Criminal Masterminds Aged 7
How we waged war on laundry, phone boxes, and Mr Vincent’s car in 1960s Swansea
We weren’t bad kids in the Port Tennant end of Swansea in the early 1960s. We were curious, bored, and occasionally criminal. Most of what we got up to would get you therapy now, or a court date.
Back then it was just what kids did.
Our criminal high command operated from Ysgol Street, where the public phone box stood conveniently next to a police box. I once acted as lookout while some older kids tried to rob it. The copper inside stepped out and gave me a good clout round the ear while the other, far more alert, boys scattered. No arrest. Just a reminder that someone was always watching, and probably another hiding from my father on top.
When we were feeling particularly wicked, we threw mud at some poor woman’s freshly hung washing. Her lines stretched along the back of Ysgol Street.
Our seasonal speciality was setting fire to the grassy bank sloping down to the railway lines, then phoning the fire brigade ourselves afterwards. We would stand there wide-eyed, tiny pyromaniacs pretending to be concerned citizens. It never occurred to us that grown-ups were not as daft as we hoped.
We bought Mars bars on tick from Doris Murphy’s corner shop, hoping the odd chocolate bar might slip under the radar when Mam settled the bill at week’s end. It never did, and the consequences were swift and painful.
My most inventive theft involved a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, not for the cereal, but for the toy glider printed on the back. I was caught in the front garden, carefully cutting it out, before Mam could stop me. Priorities, even then.
Peter and I once smashed the rear lights on a parked lorry. No idea why. Mr Vincent saw Peter do it but not me, and told my father. I thought I had got away with it until Peter, in true Judas fashion, grassed me up. I can’t remember if I hit him for it, but I would like to think I did.
Clive Jones had Down’s syndrome. The word everyone used then was “Mongol”, and we did not understand its weight.
Clive was about fourteen, but he was more at ease with our gang of seven-year-olds than with kids his own age. His dog Ben, roughly the size of a small donkey, would let smaller kids ride him like a furry pony. The pair of them were a proper double act, gentle and always part of the gang.
Clive’s mother once caught us playing doctors and nurses behind her garden hedge. She was lucky she never saw what we got up to in the old air raid shelters, the red one, the white one, or the underground one. She would never have recovered.
Our darkest moment came when, to get our own back on Mr Vincent, we talked Clive into hammering a rusty six-inch nail into Mr Vincent’s brand-new Hillman Minx. By some miracle the nail went clean through the rubber seal between the boot and the bodywork without causing real damage.
The act has stuck with me, not for the potential destruction, but for the betrayal. We used him. We knew he didn’t understand consequences like we did.
My father did what fathers did then.
Corporal punishment did not work.
The clouts faded and it only made us sneakier.
Clive stayed. Ben stayed huge and gentle.
That is what I remember.