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childishly gratified by the gorgeous ‘ping’ of the strings as the stone hit the sweet spot and I watched, transfixed, as it looped high into the air. After it reached its zenith and began the journey back to earth, I watched it drop behind the block, and for a brief second I was annoyed that my view of the stone’s aesthetic voyage had been interrupted. Half a second later I heard the unmistakeable sound of a windscreen being hit by a piece of rock travelling at terminal velocity. Then the shrieks rang out.
    “Oi!! What farkin caarnt did that, the farkin caarnts?!”
    Nothing my mother could deliver would have matched the punishment he would have dished out and I was sufficiently terrified as to nearly empty myself right there and then. I was already hidden in the stairwell when he, his pals and his large Alsatian careened around the corner looking for the culprit. To be honest he was probably expecting a sniper, so shockingly abrupt was the explosion of glass around him as he fiddled with wiring in the footwell. Some while later, on one of theResidents’ Association coach trips to Margate, I heard him tell this story, and he clearly retained a desire for homicidal revenge within his heart. I tried not to look guilty as his cohorts chorused their disapproval. Apparently, my act had necessitated his pilfering of another windscreen from a similar car.
    I was more moronic than malicious in my vandalism but like Frank Spencer in
Some Mothers do ‘ave ‘em
I could cause pandemonium in a split second of brainless curiosity. Like the time I set the entire adventure playground in Bishops Park ablaze by lighting a mini fire to keep warm under the main climbing frame. Within seconds, the little fire had erupted into a conflagration that began to race up the thick telegraph poles supporting the structure. Four fire engines raced past me to the inferno as I ran sobbing from the park, and I spent months avoiding all contact with the outside world, absolutely sure guilt was written all over my face. For days, soot and minor burns
were
written all over my face. It meant hundreds of kids from Fulham and Hammersmith had to find something else to do while they rebuilt the playground. Helping a local milkman on his round lasted only a brief time. He’d asked me to drive the float around a small roundabout on a housing estate so that it would face the other way. I overdid the corner, and woke the entire estate as the float, riding on two outer wheels at 45 degrees to the road, emptied most of its bottled load onto the tarmac.
    Back at the matriarchal prizefight, there was no hiding for my mother’s opponent, but it
was,
as I said, her lucky day. Of course, as her set perm flicked from side to side in time with the blows that were crashing into the side of her head, she would not have seen it that way, but I could honestly attest to it. As it was, my mother appeared to have only those lethal hands and a shopping bag at her disposal. The bag, I noticed, was emptied of milk, pasta and sundry items and was lyingcrumpled on the ground, evidence that it had already been deployed in battle. Had the woman – whose retaliation merely consisted of gripping with despairing, white-knuckled fear to my mother’s coat – managed to break free of the rain of blows, Mum would have retreated behind a flowerbed with the shopping and begun to chuck it. The outcome would have been just as messy for the victim.
    “I willa fucky killa you!” screamed my Mum as another shuddering clout hit its mark. “My son issa NOT inna fucky borstal!”
    Even amid the guttural squawks of shock and the noise of the baying crowd, the emphasis was resounding. The woman had made the mistake of suggesting to my mother that Serge, rather than being in a school that required an 11–plus pass grade to get in, was, merely by dint that he slept there, in a borstal. If she had mentioned that Matteo actually
was
in a borstal, there would have been no problem. As the sickening