The inititation test turned out to be not so bad. In fact I think some of the boys were a little embarrassed by it. It involved breaking into a building site and following a prescribed course, climbing over the half finished factory unit. At one point you had to climb along some scaffolding, shout out: ‘I am a commando’ and then jump off. It seemed a bit silly. Even though it was a palpably soft test I still didn’t get involved with the climbing and jumping. One of my many terrors along with being killed by a train, drowned in a storm drain and savaged by a guard dog was falling off half-finished buildings. I said I wasn’t going to do it and the leadership decided that in my case just breaking into the building site was enough.

Once in the Blitzkrieg Gang life was quite sweet for a while. We had a den underneath a tree on the wasteland at the side of one of the massive gasometers at Saltley power station. Out of school we’d hang out there quite a lot, throwing stones at the abandoned machinery that littered the ground. We were always engaged in target practice though none of us ever mentioned that we were unlikely to enounter the enemy hidden away as we were in our little bunker.

At school the Nazi craze was slowly mutating into something more contemporary and British. I’d seen the graffiti ‘NF’ sprayed here and there in the area but Nottingham Forest were quite popular at the time and I thought it related to them. When John Mahoney started writing it on his hand though I knew that couldn’t be right as he was a Villa supporter like the rest of us. I eventually discovered that NF stood for National Front. I knew all about the National Front. In fact all I knew was what Jerry Dammers had taught me but that was enough. I couldn’t see it catching on at school, everyone in my class had immigrant parents, of one sort or another. Perhaps John Mahoney sensed this flaw too. Or perhaps his natural cowardice and barely concealed fear of confrontation made him choose the one ethnic group not represented at school, but for whatever reason a new acronym sprung up on his hand: APL.

This was not, what might have been at least consistent, an Anti Protestant League, but instead another of Jimmy’s Borstal hand me downs - the Anti Paki League.

I thought Paki was a bad word. It wasn’t one I’d ever heard at home. It seemed a toxic, hate-filled word even back then. There weren’t many Asian families in the neighbourhood which was predominantly a mixture of Brummie, Irish and Afro-Carribean. The only Asian children I ever saw were the children of the shopkeeper up the road. Sometimes they’d be out playing at the kerbside, two little girls with long plaits, and a smaller boy in what looked like a dress. Despite the weird clothes I felt the universal kinship of the offspring of retailers. I’d see them sometimes at the warehouse telling their dad which crisps to buy. I wondered if their dad paid any more attention to their advice than mine did.

Soon all the boys in the gang had white laces in their Docs, which meant you were APL. ‘Paki-bashing’ was apparently how they spent their free time. They spoke about it in coy terms, lots of nudges and winks, as perhaps they would speak in a few years about equally fictitious sexual escapades. They talked about ‘christening’ their Docs with the blood of their victims. I wondered where they were finding these victims. Did they mean the two little girls? Their four-year-old brother?

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