Scully by Alan Bleasdale (Arrow Books 1984)

 

'Yes Mam, alright Mam. I'll go an' tell her now,' he said and got his jacket on and went out.

As soon as he’d gone, I whipped over and had a look at his letter to nobody that he thought he’d hidden in last week's TV Times. It was another in his series of ace letters to Tranmere Rovers. He’s written at least two more to them that I know of.

Dear Sir,

 I was on the King Blessed Vergeins Playing feelds Eastbank last Sunday watching the Football Match Between Astley United And Garston Bakereries in Div. 9 of the Liverpool F.A. Sunday leeges and my Atension was atracted by the centre forward for Astley United. Sir. I tell no lie when I say that in all my many years Watching and referring football off all clases, I have not often enough seen Talint like what this PlaYEr has got. He his scilful, too footed and a gooD header off the ball. He is strong in the takle a gooD dribler and not a CowErd. I found out that is name is Antony James Patrick Scully and that he his twenty years old next birthday and that he lives in 47 Sankey Road, Eastbank, It wooD be a crying shamE if some BIG CLub did not spot him BEFOUR IT HIS TO LATE.

p.s. I am noT Related to this BOy at ALL.

Yours truly.

An Old Age Pensionor.

You might find it funny but after you’ve read as many as I have, it gets a bit boring. I got me felt tip pen out and wrote, IVOR BOLLOCKOFF above where he’d put ‘Old Age Pensionor', and folded the letter up and stuck it back in the envelope.

Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Crump (Penguin 1986)

 

I got lost one day and nearly spent the night in the bush. I had no idea where I was, but just on dark I dropped down off a ridge and came out on the creek bed just where I’d lit a fire a few days earlier to have a brew. I reached camp an hour after dark, but I didn’t say anything to Uncle Hec about getting bushed. I was supposed to be able to remember exactly where I was at all times.

Uncle Hec’s foot was improving, especially after we changed the shirtsleeves for a proper bandage. He could take a bit of weight on it and get around more easily, but he still couldn’t get his boot on. It made him real crotchety, that foot. I was reading Don Quixote again and he used to say it was turning my head. But he was only looking for something to grumble about. It’s a good book, that.

(Pages 167-168.)

They appeared suddenly from among the rocks, from where they must have been watching me, and it was all I could do to keep the shock off my face. They were both dressed in rags tied around them with strips of torn cloth and flax. Where a button was missing they’d poked the cloth through the button-hole and inserted a piece of stick through it. One of the boy’s trouser-legs had frayed off above the knee and the leg was covered with old bruises and scratches and he had a large scab on his knee that didn’t look at all healthy.

Similarly one of the old man’s shirtsleeves was torn off at the shoulder; his arm was scratched and scarred and there was a filthy piece of rag tied around a deep graze on his wrist. Their boots were falling to pieces and by all rights should have crippled them.

The old man, Hec, was gaunt and stringy, with a straggly grey hacked-off beard and sunken piercing eyes. He had a pronounced limp, which I learned later was the result of an accident to his foot that had never healed properly.

The boy, Ricky, was a good-looking Maori chap. His hair stuck out in tufts from his head and his hands and face were streaked with inground dirt. There was something almost primitive-looking about him.

And they stank. Badly. Both of them.

The old man carried a battered old pea-rifle and they had two very thin dogs with them. They were both very nervous, especially the boy.

(Pages 309-310.)

A Crafty Cigarette – Tales of a Teenage Mod by Matteo Sedazzari (Zani Media 2015)

Luckily for my father Theo did not press charges for criminal damage. Later my mother explained to him about my father’s problem with Charlie Cairoli. Theo, being the wise man that he is, totally understood and told my mother that he was once in The Kinks for a brief time, as 2nd guitar and backing vocals. They did a gig in Acton, this was before they made it big, by the way. Theo broke his strings during a song and Ray Davies never called him again, or so he told my mother. Now Theo can’t listen to any records by The Kinks and has to leave the room the moment their music comes on. 

Shit, both Vinnie’s father and my father could have been huge stars, that’s quite depressing.

Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin (Harper Perennial 2010)

When I woke up that morning it was still pretty early. Summer had just begun and from where I lay in my sleeping bag I could see out the window. There were hardly any clouds and the sky was clear and blue. I looked at the Polaroid I had taped to the wall next to where I slept. It shows my aunt and me sitting by a river; she has on a swimsuit. She’s my dad’s sister and she looks like him, with black hair and blue eyes and she’s really thin. In the photo she’s holding a can of soda and smiling as I sit next to her. She has her arm around me. My hair’s wet and I’m smiling. That was when we all lived in Wyoming. But it had been four years since I’d seen her, and I didn’t even know where she lived anymore.

My dad and I had just moved to Portland, Oregon, and we’d been there for a week. We didn’t know anybody. Two days before my school year was done we packed the truck and moved out from Spokane. We brought our kitchen table and four chairs, dishes and pots and pans, our clothes and TV, and my dad’s bed. We left all the rest.

Happiland by William Bedford (William Heinemann 1990)

When his work was finished, Harry went down to the promenade and sat at one of the window tables in Brown's cafe. From the window, he could see the pier and the deserted shores, and the slipway where the inshore fishing boats would come when the tide began to ebb. Great banks of cloud were gathering at the estuary, and as he ordered a mug of scalding hot tea and a bacon buttie with onions, the wind howled and gusted along the promenade, whistling underneath the cafe door. He fed some sixpences into the juke box, selecting Rosemary Clooney and Tennessee Ernie Ford, Frankie Laine and Teresa Brewer, and then sat down to wait for his food. He had spent all day baiting the fishing lines with frozen bait, and now he was waiting for George Bainbridge to get back from his trip to see what fresh lugworms were required tomorrow. During the winter months, when the fairgrounds were closed, Harry's only money came from the casual bait digging he did for the inshore fishermen. In the summer, he worked on the fairgrounds.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High - A True Story by Cameron Crowe

In the summer of '79, I had just turned twenty-two. I discussed the idea for this book with my New York publisher. Go back to high school, he said, and find out what's really going on in there with the kids. I thought about it over a weekend, and took the project.

I had attended Ridgemont Senior High School in Redondo Beach, California, for a summer session seven years earlier, and those eight weeks had been sublime and forbidden days, even if it did mean going to school in the summer. I normally attended a rather strict Catholic school, and there were many of us who believed that all our problems would be solved, all our dreams within reach if we just went to Ridgemont public high school.

In the fall of '79 I walked into the office of Principal William Gray and told him the plan. I wanted to attend classes at Ridgemont High and remain an inconspicuous presence for the full length of the school year. The object, I told him, was to write a book about real, contemporary life in high school.

Principal Gray was a careful man with probing eyes. He was wary of the entire plan, and he wanted to know what I had written before. I explained that I had authored a number of magazine profiles of people in the public eye.

"Like who?" he asked.

I named a few. A president's son. A few rock stars. A few actors. My last article had been on the songwriter-actor Kris Kristofferson.

Principal Gray eased back in his chair. "You know Kris Kristofferson?"

"Sure. I spent a few weeks on tour with him."

"Hell," said the principal. "What's he like?"

"A great guy." I told him a few Kris stories.

"Well now," said Principal Gray, "I think I can trust you. Maybe this can be worked out."

The Toy Collector by James Gunn (Bloomsbury 2000)

Our basement had a paneled corkboard ceiling. You could climb a ladder, push up the panels, and hide things in the space above them. Through the years the space housed chewing gum (my father despised the cracking sound), fireworks, smoke bombs, cigarettes, love letters from Stacey Kees, magazines with naked people, witchcraft tracts, porno videos, anarchist newsletters, condoms, a pair of handcuffs, alcohol of various grains and proofs, pills, grass, coke, a Graphix bong, a foam vagina, a .38 revolver, and many other useful items not sanctioned by the Gunn family government. The space's longest resident, though, was Scrunch 'Em, Grow 'Em Dinosaurs, known to the authorities only as The Lizard Game. Back in the early seventies my mother would probably have turned us in had we not outwitted her by hiding our contraband in the basement ceiling. She seemed all right, but after you had lived with her for four years you knew she'd turn rat if the circumstances were right. Due to renovation the space is now gone. Neither my brother nor I know what happened to the toy.

The Anatomy School by Bernard MacLaverty (W.W. Norton & Company 2001)

'OK - it's not Banquo who fucks things up, it's MacBeth,' said Blaise. He too was chewing at the stem of a piece of grass now, biting fragments off it and spitting them out. 'We are all like a man rowing a boat. We have our backs to the way we're going. We can't look ahead, can't see the future. All we can see is the past behind us.'

'Very good,' said Kavanagh. 'But not so the canoeist.' They all laughed.

Blaise joined his hands and cradled them behind his head and said, 'Where do you think we'll be three or four years from now?'

'What a crass question,' said Martin.

'It'll be easier looking back. Three or four years from now you'll say - remember that day we mitched off to the Waterworks.' They thought about this in silence. Clouds covered the sun and their shadow could be seen moving on the hills. The water sounded continually at the lake edge.

The Last Mad Surge of Youth by Mark Hodkinson (Pomona 2009)

Woody was one of the few who lived with his real dad. Barrett had christened him 'Luigi' after calling round one day and finding him wearing the coolest sunglasses he'd ever seen. The rest of his apparel was strictly dads' stuff of corduroy trousers, patterned cardigan and Hush Puppies. The glasses, though, were straight out of The Godfather.

Carey recalled that Luigi had driven them to their first proper concert - Hawkwind at a large concert hall. On the way there Luigi spoke gravely as though they were preparing for war: don't talk to anyone; keep a good grip on your tickets; go two at a time to the toilets; leave a few minutes before the end to avoid the rush; if anyone steals your seats, tell the usherettes. Woody told him they didn't have usherettes at gigs, unless that was the name of the support band.

"Well, you know what I mean, whoever's in charge."

Woody sad no one was in charge. His dad told him to stop being a clever arse.

Soon after they entered the hall, a skinny bloke ambled on to the stage carrying an acoustic guitar. He began singing caustic songs about pregnant teenagers and getting beaten up on council estates. The crowd was in uproar. People left their seats and moved down the aisles to get closer:

"Fuck off."

"Twat."

"Get off."

Barrett, Carey and Woody went to the toilet. While they were standing at the urinal they saw a dishevelled longhaired lad turned slightly to the side, fiddling with himself. Woody wasn't shy:

"What you doing?"

He turned around.

"I'm trying to piss in this bag."

He had a crisp bag, half full of piss. He was drunk and struggling to hold it, splashing the floor and his shoes.

"What are you going to do with that?"

"Wuzz it at that bastard on stage. He's lucky it's just piss."

He turned back to the job in hand before looking over again.

"How old are you lot?"

"You look about nine."

Carey and Barrett noted the name of the bloke with the acoustic guitar billed as a 'punk-poet' on the posters: Patrik Fitzgerald. They were going to buy his record, the one about having a safety pin stuck in my heart, for you, for you.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon (William Morrow and Company 1988)

At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business. We'd just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will - a year I'd spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him. But Claire had moved out the month before. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom.