Wicked Cahoots

When he made his first personal appearance in the dirty alley on someone else's rusty bike, screaming along in a cloud of dust it rendered us all speechless and motionless. But I was amazed that despite his grey-faced surliness, he was very affable with us... the bully with a naive and sentimental heart. He was so happy to hear that I liked his dad or that my mum liked him and he was welcome to come to tea with us at five twenty five... Our "adventures" were spectacular: chasing after other bikesters, screaming at the top of our lungs into blocks of flats and then running as our echoed waves of terror blended with incoherent threats... "I'll call the Police, I'll..." Wicked cahoots. ("Wicked Cahoots" and "The Woodville Hall Soul Boys" stem from stories written in the late 1970s; while they first saw the light of day in versified form in 2006.)