Sprout Mask Replica

  ‘What do you want here, boy?’ The voice of Ernie echoed round the hall.

  ‘Is this the Sir John Doveston Memorial Gymnasium? And are you Mr Ernest Potts, its trainer in residence, sir?’ asked a small clear voice.

  ‘Mr Ernest Potts?’ Ernie raked at the stubble on his chin. ‘Sir?’ He made an attempt to square his shoulders once more, but twice in a single day was pushing it a bit and he collapsed in a fit of coughing.

  ‘You were a fighter, sir, weren’t you?’ asked Billy ‘The Whirlwind’ Bennet. ‘My father said he saw you spar at The Thomas Becket.’

  Ernie leaned heavily upon the top rope and stared hard at the lad. ‘That was a long time ago,’ he managed, between what had now become wheezings. ‘What did your daddy say of me?’

  ‘He said you were a stiff, sir,’ answered Billy.

  ‘Then your daddy knows his stuff,’ said Ernie, much to the surprise of young Bill, who had calculated that this remark would get the old bloke’s rag up. ‘What do you do, sonny?’

  ‘I box a bit,’ said Billy. ‘I was hoping I might join your gym.’

  ‘Box a bit?’ Ernie chuckled, then coughed, then chuckled again. ‘I used to box a bit. But I used to get knocked down, a lot!’ He beckoned to the young intruder. ‘Come up here and let’s have a look at you.’

  Billy jogged up the steps, set down his bag and gloves and, with a jaunty skip, vaulted clean over the top rope.

  We’ve a live one here, thought Ernie. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Do your stuff.’

  Billy ‘The Whirlwind’ Bennet stripped down to his singlet and shorts, put on his training gloves and began to shadow-box about the ring. Ernie slouched upon the corner stool and viewed this with a professional, if somewhat bloodshot, eye.

  Billy thundered around the mat, making with the dazzling footwork. Twisting and dipping and weaving, he brought into play astonishing combinations of punches. ‘Fish!’ he went as he hammered his imaginary opponent from eye to solar plexus. ‘Fish! Fish! Fish!’

  ‘Why do you keep going, fish?’ enquired Ernie, as he lit up a Woodbine.

  ‘I hate fish,’ snarled Billy. ‘Hate ‘em.’

  Ernie nodded and sucked upon his fag. ‘I used to know a fighter called Sam ‘Sprout-hater’ Slingsby. He used to imagine his opponent was a giant sprout.’

  ‘Was he any good?’ asked Billy, as he made sushi out of his shadow-spar.

  ‘A complete stiff,’ came the not-unexpected reply. ‘Never had the sense to think that, unlike a sprout, a man might kick the sh*t out of him.’

  ‘That’s why I chose fish,’ said Billy, bobbing and feinting and blasting away. ‘Fish are slippery and fast and sly. Like boxers, I think.’

  Ernie nodded. This boy is not the fool I have yet to give him the credit for being, he thought. ‘Have you had any experience?’ he asked, as he rang the bell and examined the lad who stood before him, as fit and full of breath as if he had yet to throw a punch.

  ‘None,’ said Billy. ‘That’s why I came here. My father said that although he thought you were a stiff, he considered you one of the dirtiest fighters he’d ever seen and could think of no-one better to give me the benefit of your years of experience.’

  Ernie was most impressed by this. ‘You have some potential,’ sniffed the old blighter, who had, to his own mind, just witnessed possibly the most stunning display of pugilistic skill ever seen in his entire life and who, for all his drunkenness and dead-lossery, knew genius when he saw it.

  And who knew that he must own this lad or die.

  ‘I’ll train you, if you want,’ he said in an off-hand tone.

  Billy ‘The Whirlwind’ Bennet grinned a toothy grin. ‘I would be honoured, sir,’ he lied.

  There was to be deception and chicanery on both sides of this partnership. And although Ernie’s motives were blatant and obvious, exactly what Billy was up to was anyone’s guess.

  ***

  The Whirlwind’s training began the next day. There were five-mile runs, which Ernie supervised from the gym, by means of a two-way radio; press-ups and chin-ups and plenty of work-outs on the speedball and heavy bag.

  ‘We must find you a partner to spar with,’ said Ernie. ‘One who can give you a real taste of ring action.’

  ‘Fish! Fish!’ went Billy, as he beat the speedball to shreds.

  Lightweight Jimmy Netley arrived at the gym that very evening in response to Ernie’s telephone call. For a man of twenty-three years, Jimmy wasn’t wearing well. His eyes bespoke him a late-nighter and his sallow complexion gave added eloquence to this bespeaking. Jimmy’s hands toyed nervously with his copy of The Boxing News and these hands were never very far from the glass handle of a pint pot.

  He had been a promising youngster, but had become too susceptible to the pleasures of the pump room. Jimmy dug about in Ernie’s ring-corner ashtray in search of a serviceable dog-end, as the manager of Billy The Whirlwind (the inverted commas had now been dropped) Bennet swaggered in, wearing a very dapper lime-green suit.

  ‘Good evening to you, Jimmy me bucko,’ called Ernie, affecting an Irish brogue to go with his attire.

  ‘Good evening to you,’ called Jimmy, who favoured an Italian sling-back himself, but only when home alone with the blinds drawn. ‘Would you have a spare fag about your person?’

  ‘No ciggies for you, you’re in training.’

  ‘I’m bl**dy well not.’

  ‘You bl**dy well are.’

  And bl**dy well he was.

  One week turned into another and this one into a further one still. Jimmy and The Whirlwind sparred and jogged and did the inevitable work-outs on the speedball and heavy bag.

  Ernie watched the young men train. He watched The Whirlwind pour forward with a gathering storm of punches, rain down upon Jimmy with a gale force of blows. Everything about this boy was meteorological.

  Except for the fish.

  Although there had been rains of fish!

  He watched as Jimmy ‘I’d-rather-be-home-with-my-footwear-collection’ Netley stumbled about the ring, catching every punch and making heavy weather of it all.

  ‘This will give our boy the confidence he needs,’ Ernie whispered to the storm-damaged Jimmy, whom he had cut in for one per cent of the action.

  ‘Gawd bless you, boss,’ mumbled Jimmy from the canvas.

  Friday night was fight night. Billy would have his first professional bout. Even for a loser like Ernie Potts certain things could be achieved through discreet phone calls to the right people and veiled threats regarding doubtful decisions, mysterious fixtures and vanishing purses... and later, the cutting in of powerful gangland figures for thirty-three per cent of the action.

  Billy The Whirlwind Bennet had even gone to the trouble of fly-posting the entire borough with broadsheets, printed at his own expense, announcing the event. He would be boxing AT WEMBLEY! three fights up from the bottom of the card on a bill topped by the British Heavyweight Championship.

  Some showcase.

  For some fighter.

  This had to be seen.

  Now, the atmosphere at fight night is really like no other. Electric it is and it crackles. The crowd is composed of the very rich and the very poor and all in between, drawn together as one through their love and appreciation for the noble art.

  There are captains of industry,

  Men of the cloth,

  Sailors at home from the sea.

  There are three jolly butchers

  And two bally bakers

  And Eric and Derek and me.

  There’s a gutter of fish

  And a breeder of snails

  And a chap who takes whippets for walks.

  There’s a bloke from the zoo

  And he walks whippets too,

  But he’s also a monkey that talks.

  There are doctors and dentists

  And Seventh Adventists

  And pop stars and patrons of arts.

  There’s that chap off the telly

  Who isn
’t George Melly,

  The one who wrote “Naming of Parts”.

  There are men with cigars

  Who have bl**dy great cars

  And bracelets as gold as can be.

  They’ve got wives who wear diamonds

  And coats made of mink

  And they don’t give a toss for PC.

  There’s a coach-load from Lewes

  Of girls with tattoos

  Who’ve all got pierced cli–

  Well, you get the picture. They come from all walks of life, but they all share that love and appreciation for the noble art, for a classic sport that dates back thousands of years; to watch highly trained athletes, their bodies honed to physical perfection, exhibit their skills. The bravery, the competition, the artistry. The poetry.

  The blood.

  Electric it is and it crackles.

  Minutes before the first fight, the house lights go down and the ring illuminates. The crowd dip and hover, form tight knots about the doorways and bars, wave programmes and cheer wildly. Many pounds change hands and many loyalties also.

  Then a ring of the bell. The man in the tuxedo. The announcements of benefit nights and early retirements (as with disgraced politicians, broken boxers leave the arena to spend more time with their families).

  There are bows from visiting ex-champs and then the game is afoot.

  Billy The Whirlwind Bennet sat in his changing-room, his hands, neatly bandaged, resting in his black satin lap and his legs dangling down from the bench. Ernie, almost sober, was administering the last-minute advice.

  ‘Now this won’t be the doddle I was hoping it would be,’ said he. ‘The fellow I had lined up for you got walloped last night in a disco, they’ve substituted a rather hard case. But you’ll take him. If you just box clever, you’ll take him.’

  ‘I certainly will,’ agreed Bill. ‘Fish fish fish.’

  There was a rapity-rap-rap at the door and a voice called, ‘Bennet.’

  It was time to go.

  The walk from the changing-room to the ring has been compared to that from the condemned cell to the electric chair. And there are some similarities, from that scrubbed and clinical room, along that darkened corridor and then out into the bright bright lights.

  ‘Roar!’ and ‘Cheer!’ went the crowd.

  ‘Fish fish fish,’ went Billy, as he jogged towards the ring, punching holes in the air.

  As he neared the squared circle he spied out his opponent being uncaged and led forward on a chain.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ mumbled Ernie. ‘Just box clever,’ he told young Bill.

  Billy The Whirlwind Bennet cart-wheeled over the top rope and did the old soft-shoe-shuffle in the sand tray.

  ‘Will you be wearing any gloves?’ asked the referee, who had been following the story closely and had noted the omission.

  The two fearless facilitators of fisticuffs faced each other. (Forcefully.)

  Kevin ‘Mad Dog’ Smith, tattooed terror from Tottenham, glared down at Billy Bennet. ‘You’re dead,’ was all he had to say.

  Billy just winked and spoke a single word.

  And that single word was ‘fish’.

  ‘Seconds out. Round one.’ The bell went ding and Billy went to work.

  He rushed across the ring like a human tornado. He battered Smith with a blizzard of body-blows. He tormented him with a tempest of trouncings.

  ‘Fish,’ went Billy. ‘Fish fish fish.’

  Stormy weather though it was, Smith fought bravely back, but he couldn’t lay a glove on Billy.

  The boy was a blur. A thunder storm. A buster.

  A tornado. A typhoon. A cyclone. A simoon.

  The fight lasted just the two rounds. The broken bloodstained ruin that had once been Kevin Smith was stretchered away to hospital and the fight scribes at the ringside abandoned the rest of their evening of boxing to rush to their offices and file reports on this sensational discovery.

  The crowd rose as the one it was and the applause reached ninety-eight on the clap-o-meter.

  Billy The Whirlwind Bennet had found his way into the people’s hearts. He was borne, shoulder-high, to the changing-room.

  He would never box again.

  The plot was an old one and owed much to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who had used it twice in his Sherlock Holmes stories. The object of the exercise had not been to create a boxing legend. It had been to keep Ernie Potts away from his gym for one full evening, Potts, as has been stated, being a virtual recluse.

  The full evening in question being this very one. 16 August 1977. Because this very one was the hundredth anniversary of the burial of my great3 granddaddy.

  For while Billy fought bravely and scored great points in the annals of boxing, his brother Nigel packed thirty pounds of dynamite into the basement of the Sir John Doveston Memorial Gymnasium and blew the whole caboodle to oblivion.

  This act of vandalism would normally have raised a few eyebrows and caused a bit of a to-do. But not tonight. Tonight the locality was deserted. Tonight all the folk for a half-mile radius of the gym were packing Wembley, hoping to see a local boy make good.

  It was a brilliantly conceived plan.

  Nigel Bennet now stood in the tumbled ruins of the gum, an ancient map in his hands.

  ‘Four paces north and four west,’ he said, pacing appropriately and studying his compass. And then ‘aha,’ and he kicked amongst the fallen bricks. ‘This must be the spot.’

  Nigel Bennet had come in search of my great3 granddaddy’s sporran which local legend (for local legend is a funny old fellow and tales grow with the telling) now foretold, would, upon the one hundredth anniversary of its laying-to-rest, pass on magical powers to whoever should unearth it.

  Exactly what these powers might be, no-one seemed absolutely sure, but that they would be pretty awesome was the general opinion.

  Oh what fools we mortals be. And things of that nature, generally.

  Nigel stumbled around in the moonlit ruination. ‘Come on,’ he shouted. ‘I’m here. I’ve released you from your tomb. Pass on your powers to me.’

  It wasn’t all that likely, was it?

  Nigel kicked about. ‘Come on,’ he growled, ‘come on. I paid good money for that dynamite. I can’t hang around here all night.’

  A sudden rustling at his feet caused him to jump backwards and he fell heavily, tearing the arse out of his trousers.

  A rat scuttled by.

  ‘B****r,’ swore Nigel. ‘Oh b****r me all to Hell.’

  Another rustling, this time beneath his bum, caused him to leap once more to his feet.

  Something stirred.

  Nigel stared down. Something seemed to be burrowing up through the dirt.

  ‘A mole.’ Nigel raised a boot to stamp the beastie down. But it wasn’t a mole. Nigel’s foot hovered in the air. Something large heaved itself up from the earth, something large and hairy.

  ‘A beaver?’

  Not a beaver! This was large and it was hairy. But it was also bright and silvery about the bright and silvery parts. And these bright and silvery parts were all engraved in a Celtic manner.

  The sporran rose slowly into view.

  ‘Great Caesar’s ghost,’ whispered Nigel, who favoured an archaic comic book ejaculation during periods when he wasn’t swearing. ‘It isn’t, is it?’

  But it was.

  Now fully emerged from its hundred-year hibernation, the mighty sporran lay a-gleaming (about the silvery bits) by the light of the full moon. And as Nigel leaned forward, hands upon his knees, it creaked open (at the opening bit) to reveal what looked for all this wild and whacky world of ours to be nothing more nor less than emeralds of vast dimension.

  ‘Emeralds,’ Nigel’s lips went all a quiver. ‘Emeralds the size of tennis balls.’

  Nigel dug in deep, plucked out an emerald and held it to a greedy eye. ‘This ain’t an emerald, it’s a bl**ding sprou—’

  But he never had time to finish the word. There was a ghastly gasp, a
sickly snap and the sporran of the Devil swallowed Nigel in a single gulp.

  The crowd at Wembley and the folk later packing the pubs of Brentford knew nothing of this. Billy, unaware of his brother’s hideous fate, but sure that a share of something awesome would soon be heading his way, drank champagne, posed for photographs with local publicans and made certain that Ernie was in no fit state to get back to the gym before morning.

  And when morning finally came and Ernie staggered back to find his gym gone and Billy became aware that his brother had gone with it, rumour spread across the borough like a social disease.

  ‘Smith’s manager did it,’ claimed someone.

  ‘More like the council,’ claimed someone else.

  And someone else again spoke of a natural disaster. ‘Look at that hole,’ this someone said. ‘Surely a meteor hit this place.’

  Nigel Bennet was never seen again. Billy, who now considered that his brother had absconded, taking with him whatever awesome powers the magic sporran had seen fit to dish him out, joined Jimmy at the bar and took to drink.

  Whether he would ever have made a champion, who can say, but Ernie still dines out on tales of his greatness.

  And there is talk of the council building another gym.

  Not on the site of the old graveyard though.

  CAMPING OUT

  My Uncle Brian, whom Mum never cared for,

  Would come up to see us, each once in a while,

  And we’d sit and listen for hours as he told us

  Of things that he’d done long ago, when a child.

  Like camping out, for instance.

  You’ll need a good penknife and three yards of string.

  Some pegs and some canvas, a tent is the thing.

  A sturdy tin-opener, never forget

  You can’t light a fire if your matches are wet.

  Keep socks on at night and you’ll never catch flu.

  Don’t camp near an ant hill whatever you do.