"Andy McNab - Immediate Action" - читать интересную книгу автора (McNab Andy)

unheard-of luxury, biscuits.

From there we went on the council and lived quite a few years on the
housing estates in Bermondsey. Aunty Nell's husband, George, died and
left my mum a little bit of money, and she decided to buy a corner cafe.
We moved to Peckham, but the business fell through. My mum and dad were
not business people, and everything went wrong; even the accountant
ripped them off.

We went onto private housing, renting half a house.

My uncle Bert lived upstairs. Mum and Dad were paying the rent
collector, but it wasn't going to the landlord, so eventually we got
evicted and landed up going into emergency council housing.

Money was always tight. We lived on what my mum called teddy bear's
porridge-milk, bread, and sugar, heated up. The gas was cut off once,
and the only heat source in the flat was a three-bar electric fire. Mum
laid it on its back in the front room and told us we were camping. Then
she balanced a saucepan on top and cooked that night's supper, teddy
bear's porridge. I thought it was great.

I joined my first gang. The leader looked like the lead singer of the
Rubettes. Another boy's dad had a used-car lot in Balham; we thought
they were filthy rich because they went to Spain on a holiday once. The
third character had got his eyes damaged in an accident and had to wear
glasses all the time, so he was good for taking the piss out of. Such
were my role models, the three main players on the estate. I wanted to
be part of them, wanted to be one of the lads.

We played on what we called bomb sites, which was where the old
buildings had been knocked down to make way for new housing estates.

Sometimes we mucked around in derelict buildings; the one on Long Lane
was called Maxwell's Laundry. We used to sing the Beatles song "Bang,
Bang, Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and muck about inside it, throwing stones
and smashing the glass. There were all the signs up, NO Y, and all the
corrugated iron, boards, and barbed wire, but that just made it more
important that we got inside. We'd get up . on the roof and use the
skylights as stepping-stones in games of dare. It was fun until the kid
fell and died.

I changed gangs. For the initiation ceremony I had to have a match put
to my arm until the skin smoked and there was a burn mark. I was dead
chuffed with myself, but my mum came home from her shift at the
launderette, saw the state of my arm, and went ApeShit. I couldn't
understand it.

She dragged me off to the house of the Rubettes' lead singer to moan at
his old girl. The two mums had a big shouting thing on the landing,