I'm not saying. However, the Fonz reminded me of my brother, even to the leather jacket.
Last edited Mon Feb 22, 2016, 01:13 PM - Edit history (2)
we (my schoolmates and I) looked upon him and his Teddy Boy pals as very much larger than life - which they were. At leat the more namby-pamby kind of life that suited us better.
He wasn't academic, went to a very rough school and was perfectly suited to it. Quiet but a fearless fighter. Ended up in his early fifties with most of his teeth knocked out, when he went to help a pal who'd got into a 'contretemps' with some cane-cutters in Queensland, Australia.
I prefer not to risk having to eat my meals through a straw - which he could have ended up doing, had he not been killed in a car accident around Christmas by a drunken driver. I had my school-mates in stitches telling them about the antics he and his pals got up to ; one pal in particular, they would see in the upstairs of a large, local cafeteria called the ABC- they don't exist here any more - sporting a pork-pie hat and leaning in his chair against the wall, with his feet on the table. But he wore that hat properly, like Tuco's nemesis, the County Killer ; not Easter bonnet-style, like the Beastie Boys.
The trains from Enfield to Liverpool St never seemed to go more than 15 to 20 miles an hour, and just to generate a bit of excitement, he'd jump off a train while it was going, to run across the abutting back gardens of houses lining parts of the route, and out into the street in the front of the houses ! Oh, and Soho was Chinatown !
Albie had a pal, Sam, who, if anything, my brother reckoned was madder still, though in a different way. And being serious, not playing around. They had some fun at his expense occasionally, rocking his Austin 7 from side to side, as they sat in the back, while he was driving it.