(Loosely based on Grimm’s The Travelling Musician)
The ‘Dunlivin Rest Home for the Chronically Ancient’ had seen better days, nestling as it did between a SpeedyJob tyre and exhaust garage and a Shilling Shop distribution warehouse. Once upon a time the splendour of the home’s architecture had been graced by green fields and sweet smelling meadows, but now the house and its inhabitants’ only claim to grandeur was the dusty tether that held their tired old souls to the swirling currents of modernity. Paint peeled from every windowsill, and the delicately pierced eaves dripped rust from the corroded iron guttering that hung to the fabric of the building for grim life, just like most of the inmates. The one simple, uncluttered vista enjoyed by residents was a patch of scrub land directly opposite the front door, a patch of land on which grew truly magnificent specimens of urban thistles. Pippin’s field existed, such as it was, as a result of the wartime demolition of a row of terraced houses by a thousand pound bomb. Such were people’s retirement prospects in one of London’s outer suburbs just a few short years ago.
Of the many residents crowded two and sometimes three to a room, most were in such a raw state of dilapidation that a high-backed plastic chair, a warm mug of something resembling tea and endless quiz shows on day time television were the only stimulants they could manage. There were four residents in particular, however, for whom the prospect of one more day drinking thin soup and watching cheap soap operas was simply too much to bear. The accumulated spite and suffering caused by rough hands, tepid bed baths and endless days spent watching traffic through grey streaked windows forced their liver spotted hands to desperate action. One Tuesday morning, after another breakfast of stale toast and last year’s raspberry conserve, Big Al Frasier nodded to one of his co-conspirators and whispered, “Pass the word on, Harry, we’re go for Operation Sunlight straight after lunch”.
Harry nodded back, adjusted the cuffs of his shirt so that they were set at regulation length under his smart blue blazer, and stood up very slowly so as not to dislodge any more of his vertebrae than were absolutely necessary.
Big Al watched Harry Cock, once a sergeant major in one of Scotland’s finest regiments, parade out of the dining room, his head held as high and his back held as ramrod straight as his recalcitrant spine would allow. For all of his eighty years, his triple by-pass, his two replacement hips and his urgency in the bladder department, he was still a fine specimen of a man, just the sort you needed on a dark and dangerous mission. His fighting spirit was legendary in the home, where he constantly battled with the carers in a vain attempt to keep up some semblance of dignity in the most trying of circumstances. It certainly wasn’t easy keeping your pecker up when you knew that your son had sent you to ‘Dunlivin’ because he wanted to extend the living room to make way for a home cinema, but old Harry wouldn’t let the buggers grind him down. Anyway, all of that was soon to be a thing of the past if things went smoothly and their aged bodies held up. Big Al thought Harry was a brick, although he never said any such thing to the man’s face, not now that he sometimes forgot the exact words he should use when he came over all emotional.
The third of the four conspirators, or Musketeers as Big Al preferred to call them, was Miss Peggy Grimalkin, or ‘Wheels’ for short. Peggy struck the fear of God into the soul, despite the fact that she had been chair bound for thirty years. She had obviously been a bit of a looker in her youth and, after lock down at half-past eight, Big Al often wandered through the dreamy pastures of his own tender years and thought about what might have happened had he met her when they were both considerably more agile. It was best not to mention such things to her these days, however. Peg could give you one of those steely-eyed stares that made your knees tremble for all the wrong reasons, and she gave him the impression that she could impale a charging tigress at fifty paces with her size four knitting needles, regardless of undergrowth, wind direction or terminal medical conditions.
“Still”, he thought, “she keeps herself clean, she’s still got lovely hair and all her own teeth. She’s bound to be an asset in a tight spot and we’ll need some wheels if things get really sticky”.
The only one of the four Musketeers who did not possess his own teeth was Dickie “Dog” Virtue. Dog, as he was affectionately known by the inmates, was a fixer, a King Rat sort of geezer, a man who instinctively knew how to play the game of survival. His procurement of a case of brandy and some Turkish Delight last Christmas had become the stuff of legend amongst those inmates whose memory had sufficient width to deal with real live events. What on earth the woman from the off-licence could have wanted with twenty litres of KY Jelly was anyone’s guess, but the trade had made another season of miserable bad-will into a truly festive moment, a moment when they had all been able to remember what it was like to be five years old again. Dog was vital, Dog was one of the team, and even though he might sell his granny, God rest her soul, Big Al was sure that he could prevail upon him not to sell Peg unless it was absolutely necessary.
Big Al wiped up the last of the jam with his crust and popped it into his large, cavernous mouth, which was made all the more impressive by the hydraulic motions of his many chins. He had been a builder and a labourer all of his life and was still a bear of a man even at his advanced age. He was no longer six feet tall, having lost nearly a foot to general decay and a lifetime of hard physical exertion, but he felt happy in the knowledge that he more than made up for his reduced height by some impressive lateral expansion. His muscles were still toned and powerful, albeit shaped a little differently from his younger days, because you simply couldn’t carry that much weight around without having an underlying physique capable of crushing small boulders between your knees. He preferred to think of his outer layers of fat as camouflage, as a shield against the austerity of the regime in which he found himself incarcerated. It felt, he sometimes thought, as if he were watching the world unfold through two tiny little portholes, but that world would soon end and a new world would be born. As soon as lunch was finished, as soon as they had all visited the bathroom and while the staff and the other poor inmates took their afternoon naps, the Four Musketeers would prize open the big sash window in Peg’s ground floor bedroom and would make their break for freedom, armed with their carefully horded rations, a small but effective arsenal and assorted medical paraphernalia.
The rhubarb crumble was particularly impressive that lunchtime. It consisted of one part crumble, one part rhubarb and five thousand parts grey sludge and the sight of old Mrs. Bottomley’s custard covered chin really had been the last straw. As soon as the staff room door slammed shut and the sound of contented snoring reached its usual two o’clock crescendo, the four escapees assembled in Peg’s ground floor bedroom and made their final preparations.
Harry was as organised as ever, trailing a small, wheeled suitcase behind him that was covered in taped down lengths of flexible domestic waste piping, each one of which contained a stout, wooden shafted golfing iron. Dog, displaying his usual laissez-faire attitude to preparedness, wore his old tweed jacket, an unusually patterned pair of slacks and some water stained loafers. The only visible signs that he was prepared for the rigours of the road were a Swiss army knife hanging from his belt and a tube of denture fixative, which peeked out from his breast pocket. Peg had attached various wire shopping baskets to her wheelchair, which contained carrier bags full of clean underwear, balls of wool, her entire collection of knitting needles and enough boiled sweets to sink a battleship. Big Al had managed to squeeze himself into combat fatigues and a camouflage pattern baseball cap. He held a canvas kit bag over his shoulder, the combined effect making him look a retired butcher setting out for a survivalist weekend jaunt.
Big Al nodded to Harry, withdrew a mottled black crowbar from his kit bag and applied every ounce of his considerable weight to the task of inserting its flat end between the window and its frame. The team visibly tensed as the sound of splintering wood briefly obliterated the sound of snoring coming from further down the hallway, but no one stirred. One by one the aged, rusting nails that pinned the sash window permanently closed sheared and shattered. Harry and Big Al managed to push the sash window up as far as it would go. Harry then climbed through the opening as gingerly as he could and one by one the team passed out the bags, the wheelchair and finally Peg herself.
“Mind where you put your hands, Al Frasier”, she hissed as he took hold of her just a little too familiarly for her liking.
Once outside, Harry closed the window, Dog checked that the coast was clear and the four of them set off down the street. Stage one of the plan had been a complete success and stage two required them to put as much distance between themselves and ‘Dunlivin’ as possible by teatime. Thick black clouds swept across the city skyline but thankfully the rain held off as the four musketeers hobbled and rolled towards the safety of the crowds in the nearest shopping centre, where they spent an hour attempting to blend in with the general population, before realising, as the shops began to roll down their shutters and the boulevards started to echo to the sound of Peg’s squeaky wheel, that they would have to find somewhere safe to shelter for the night.
“Tell, you what”, said Dog, “why don’t we head down to the Chavbury Estate? There’s loads of empty flats down there…well, there always used to be. Don’t suppose it’s changed much recently”.
“He’s right”, said Harry, “We’ll need a roof over our heads tonight by the look of those clouds”.
By the time that darkness had fallen and London’s sodium orange suburban streets had taken on their ominous evening mantle, the gang of four had made it to the outskirts of the Chavbury. To be safe all they needed to do was negotiate the broken bottles and the carcasses of burnt out cars, fend off twelve year old muggers with their assortment of knitting implements and lofted sand wedges, and then break into a boarded up flat. Big Al could feel the tension and the heat in the mean city streets and he was starting to sweat profusely as he pushed Peg along in front of him. What they all needed right now was a nice cup of tea and a slice of fruitcake.
“I don’t think I can go on much longer”, Harry called out from behind a glassless bus shelter as he relieved the pressure in his bladder for the umpteenth time since their daring break out from Stalag Wrinkly. The fact that everyone could see exactly what he was doing was, from Harry’s point of view, immaterial. Unlike the kids on the streets, Harry still believed in doing the right thing and as the bus shelter was the only half decent structure left standing on this particular street, it would have to do.
“Me neither”, said Dog, “I need a sit down and a rest”.
“And me”, added Peg, as she finished another row of the scarf that she was knitting in case the weather turned nasty.
“What do you mean, ‘and me’? You’re always sitting down and having a rest”
“Don’t you go cussing me, Dog”, Peg replied, giving him one of her looks and waving her knitting at his groin. Dog instinctively took a step backwards.
“Peg’s right, boys”, said Big Al, “we all need a rest. Anyone got any ideas?”
Harry finished watering the nettles behind the bus shelter and rejoined the group. “There’s a place over there, just down from the shelter, where the door’s open. We could try that”.
“Zip, Harry”, said Big Al, wheeling Peg away from Harry’s partially exposed nether regions. “OK, you three stay here. I’ll go and recce”.
Big Al set off to reconnoitre the joint by the light of the street’s one remaining lamp post, taking on a silhouette that looked like the backside of an African elephant being ridden by Mr. Potatohead. Dog, Peg and Harry formed a triangle, standing, or in Peg’s case sitting, back to back, weapons at the ready, determined to protect their hard won freedom and their supply of ginger nut biscuits against all comers.
It was pretty evident, even though Big Al had been away from the mean streets for some years now, that this was no ordinarily abandoned abode. The open door was made out of half inch steel plate, and judging by the array of padlocks hanging from various latches and catches, it was designed to prevent the delivery of more than just junk mail. Given the obvious levels of security employed to keep people out of the place, Big Al was a little surprised to find that there was no one on guard. Sloppy, he thought to himself as he peered inside the hallway. There was no carpet on the floor, the occupants clearly preferring to use carrier bags, cigarette butts and tinfoil as a floor covering. He could hear voices in the front room of the flat so he decided not to venture in, and instead inched his indelicate frame along the front wall of the building so that he could peer in through a window guarded by a sheet of metal security mesh.
In the front room he could see four young men, none of them older than twenty, lolling around on a flea-bitten sofa and smoking some very large looking cigarettes. On the floor by their feet there were bags of powders and pills and some neat piles of ready cash. Big Al understood. He had seen enough repeats of television cop shows to know that this was something called a drugs den and if he and his fellow musketeers were to stand any chance of converting the place into a bijou little residence for the independently retired, they would need a plan.
“Right, so you all know what to do”, said Big Al as the four of them huddled together at the end of his pre-battle briefing. They all nodded solemnly and placing their hands in the middle of the huddle, one on top of the other, they exchanged flint eyed glances, took a deep breath and prepared to attack. They knew that this was the big one and that anything could happen in the next five minutes.
The Special Operations Pensioners crept up to the front door of the flat, where Big Al steadied his company of grey haired warriors, checked that each of them was armed and ready, and chopped the air with his hand, unleashing his elderly dogs of war on the poor, unsuspecting youths within. Harry went in first, seven iron at the ready, and made a beeline for the kitchen at the far end of the hall. He reached his objective safely, made a quick mental map of the room’s layout, opened a large cupboard and found what he was looking for. The flat had an old, pre-industrial fuse box set low on the back wall of the cupboard and Harry’s job was to kill the lights. Unfortunately the plan had taken no account of old ironing boards, a defunct Hoover and piles of dirty washing, nor had it taken into account the fragility of Harry’s back. He waved at his compatriots desperately, but Big Al just made chopping motions with his hand. With all the excitement and the adrenalin pumping through his veins Harry suddenly needed to pee very urgently, which is precisely where his old military training kicked into gear. You had to make do with whatever came to hand, and in this case Harry knew exactly what was needed. He unzipped and let fly, killing the lights and every other electrical appliance in the entire block with the torrential fizz and sparkle unleashed from his own personal water cannon.
As the flat flickered into darkness Peg wheeled herself into the living room, where the youths had been relaxing. She screeched like a banshee, running two of the youths over as they stumbled towards the hallway. She reversed back over them, stabbing them in their bottoms with her knitting needles just to make sure they got the message that you should never mess with a retired nit nurse.
Big Al followed her into the room and absorbed the other two charging youths as they crashed into his stomach. When they finally emerged from the folds of his military fatigues, desperately fighting for air, he picked both of the scrawny little runts up by the scruffs of their necks and deposited them on the pavement outside the flat. Just in case they felt like continuing the fight, both Dog and Harry were now positioned on either side of the doorway wielding frying pans in frenetic arcs above their heads while shouting and screaming at the tops of their voices.
Big Al retrieved the remaining two boys from underneath Peg’s wheels, ejected them from the building and, once he was certain that the perimeter had been secured and that Harry and Dog were safely inside the flat, he slammed the huge metal door shut and leant his not inconsiderable weight against it. Harry lit some candles that had been lying on the living room floor and the four of them wedged the door shut with an old wooden plank. The battle weary troop then panted and wheezed their way to the kitchen, lit the gas stove and settled down for a nice brew.
Outside on the pavement the four young men picked themselves up and fled towards the local multi-story car park to regroup. A new gang of vicious, drug crazed thugs had obviously taken their stash and their safe house away from them and they would have to get their revenge, but first they had various stab wounds and inflamed bruises to tend to. Meanwhile, in the kitchen Big Al took a puff on his inhaler, took a long gulp of his life restoring tea and grinned.
“Bloody hell, Peg, I thought you were going to steam roller the poor buggers”, he said as he totted up the ready cash and the bags of gear from the living room.
“I wonder what these yellow ones do?” said Dog, digging a little mental furrow and sowing the seeds of a bright and blooming future for the four of them.
After a nice cup of tea, and having eaten a whole packet of ginger nut biscuits between the four of them, Harry checked that the front door was firmly wedged shut and that the rest of the flat was secure. Peg had already completed her ablutions and bagged the flat’s only bedroom, so the men settled down on the sofa and tried to get some much needed sleep. After the battle of Chavbury, the troops needed some rest and some liniment, and so, with the candles snuffed, Big Al, Harry and Dog let their eyelids drop and drifted off into the more than welcome land of dreams, a land where they were all twenty-five, raven haired and able to drink more than half a pint of beer before needing the toilet.
Outside, in the bleak, bottom numbing reality of the concrete jungle, the four young drug baronets finished patching up their wounds, smoked their last spliff and started to get really scratchy. They had a couple of notes and about five cigarettes left between them, having lost everything else that defined their world during their eviction from the flat about two hours earlier. They tooled themselves up with iron bars, a pocketknife and a length of metal chain, and were now ready to reclaim what was rightfully theirs. After some heated debate and a slap or two, the youngest and smallest of the four boys was despatched on a fact finding mission, and was told not to return until he had thoroughly investigated the situation and found out who and what they were up against.
Using his many years of experience in the breaking and entering of various types of house and small factory unit, the young drug runner prised open the kitchen window with a chisel and a length of coat hanger wire, climbed warily onto the kitchen work top, and set about the business of clandestine intelligence gathering. He noted the four washed mugs on the draining board, nearly fainting with the shock when he realised the place had been subjected to soapy water, but recovered his sense of cold, rational, Holmesian observation and started to make his stealthy intrusion into the heart of the enemy’s camp.
Unfortunately for the young man, his powers of observation did not run to doorknobs and as he stole down the corridor towards the open living room door he completely failed to notice the knob of the bedroom door twisting slowly in the shadows behind him. Just as he was about to peer around the door frame to see what or who might be in the front room he became aware that the night air had suddenly taken on the consistency of treacle. He felt his chest muscles constrict and his stomach started to scream at him from inside that whatever else he might do in life, he most definitely should not turn around and look behind him. Of course, the young man had no choice in the matter, whatever self-preservatory advice his petrified gut might be giving him, and he turned to face the unknown demon lurking in the pitch black darkness of the corridor. He came face to face with two gleaming sparks of impish fury.
Peg, suffering from the combined effects of ginger nut dyspepsia and the thought that the bed would be full of fleas, had been quite unable to sleep. She had no doubt that the boys would be well away in the land of nod by now and so, with the coast clear, she could open the bedroom door and get some much needed air. Just as she had been about to trundle down to the kitchen for a glass of water she heard the sound of wood under duress and guessing that something troublesome was afoot she had waited for the inevitable sound of footsteps in the hall.
The boy never had a chance. Before the scream could reach his larynx Peg’s favourite carbon tipped, size seven knitting needle had slid home with deadly force somewhere between his thigh and his groin. The boy staggered backwards only to find his posterior fixed firmly in the vice like grip of Dog’s false teeth. The scream strangled in his throat, turning into a mewling whimper as he caught sight of the huge bulk of Big Al Frasier standing silhouetted in the living room door way. He could feel something warm and sticky running down his left leg and faced with the combined wrath of the incredible hulk and his rabid guard dogs the boy dug deep and somewhere in the darker recesses of his motor neurone system he found the strength to leap over Peg, to hit the ground running and to dive head first through the plate glass kitchen window, preferring the possibility of death by a thousand cuts to the prospect of facing these hell hounds one moment longer.
As the last shard of glass hit the kitchen linoleum, Harry emerged from behind Big Al, holding a lighted candle and asked, “Anyone for a cup of tea?”
For the previous occupants of Flat 2a, Chavbury Villas the war was over. Faced with the terrifying ruthlessness of Big Al and his cunningly disguised Yardies, the local criminal fraternity decided that discretion would be infinitely preferable to the valour required to face down Wheelchair Peg, Dickie “Dog” Virtue and Harry “The Sergeant” Cock, and that is exactly how the legendary Frasier gang started out on the road to criminal infamy…