Originally Posted by
Jem
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What variety, we’ve had go go dancers who’ve gone ga ga, spanners and instructions on how to throw same, who flung ku fung dung, saints and causes, Rambo’s wheelchair, and the devil knows what else. what more could a soul ask for? Maybe a bigger spanner to secure all the nuts we have loose here.
Great stuff fellow scribblers.
And now in the interests of continuity.
Going back to when I was a small boy we had ‘Corner Boys’ over here in the City, I don’t know what you called them in your parts, but they were before the Teddy boys, not quite hooligans, just suspicious looking lads who usually hung around street corners trying to look their best. Smoking but no drinking and nobody had even heard of drugs then, they waited for the girls to pass by, then they would practice the wolf whistle with a bit of slagging thrown in, all quite harmless and the girls seemed to love it too because they kept coming back for more and the girls all tried to look their best too. Now and then a row would break out between rival wannabe leaders, sort of like an online forum, but nothing too serious bar a bleeding nose or a fat lip.
At weekends a card game would get going, pontoon usually as it was a quick game and easy to pick up the coins off the pavement if a copper showed up, they were seldom caught gambling because they normally posted a few small kids ‘On guard’ further up each approach to the corner. When some of the small kids had to go home to bed and left their post unprotected, the odd copper would sneak up on the assembled gamblers and they were all lined up against the wall Valentine’s Day massacre style and frisked, then all the names were taken along with all the cash and any smokes the lads had on them, but that was the last they ever heard of it and the lucky copper had a bonus for his night on the beat.
Corruption has always been with us and always will, right on down the line, even to taking pennies from poor street kids.