Issue No. 17: PEANUTS FROM CHARLIE BROWN

George Buist had a very big head. I say this not in any sense as a comment on his self-importance but simply as a statement of truth. George had a small, squat body and an enormous head on top of it - "Like a drum on a pea" as Mam once succinctly put it.

George was one of a number of kids from my estate (although, in his case, the 'nicer' east side) who went with me from our Junior School to the Grammar School. For a year or so, when he was eleven and twelve, George thought that he was Denis Law, the legendary Manchester United footballer. Simultaneously, he started to speak in a thick Liverpudlian accent. I'm not sure if George started to speak like a Scouser because he couldn't perfect a Denis-like Aberdonian accent or because his older sister's boyfriend was from Liverpool and he wanted to impress him. For a couple of years, his close friends endured the sight of George running around the local park playing footie in his Man.U. strip, holding onto the cuffs of his sleeves like Denis, and then trying to decipher what he was saying during and in between these sessions. George was a likeable lad. Nobody wanted to dishearten or disillusion him. However, the facts were that (like the rest of us) George was an enthusiastic but crap footballer and that no one, including his sister's Liverpudlian boyfriend, could understand a word of what he said.

'Tojo'

George and the rest of us were plagued by a younger boy who lived near him and who, despite our best efforts at dissuasion, attached himself to our group when we were at George's house. He looked like a snotty-nosed Tojo, the former Japanese Minister of War, with his round face, round NHS wire-framed glasses and close-cropped hair. Possibly unlike Tojo, he also used to stink of sweat and ancient, accumulated farts. We routinely tortured him with 'red hot pokers' and by bouncing tennis balls off his head. Sadly for him, he was called Charlie Brown. Charlie's only saving grace was that he had an older sister, a couple of years our senior, who looked like Dusty Springfield. It's fair to say that a number of us developed a crush on her, yet no one could pluck up the courage to say anything to her. Then we thought about Charlie.



Dusty Springfield

For a couple of weeks we were exceptionally nice to Charlie. We let him play with us, gave him sweets and ignored his smell. He wasn't stupid; he knew something was up. We pumped him for information about 'Dusty' - her likes and dislikes and whether she had any boyfriends, especially any bigger than us. We then composed an anonymous letter to her signed 'An Admirer' and posted it through her door. We heard nothing for a week, as Charlie had been kept in sick, with typhoid fever or cholera or something like that. Eventually, he re-appeared in George's garden. We grabbed him and asked whether 'Dusty' had got the letter.

"Errm...yes", said a reluctant Charlie.

"Well, what did she think about it?"  we asked.

Our insistence was too obvious and the penny dropped with Charlie. He squinted at us through his steamy, grubby glasses and grinned, showing yellow and brown teeth and said "She went to the toilet and wiped her bum on it!"

We were humiliated, mortified, crushed and, in a manner of speaking, wiped out. We didn't know if Charlie was telling the truth or not; there was no way of finding out. We should have thumped him anyway for being so pleased about our defeat. We didn't, we just silently sloped away home. George told us later that he had taken Charlie to one side and spoken to him quietly and at length about friendship, loyalty and sympathy towards his comrades. And then he thumped him.