Chapter 17 – Phone boxes and dole cheques.
Mr McDoud had moved into the flat on the floor above Mr Rose. His Mrs had followed soon after and the two of them kept themselves to themselves. Nobody ever saw Mrs McDoud but they certainly heard her. She had a fierce tongue on her. The consensus was that they did not get on. Nobody could understand why she had followed him down from Glasgow. She never left the flat and he was always out.
Mr McDoud was probably in his early fifties but he looked much older. Life had chiselled his face into a red wrinkly mess with a tomato for a nose, shaggy eyebrows and a permanent week’s growth of bristle on his face. That’s really hard to achieve! It takes some doing. It wasn’t helped by a liberal smattering of scars. They did nothing to improve his looks.
As far as anyone could tell Mr McDoud only possessed one set of clothes. He wore the same grey flannel trousers with the same grubby white shirt and the same grey jacket wrapped around with a long mac that drooped to his ankles. His thinning hair was always tousled and greasy.
Mc McDoud was nearly always to be found sitting on the park bench in Clissold Park nursing a brown paper bag with a half bottle of scotch from which he took a slug. He had no time for anybody but he seemed to take to Danny. If Danny was passing through he’d always park himself next to Mr McDoud and start up a conversation. Most of what came back at him was utterly incomprehensible but the tone seemed friendly enough so he persevered. Mr McDoud even once offered him a slug of scotch. That was really an honour that he could not refuse. Danny just hoped that the scotch had enough germicidal properties to keep him from harm.
The McDoud’s were set on world conquest, or at least on taking over the whole apartment block. There seemed to be an unending stream of them. Mr McDoud must have been a bit trimmer in his younger days because he and Mrs McDoud had produced a whole tribe, or rather – clan, between them. Either Mr and Mrs McDoud had acted as pathfinders or the rest of the offspring had found out where they were hiding out because they started appearing one by one. They took over the flat next to Mr and Mrs McDoud. There was a horde of them. It was not possible to determine exactly how many of them because they all looked so similar – lanky lads and lasses with shaggy black hair hanging over their foreheads and eyes, pimples and pale white skin that had that translucent, waxy appearance. The only way you could tell any of them apart, even with regard to genders, was by relative size. This was further complicated by the fact that none of them appeared to speak a word of English. The language they shouted at each other bore no resemblance to any words ever spoken. It was guttural and harsh with undertones of violence like shards of glass. They were so feral that nobody went near them. Heaven knows what the sleeping arrangements were. There were only four rooms!
What was noted was that shortly after the raggle-taggle scots army moved in all the giro cheques for both houses started to disappear. The dole office sent out the welfare in weekly cheques. Unless you opened the door to the postman and took personal charge of your cheque you never got to see it. That meant a visit to the dole office who promptly wrote out another cheque. Things were a lot more lenient back then. It must have cost them a fortune. The McDoud clan must have thought they’d landed on their feet. They couldn’t believe how soft the English were. It was like taking the babies toys. The stupid thing about it was that it later transpired that they were cashing the cheques at a local post office. For heaven’s sake! Why did the post office cash them? Why didn’t the police follow it up? Is everybody daft?
Well the answer to that is obviously yes.
The other thing that was noted was that none of the phones in the five mile radius around the house were working. The money box had been prised off in all of them.
The mystery was solved when Danny discovered why Mr McDoud always wore that long mac. One day when he was sitting next to him on that park bench he must have been a bit more plastered than normal and let his coat flop open. Danny saw that inside, in specially made pockets, Mr McDoud kept the tools of his trade, the most notable of which was a large jemmy that he had been using to prise open the money boxes of all the phones in the area. No sooner did British Telecom repair the boxes than Mr McDoud, allowing just sufficient time for them to have collected enough cash, prised them open and took the coins.
The answer to where he got all the money for his considerable intake of whisky was provided. Whenever his bottle was empty he bought another courtesy of British Telecom. You might ask how any respecting off-licence would constantly accept payment for a bottle of scotch in threepenny bits. But then money is money. Nobody asks questions.
The arrival of the McDouds was a scourge upon the whole area. We were all affected, though, to his immense credit, he never did Mr Rose’s phone. That was off limits. Even rogues stop at something. Not one of us was robbed, well, apart from the giros, and the phone was sacrosanct. The code was that you don’t shit in your own bed.
These are my six books of poetry. They are available as paperback or on Kindle from Amazon – all for under £5 for a paperback. You could buy the whole lot for just £27.62!!
They are not conventional poetry books. They are like you find on my blog with a page of explanatory prose followed by the poem. The prose is as important as the poem to me.
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Stanzas and Stances – £5.59
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Poems and Peons – £4.33
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Science Fiction books:
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Green – paperback £9.98 Kindle £2.56 (or free on unlimited)
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Rock Music books
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Other selected books and novels:
Anecdotes-Weird-Science-Writing-Ramblings – a book of anecdotes mainly from the sixties and other writing.
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More Anecdotes – following the immense popularity of the first volume I produced a second
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Goofin’ with the cosmic freaks – a kind of On the Road for the sixties
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The book of Ginny – a novel
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In Britain :
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In America:
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In all other countries around the world check out your regional Amazon site and Opher Goodwin books.
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