Issue No. 13: THE MILESTONE MOMENT

Not the Levey Brothers......but like 'em.

The truly malevolent influence in our neighbourhood upon the young kids was the Levey boys.

As the early 1960s progressed, and as 'problem' families were relocated onto our estate by the Council, the estate, and our street in particular, acquired the reputation throughout the town as a violent and crime-ridden area.

The boisterous, yet innocent fun of a group of boys gradually became threatened and subverted by another group of boys who were, simultaneously, outwardly friendly but also intimidating. These boys were from seven families in my part of the street, and the epicentre of this group was the two Levey brothers. The worst was charming, smiling yet chillingly evil. He had an unusual name for those days, and one I had hitherto never come across before - Damien!

Our games were interrupted by the Levey gang and they forced their way into them. They contrived to be insulted so that fights would start. They were threatening and they carried out their threats with beatings. The level of violence increased as they grew into their teens. The crime in the area escalated and the never-before-experienced thieving from working class neighbours began. Eventually, the 'decent' families began a frantic scramble to be re-housed elsewhere. For us, this didn't happen until 1970.

Big Freddie

There was an odd aspect of this sinister development. One of the Levey Boys' gang members was a much older boy - in his mid-teens - called Big Freddie Freeman. He had a much lower mental age than his years and therefore always played with the younger kids. However, he was easily manipulated by the Leveys, who used his superior height, strength and weight to good effect as one of their 'enforcers' of punishments.

This seemed an ideal set up for the Leveys but Big Freddie had one fatal flaw - he was excessively scared of the spirit world or 'Ghostesses' as he would teeth-chatteringly stutter when 'the fear' descended upon him. This weakness did not stop Freddie from bashing other kids, especially in broad daylight. However, if the victims had the presence of mind, they would, in the midst of their pain and humiliation, say something foul and devilish to Freddie (but not terribly original), along the lines of "The Bogeyman will get you tonight!"  They could then nurse their injuries in the certain knowledge that - when darkness descended, and as cats wailed, dogs howled, floorboards creaked, doors slammed, mice scuttled, insects crawled up the walls and bats flew out silently on their nightly mission - Big Freddie would be cowering under the bedclothes, wide-eyed, shaking and twitching (and, we imagined, peeing himself) waiting for The Bogeyman to rip the sheets from his desperate clutches.

Pop Guns and Dustbin Lids

David Green had the first telly (TV) in our street. He was also the first person I knew who ate tinned spaghetti. Up until the time David's Mam rented her TV (no one could afford to buy one) all our entertainment, as kids, was the rumbustious kind we made up ourselves, including: street football and 'shoot-'em-up' games such as Cowboys & Indians, Cops & Robbers and English v Germans or 'Japs', our special re-enactment of World War 2.

All of these games required much imagination and, more often than not, the 'six shooters' were our fingers and the rifles and tommy guns were powerfully visualised and made to sound as authentic as our voices could portray. However, birthdays and Christmases afforded some of us the luxury of acquiring such 'toys' as: Colt 45s and (in my case) a long-barrelled Wyatt Earp 'Buntline Special'; plastic, nerve-jangling machine guns; pop guns and plastic swords of various types. You could, of course, also get plastic bows and arrows, but it was best to make these yourself using bamboo canes from the local hardware shop and twine or string. The arrows were of a varying degree of danger. Swords too could be made from these bamboo canes. So, with makeshift swords, pop guns and bows and arrows in abundance, kids' games on my estate also had a high degree of lethalness about them.

The things that fired our imaginations, pre-TV, were the war stories in comics such as 'The Victor', in the countless pulp heroic war 'libraries' like 'Commando' and in the war films and westerns shown at the local cinema, 'The Palladium', along with the serial 'shorts' such as 'Zorro'. Radio was an interesting diversion and a good laugh on a Sunday, but it didn't spark us into frenzied action.

Even our gentler games had a hard edge to them, such as catching butterflies in our back field using steel dustbin lids. Surprisingly, these seemed to do little harm to the insects but were a constant danger to the groups of small boys silently creeping through the long grass and simultaneously jumping for the same prey, bin lids to the fore.

All of these games did not disappear overnight with the coming of the telly but, as more families acquired 'the box', inevitably more time spent watching it meant less time  playing outside .

David Green's telly was the milestone moment. The first day he got it, there were a dozen kids in his front room watching 'Champion the Wonder Horse'. He was the most popular kid in the street, at least until other families got their own sets.

During this period of popularity, all the kids were invited to David's birthday party, where we were served up tinned spaghetti on toast. None of us, other than David, had seen tinned spaghetti before. "What's that?" one of the lads asked, rather impolitely. "Worms!" David replied, getting a cuff on the ear from his mother for his response. It was enough to put some of us off, and we sat looking at our plates, waiting for signs of movement. Eventually, they were taken away and replaced by jelly and Bird's custard. We all wolfed this down and then surged from the table to crowd around the 12 inch TV screen. 'The Lone Ranger' was about to make his long-awaited first appearance before us.



'Hey ho Silver.....Away!'