Short Story: The End

The End

I grew up in the suburbs of south west London, acres of tarmac, semi-detached houses etc. nothing special I thought. A cul de sac where the local rec, with its swings, slide and highly dangerous witches hat were only a few minutes away by bike.

There was a gang of kids of various ages from 6 to 16 who lived down my street and we roamed around in a feral way as kids do. James D’Eath (I know, unfortunate name) lived opposite to me and his dad drove an ambulance and gave us hell if we woke him up when he was sleeping in for the night shift. His mum was very pretty and made us drinks when we camped in his back garden.

Most other grown ups spent their time shouting at us for hitting their windows with a football, for playing head-on collisions with go-karts, for skateboarding while hanging on to the coalman’s truck, that kind of thing. Mark Hoseason was tubby, ginger haired and his mum had died when he was little. That meant he often had the house to himself so we went round there a lot. In his garage, on a camping stove we melted the little lead weights mechanics use to balance car wheels into lead ingots. We’d conduct night time raids on the local streets to get more lead. If there’d been a market for lead it would have been the start of a life of crime, but we got bored and moved on.

Steven Hampton wasn’t allowed round my house because my mum said he never washed and he was not to be trusted. He had a brother who had a job and a car and another who was still a toddler in a nappy. His house smelt of cabbage and we never went there; in a world where everyone shouted at us his mum and dad stood out as much more shouty than the rest.

An old man (old to us, probably my age now) lived on the corner and had a high wooden fence. If you banged on that fence he would come out and shout at you, so we did that when we were bored. We called him Tarzan because his garden was a jungle.

We were rarely inside, we all had bikes and pretty much disappeared on them during the days of summer. There were tracks through the woods and we’d make circuits and jumps out of bits of wood. We saw Burt Reynolds in the film Hooper which is about stuntmen. So then we all wanted to be stuntmen. We practised riding along and throwing ourselves off our bikes until James broke his arm and we had to stop.

There were other bit players in our gang; Sean Burbidge who was too young to be in with us but whose parents had the only Video Cassette Recorder on the street ; Luke McCarthy whose dad was a builder and who could get us cool stuff like blowtorches and palletes to build camps; Dave Marshall whose dad had a heart attack in the street one day and his older brother who was a detective had to look after him from then on. Plus a cast of extras who I remember only fleetingly as background figures in my childhood drama.I don’t remember any girls.

So we had a gang and at some point it ended. By the time I was 14 none of those guys were around anymore. There must have been a last time we watched Porky’s on Sean’s VCR, a last time we shot at birds with Mark’s brother’s air rifle and a last time we played forty-forty as dusk settled in and we got called in for our tea but I don’t remember it ending. We all just got older and it just fizzled out. Unlike the box of fireworks we lit on fire all at once in the woods that time.