Bernie the Bolt goes ballistic

The first time I saw Bernie, he was wearing a long red and black striped jumper, and a mass of curly hair sprouted from his head like black brocolli. He was very short and round, and my first thought was, ‘fuck me, it’s Dennis the Menace.’ I was sixteen at the time, and was trying not to draw too much attention to myself as I sat in a dark corner of the Daffodil Lion by the dartboard, sipping the last of my lager. But Bernie saw me staring, and looked enquiringly over at me. It wasn’t a threatening look, but definitely one that demanded a response.

“All right mate?” I said. “Just admiring your jumper.”

He gave me a filthy look.

“Honest mate, I’m not taking the piss.”

He raised his head slightly, and continued to return my stare.

Although, it was a few months since Belsen and all those other bands, had been banned from playing at the Daffodil Lion, quite a lot of the old crowd still drunk down there. And although most of the guys were a laugh, there were a few who were always looking for trouble. So, I tactfully swivelled round on my stool, and pretended to watch the guys playing darts, until my mate Barry returned from the bar with a couple of fresh pints.

We were both in a sixth form band, the Peccadilloes. Barry, a drummer, was a year older than me, and six three, so I reckoned, if things turned sour, he’d easily sort out the guy with the jumper, who was only about five feet tall. Anyhow, I reckoned I’d stay out of Denis the Menace’s way.

But, as soon as Barry had sat down, he spotted the dwarf in the jumper and shouted out, ‘Oi Bernie, over here.’

They greeted each other with a manly hug and an elaborate hippy handshake. Then Barry expertly flicked open a pack of Embassy and offered one to Bernie.

“Here,” he said. “Do you known Rob? He’s a mean fucking singer.”

Bernie nodded tight-lipped, as he lit his cigarette.

“We just met,” I said. “Kind of.” And I buried my face in my pint.

Anyway, it turned out that Bernie wasn’t any kind of a thug. Quite the reverse in fact. He was one of these really sensitive, insecure guys who was a bit obsessed about his lack of height and tended to get a strop on if he thought someone was looking at him in a certain way. But he was also very passionate about things.

Although, admittedly, it took him a couple of hours (and a further four pints) to thaw, it turned out we were both members of CND and liked the same bands (Dead Kennedys, Joy Division, early Cure), and by the end of the evening we were getting on like the Cocteau Twins.

Bernie was only two or three years older than me, but seemed much older - probably because he’d left school at sixteen and, for a couple of years, had been working in the ironmongery department at Hargreave's & Sons, an old fashioned hardware store that had traded in the town for over a century.

I never discovered precisely why everyone called him Bernie the Bolt, but I guessed it had something to do with his job (and was presumably also an oblique reference to The Golden Shot, that Seventies TV show hosted by Bob Monkhouse, which at the time would still have been fresh in most teenagers’ memories).

As I said, although Bernie was a passionate person and proudly wore button badges proclaiming his support for CND, the Anti-Nazi League, the Animal Liberation Front and Bristol Rovers F.C., he was the last person you’d expect to get arrested. But that’s what happened.

Bernie played guitar, and had an early Fostex four track in the bedroom of his mum and dad’s bungalow (admired throughout the cul-de-sac for the neatness of its bedding plants and the whiteness of its net curtains). Me and Barry started going round there after school, and laying down cover versions.

I remember we did she’s Lost Control Again by Joy Division, and Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols. We started off doing the recordings semi-seriously, but soon got bored and started playing about with the speed control during playback, so that Pretty Vacant (which we speeded up) sounded as if it were being performed at 200 mph by Pinky and Perky, while She’s Lost Control Again, sounded like it was being sung by an ogre on Valium (not unlike the original).

We could tell Bernie, didn’t find it quite as funny as we did. But he politely indulged us. He was that kind of guy - gentle, shy, nice. However, These were not the sixties. It was not a time of harmony and peace.

I was minding my own business waiting for a lift home from town, just by the College roundabout, when this police car went past on the far side of the road. The copper stared out at me, and I stared back. Then he went round the roundabout, came back down the road and pulled in. I wasn’t that bothered. I was just standing there by myself, kicking small pebbles into the gutter, planning what I was going to watch on telly that night. So, I don’t move when the car pulled over. I just stood there.

This copper wound down the window, but kept staring straight ahead. He just raised his hand and beckoned me over. He didn’t even look at me, just waggled his middle finger like I was some puppet on an invisible length of string. So, I just ignored him. When he finally bothered to turn his head toward me, I could see he was about forty with face fuzz and beady eyes that narrowed with anger as he shouted, “Oi you! Get over here NOW!”

I pulled a face, and skulked across the pavement, until I was beside his car. He looked up at me with his DLT beard and his piggy eyes, and said, “Are you stupid?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Well why did you ignore me?”

“I wasn’t aware you’d said anything to me?”

“Why do you think I pulled over?”

“You tell me.”

“What’s your name?”

I told him.

“Where do you live?”

“Westing.”

“Address”

“Westing.”

“Don’t fuck with me. Give me your address NOW.”

I was slightly startled at his use of the F-word, and complied.

“So what are you doing here?”

“I’m waiting for a lift. Not that it’s any of your business.”

His face rippled with rage, like the surface of the Arizona desert, when they do one of those underground nuclear tests. The veins in his neck pulsated with little shockwaves of indignation.

I could tell he wanted to lay into me. But he could also tell by my accent and my address and my attitude that I was middle class. He didn’t want to fuck with me too much, in case my Aunt turned out to be a Magistrate, or my dad played golf with the local MP (as it happens, she wasn’t and he didn’t, but the copper wasn’t to know that) so he just gritted his teeth.

“There’ve been several burglaries around here all right? You’re standing here loitering about in a very suspicious manner. I would be within my rights to take you down the station right now.”

“You can’t.” I said, starting to panic. “My mum’s on her way to pick me up. She won’t know where I am.”

Seeing that I was starting to shit myself, the copper decided to turn the knife a little.

He got out of the car.

“Empty your pockets.”

Fortunately, there was nothing in them apart from my door key, about thirty-six pence in assorted change and some silver foil from a chewing gum wrapper. The copper got quite excited about the foil. He got straight on the radio and started to ask them to check up on me, like I was the Yorkshire Ripper or something.

I felt like I was about to piss myself, and jiggled from foot to foot.

“Don’t even think about going anywhere,” he said.

Right then my mum drove past on the other side of the road. I waved, relieved, as she headed for the roundabout to turn round.

“That’s my mum,” I told the copper. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the Volvo badge, and decided I was more trouble than it was worth. He got back in the car, put on his seat belt and and raised a threatening finger.

“I’ll be watching you,” he hissed like some dirty phone caller.

Then he screeched off, just as my mum pulled in.

“What have you been doing?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said indignantly. “He just wanted to know if I’d seen anything suspicious. There’ve been some burglaries around here or something.”

As we drove home I slumped into the back of the car. The adrenaline subsided, the bravado evaporated, and a tear trickled down my face.

It sounds pathetic. But I was just a kid. Sure, the copper was in his rights to stop and check me out. But the way he spoke, the body language - that had nothing to do with law and order. It was just a big power trip - the thick pig tosser.

When I told Bernie about my little encounter with the law, I expected him to share my indignance. But, to my surprise he was quite defensive of the police. One night as we were walking up to his place, he introduced me to this copper called P.C. Osgood. Actually, I don’t know if he was a P.C. or a Sargeant or what, as he had a couple of stripes on his sleeve. But that isn’t really important, as he wasn’t like a proper policeman at all. He seemed more like a geography teacher or something, who just happened to be wearing a uniform (in fact, if they did police tunics in corduroy, I’m sure he would have opted for one).

P.C. Osgood greeted Bernie like a long lost son, and they stood chatting for ages about how his mum was, and how business was going at the hardware store, and how the music was going, and what bands we were into. It turned out, when he was off-duty, P.C. Osgood played a Rickenbacker bass and drove a 1968 Triumph Bonneville 120R. Christ, he even listened to John Peel, and asked us what we though of the latest offerings from Spear of Destiny and Misty in Roots and the Fall.

When we were sat there in the Blue Boar and everyone started mouthing off about pig this and filth that, Bernie would leap to their defence and say that the police were just human like us, and it was the government’s fault that everything was so shit, and we shouldn’t blame the police, because they were just doing their job. People would listen to Bernie, because he always spoke like he believed one hundred per cent in what he was saying (which is probably because he did). And I’m sure he changed a few kids minds about coppers and all that (even if not completely).

Then one night we were walking home from the Blue Boar, and as always we took a short cut through the alleyway. We’d often see guys dealing down there – hash and speed and maybe a few wraps of coke. But we ignored them and they ignored us. So, when we saw three figures stood lurking in the darkness at the end of the alley we thought nothing of it.

When we got to the end of the alleway, three very bulky young policemen stepped from the shadows and stood elbows out barring our path.

“All right lads, what are you doing down here?” they asked towering over us.

“We’re just going home,” I said.

“Where from?”

I paused, not wanting to admit I’d been under-age drinking at the Blue Boar (although this must have been obvious from the alcohol on my breath). My hesitation immediately raised suspicion and before I could compose a convenient lie, one of the coppers said, “Are you buying or selling?”

“Buying or selling what?” asked Bernie belligerently.

“OK, up against the wall.”

And before we knew it we both had our faces against the brickwork.

“You practically broke my nose,” I said.

“That’ll be the least of your worries when we’ve finished with you,” said the copper who had me against the wall.

He held me tighter as his colleague proceeded to frisk me. I could smell fried food on both their uniforms. They were obviously fresh from the canteen or the chip shop - refuelled and ready for action. The food smell mingled with cheap aftershave, and stale piss and dogshit from the gutter by the wall, and I felt like retching.

“Keep still, and keep your hands on the wall,” said the copper, who was holding me.

“What the fuck are you doing,” I heard Bernie ask, and I soon realised why, as a few moments later as one of the coppers proceeded to undo the button fly on my Levis and pull them down round my knees.

“Hey!” I said as he kicked my legs apart. “You can’t do that.”

“We have reasonable reason to suspect that you may be carrying restricted substances with intent to supply.”

I felt something hard brush against my testicles and recoiled. I peered down to see the end of a truncheon lifting the edge of my boxer shorts, and I jerked back from the wall, pulling free from the grip of the copper who was holding me. He immediately got me by the arm, and bent it up by my shoulder blade as he pushed me back against the brickwork.

“Arrghh,” I groaned. “You’re breaking my arm.”

He released the pressure a little.

“Well keep fucking still then.”

I could tell he was as tense as I was.

“They’re clean,” I heard one of the the coppers mutter.

“They must have ditched the stuff when they saw us,” said the one who was holding me.

The pressure was reapplied on my arm.

“All right, what have you done with your gear?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I won’t ask again. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE GEAR?”

A knee went into my back and my arm was practically wrenched out of its socket.

“My arm, “ I cried out again. “Please mate, you’re breaking it.”

I started to sob quietly.

“Oh, leave him alone,” I heard Bernie say. “He doesn’t touch drugs. He’s still at school. When his parents find out what you’ve just done to him, your Super’s really going to hear about it.”

The copper released my arm.

“All right, all right. No one’s broken anything. Pull your trousers up and stop whimpering.”

They left me standing there wiping away my tears with the back of my hand and started to scour the ground by Bernie’s feet. Then suddenly, one of the coppers stood up with a plastic bag of small white pills in his hand.

“What have we here?”

“Looks like speed to me. Dexamphetamine, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?”

He handed the bag to his colleague who looked at it and nodded.

“Yea, that’s Dexies all right.”

“Nothing to do with me,” says Bernie.

“It just fell out of your pocket.”

“It bloody didn’t”

“Yea, we all saw it. Even your mate here.”

The copper looks threateningly at me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was dark.”

Bernie looked at me. I tried to stand up for him.

“Someone else must have dropped them. We always see people along here…”

“What kind of people.”

“You know dealers and that. But we just walk past. Bernie ain’t got nothing to do with them.”

The policeman got out his pen and notebook.

“So when did you report these dealers to us.”

“I didn’t.”

He scribbled dramatically.

Bernie gave me this look and shook his head slightly.

“I mean I didn’t see anything, not anyone actually dealing,” I said hurrdily. “I mean we just saw some blokes stood around. And I just thought they might be up to no good.”

“So why did you think that?”

“I don’t know?”

“So what did they look like?”

I shrugged.

“So why didn’t you report them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t bloody know much, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was dark.”

He jabbed my shoulder with his finger.

“Look at me!” he said.

I raised my head. The copper stared menancingly into my face and said.

“Witholding evidence is a serious offence. You see ever anything, you tell us straight away, OK?”

I nodded. One of the other coppers came over to me then, and took me to one side as the other two put the cuffs on Bernie. To my relief he seemed much more chatty and friendly.

“Now son, I need to check with my colleagues. But I think we’re going to give you the benefit on this occasion. How old are you seventeen, eighteen?”

“Eighteen,” I said.

“So, you’re what, studying for your ‘A’levels?”

I nodded.

“So what you planning to do? Have a year off travelling? Go to straight to University?”

“I’m not sure.”

I didn’t think it was a good moment to tell him I was in a band called ‘Fight for Justice’ and we were planning to use the power of punk to overthrow the facist Tory junta.

“Well, whatever you decide, you get yourself a record for drug dealing, you’re going to find life a whole lot harder.”

“Understood,” I said compliantly.

“Now you cooperate with us, you’ll have no problems on that score.”

I grinned politely at his pun.

“I know you weren’t involved in any of this, OK?” He lowered his voice. “But you want to be very careful who you hang out with in future.”

“Bernie’s all right,” I said.

The copper’s face filled with disappointment.

“I thought you had some sense.”

“I do.”

“Well, do yourself a favour and spend your time at home revising and less time out here, hanging out with dealers.” He stared at me reproachfully. I wanted to say ‘Bernie, isn’t a dealer’. That’s what I should have done. But I just stood and listened as the copper went on. “What are your mum and dad going to say? Your teachers, eh? When they find out you’re mixed up in drugs. It ain’t going to look good is it – not on your UCAS form? Or if you have a problem getting into uni…,” he looked meaningfully at me, “… it ain’t going to look good on your job application down at Quicksave.”

“No,” I conceded.

“Well,” he said. “I can see you’re a sensible lad. I just hope you’ve learned your lesson tonight.”

He looked over at his colleagues who had Bernie by an arm each.

“You want a lift home?”

“It’s OK. It’s only five minutes walk.”

“All right, mate. We’ve got your details. You get straight home and you think carefully about what I’ve said.”

I nodded.

“You’ve been a very lucky lad tonight.”

I smiled gratefully, as if I he’d done me some huge favour.

“And don’t shoot your mouth off to anyone about this. Not your family. Not your mates. OK? If we need to call you as a witness, you’ll be in contempt of court! And a pretty boy like you don’t want get banged up. You understand?”

I nodded dumbly.

“Good,” he said. “Now clear off.”

I headed back home in a daze and went straight up to my room and lay on the bed, heart thumping.

It was only about fifteen minutes later that I came to my senses and began to feel really guilty about Bernie getting arrested. My folks were downstairs watching telly, so I crept into their bedroom to use the second phone. I got the telephone number for Westing Police Station from directory enquiries. It took a while, as I was whispering into the phone. The lady couldn't hear me properly the first time, and gave me the number for Fettlington Post Office. Having rung back to get the right number, I knelt down beside my mum and dad’s bed and rang the Duty Sargaent to explain what had happened. I lied to him, saying that Bernie’s parents had been on the phone to me worried that he hadn’t come home. I wasn’t sure what I could tell them, I said, because I might be a witness, even though the whole thing was a misunderstanding because the pills they’d found on the floor couldn’t possibly belong to Bernie.

Before I could finish, the Duty Sargeant cut me off in mid stream.

“I can confirm that a Mr Bernard Kenneth Kenton has been brought in and is currently being questioned. But as far as I can see, he hasn’t been formally charged yet.”

“So what can I tell his mum and dad?” I asked again. “They’re very worried. They don’t know where he is. Should I call them?”

“No, leave it with me, and I’ll make sure Mr Kenton is able to contact his parents.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Thank you, sir,” said the Duty Sargeant and promptly ended the call.

I was still sat there a couple of minutes later, wondering if I’d done the right thing, when my mum came into the bedroom.

“What are you doing down there.”

“Oh I was just phoning Bernie,” I said, getting slowly to my feet.

“Why don’t you use the phone downstairs.”

“I was up here…” I said lamely.

“What are you going on the floor?” She stared at me, not unlike the copper had earlier that evening. “Have you been ringing those premium rate numbers.”

“No,” I said indignantly.

“Well somebody has,” she said.

“Really?” I said

“Yes,” she said. “We’re getting an itemised bill from now on.”

“Well, it’s nothing to do with me.” It really wasn’t.

“Well,” said mum. “We’ll be able to see in future.” She looked down pointedly at my button fly, which in the confusion and darkness of the alleway I had buttoned up twisted like a boxer’s lip, with the top button in the bottom hole.

I wanted to explain myself, but bit my tongue before the evenings event’s spilled out, and I just got up and skulked back to my room.

I don’t know if my phone call to the police station helped or not. But apparently, they threatened to do Bernie for possession and put the pressure on him for a couple of hours, but then they suddenly released him without charge around midnight. I actually heard this second-hand from other regulars down at the Daffodil Lion, as Bernie was no longer speaking to me.

To my great relief, the police never contacted me. And I never discovered where the drugs had come from. Whether those rogue police officers had planted them, or someone else had dropped them. Or whether (maybe) they had been Bernie’s after all (which I’m afraid to say, a small part of me couldn’t help but consider as a possibility, whether or not it was actually true).

I knew Bernie could tell what I was thinking. But, after a few weeks he seemed to forget about it, and resumed nodding at me when he saw me down at the Daffodil Lion. However, I never got invited to play with his four-track again. I never dared drink at the Blue Boar, and I used to flinch every time I saw a cop car.

Then one afternoon I was walking down the hill to the leisure centre for a game of squash with my uncle Clive (my dad’s youngest brother who’s only eight years older than me). Suddenly this panda car screeched to a halt behind me, with blue lights flashing and everything, and this young copper leapt out and shouted at me to drop my sports bag.

I was so startled I just stood their frozen with the bag clutched to my chest like a favourite teddy. The copper crouched down behind his car door and screamed (and I mean, screamed):

“DROP THE BAG NOW AND STEP BACK”

I did as he had asked and stood in the road with my hands half up, like I was failing an audition for the Bill.

“BACK FURTHER”

I took a couple of steps back.

“FURTHER!”

I took a couple more steps, and ended up spreadeagled across the bonnet of a red Golf that had seen the blue lights and stopped in the road behind me.

I picked myself up and waved an apology to the driver, a young mum with a couple of kids peering excitedly from the back seat. She looked petrified and spread her arms out, partly in surrender and partly to form a barrier in front of her kids’ faces.

“STEP AWAY FROM THE CAR!” shouted the policeman, who had seized his opportunity to sidle out from behind his car door and stand over my sports bag.

I skulked in the middle of the road in total bemusement, as the traffic started to stack up, passers by gathered, and people peered over the hedges of neighbouring houses.

“Is it loaded?” asked the policeman.

“What?”

He pointed down at the handle of my black squash racket poking out of the bag. And just as he did so, he noticed the towelling grip and the words Dunlop in white letters on the side.

He raised his hand to his forehead in a mixture of relief and embarrassment, and his shoulders subsided, like a half-baked cake in an opened oven. He gestured at me to step to the side of the road, waved on the mum in the red Golf, and handed me back my bag, as the crowds subsided.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “I didn’t mean to alarm you. I thought it was a bloody gun.”

“Well, from a distance…you know…I guess, it’s hard to tell sometimes.”

“Where are you off to anyway?”

“I’ve got a game at the lesiure centre.”

“In the league ?”

I shrugged, a little fed up with all the questions.

“I play down there myself,” explained the policeman. ”I’m in 8F at the moment. I was up in the 4s, but work’s been busy, extra shifts, it’s hard to squeeze the games in.”

“I know. People are hard to get hold of,” I said. “I’m in 7D, but I lost my last game. You know that guy, Kevin whatsisname?”

“The fat guy with the head band and all the raquets?”

I nodded.

“Cheating bastard. Asks for a let every bloody point.”

“Yea, even though he stands in your way the whole time…”

“He does that to everyone. You want to get someone to ref next time.”

“Hopefully, I won’t have to play him again,” I said.

“He seems to be in every bloody league I’m in.”

“And me.”

“Oh well, I guess we might be playing each other soon then.”

“Could be,” I said.

“Well, I’m Tony Brown.”

We shook hands.

“Dan,” I said. “Dan Hale.”

The policeman looked at his watch.

“What time’s your court, Dan?”

“11.40”

“Sorry mate, I’ve already made you five minutes late. Hop in and I’ll run you down there.”

“It’s OK.”

“Come on, jump in. It’s my fault for holding you up. You’ll miss your whole game otherwise.”

I reluctantly got into the passenger seat, feeling quite strange, surrounded by the guy’s cop gear, the smell of oil and boot polish, and the constant crackling of the police radio.

“Bet you didn’t expect to be getting a ride in one of these,” said Tony as we hurtled towards the leisure centre.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,“ I said.

“What you been up to then?” he asked, his tone shifting slightly.

“Nothing much,” I shrugged.

Tony nodded.

“Well, don’t make a habit of it.”

“I won’t,” I said. And we sat in a slightly awkward silence until we reached the doors of the lesiure centre.

“You might get a few stares, when people see you getting out. But ignore them.” He winked. “Just go and enjoy your game.”

“Thanks Tony.” I struggled to unhook the handle of my squash raquet from beneath the police radio. “If I can get my gun free.”

He pulled a mock stern face, and chuckled.

“No worries, Dan. Have a good one.”

“Yea cheers, Tony.”

“Ta ta, now.”

I shut the door, and waved as he drove off.

My uncle Clive was watching from the leisure centre reception.

“What’s going on? Has there been an accident?”

“No, nothing like that,” I said. “It’s just a mate, Tony. He’s a copper. I was running late, so he gave me a lift.”

Tyres squealed in the distance.

“He doesn’t hang about does he?”

“No,” I said. “He doesn’t”

“Well, we better get on court.”

“Yea, sorry, yea.”

And off I went to beat Clive; 9-7, 2-9, 9-5.

I felt better about things after that.

I even played Tony a couple of weeks later. And he didn’t seem to mind that I beat him, even thought I was quite a lot younger than him.

He told me I had real talent and could be up in league two or three with a bit of practice and a bit of extra strength on my back hand. We even went for a pint afterwards. It was just a quick one in the leisure centre bar, up by the observation gallery. But it was good of him, because he still had lot of extra shifts on, and didn’t have a lot of spare time.

I wasn’t surprised Tony was so busy. That summer the police were everywhere. And they’d been given carte blanche to keep the kids off the streets. The trouble was, there was nowhere else for us to go.

Unemployment had skyrocketed and there were no jobs. Parents didn’t want kids hanging around at home, but they were no longer entitled to benefits, so they couldn’t afford to move out (or even go to the swimming pool or the cinema for the afternoon). It was different if you were old and unemployed or a student – then you got money off everything. We got nothing. There were a few training schemes, but these were just a mix of litter collection and letter writing classes. And in the carparks and alleways the words ‘No Future’ were grafittied on every wall.

As the summer went on, the drug dealers stepped up their activities, and the police stepped up their stop and search. You couldn’t turn the corner without bumping into one or the other of them. And then the temperatures really began to rise. The sun got everywhere. It crept in between the curtains and warped the 12 inch Cherry Red EPs I’d left on my bed, and exploded a can of deodorant on my sister’s windowsill – shattering the glass and cracking the wall.

The town was coated in a black choking dust. It lay on cars and windows, and no one was allowed to wash it away. And the sun kept blazing down. It flayed the skin from builders backs, and melted the tubs in the ice cream vans before the scoops could even be got into them. And the children settled for rockets from the corner shops, and sheltered beneath trees in the parks, because the metal of roundabouts and slides burned their soft hands and thighs, and goalmouths turned to concrete and cracked, and the streams ran dry and cracked and the roads cracked, and everyone tried to escape to the sea, but just jammed the roads and flashed the Vs in a frantic semaphore of frustration, as the tarmac melted beneath their tyres, and their idling engines cast chains around ashmatic chests. And we all breathed in the black choking dust, and this terrible ever-thickening tension.

People who went out to work lost their jobs or were worried about their jobs. And the people at home dusted and dusted and still the sunlight swam with dust. And the kids stayed in to escape the heat, and the dealers and the searches.

I left school and had nothing to do, as I’d decided to neither go travelling nor go to university nor find a job. But I soon tired of the parental nagging, and the boredom and the pennilessness of teenage unemployment, and set out to find myself an income.

I went to see the caretaker at my old school, but all the cleaning jobs had gone. I saw a card in the window of Victoria Wine, but they said I was too young and had no experience. I went to the Job Centre, and had a mock interview, but the only vacancies they had were for weekend burger tossers at the county show and they wouldn’t consider taking on veggies (even if I’d wanted a shot at it).

So I’d just go and sit in the park and listen to someone’s ghetto blaster or play football, or we’d walk out along the old railway line, look at discarded porn and chuck rocks at trees. At dusk, we’d gather by the canal with the rest of the town’s disaffected youth, who'd spent the day shoplifting lighter fuel and glue and aerosols. We'd watch as they sprayed grafitti on bridges and sniffed themselves into oblivion, and burnt stuff and broke stuff, and tormented ducks and drunks, until the police, sweating in shirt sleeves, lined them up against the wall, and confiscated their bags of glue and kicked their ghetto blasters to bits when they thought no one important was looking. Then they’d load them in vans with the drunks and drop them miles out of town. Until one old drunk collapsed in the heat on the bypass and pegged it (and the policy was abandoned).

And still the sun kept shining and the men on the allotments shook their heads and pissed on their cabbages and fought over stolen tools as their water butts ran dry and flowers fell from stems, and the town dried and constricted and twisted and turned brown, like a seed head about to burst. And then it did burst.

The riots happened first in larger cities and towns, spreading west from London, through Reading to Bristol, and south from Liverpool and Leeds, through Birmingham to Bristol, and the anger collided there and ricocheted off into Westinghsire, where one afternoon, thirty or forty youths gathered outside Woolworths. Two policeman came to tell them to go home. And there was some pushing and shoving, and they pulled one kid away at random, and bundled him into the back of their panda, thinking the threat of arrest would disperse the crowd. But the kids gathered around the panda car and started rocking it back and forth until it tipped up on its side, and the police men clambered out and ran for reinforcements, and by the time they returned there were 300 kids there and the panda car had been torched and the shops had all closed early and put up their shutters. And Bernie put on his jacket with his badges and went to join them milling around on the street, no one knowing what to do next, except spray ‘pig this’ and ‘pig that’ on every available surface.

After a couple of hours, a convoy of armoured vans and buses pulled up, and a hundred riot police (seconded from neighbouring counties) appeared and formed a phalanx at either end of the street trapping the kids in the middle. And as they started to close in, the kids threw stones, but there weren’t many stones, so they threw bottles, and empty aerosols, and pissed in empty cans to give them extra weight, and still the lines of black helmeted police closed in, like so many parochial Darth Vaders.

When the kids had run out of things to throw, one of them, to great cheers and laughter, smashed a window of a shoe shop and they started to throw ladies’ shoes at the police. Then, from behind the police lines, someone threw a petrol bomb, which exploded, splattering and scattering them. And as the human dam opened, some of the kids decided to make a run for it.

The police started lashing out with their battons, and then everyone piled in and a couple more petrol bombs were thrown, and a policeman and a kid were both on fire like Hollywood stuntmen. But it was no movie. And more shop windows got smashed and word got around that there was stuff to be had, and dozens more kids poured into the town centre and started carrying off whole racks of shirts and jeans, and hi-fis and speakers and LPs. The police were grabbing and lashing out at whoever they could. And the air was frantic with fire and missiles and glass and blood and noise.

As the battle reached its peak, Bernie saw a girl he knew. She was a bit of a dreamer called Miranda Kerr, who used to dance through the town with her hair tied-up in ribbons that hung like rainbows around her face. As she skipped past the shoppers, she used to laugh our loud at their scowling faces, but she was harmless enough - just young, with her head up in the clouds.

The afternoon of the Westing riots, as usual, Miranda came waltzing home from her art course at Westingshire College. Without realising what was going on, she danced straight into the battlefield. In a panic, she started to run. But she turned the wrong way and ended up hurtling into the thick of it.

That night, in the Daffodil Lion, Bernie tearfully told us how he’d try to get across the street to shield her and shepherd her away. He’d called out her name and she’d looked up. She was full of fear, but actually smiled for a moment, relieved to see a familiar face. But before Bernie could reach her, a brick had hit her on the back of the head. And she’d wandered dazed towards a couple of coppers. At this point Bernie had been relieved, thinking they would help her, but instead, cornered and in a panic, the coppers must have thought she was attacking them, because they just laid into her with their batons, beating her around the head and back. And then some of the rioters piled in behind her, and she collapsed on the ground beneath them all. And when they’d finished beating the crap out of each other, and trampling all over her, she was left there on the floor like a ragdoll among the discarded boxes of trainers and Benetton jumpers. Then a policeman and three kids took a leg each and carried her away - and everyone stopped and stared, their faces hung with shock, thinking she was dead.

When Miranda finally arrived in casualty, having been transferred unconscious from the back of a police van to an ambulance, the doctors discovered she had fractured her skull in three places and had swellings on her brain. The police provided several statements from witnesses suggesting that the security shutter from the front of the Curry’s store had collapsed on top of her, inferring that she was one of the hardcore troublemakers.

But Bernie was adamant that Miranda had taken no part in the riot and had been nowhere near any shop when the shutters were ripped down. He even went and gave a statement saying he'd seen a policeman kick her in the back, whilst his colleagues repeatedly rained baton blows down on her skull. But it was never used in court.

Either way, several parts of Miranda's brain were damaged. And after five months in the Rehabilitation Unit at Westinghsire District Hospital, she returned home to be looked after by her parents - twenty-two years old and never able to work or speak properly ever again.

"Fucking tragic," as Bernie observed.

She seemed happy enough though. She became convinced she was a famous ballerina and could often be seen limping through the town in dancing shoes and a dirty, pink tutu, with an old mobile phone she’d found dumped outside an office, pausing occasionally to make angry calls to God.

I noticed a change in Bernie after that, like he had some worm in his guts that constantly wriggled and ate away at his soul.

In January 1982, after one hundred and seventy two years of trading, Hargreaves and Sons (unable to cope with the endless shoplifters, or compete with the new DIY hyperstore with its free car park on the edge of Westing) closed down. The building was sold to a local property developer and Bernie the Bolt joined the three-million strong ranks of the unemployed.

After losing his job, Bernie still turned up at the Daffodil Lion, battling through the weather on his dad’s old push bike, although he made his pints last longer, and his previous passion slowly left him, shrivelling like the skin of an uneaten fruit.

After a few weeks on the dole, Bernie got a job working at Hallowsmere Common as a labourer building the concrete silos for the cruise missiles. He used to wear a bobble hat with a CND badge on it. So much for National Security. Perhaps the USAF thought he was being ironic (although the Yanks ain't exactly famed for their understanding of British sarcasm).

Soon the silos were complete. Bernie was back on the dole. He was also back at the common.

There had been a Women's Peace Camp at Hallowsmere Common since the decision to site Cruise Missiles at the base was first announced. To start with, it was a small affair - a caravan and half a dozen women - and most people supported them. They held a benefit night at the Daffodil Lion, which was attended by many of the peace women and their supporters, who danced the night away to Inner Earth, Westing's reggae band - one old black bassist and three white dreadlocked travellers.

Me and Bernie danced our socks off that night. Even if we didn’t donate any money (both being unemployed).

In December 1982, there'd been a huge rally at the air-base to protest against the imminent arrival of the missiles. The rally was preceeded by a march along the Fettlington road, which passed a few hundred yards from the pub.

A dozen of the Daffodil Lion's regulars had taken part, using the pub as an assembly place, before joining the marchers. And about fifty other people appeared there – mostly old hippies. We wondered where they had all suddenly come from, crawling from the larval incognito of eighties life to share a mutual metamorphosis, alien hordes of bead bestrewn masqueraders drawn to the pub's flower power decor as if by some cosmic homing signal – like pacifist space moths swarming to interstellar pheremones.

Much to our amusement, many of the hippies spoke the same way they had done in the sixties. Were they putting it on? Adopting that ‘Hey Man Wow Groovy’ lingo in remeniscence of those swinging summers of love. Or had they (and this was a more chilling concept) been talking that way for the past fifteen years, in their suburban hideaways (three bedroom semis with camper vans rotting in unweeded drives and bay windows stickered with faux stain-glass suns and dolphins).

Paul, who had run the pub since the sixties, thought he recognised one or two faces from back then, guys he hadn’t seen for 15 years. He guessed he was just imagining it, what with all those beards, beads and pony tails.

Before the march commenced, Bernie stood up and gave a talk. He asked everyone to stand in silence in memory of Hiroshiman and Nagasaki. And, after a minute, his voice cut through the silence.

"This is how I imagine the bomb, not as some finned hunk of lead and plutonium plumetting from the Enola Gay, nor as a cloud of evaporated children, nor a mile-wide ripple of ravenous heat that turned all to ashes, but simply as a silence (albeit a silense of unimaginable intensity).

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just a brainwashed communist. Maybe it was a mercy killing, that in the long run saved more lives. It was certainly quick. Maybe all those Japanese women and children should be grateful for that. Just think. It took a day to kill 60,000 people in the Somme. And in Passchendale, it took three months for 300,000 of our Great Uncles to be slaughtered. It was messy too, all that shelling and maiming and gassing - like killing rats. Not to mention those that drowned slowly in the mud. Imagine that! Slowly sinking into the mud, too weak to stop yourself being sucked into the earth and drowned. No, Hiroshima was far cleaner. 100,000 dead in a second. Instant incineration. Now that’s progress. Isn’t it? What a wonderful advance for military technology! Why slowly suffocte your enemies in shit, when you can cremate them and scatter their ashes in a second. And no discrimination - men, women, children, the young and the old. Now that’s equality for you!

Of course, afterwards, there were a few children born with deformities and a few people got cancer. But it was no big deal. After all, they were only Japs. And, hey, nothing’s ever perfect. Not even atomic weapons.

But you know the biggest cancer we have to fear is not the one you get from exposure to radiation. No. The real killer is the cancer of our hearts, the malignancy of intolerence and hatred, caused by ignorance and misunderstanding and fear.

So, tell me, what are we afraid of? The ordinary Russian or Chinese people do not want to come over and fight us. They have no grudge against you or me or our sisters and brothers. It is the leaders. The Stalins, The Hitlers… the Thatchers… "

Bernie’s speech was halted for a few seconds until the crowd had stopped booing and hissing and cursing.

"…it is they who we should turn on. If we got rid of them we would have no need for bombs.

But we must fight our anger. For the bomb is not the real problem. It's not the dividing of atoms, but the the divisions between people that are at the core of our problem. It is not the latent power of plutonium we should fear, but the latent power to abuse and kill that lies within us all.

So, I remind you all that this is a peaceful protest today. If you want to fight anything, then fight the hatred within yourself. It is easy to be angry. So, instead let us celebrate the kindred spirit between us and go forward with peace in our hearts. A demonstration of togetherness, not a negative, but a positive energy, which we can spread throughout this town, the country and the entire world."

I remember giving Bernie a big hug afterwards, as he blushingly folded away his piece of crumpled paper. And I felt like we were proper friends again (finally laying to rest that business with the ‘stop and search’ in the alleyeway by the Blue Boar).

That December day in 1982 had been bitterly cold, and the roads were covered in ice. However there had been an almost festive atmosphere among the marchers, a pre-Christmas revellry, which belied the seriousness of their mission. Everyone was positive and good humoured. And although some undercover officers mingled with the genuine protesters, and photographs of alleged ring leaders were taken from among the trees, generally the police, the security services and the army kept a diplomatic distance, meaning that it was a day of peace, of candles, badges and ribbons. Not a day for Bernie the Bolt to get himself arrested.

But, as the year went by, tensions grew. There was the Falklands conflict. The miner’s strike. Unemployment grew higher. And then the Galaxies started to arrive at the base.

A few years earlier, I’d been inside one of those huge planes at the Hallowsmere Common Air Show (months before there was any mention of nuclear weaponry being stationed there). The plane was like a flying warehouse. An enormous thing. My dad took a picture of me and my brother standing in its cavenous mouth. We looked like two ants on the rim of a toppled bucket.

The Galaxies used to black out the sky as they flew low over the pub on their approach to the base. Sometimes they would circle endlessly, a repeated darkening drone passing over and over. And sometimes I thought. What's happening? Why aren't they landing? Are they about to lauch one of those fuckers? I'd have to turn on the radio then to check there was no four-minute warning being issued.

Despite the comfort of inane chatter, pounding pop music and innocuous news bulletins, it still made the shit churn like worms in my bowels to think of that apocalyptic cargo held in the Galaxy's swollen grey belly skimming the tops of the trees.

The first American Tomahawk missiles arrived at Hallowsmere Common Air Base just under a year later on November 13th 1983. I remembered the day well.

That week before, me and Bernie had gone home drunk and decided to give each other a mohican. First off we used a pair of kitchen scissors to trim the sides of our hair. Soon the black tufts of Bernie’s hair were covering the floor, turning him from Denis the Menace to a native American. We were both laughing as I used the shaver to reveal his pale skull untouched by sunlight for two decades. But by the time I’d finished, I felt quite scared looking at him, metamorphosed into some punk alien (not scared of him, just kind of uneasy about what we were doing).

As I sat down in front of the mirror for my turn, the effects of the drink were starting to evaporate, and I was having serious second thoughts about the whole hair cutting pantomime. But, as Bernie started to shave my head, I slowly felt the anxiety lift from me. And the process seemed to take on an almost spiritual significance - as if we were not only cutting our hair, but ritually severing our links with civilisation.

I’m not saying that some great wisdom or enlightenment was bestowed upon me courtesy of a Remington home shave kit. That would be overstating the case. But, you have to appreciate that at that time, having a mohican in a provincial town like Westing was not normal. It was enough to get you stopped by the police, and banned from shops. Cars would slow down in the street, children would point and pubs would refuse to serve us (as they had refused to serve the punks, and the blacks and the gypsies and the Irish before them, and before them women and men in working clothes). But not so the Daffodil Lion.

Financially, the pub wasn't in a position to ban anyone. Besides it was that kind of place - renowned for its wholesome vegetarian menu, its liberality and relaxed atmosphere. It was a natural gathering place for members of CND. However, even at the Daffodil Lion, people treated us differently. Among the protestors, the mohicans gave us a kind of ‘inverted’ gravitas. People would step out of our way in defference (as would everyone else – thinking we were mindless thugs like Sid Snot on the Kenny Evertt show).

On November 13th, 1983, the pub was totally packed. There was a definite tension in the air, light years from the care free gathering of the previous Winter. The yueltide jollity of that day had been replaced by one of mutual immutability through which trailed the smouldering ghost of Guy Fawkes - Nuke Maggie, as one placard put it. Bernie made no speech. We just stood around with our pints - simmering in silence.

On the other side, envigorated by the Falkands conflict and their subsequent election victory, the government obviously felt they had an open mandate to indulge their neurotic prejudices with ever greater zeal. Unamed sub-Whitehall departments excitedly plotted how best to subjugate those interferring Trotskyist scum, relishing the footage on the nine o'clock news of their faceless footsoldiers beating the crap out of Guardian reading teachers and vicars, with the ruthlessness of a phosphorous bomb bunged into a bunker of screaming Argie conscripts. And into the midst of all this came Bernie the Bolt, all mohican and bitterness.

The lanes around the Daffodil Lion swarmed with police, blocking all routes to the air base which was about two-and-a-half miles away in the next valley. But thousands of people still traipsed across fields and footpaths to reach the gates and hundreds of police had to link arms to prevent them getting through. As everyone milled around and chanted like a crowd outside a football ground, suddenly something burst inside Bernie, and when I looked around he was gone.

Filled with fury at the thoughts of his friend, Miranda, dancing deludedly through Westing in her dirty Tutu, he was unable to bear the sight of the unnumbered uniforms. And picking up a fallen branch, he broke through a weak link in the police chain and made a run for the gates, suicidally attacking a whole phallanx of riot police rather like a squirrel attacking a herd of hippos.

Bemused rather than threatened by his behaviour, half-a-dozen policemen dived on top of Bernie, half-asphyxiated him with their combined body weight, and tossed him into the back of a van.

After a night spent singing songs of peaceful protest in a crowded police cell, he appeared before a trio of Westing Magistrates, who having heard the details of his case, cautioned him with due solemnity and bailed him pending pyschiatric reports.

Although there had been almost two hundred arrests that day, it was Bernie's that was the most memorable. His solitary onslaught on the police line had been captured by a freelance photojournalist, and his image was splashed all over the front of the Sunday papers. So, when he returned to the Daffodil Lion the following evening (bound over to keep the peace) he was greeted like a conquering hero.

For a while, Bernie the Bolt became something of a local celebrity (and even secured a job in B&Q through his fame). However, the Hallowsmere Common Peace Camp never quite enjoyed the same support. The confrontation that had flared up on November 13th and the direct action that followed (the peace campers cutting through the wire and painting slogans on the missile silos) was far from the cosy protest - the button badges and peaceful marching - that the local campaigners felt comfortable with.

The Westing Chronicle suddenly launched a campaign against the women, printing stories of shit and sanitary towels being flung into the gardens of houses near the air base, and letters claiming that lesbian orgies had been occuring on the edges of bridlepaths.

At the same time, the local freemasons (those good men of Westing) delayed their dodgy property deals for a while to launch their own offensive, meeting in the darkness of the Conservative Club car park with members of local Neo-Nazi groups, who ransacked the peace camp whilst the women slept, poured concrete on their fresh water pipes, set fire to their tents, and left threats to kill on the answer phones of their few remaining supporter.

Undeterred, the women stayed on at the Hallowsmere Camp for many years (even after the missiles had eventually gone). But, aside from a few loyal supporters in the town, they became isolated, marginalised and eventually forgotten, and the media turned its attention to the villification of single mothers, women priests, teachers, vegetarians, pop singers and social workers, who were, of course, truly responsible for bringing our once-proud empire to its knees. But the peace women were not completely forgotten.

A few months after Bernie had gone ballistic up at the air base, I got a job doing deliveries round Westing. My manager, Sandy, was a right old Thatcherite yuppie running her own business. She had this big Mercedes estate. And though I kind of liked her (especially as she’d given me a job), I also thought she was a bit of a facist.

Then one day I had to do a delivery of some package to the Hallowsmere Common airbase. When I arrived and saw the armed police on the gate, that barbed wire, those silos, all I could think of was Bernie, fired up, charging at them with his broken branch. My heart stared pounding and my head started spinning. Fuck it, I thought, and drove back to work with the package still in the boot.

I remember this guy Duncan - an ascerbic Scot who was Sandy’s right hand man - asked me, “What’s the problem. Wouldn’t they let you in?”

“No, I’m just not delivering up there. Those bombs are designed for one thing – to kill innocent people. I’m not helping those bastards.”

And he just gave me this look like I was a piece of dog shit.

He went straight in to tell Miranda. I could see her peering out through the frosted glass of her ‘management cubicle’ as Duncan ranted on about what a waste of space he thought I was and how much business I was losing the company.

I just stared belligerently back at her and went to tidy the shelves in the stock room. That afternoon, she called me into her office. I thought she was going to sack me or give me an official warning.

“Duncan tells me you refused to deliver to the air base.”

“I’m really sorry,” I mumbled. “It’s just a personal thing.”

“Don’t apologise,” she said. “I agree with you. I wouldn’t either. I admire those women. They’ve got guts. It’s shameful the way they’ve been treated.”

“Oh,” I said.

And I wanted to reach over and give her a big hug. But I just sat there, and suddenly I felt tears well up in my eyes. And I had to rush out of the room, so she wouldn’t see them fall. And after that I didn’t mind working for her so much. Still, it all seems a long time ago now.

I met Bernie the other day. Twenty years on. He still lives in Westing, runs his own painting and decorating firm, and is divorced with one kid on the other side of London. He's teetotal! He still goes to see most of Bristol Rover's home games when he can. But he isn't involved in CND any longer. The missiles and Americans have gone from Hallowsmere Common. And the Russians and Chinese are our friends now (apparently).

And Miranda? Well she’s in town most days. She doesn’t wear the tutu and she doesn't waltz anymore. She just shuffles along in layers of coats and jumpers, wearing two pairs of cheap sunglasses. She still carries a mobile phone (a much newer model, of course, found in a litter bin outside Starbucks) and she still calls God - screaming into the handset, asking him why he hasn’t sorted it all out yet.

All fiction on this site is © Copyright Roger Frederick 2005 All Rights Reserved