BEYOND THE RESO

DECADE 

f the Clinic playing fields formed the gaping, gap-toothed foul mouth of the Reso council estate, my house was located at the tonsils. Events, good and bad, gargled past our house.

        It could be a happy place, as on the stroke of midnight on December 31^st 1969, or a place of casual or deliberate violence and menace. I had a fierce loyalty to the estate. I wore, as a badge of honour, the contempt and low expectations the rest of the town invested in us. I knew, and even relished, the fact that we were feared and misunderstood.

        I’d grown up in a household where a mysterious, disembodied voice, which sounded remarkably like my mum’s, had accompanied me in all my scrapes. It was this voice that had urged caution when my fellow warriors went robbing from the pick and mix at Woollies. The voice was so strong and insistent that I always absented myself from these expeditions on some pretext or other—Romanian family visitors, Polish furniture store employees coming to deliver furniture or some such vacuous excuse.

        It would be noble and mature to assume I had developed a keen sense of right and wrong, but to be honest it was fear and a too active imagination that kept me on the more or less straight and narrow. My friends assumed they would get away with their wrong-doing. I always assumed I would be caught. I would be presented to my parents as a habitual felon for a brief and sorrowful parting before I embarked upon, as Sergeant Walker so pithily put it when he had caught me riding my bike on the pavement, “A period of penal incarceration to punish me for my crimes and investigate whether I had a soul worth saving.”

        I did not know what penal incarceration was. It sounded like the sort of thing that the older lads giggled over when they talked in the corner of the clinic field with their new transistor radio turned up high enough so that you could not make out what they were saying.

        I did not like Sergeant Walker though and, if he was saying it, I was sure I’d find it disagreeable on principle. Sergeant Walker had that mix of authoritarian bully boy and evangelical religious zealot based on his ‘Strict and Particular’ Methodism.

        I always thought it strange that his Methodist chapel had the words Strict and Particular in gold writing on the chapel notice board. It seemed a bit unChristian-like really. They might as well have written, ‘and no riff-raff!’  I had no recollection of such sentiments being expressed at any church service, Sunday School or R.E. class that I ever attended and I reluctantly attended many of them. Where Jesus had uttered, “Suffer the little children to come unto me”, Sergeant Walker would interpret it to mean, “Make the little children suffer!”

        For some people, ‘Strict and Particular’ Methodism inspired them to do great work in the community. In Sergeant Walker, it merely added religious fervour to his niggardly personality.

        It was the fear of Sergeant Walker turning up at my house with a long list of charges against my person, horrifying my parents and bringing disgrace on the family that kept me out of the worst of trouble.

        The only thing that could shake my resolve was the ultimate challenge on the Reso—the word ‘chicken’.

        The accusation of ‘chickenhood’ would compel me to do the most stupid things. Proving I was not a chicken had seen me disconnect the brake shoes of my bike and cycle unwaveringly on the right hand side of the road around the whole estate pretending, as my tormentors had insisted, that I was an American. Chicken had seen me hold a milk bottle whilst four Little Demon bangers had exploded within it. Chicken had seen me heed the suggestion of a ‘friend’ at Sunday School, who had suggested that of the four three-penny pieces that I had been given as collection money for myself and my brother, two should go in the collection plate and two on ice creams on the way home. It had seemed an equitable arrangement and I carefully explained the plan to my brother. He had eaten his Cornish Mivvi ice-lolly with relish and I had carefully wiped both his and my mouths with the proper linen hankie I was forced to keep in my Sunday trousers. I had carefully explained that, although the fifty per cent commission WE had taken on the collection money had been fine with God and that the ice lolly did taste remarkably good on that long walk home on the hot Sunday afternoon, it would probably be best if we did not share these facts with mum when we got home.

        My brother listened carefully to my words, sucking enthusiastically on his Mivvi, which I took to be agreement, and I relaxed in the belief that our little secret was safe. Outside our gate I stopped him and rehearsed the correct answers one more time. I’d checked with God and he was fine with the ice-lolly idea but that we would keep it to ourselves because mum did not realise that I was now old enough to be able to speak to God personally.

        My mother greeted us at the door with the glowing look of one whose children had foregone the boredom of a sunny Sunday afternoon playing with friends to attend Sunday School. I’m sure she saw us, as we stood in the doorway, as wreathed in the light of heavenly benevolence. Behind us, an angelic choir was holding a note of perfect pitch heralding our return to the family fold.

        My brother immediately announced, “David spent half the collection money on ice lollies.”  And the vision was broken. As would have been my brother had I been able to get my hands on him.

        It was unexpected turns of events like these that had kept me from a career in crime, and in lie-telling more generally. I had the imagination to know I would get found out.

        I felt these certainties on the Reso would continue in the time honoured way but, as the new decade of the 1970s dawned, change was in the heady air.

At the stroke of midnight on December 31^st 1969 I had found myself in the very agreeable position of being attached to the lips of my young and rather beautiful Auntie Linda. The new decade had certainly got off to an auspicious start and I had heightened, and probably highly unrealistic, expectations of what the next ten years would have in store for me.

        However I was conflicted with two alternative visions of this future. On the one hand, I had every expectation that the pattern of my life in the previous decade would continue unabated. The Reso with all its nooks and crannies would remain comfortingly the same, as would my house at the centre of the spider’s web of activity.

        On the other hand, there would be changes. Secondary school beckoned and that strange unknown world beyond the estate where people spoke and acted differently. I looked forward with great anticipation to more access to books, models of the plastic kind and biscuits, especially chocolate digestive biscuits.

        There would still be the gauntlet of casual violence to run on the estate but my advancing years would leave me better able to cope with that. Hopefully, as my frame bulked up to match my height, I would not be such an obvious lanky target and fights that began with the comment, “You think you’re dead tall, don’t you?” would become an increasingly rare occurrence.

        Another consolation for me was that some of my fiercest potential tormentors—the berserkers of the estate who were untrammelled by any sense of morality or fair behaviour and for whom violence was a way of life—would inevitably fall foul of the police and be temporarily removed from the estate through the good offices of the criminal justice system. That had been the pattern of weeding out on the estate since time immemorial, or at least for the twenty years since the estate had been built, which amounted to the same thing in my book.

        True, there was the ordeal of the transition to secondary school to overcome. However, I’d suffered much worse indignities than the traditional ‘head down the toilet’ and ‘satchel over the rugby posts’ tales in my daily life on the Reso. To one who had known being held head down among the sticklebacks and leeches of the local cut, the toilet was comparative luxury and certainly more hygienic. I’d also have the kudos of being off the Reso as a guarantor of my comparative safety.

        It was a common misconception that anyone ‘off the Reso’ would come unflinchingly to the support of a fellow Apache in much the same way that the Mafia looked after their own. It was a misconception that many of my fellow Reso dwellers encouraged as it allowed us to be untroubled by lairy miscreants from other parts of town.

        In truth, if some of the faces from the estate did leap to your defence, it was less to do with the commonwealth of the Reso looking after its own and more to do with your chief tormentors being put out by outsiders breaking their monopoly on giving you a hard time.

        All in all, the transition to secondary school was due to be a happy occasion and a positive experience, although leaving the comfort zone of Emmanuel primary school would undoubtedly be a wrench.  

        I was aware that, like it or not, and I generally liked it, my world would in future be less circumscribed by the confines of the Reso. I’d move from a world where I knew everyone, and was passingly known by everyone, to one where new faces and opportunities would appear.

        I’d glimpsed this on the visit to Glyndwr secondary school where pupils from the other Rhyl schools had been on guided tours. It felt like some medieval town with ties of red and yellow and yellow and black competing with the red and grey stripes of the Emmanuel colours. We were shepherded in groups around the corridors. The others seemed so foreign, yet self-assured, and I felt self-conscious and inadequate in their fleeting company.

        I resolved to smile at some of my future fellow pupils and snarl at others so as to keep my options open when the first week in September dawned. Being enigmatic would buy me some time to decide how I wanted to play my hand in the new school, and where in the pecking order I could expect to establish myself. Without being aware of it, I found myself smiling at an inordinate number of what appeared to me to be exceptionally good looking girls from the other schools and snarling exclusively at lads.

        In the classrooms were the legitimate inhabitants of the secondary school wearing the house ties of blue and gold. Some seemed deep in work with their teachers while others craned their necks to get a glimpse of younger siblings or friends from their primary schools. They all seemed so much more grown-up than me and I hoped the experience of secondary school would bring about a similar transition in my demeanour.

        Over and above the change of school, all would remain reassuringly the same I thought.

        I had clearly not picked up on a pattern of events that would ensure that the turn of the decade would bring decisive and fast moving changes in my life, not the least of which was to wrench me from the Reso.