"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

foreign plate, we'd always know there was stuff in the boot. And as we
learned, they were easy enough to break into.
In school lunch breaks we often used to take our school blazers off and
hide them in holdalls so no one could identify us when we stole. We thought
we were dead clever. The fact that ours was the only comprehensive school in
the whole area didn't really occur to us.
Then we'd go around looking for things to steal. We got into a car one
day, took a load of letters, and discovered that they contained checks. We
were convinced that we'd cracked it. None of us had the intelligence to
realize that we couldn't do anything with them.
We broke into a camping shop one night in Forest Hill. There were three
of us, and we got in through the flat roof. Again, we didn't really know
what we wanted.
It was one of the places where you could go and buy swimming ribbons to
put on your trunks. So the priority was to get a few of those and all become
gold-medal swimmers. After that we didn't know what to do, so one of us took
a shit in the frying pan in the little camping mock-up that they had as a
window display.
At the age of fourteen I was starting to get all hormonal and trying to
impress the girls that I was clean and hygienic. You could buy five pairs of
socks for a quid in Peckham market, but they were all outrageous colors like
yellow and mauve. I made sure that everybody saw I was wearing a different
color every day. I also started to have a shower every night down at Goose
Green swimming baths. It cost five pence for the shower and a towel, two
pence for soap, and two pence for a little sachet of shampoo.
I wore clean socks, I was kissably clean, but I was overweight.
The girls didn't seem to go a bundle on fat gits in orange socks.
Then the Bruce Lee craze swept the country. People would roll out of
the pubs and into the late-night movie, then come out thinking they were the
Karate Kid. Outside the picture houses, curry houses, and Chinese takeaways
of Peckham of a Friday night, there was nothing but characters head-butting
lampposts and each other to Bruce Lee sound effects.
I took up karate in a big way and got into training three times a week.
It was great. I was mixing with adults as well as people of my own age, and
I started to lose weight. I was also doing a bit of running.
The schooling and all things academic were still bad. I got in with a
fellow called Peter, who wore his cuffs and big, round butterfly collars
outside his blazer. I thought he was smooth as fuck in his big, baggy
trousers. He asked if I wanted to do a couple of weeks' work for his dad,
and I jumped at the offer.
His old man owned a haulage firm. Peter and I loaded electrical goods
into wagons, then helped deliver them.
We made a fortune, mainly because we nicked radios, speakers, and
anything else we could get our hands on when the driver wasn't looking.
I earned more than my old man that month. Even in adult life people
would have perceived that as a good job. My attitude was, "Get out of school
because it's shit, get a job, earn some money," and that was it. I didn't
realize how much I was limiting my horizons, but there was no guidance from
the teachers. They were having to spend too much time just trying to control
the kids, let alone educate us. They had no opportunity to show us that