Free Billy Rags by Ted Lewis

both sides of the landing towards us, the big riot sticks in their hands. The feeling I’d had a few minutes earlier had been right: the demo had been leaked. That’s why the screws had been evacuated from the Twos. They must have been waiting in the visiting rooms all evening.
    We pushed the gate to. The PO was reeling all over the landing, dazed and dishevelled, just like a drunk out of Laurel and Hardy. The screws charged past him, spinning him round all over again. Tommy turned the key in the gate just as the heavy mob hit it, jabbing their sticks through the bars at us. They were sick. They looked like a bunch of gorillas in a bramble bush, jab-jabbing away, screaming out our names, squeezing every inch of their arms through the bars.
    Behind me, the altar came rocketing out of the chapel. I had to nip to one side as six of the lads propelled it along the passage and slammed it into the gate. One of the screws got his arm broke in the process and fell to the floor, screaming. Some of his mates dragged him off. I squeezed past the lads who’d brought the altar and left them to cheer the screw with the broken arm.
    Everybody else was working in the office so I went into the chapel and set about smashing up the furniture in order to buttress the back of the altar. Soon the whole passageway was wedged up with steel filing cabinets, tables, furniture; even the doors had been ripped off the office and the chapel and jammed in amongst the rest of it.
    They would need a tank to get down that passageway. The screws were still pissing about with their sticks. One of them came back with a key but by that time it was too late. Walter had ripped some metal piping off a wall and had broken himself off a bit and was waving it at the screws. He was having a rare time; his face had all pursed up and the veins were wriggling in his forehead.
    â€œYou cunts,” he screeched. “You’re the thickest fucking screws in the country! Thicker than the fucking Filth!”
    â€œYou’ve got to come out sometime,” one of them yelled.
    Walter picked up the seat of a chair and winged it at the gate. All the waving arms withdrew for a second. Walter got the rest of the lead pipe and broke it up into short lengths and organised a five-handed poking-militia just in case the screws got too ambitious. I made myself conspicuously absent from all this and got on with feeding furniture to Benny Beauty who was stacking everything he could shift on to the barricade. After about half an hour it was almost up to the ceiling but there were plenty of gaps and passages and you could climb through the middle to get from the chapel to the office or vice versa, no trouble.
    The screws kept digging and poking at the stuff by the gate but that would get them nowhere.
    I crawled through the barricade and into the office.
    Lying by the edge of th e football field, Potter, Jarrow, Clapson, and me. Warm summer sun fills the sky and beyond the school buildings there is the buzz of lunch-time traffic.
    â€œWhat you doing tonight, Billy?” Potter asks.
    â€œPictures, I expect,” I answer.
    â€œWhat’s on at yours?”
    â€œStreet with No Name. Richard Widmark.”
    â€œSeen it. Saw it at ours last week. Dead good. He gets mown down at the end.”
    â€œAll right, don’t tell us about it.”
    â€œIt’s dead good, though:
    We fall silent. On the opposite side of the pitch, walking slowly round the perimeter, is Derek Arnatt, arm in arm with Anita Dent; they started going with one another the end of last week.
    They turned the angle where the corner post is and walk another straight line towards the goal posts.
    â€œLook at them,” Clapson says. “Love’s young dream.”
    â€œGordon McCrae and Doris Day,” says Jarrow.
    â€œWait till they get on this side,” I say. “We’ll give them a calling at.”
    They turn by the next corner flag and walk towards us. I can