too early in the year to swim - even in high summer the Sisters were bonemeltingly cold - but we could collect tadpoles, fish for sticklebacks, muck around on the edge of the water and pretend to push each other in, explore the surrounding grass and weeds for metal bolts that you could shoot out of a catapult and have huge, ill-defined mock battles through the bulrushes and stinking shallows. It was guaranteed entertainment, on a bank holiday when the shops were shut and there was sod-all else to do, so we were all up for it.

And if ‘we all’ suggests a warm and inclusive cosiness, then strike it out and put something else in its place. There were lots of ways you could be bounced out of the collective. The gang of us, if you could corral us in one place for long enough to count, probably numbered around fifty on a good day, and we ranged in age from eight to fifteen. The frequency distribution was about what you’d expect.

Very few of the youngest kids had the stamina to keep up with our wilder activities, and a lot of the fifteen-year-olds had discovered other, more absorbing pastimes that kept them busy elsewhere, so the thickest concentration was in the middle of the age breakdown.

As far as gender went, we were equal-opportunity delinquents. The hardier girls ran with us and did as we did, without question or challenge.