Free The Life of Lee by Lee Evans

would frantically dive on the floor, fighting each other to be the first to get the silver coins. Paddy wouldweave away off home to his wife to explain why he now had no money, leaving us like pigeons pecking away at the tarmac. We would huddle up to compare our riches.
    Some of the kids would then run to a call box about fifty yards down the hill and with the change make random calls to people. I listened in to a call a couple of times.
    ‘Is that Mr Walls?’ they would ask.
    ‘Mr Walls? No, there are no Walls here.’
    ‘Well, what’s holding your ceiling up then?’ the boys would shout and put the phone down.
    Well, we thought it was funny at the time.
    Because we never had any money, trying to find something that might make us a few bob was a major preoccupation on the estate. If it wasn’t tied down, it was gone. And if something was going cheap, it would be already gone by now. Bob-a-job week was always extended to gissa-bit-more-a-job month, and a local character called Nanny Norling was just another way of getting in on some action.
    An elderly lady, Nanny Norling lived in the very top flat of the block across from ours, and was to some kids a great source of income. I personally think she may even have been the first cash machine on the estate.
    Initially, as a kid of around seven years of age, all I ever saw of Nanny Norling was her ominous, bony hand, the hint of her long, unkempt, grey hair that would wave wildly in the wind around her gaunt, ashen face, and the two small, pea-shaped eyes that would peer over the edge of her window box down towards us as we played beneath the flats.
    Someone would notice her window open and, looking up, we’d stop dead still in anticipation as a hand would emerge and begin to be royally wafted around. It was a signal similar to the one they give at the Vatican when they have chosen a new Pope. This was our own, equally important, sign that there was going to be a major food drop.
    The hand would retreat back into the open window and suddenly emerge again, but this time bulging with hard-boiled sweets. Then the palm would open like a claw-crane, letting the sweets cascade on to the courtyard below. We would watch them descend through the air, clucking away beneath like hungry chickens waiting for seed to drop to the ground.
    We would run to the bottom of the flats, hands up ready to catch them, but alas, more often than not the sweets would smash uselessly into a thousand pieces on the concrete at our feet, rendering them into nothing but powdered sugar. It was the same with another food she liked to drop, fruit. The hand would come out, holding an orange or an apple. The hand would open and the fruit would drop. Even if you caught it from such a great height, it would splatter in your hands. But we still fell for it every time; it was as if we had been trained like chimps on a sort of ‘press-the-button-get-the-banana’ reward scheme.
    Some of us kids knew that Nanny Norling was bedridden and so unable to leave the flat. Sad for her, but the advantage to us was that she always needed someone to make the trip to the corner shop for her essentials. So if her hand came out of the window and made a sort ofregal beckoning motion – well now, that’s where the real money was at.
    When that happened, by God, the race was on. All hell broke loose – there might be five, six kids, maybe more, running up the stairwell towards her flat. Before you could say ‘The Nanny Bank of Bristol’, we would be banging at her door offering our services in exchange for some cash. It was mostly pennies, but it was still money.
    I remember on one occasion, I was hanging around at the bottom of the flats, along with my brother Wayne and a couple of other kids, Tony and Alex, when Nanny Norling’s window suddenly opened and the usual little wave summoned one of us up to see her. We shot a look at each other, like gunslingers waiting to see who would draw first.
    I had never been fortunate