The Road to Crosslands

Chapter 10

All the talk about our schooldays made me think even more about my little brother and my last couple of years at secondary school. Of the three of us, I was the only one who left school with any exam certificates, and that was all down to Paul.

It wasn't that Spud, Flinty and I were totally thick. We just lacked motivation and we'd discovered the pleasures of drink and recreational drugs. In the mid-1990s Britain was in a recession and had high unemployment. There were few good jobs available for school leavers and our prospects looked dismal, so studying for exams seemed like a waste of valuable drinking time.

Paul was completely different to me. Even though he was nearly five years my junior he was in many ways more mature. He was brilliant at most subjects and won a scholarship to a good grammar school when he was eleven.

It was Paul who helped me with my homework and explained the intricacies of algebra.

No-one in our family had ever been particularly bright or gone to university, so where Paul's brains came from was a mystery. There was a bloke living in the next street to us who'd been on a TV programme for eggheads called Mastermind and my dad used to joke that my mother must have had an affair with him.

Mum and dad had high hopes for my brother and, even if I felt slightly jealous at times, so did I. I was proud of him. With his help, I managed to scrape four CSE passes, which proved very handy when I eventually joined the army.

***

When I rejoined the conversation Spud was in the middle of recalling his first jobs. He'd had quite a few before settling down to work on the building sites.

'Then I had a go at fence erecting,' he was saying. 'My first week, the boss sent me and another two lads to put up a tennis court. We had to dig holes then plant these bloody big concrete posts and make sure they were all the same height. You had to grip them between your knees, lift them up and then whack them down to get the bottom of the hole compacted. At the end of the first week I'd worn the legs out of two pairs of Levis and the soddin' boss only gave me a lousy eighty quid ... said I was on trainee wages, two quid an hour! It cost me seventy to buy new jeans and more than a tenner for bus fares to work!'

'Let's face it,' Flinty said vehemently, 'we've always been exploited by the capitalists. That's why I take advantage of the dickheads every chance I get.'

The whisky and weed were starting to affect Flinty. His speech was slightly slurred and his eyes were turning red.

'D'you remember,' he said, addressing Spud, 'the first car we nicked ... off that toffee-nosed berk in the Queen's Head?'

'Course I do Flinty.'

You nicked a car?' I echoed, not sure I'd heard correctly.

'Not just one,' Flinty bragged.

'Where was I? I never jacked any cars.'

'No ... you had the Ratmobile. We didn't need to when you were with us. It was always when we were on our own and didn't have any transport. Anyway, as I was sayin', me an' Spud were in the Queen's Head in town and this wally was going on to his mates about how much money he was making selling mobile phones and how these new phones were changing the world. He was really bigging himself up and then he dropped that he'd just bought a new BMW. So, I goes and stands next to him at the bar as if I'm ordering a drink and I lift the keys out of his jacket pocket, neat as you like!'

'Then we went outside,' Spud added, 'and 'cos it was brand new it had one of those locking buttons on the key fob that made the lights flash, so we knew which car it was.'

'We wrapped scarves around our faces and I drove that thing past every speed camera in Swindon at about 70 mph,' Flinty laughed. 'Man ... he must have got at least a dozen fines through the post.'

'What did you do with the car?' I asked, gobsmacked that I had known nothing about this.

'We dumped it next to the council flats and wiped it down. Then we both walked home.'

'How come you never told me ... and how come you never got caught?' I wanted to know.

'You were always a bit uptight about stealing stuff, and we never kept a car for more than an hour. Just long enough to have a bit of fun and get us close to wherever we wanted to go. We figured it always took more than an hour for the plods to get involved.'

***

The revelation that Flinty and Spud had been car thieves was soon put out of my mind when Spud changed the subject and we started discussing our trip to the Glastonbury Festival.

It was not long after I'd passed my test and I had just bought the Ratmobile, which Brian, my boss at the garage, had accepted in part-exchange for a motor he was selling. I got it for a song because he didn't want a 'monstrosity like that' cluttering up his forecourt.

We were all eager to take full advantage of our new found freedom and the festival of '97 seemed like a great idea. We bought advance tickets at a travel agent in town, acquired an old tent, and set off on the two-hour drive. We spent another two hours in a queue to get into the car park, half a mile from the festival site. Then we had to carry all our gear up a country lane in the pouring rain. It was the middle of summer but the site was a sea of mud. We couldn't get the tent pegs to stay in the wet ground so the tent kept collapsing, but everyone was having a laugh about it, and at least it wasn't too cold.

We left our tent half erected and splashed our way to the beer stalls to have a few and decide which of the sound stages we were going to visit. The beer was all real ale and home-made stuff that cost a fortune and tasted like cold tea, but it must have been put through a still because after a couple of pints we were legless.

After staggering through the mud, we eventually found the stage we wanted and I have vague memories of pogoing to Prodigy and then squatting in two inches of water singing along to Radiohead.

It must have been three in the morning when the music stopped and we'd sobered up, so we went to look for our tent. The field where we had camped was now an ocean of tents, and they all looked more or less the same. There must have been at least a thousand and none of us three could recognize ours. We weren't the only lost souls wandering around. It was like the night of the living dead with zombie-like festival-goers wondering where the hell their possessions were.

In the end, we just lay down in the open, together with a few hundred other people, and waited for the refreshment stands to open in the morning. I'm amazed we didn't all catch pneumonia.

By the third day, we still hadn't found our tent and we'd run out of money so we decided to go home. We tramped back to the car park, covered from head to toe with mud, knackered and broke, to find the Ratmobile completely blocked in by other cars. The back of the Rat looked invitingly dry, so we climbed in and went to sleep. When we woke up, we were alone. All the other cars had disappeared. We couldn't be bothered going back to retrieve our tent.

***

'What a great time we had!' Flinty enthused when we'd finished reminiscing.

'I'm surprised you can remember anything about it, you were basted the whole time,' I remarked.

'That's why it was great,' he pointed out. 'A three day high.'

'Our tent's probably still there,' Spud joked, 'being used by generations of festival potheads.'

My memories of Glastonbury were hazy, but we went on another trip a few weeks afterwards that was much clearer in my mind. It had been a disaster at the time, but looking back I could laugh about it, so I asked the others if they remembered the booze cruise.