Although Gerry was never to prosper in Mrs. Restall’s swimming academy he was no wimp. His growing friendship with Ralph Ireland-West’s family involved regular visits to other swimming pools where, with the temporary assistance of water-wings, he and Ralph were soon ruling the waves of the local baths. At the time this consisted of the open-air swimming pools of Lindonshire which were blessed with unseasonably good weather that particular summer of 1965. There, under the less-than watchful eye of Ralph’s long-suffering mother, and his largely ignored younger siblings, the two boys began their own brotherhood of mischief and mayhem.
The bottle-scam could not be repeated with the introduction of non-deposit bottles across the country and so together the boys made their solemn but increasingly anti-social pact. Gerry had aroused certain suspicions when, having decapitated Mrs. Ireland-West’s invaluable Capo di Monte parakeet, he had carefully replaced the severed head upon the beloved bird’s plaster shoulders and awaited the inevitable shriek which, whilst dusting the mantle’s several ornaments, had escaped her astonished mouth. Ralph made Gerry’s confession for him, a routine that would repeat itself many times during their friendship, but was more than a little surprised by her immediate forgiveness. She was a very nice lady he soon discovered, and her policeman husband had real crimes to detect and solve.
Their family name was itself an affectation at least and an outright deception at worst. Garnered from Ralph’s father’s maternal grandparents - who had brought-up the young Ray Alcock for reasons that would forever remain shrouded in mystery - he had correctly surmised that a lifetime of merciless teasing might thereby be averted and his promotional prospects most likely enhanced. He was of course correct and continued to exploit the British class system’s snobbery for double-barrelled names and gullibility for many years to come. In years to come his children would come to question this name-change and seriously re-consider a return to their former appellation when the extent of Ray’s drinking, womanising and larceny - constructed on the basis of this subtle legend - fully revealed themselves. For now his star was in the ascendant and the boys enjoyed the privileges that this conferred.
It was Ray who took the boys to Nottingham Forest’s Trent Bridge ground for the game against Manchester United. The visiting team featured a galaxy of the days’ stars and Gerry’s excitement at the prospect of seeing his idols; Bobby Charlton, Denis Law, Paddy Crerand, Nobby Stiles and Alex Stepney, was eclipsed only by the performance on the day of a young man from Belfast who would subsequently establish new standards as both a footballer and playboy, George Best. Played out on a wet winter’s afternoon, Gerry watched spellbound as the Forest fullback, Peter Hindley, expended his considerable energies in trying first to contain, and then to maim the slight and lithe figure of the Irish teenager under the floodlit gloom and in filthy conditions. George, with his shirt symbolically overhanging his shorts to the extent that only a dirty brown stripe remained below his royal-blue jersey, dodged, twisted, skipped and jumped the most primitive of his oppressor’s challenges before entirely escaping the brute’s attentions, rounding the hapless ‘keeper and slotting the ball into the bottom corner of the home team’s net to settle the contest in one inspired moment of footballing genius. His single-handed bravery - Hindley was as intimidating as his namesake in Wuthering Heights - left the behemoth defender humiliated and cemented Gerry’s passion for what was then a not very beautiful game. Best, who held the world in thrall for several thrilling and unforgettable seasons, would suffer the tyranny of celebrity and the brutality of many of the days ‘stoppers’ before a long and tragic descent into gambling and alcoholism robbed Gerry and his other millions of admirers of possibly the greatest sportsmen of the era. That his birth in Belfast was to deprive Georgie Best - as Gerry’s besotted mother would declare on sight or sound of this devastatingly handsome heart-throb - was a tragedy that became all too apparent the following year when his nationality ensured his absence from England’s 1966 world cup ‘triumph’.
Ralph and Gerry became obsessed with football and Gerry was impressed by his friend’s dedication when he found him endlessly heading a heavy leather football against the next-door pub’s dividing wall (now somewhat belatedly topped with cemented broken bottles of brown and green glass shards to prevent further invasions of the bottle-snatchers). School football was a very different affair to the game that was played in the local park with the jumpers-for-goalposts imperative. Gerry smiled with mirth at the first game, refereed and ‘taught’ by Mr. Lowday on the school field, which had been carefully marked-out by Tom Pickering, the school’s caretaker, grounds man and secret policeman. Mr. Lowday overruled the usual convention of selecting a captain who would then select his friends, in turn with his opposite number, based on personal allegiances. The teams were therefore highly unbalanced from the beginning and contained uneasy alliances and smouldering resentments in their ill-considered ranks. Mr. Lowday then placed each individual in their ‘starting’ positions from goalkeeper, full-backs, right, left, and centre-half, before physically leading the by-now confused and thoroughly intimidated forwards into their position on the wing, inside or centre forward, where frozen like Mr. Tumnus they stood rooted to the spot.
On Mr. Lowday’s whistle, accompanied by a self-important glance at his watch, the centre-forward of the team kicking-off punted the ball - in his new, leather-studded, ankle-high boots - into their opponent’s half. All twenty-two players remained, rooted to the spot into which the head-teacher had so recently coerced them as the ball rolled to a halt between two defenders. A moment’s hesitation was resolved as the frustrated head-teacher exhorted his static pupils to “Get after the ball then!” which they promptly did, abandoning all positional sense to swarm after the ball like angry hornets in pursuit of one intruder. Whatever fantasy notion Mr. Lowday had been fostering for his charges organisation vanished in a sweating, puffing and savagely kicking melee in which players changed sides endlessly in order to return to their preferred allegiances or simply to be on the winning side, and each successive kick-off revealed new teams, of wildly unequal numbers as the whistle blew in exasperation from the head-teacher’s dropped jaw. It was the only game over which Gerry could remember him presiding - he was replaced for the next game by the ever-popular Mr. Dodd who’s enthusiastic insistence for playing with the losing team was never resented - and one of only two lessons that Gerry ever experienced his ‘teaching’ which taught him only contempt for the dictatorial buffoon. Gerry had a varied knowledge of teachers and learning but knew already that this was not Mr. Lowday’s forte.
Tennis was another game, that once-a-year at least would see the production of imported tennis rackets and balls as children would seek to emulate the talents of this year’s foreign Wimbledon Lawn tennis champion. Played in the street - occasionally interrupted by a passing car - singles and doubles contests would be highly contested affairs of three sets involving much fetching of inexpertly hit balls from the gardens of neighbours. Most neighbours tolerated these not infrequent incursions into their territory but not so Mr. Campbell. A native of New Zealand, Mr. Campbell and his equally aged wife occupied the bungalow at the end of the road opposite the Hood household. Emerging occasionally to venture forth on his ‘sit-up-and-beg’ bicycle, which would ‘tick’ as its Sturmey Archer gears went through their paces, Mr. Campbell was a man in his eighties. He took enormous pride in his garden which was populated with his pride and joy, hydrangeas, which bloomed pink and blue in profusion around his carefully manicured lawn. He soon made it known to Gerry’s parents that street games and the retrieving of tennis-balls from his garden were a great annoyance to him and Gerry’s father had advised caution to the boys following a visit from the irascible pensioner.
The conflict escalated when his successive confiscations of stray balls threatened to mar the simple pleasures of the boys and sundry other children with whom they would play. Gerry and Glenn decided a new strategy was called for to end the cat-and-mouse contest with a man they had come to regard with derision as an ‘old fogey’! A pre-prepared ball was then launched onto the lawn of the old man whom they were certain was lurking in anticipation of their latest trespass. Before the boys even had chance to venture threateningly onto his hallowed turf Mr. Campbell emerged from his hide and with great self-satisfaction pocketed the ball deep into his high-waisted cavalry-twill trousers as he smiled at the boys from beneath his Panama hat.
Gerry’s father was unable to suppress a smile at his boys’ ingenuity when, confronted by Mr. Campbell on his doorstep, he was told about the old man’s consternation when, returning indoors after his latest confiscation he discovered it had been liberally smeared with what he assumed to be grease. Their subsequent admission that the grease was in fact what they freely confessed to be ‘dog-shit’ turned his amusement into outright hilarity and if he had intended to tell the boys off for their actions, they failed to notice any real disapproval in his words. Tennis continued but Mr. Campbell didn’t, passing away shortly thereafter. It was never known whether his laundry was a significant factor in his demise, but the boys felt little regret at his passing and the new occupants were much more tolerant of their admittedly improving tennis skills.
The weekly trips to the swimming pool developed a new dimension when Gerry acquired the ability to swim. This was no doubt enhanced with the arrival of a new and very interesting phenomenon - puberty. Whilst the boys experimented with their spitting prowess the girls had embarked on a project of their own - growing breasts! Well, not the rounded protuberances possessed by their mothers, but tiny mounds of varied mass which would protrude above the surface as they swam backstroke up and down the pool. Mysterious and alluring at once, the boys continued to check for signs of their own adolescence but not a hair or growth to match the girls’ developments could be found in the boys changing-rooms. Breasts were nevertheless the main topic of conversation with those boys who were somehow aware of their link with sexuality, ‘sex’ being a word that was never spoken in Gerry’s household but which appeared repeatedly on the pages of Gerry’s father’s Sunday newspaper, the News of the World.
Invariably linked with the word ‘scandal’ the subject of sex was frequently adduced in connection with coven’s of white-witches who apparently gathered in forest-clearings, and sometimes on the altars of rural churches, where they would disrobe and, calling upon sinister forces of evil, summon up Satan before indulging in what were referred to as ‘orgies’ the details of which were very much left to the reader‘s imagination. Gerry wondered if there was a nearby coven and whether his parents were secret alumni during their Saturday night outings when he, his brother and their infant sister were entrusted to their teenage babysitter who spent the evening practicing for her own induction to a coven with her teddy-boy boyfriend on the family’s moquette sofa. The disarray of the anti-mocassar protective cloths on the sofa should have been enough to alert Mr. and Mrs. Hood to the evenings of passion they silently acquiesced to, but not a word was ever spoken about the torrid happenings in their own front room.
Ralph however had grown ever more curious about breasts and when Sarah Sullivan objected to his physical examination of her tenderest parts in the swimming pool he took immediate revenge by holding her under as she passed, cones surfaced, on her next backstroke length. His fascination did not end there. Had it not been for the eagle-eye of the ever watchful Tom Pickering perhaps the boys would have escaped detection when, on Ralph’s prompting Gerry hoisted his friend up on his shoulders outside the girls changing rooms where it was hoped a glimpse of the girls would reveal the full extent of their pubescent development. Straining under the weight of his friend, Gerry’s view was entirely of red-brick and mortar, but before his turn to peer at the nubile bodies which Ralph’s greedy eyes were currently surveying could be had he collapsed under the weight of Mr. Lowday’s clearly disapproving hand. The two boys were led to his nearby office where Gerry steeled himself for another experience of unconscious correction.
In the event nothing of that nature happened. This was far too serious an offence for mere physical violence, requiring as it did, a pernicious shame to be felt by their collective families. Their fathers were summoned the next day and as the charges against them were made Gerry voiced his outrage that he too was to be tried and found guilty of the sin of being a ‘peeping-Tom’.
“I never saw anything!” he intoned repeatedly, but could not but help notice the difference between his and Ralph’s father’s reaction to the allegedly ‘shameful’ incident. Gerry was grounded for his part in the affair whilst Ralph’s father seemed somehow proud of his boy’s interest in the female anatomy.
‘Perhaps’, reasoned Gerry to himself ‘it would have been ok if I had been on Ralph’s shoulders, or at least in his shoes’ but that, as he was to learn with time, was definitely not to be the case.
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