friends are the most important fings of all."
I looped my arm in his and leaned close to kiss him on the cheek.
"I'm glad you're my friend," I whispered.
"'ere! Don't get all sloppy," he mumbled, wiping the sullied cheek with his sleeve, but
he was smiling.
Chapter 6
July 1960
Summer
Over the following weeks and months of summer, Joey and I were almost inseparable.
We scampered for shelter together when an unexpected shower caught us unawares,
huddled together for warmth when the north wind turned chilly, shared our food, and
swam naked together in the sea on sultry summer nights. We talked as I had never been
able to talk before, and I learned to admire and respect that little man more than I had
never felt about any adult.
Joey's father was a disturbed, violent man, who regularly beat his wife and child after
bouts of heavy drinking. Without a hint of emotion, Joey described a pattern of dreadful
abuse; of nights when he hid in a cupboard to escape his father's rampages, hearing the
horrifying sounds of his mother being beaten senseless.
Eventually, she could take no more - she stabbed her husband forty-eight times with a
carving knife. The young Joey, only six years old at the time, emerged from his hiding
place when silence fell, and found her sitting in a lake of blood on the kitchen floor beside
his father's body, singing softly to herself.
A court found her not guilty of murder, but had her confined in a mental institution.
Joey was placed in an orphanage. He hated it so much he escaped after only a month, and
had lived on the streets ever since.
He passed on all his survival experience to me, showing me how to find food, how to
stay dry, and who to watch out for. He also introduced me to some of the other drop-outs
in the town.
Until then, I had not realised how many people were sleeping on the streets of Great
Yarmouth. People like "Blinker", a man of uncertain years, but definitely over sixty, who
drank wine from the bottle to try to drown out the sounds of gunfire in his head. Or
Gertie, an apparently sweet old lady who could, in a second, change into a cobra, spitting
venom at anyone within sight.
They all knew Joey, and despite the fact that he was younger than any of them, they
treated him as an equal, showing respect that at first seemed odd, but that I soon came to
understand.
It all seemed so easy, almost idyllic. The long, warm days were spent at leisure on the
beach or in a park. If it rained, we dived into one of the amusement arcades, roaming up
and down the aisles, dipping our fingers into the payout troughs on the front of the
machines. Quite often we found a penny or two, and fed it straight into the machine in the
hope of winning the jackpot. Once, we did, winning the top prize of one pound. We dined
well that day, in a restaurant - fish and chips with peas and a cup of tea - a lovely dinner
that was like a banquet to us. We were so bloated afterwards that we slept on the beach
for an hour in the gorgeous sunshine.
I felt at one with the world, part of the great wash of humanity going about their lives.
But it was an illusion; this was summer, and life would become much tougher when the
cold weather arrived.
-♪-♫-♪
I expect you've noticed, haven't you, that my education has not been mentioned for a
while? Well, the simple fact is that I never returned to school after I was thrown out of The Nest (how appropriate that sounds now - thrown out of the nest by a cuckoo - I must
write that down). Somehow, the life I was living on the streets seemed to be in a different
world, a kind of extra dimension, tagged onto the place I knew before, and my mind
found it hard to contemplate returning to what, by then, was an alien environment - so I
didn't. I assume that the authorities noticed my absence and checked the last address they
had for me, Gran's guest house. I also presume that my dear uncle told them some lie to
explain why I wasn't living there.
Actually, what with the
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