Free This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood by Alan Johnson Page A

stark contrast between Pat and Albert and Lily and Steve was obvious to me.

    Along with his impressive sporting skills, Tony Cox had the fastest fists in West London. When it came to fighting, where other boys relied on their weight or their wrestling ability (or, like me, merely on their capacity to deter potential aggressors by trying to look hard), Tony was a whirling dervish, pummelling his opponents into submission: left, right, left, right. His height was an advantage. He might take the odd punch if his challenger managed to get through his flailing fists,but he’d dish out about six whacks for every one he received. Yet I don’t remember Tony ever starting a fight. He only got involved when he was forced to react, which was frequently, probably because his Scandinavian looks made him stand out from the crowd and perhaps because his reputation encouraged other boys to have a go.
    There were times when the dangers we faced were unpredictable, and when even Tony’s exceptional talent was no protection. Walking home from school one day with Tony and our friend Dereck Tapper, I noticed, crossing into Chesterton Road, a man in his early twenties acting oddly. He was standing against a wall with a sheet of corrugated iron propped up in front of him. His weird behaviour grew weirder as we passed him. Lifting the metal sheet above his head, he suddenly bent his knees, bringing the edge of it down on our skulls. Clearly this was a man with serious mental health problems and we should have run away as fast as we could but, thinking the best course of action was simply to ignore him, we carried on walking along the street. We soon realized our mistake when he threw his corrugated iron away and swiftly grabbed me round the neck, announcing with a malicious smile that I was his prisoner.
    Tony and Dereck could easily have escaped, but they stayed with me for the bizarre hour or so in which this man held me captive. As this strange quartet roamed the streets, a man with a boy in a stranglehold and two more in tow, my assailant plausibly and loudly proclaimed to passersby that he was a relative playing a game with me. Otherwise I can’t remember what was said, either by him or by any of us in our attempts to persuade him to let me go. He kept Tony and Dereck at bay bythreatening to cut my face open with a piece of broken glass, picked out of the gutter outside the notorious KPH pub, which he held against my cheek, just underneath my eye.
    The grandly named Kensington Palace Hotel, on the corner of Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster Road, was where Irishmen drank (hence its other name: Keep Paddy Happy) and it was notorious for fights, both indoors and outside. They would usually begin in the pub and spill on to the streets. To be fair to the KPH, broken glass was a feature of North Kensington streets in general. It seemed to grow in the gutters like grass in a hedgerow.
    The KPH was one of three places in my ‘manor’ that I took pains to avoid if I could possibly help it. The others were Isaac Newton Secondary Modern School (the blackboard jungle where I knew I would be sent if I failed my Eleven-Plus) and the Electric Cinema further up the Portobello Road, known locally as the Fleapit or the Bughole because of its derelict state. It never showed anything we would want to see and its clientele, we heard, consisted of nutcases who would carry us off to be mutilated and murdered.
    The memory of being held against my will, with a jagged piece of glass hovering near my eyes, while people strolled past on one of the busiest thoroughfares in London W10, will never leave me. Nobody tried to intervene or asked if I was OK. In the end, our psychopath was distracted by something and Tony, Dereck and I seized our chance and fled as fast as our legs would carry us.
    Tony and I belted into Cambridge Gardens, where the houses were big and expensive with ample front gardens, mostly hidden behind substantial hedges. We’d found a way tonavigate the