THE LIFE OF RILEY
BY FRANK RILEY ©

BOOK ONE - SPIKE ISLAND

Chapter Fourteen: Money Matters

Dad was not an Oxford don by any stretch of the imagination; he had had to go out to work from the age of thirteen and as such, the likes of Homer and Shakespeare were strangers to him. His Latin declensions were seriously lacking in finesse and his English was of a more cloth-cap variety. He was, however, fluent in French. He would call out to us: "Fur may lar port, silver plate." whenever he wanted us to close the door, and we would obey immediately. Sometimes he would even thank us for our troubles: "Mercy bow coop." he would say, in a strong garlic accent. Other times he would instruct us in the finer arts of how to ask a lady out for a walk: "Vullez vowse promenade (pronounced to sound like lemonade) avick moy sess war?" How could a refined lady refuse?

Although his education had, out of necessity, been curtailed, he did have a remarkable grasp of economics. He knew full well the value of a penny, though not so much that of a pound. His pennies were for the shopping; his pounds for the pub.

It was often my duty to do the shopping, sometimes Mike would go, and sometimes we would go together, although going together could sometimes take all day and Dad tried to discourage this practise.

The shops were located in a district called West Bank which was about fifteen minute's walk away if you ran, or half a day if you dawdled. It was about three miles on a sunny day and about half a mile if it rained. To get to the shops we had first to cross the bridges spanning the locks then meander along the river bank and up the winding covered pathway which had been erected after the war so that people could get around the bombed ruins in safety. From the pathway to the main road it was a short walk along a street called Short Street - amazing, that! How did they know it was going to be a short street before they named it?

Directly across the main road from Short Street was Fred Harvey, the grocer. That was always how he was referred to. Dad never said: "Go to Fred Harvey's", or, "Go to the grocer's". It was always: "Go to Fred Harvey, the grocer". In certain select areas in England that is how people were described. There would be Billy, the butcher, or Bob Smith, second son of Harry Smith, the baker, or Maggie, the fish and chips, and so on. The postman, as another example, was referred to as, Jimmy, the post.

People were identified indelibly in everyone's mind by what they did in life. Even those whose sole occupation was avoiding work were described thus; one such man was bestowed with the quaint name of, Alan, the dole, or, on formal occasions, Alan, the unemployment pay.

Very early in our lives, Mike and I were made to understand the importance of money. The greatest crime we could commit was to lose a coin on the way home from the shops, or be short-changed by the shop-keeper. Many's the time either one of us would be sent back to the shop from which we had purchased the food to demand the balance - it never ceased to cause us great embarrassment.

One day I was coming home from Fred Harvey, the grocer, with the ingredients for a gourmet dinner of bread-and-dripping and such like, and in the process taking care to hurry at the rate of about a quarter of a mile a day. In my free hand I was carrying the change, a sixpenny piece, and tossing it up into the air with astounding dexterity. All the way down the covered walkway I performed this juggling feat. I reached the flat part of the path which led to the river's edge and now the coin flew higher and higher as my skills increased.

There was a low, broken-down wall on my right, so, to make the game more challenging still, I began to walk along the uneven top of it throwing the coin way up in the air. I was beginning to feel pretty pleased with myself; thoughts of joining the circus as a juggling tightrope-walker flashed into mind. I threw the coin even higher and fell off the wall. The coin never came down - it must have got itself stuck on a cloud. Wait a minute! I said to myself, it must have come down. I couldn't have thrown it that high, surely? As I was working with this problem the enormity of what had happened suddenly hit me. If I went home without the sixpence Dad would kill me about seventeen times! I put the groceries down on the ground and began a frantic search, looking up in the air at frequent intervals to see if it was still on its way down.

Panic came to me without any bidding. All I could think of was what Dad would do to me when I got home. Suddenly a brainwave came to me. I'll pray to St. Jude! In those days St. Jude was the saint who could find anything. If you lost an elephant, or the Queen Mary, or a sixpenny piece, she would go out and look for it for you. In later years, I'm told, she fell from grace; she probably failed to find something the Pope had lost, for that to happen. And in still later years, I found out that St.Jude was not a woman at all, but a man! Now isn't that a fine how-do-you-do? It's all very confusing. But at the time, I thought of St. Jude as being a woman and that is how she will stay, not only for this story, but also for posterity in my mind.

Anyway, there I was on my knees in the grass, combing the base of the leaves like a monkey searching for fleas, and all the while praying fervently to dear, sweet St Jude. Ten minutes, twenty, a half hour. I was in a terrible state. "Oh, please, St. Jude, help me find the sixpence, 'cos me Dad'll kill me if I don't." An hour went by and still no piece of silver. I began to despair of ever finding it again. Thoughts of how to soften the blows which would surely come as soon as I got home now came to me. I could stuff padding down the seat of my pants, but how could I protect my head? "Please, St. Jude, if you help me I'll go to church every day and I'll never tell a fib again."

Now, it was an hour and a half I'd been searching and I was about to give up. I wonder who'll come to my funeral, I thought. Maybe he'll put me in a sack with a load of bricks, just like he drowned the dogs. I wonder what they'll say at school when I don't turn up on Monday?

I began to get up from the grass with heavy heart and unimaginable fear coursing through my veins. As I raised my left knee the Hope Diamond revealed itself to me! Embedded in the warm earth the pristine glimmer of the sixpence winked up at me. I had been kneeling on it for the last half hour. I grabbed it with exquisite gratitude and placed it most carefully in the one pocket which was hole-free and dashed off home at breakneck speed. "Thank you, thank you, St. Jude. I'll never forget you."

"Where the bloody 'ell 'ave you been?" Dad barked at me, as I came crashing through the door. My first thought was to make up a story to explain my tardiness, but since I had just undergone ninety minutes of sheer terror, my peanut brain was quite drained of any invention. I told him the truth and his first question was: "Did yer find it?" And there, proudly, I held up the great treasure to him.

On another occasion during a shopping expedition I learned a very valuable lesson, one which, because of the circumstances, I was never to forget. It was on a Saturday morning. I had completed the foraging and the food bag was filled. I was on my way home, taking a different route, by way of a change, when I ran into a school chum of mine who was standing next to a bubble-gum machine. He seemed to be in a high state of excitement as I came over to him; he could hardly wait to tell me what was causing this. The fact of the matter was that the bubble-gum machine was one of those which gave you two packets of gum every fourth penny and he had just spent his last three. This was all very interesting, I suppose, but since I didn't have any of my own money - I rarely had any, anyway - I couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

"If you put a penny in there, you'll get two for one!" he said, with alacrity.

"I haven't got one," says I.

"Yes, you have, I can hear it jingling in your pocket."

"That's me Dad's."

"Oh, bloody hell, he won't know; it's only a penny!"

"Yes he will, he's a bloody genius when it comes to money."

"Aw, go on, he'll never find out."

"He will. And if he does, he'll kill me!"

"Get on with yer, yer not going to turn chicken, are yer?"

"No...but..."

"Go on! Go on! You'll get two packets, honest!"

"Well...I...er...Oh, all right then."

The fateful deed was done. True enough, I got my two packets of gum and immediately tore into one of them. The other I would keep for later, behind our house, out of Dad's sight.

I continued on my way home chewing guiltily on the gum and racking my corrupted brain for ideas of how to explain the shortfall in the shopping-money change. Plod and plod, chew and chew, oh, my God, what would I do? Eventually, I reached our house and went inside, looking warily for signs of Dad. He was not in the front room, nor in the back room. Where was he? I heard the sound of running water out in the lean-to in the back yard. Stepping gingerly through the door, I peeped round the corner, and there was Dad, shaving, a Father Christmas lather on his face. I had already off-loaded the groceries and now I placed the shopping-money change, minus one penny, on the bench near the washbasin.

In my guilt and imaginative anxiety I had overlooked one small detail in my cover-up: I still had a great wad of chewing-gum in my fast-working mouth. Chomp, chomp, chomp, I chomped as I attempted to display nonchalance. Dad looked at me for about one hundredth of a second, then down at the money for a thousandth and said: "Yer a penny short, lad. Where is it?" Gulp! I gulped, and suddenly remembered the chewing-gum.

"Well?"

"I must have lost it, Dad."

"Oh, aye. An' I'm a bloody Dutchman!"

I lost two arms and half a leg that day, and my skin was left lying around somewhere for the birds to feed on. It was a mighty beating, but there was never one that I deserved more.

Mike had a similar, but far more spectacular incident to that of the flying sixpence. It was in all the newspapers and on the wireless; well, not really, but it could have been, had we been a little more enterprising. It happened thus: Dad had sent him shopping and it must have been a terribly important mission because he had given him a pound note with which to make the purchases. Now, a pound note, then, was a monstrous amount of money. You could buy a small aeroplane with it, about three new cars, a row of houses, or a million gob-stoppers.

Whenever Mike was sent on a shopping expedition he devoted all his being, all his concentration, much like I did, in getting the job done as quickly as it was possible to do. He would rush there and back in well under three days, sometimes even less than that if he had something urgent to do afterwards.

On this particular occasion, he left the house and headed off with determination over the bridges. In a few short hours he had reached the halfway point of the covered walkway and began to perform certain tricks with the pound note. He balanced it on his nose and on his chin and I think he tried to walk along the edge of it once, but he found it was too thin. It was while these skilful feats were being performed that the pound note just up and disappeared. Mike had never practised magic before and this vanishing act impressed him enormously. At least it did for a short while, and then the terror set in. Holy Mother of Mercy! Saints in Heaven preserve us!

Well, he searched everywhere, and other places too, but the pound note was nowhere to be found. What a terrible calamity! The loss of a penny or a sixpence was serious enough; the loss of a pound was a disaster. What was he to do? Tears of anguish ran down his face as the enormity of it all sunk home. Should he run away? Should he throw himself into the canal? Should he give himself up and be thrown into the canal, anyway? These and other drastic thoughts raced through his mind.

Then, a faint murmur of an idea brushed across his eyes. No, it'll never work, his first thoughts told him. But then again...?

The idea grew. Now his mind was galloping along. He began to fine-tune the details. Surely it would work? It must work! Anything was better than having to go home to face Dad. Lions, tigers, charging bull elephants, were nothing compared to Dad. Even the police, for which he had instilled in us an active fear, if not dread, came nowhere near to the wrath Dad could bring down on us in our misdemeanours.

The die was cast. Now the play would have to be acted out. Mike ran home at top speed in order to give the impression of extreme urgency and dashed through the door, crying out: "Dad, Dad, I've been robbed!"

Amazingly, Dad believed him and began to question him most earnestly. Mike was now obliged to give a full account of what had happened and this evoked a period of astonishing artistry. In the space of a few short minutes there were more inventions than Edison ever made; his story-telling was superior to a Dickens or a Robert Louis Stevenson; his descriptions of the assailant were worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

Dad was convinced, at least we think he was, you could never really tell with him. He might have some awful retribution waiting for you when you felt at last secure. Now that the story had been told, and perfected, Dad went to the railway-owned telephone and called the police.

It was at this point that Mike's knees turned to liquid. Whatever he had expected Dad to do when he heard his story, it wasn't this. In three and a half seconds the police arrived - that is always the way it is when you don't want something to happen - and immediately began extracting a statement from Mike, like pulling teeth, indeed. Scared as he was, he stuck to his story. The details of his invention now becoming firmer in his mind on the second telling.

They took him to the police station to make a formal statement and the third telling had him believing that the alleged crime had really happened. He was questioned in minute detail; some of the "facts" had become a little fuzzy, would he mind going over it again? I think, in the end they had a pretty good idea that the whole thing was a fabrication, but what they didn't know, or couldn't know, was why he had gone to such lengths.

They could see quite plainly that he was in an advanced state of terror and I suppose they must have guessed the reason for it, for shortly afterwards they let him go. They telephoned Dad to say that they would keep on the lookout for the mysterious attacker and added that Mike should be given comfort to carry him through his "ordeal". Which, I thought, when I heard about it, was damned decent of them. I suppose they had had many cases where children had resorted to such drama in order to avoid the wrath of a tyrannical father.

So, there you have it. The agonies we went through wherever money was concerned were enough to make us extremely reluctant to handle the wretched stuff. It was like poison; a recipe for disaster. Both of us tried many times to run for cover when it was time to do the shopping. But there was no escape. The food had to be purchased by someone, and we couldn't ask Dad - we wouldn't dare. For a short time we would be extraordinarily careful with the shopping-money, handling the coins, or notes, as though they were the Crown Jewels. But as time went by we would slacken our diligence and other calamities would descend upon us. The fuss adults make about money! You'd think the silly stuff was important the way they carry on.

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