Swearing with Mary

When I was 12 I looked about 7

When I was about twelve, I belonged to a gang of boys called 'The Boys'; there were no girls allowed, except for one who was called Mary, or Big Bum. She was bigger than all of us boys, and when she spotted us having a meeting, she came along and joined us on my Mom’s front step, uninvited, and no one could think of a way of stopping her since she was taller and stronger than all of us. Desmond suggested that we could let her in to the gang properly, even though she was a girl, but only if she could share a new swear word. We then reminded ourselves of the swear words that we already knew. They included 'bloody', 'hell', 'sod', 'shit' and 'bugger'. Of course we didn’t know what all of them of them meant, but we did know that if we used them in front of adults, we would get a smack on the head, or maybe ‘the belt’.

So there we were sitting on the step dying for a smoke, when who should come running down the street but Mary, all out of breath.  Plonking herself between Fred and Henry she moved her hips suddenly sideways and knocked Fred right off the step.

Then Mary said, ‘So what are we going to do today?’ as though she was a member of the gang.

A gang of 'tough boys' like me.

‘Well,’ said Desmond, ‘we’ve just made up a new rule  - you can’t belong to the gang until you bring in a new swear word, and it must be one that we haven’t got’.

‘What swear words have you already got?’ said Mary.

So we told her the ones that we knew. Mary said they were pissy swear words and she had a much better one. None of us mentioned to Mary that we hadn’t thought of ‘pissy’ as a swear word, and waited eagerly for the new word, which might be even better

‘Fuck!‘ she said with an evil glint in her eyes.

‘What kind of a word is that, Big Bum?’ said Fred. ‘I’ve never heard it before.’

‘I have,’ said Henry. ‘I heard my Dad tell our cat to fuck off once.’

So we agreed to let Mary into the gang. And then find someone who could tell us what the word meant.

Well, you might think that was the end of the story, but no. On Sundays I had to have dinner at home with my family in Preston Road. I usually stayed all day with my Gran ‘cause she loved me the best of all my cousins  - girls and boys - which I thought was perfectly natural. Any road up, that Sunday I came home for dinner and there we were round the table, and I dropped my fork on the floor, and said, 'Oh fuck.’

Dad lurched up and came running around the table and I thought he was going to kill me. So I headed for the door and ran all the way back to Gran’s house, with Dad chasing me. When we both got there I hid behind Gran’s long skirt.

She said to my Dad, ‘If you touch this child, you and I are going to fall out.’

So Dad backed off and went home. I was a bit miffed at being called a child, but grateful nonetheless. So I made up my mind to definitely ask Big Bum what fuck meant; I obviously didn’t know what I was dealing with.  Learning to swear with a gang of ‘tough’ boys and a girl was going to be more serious than I thought .