PINSTRIPE SPY - Chapter 1

Driving my red Lancia with the loaded trailer south for 400 miles was good therapy. I had all my pot plants carefully arranged on the back seat, my two cats Gemima and Herbie in cat boxes in the foot wells of the rear seats.
I had Dan, my conspirator, at 10 years of age reassuring me that we were doing the right thing.

We had left our home the day after he had finished his final day at his lovely Aberdeen school.
There would be no chance that I could ever pay for his education again and so when he had agreed to leave Scotland I had been really surprised.
He had long since lost his relationship with his father and had been embarrassed by some of the more outrageous things that Tony had done in and around our tiny Aberdeenshire village. Unfortunately the jungle drums beat hard and fast in a very small village in Scotland. Everything is exaggerated way out of proportion due to the absolute lack of anything real to talk about, most of the time.

We arrived back in Clacton very late at night and went immediately to stay with a close friend who had rented a two bedroom flat and needed a flatmate to share it.
The timing could not have been better for me.
I moved us in within a day.
Dan and I shared the smaller of the bedrooms and it was adequate for the little we had brought with us.

I was so completely depressed that my memory of this period is sketchy with vague impressions more than full memories.
I did not care about much.
I was horribly lonely.

I remember enrolling at a local gym and working out every day from 10am to 12 and spending a lot of my afternoons visiting old friends but something fundamental had happened to Clacton during my two and a half year absence.
It took me a while to work out what was different.
I noticed that I was not being invited out to parties or events and assumed that it was because nobody wanted a depressed person in their company.
But I was very wrong about that.
The reason I was treated like a pariah was more to do with the fact that I do not like to drink a great deal and I do not indulge in unnatural drugs.
Everyone I knew was doing a lot of cocaine, speed, LSD and magic mushrooms.
The drug scene in the summer of 1982 was exploding with all sorts of stuff and I went to see one dealer with whom I was very close.
"Why are you selling all this shit?" I asked, seeing all sorts of telltale signs in his kitchen.
"Money, Fran" he responded matter-of-factly.
"It is a bit sick to make money out of creating addictions, don't you think?" I said without flinching.
His eyes narrowed as he surveyed my indignant body language.
"You smoke dope!" He defended.
"Yeah, but it is not addictive and you know it! Why didn't you stick with that?" I countered his argumentative stance.
From then on he gave me a run down of the profit margins on various drugs and I was disgusted that here before me was no friend. This was a guy who was profiting enormously from the addictions that he was creating among his customers. He did not see anyone as a real friend. He saw only customers who could bring him more customers if he kept them well serviced.

I did not buy anything from him ever again.

I decided to buy only homegrown from friends and in bulk so that I did not have to worry about it.
Money for me at this time was no object.
I had plenty. It meant very little to me.

I packed up the trailer tent and we went to a festival and literally joined the Convoy somewhere in East Anglia. We went from festival to festival that summer, living in our two bedroomed trailer tent.
Dan loved festivals and we would always park up a fair distance from the rest of the Convoy so that he would get to sleep at night.
I liked to keep myself to myself at the time.
I was still healing from having been burned for ten years.
I was not viewing men with quite the right or receptive attitude.

When the first week of September kicked in we were miles from our home and I asked Dan if he wanted to stay on the Convoy or go to school back in Clacton. This would mean attending a school with a very poor reputation, so he considered his options carefully.
He decided that going to school was the priority and so we prepared to leave the Convoy during the next move.
We arrived back in Clacton with one day to spare in which to cobble together some sort of uniform.
Dan did not like the school from the first day.
Mr Sutherland, his form teacher at his previous school had asked me to let the next school know that he would very much like to hear from them, so that he could pass on his experience of Dan and his recommendations. He never received a word from the school and I had to give him the School address and phone number so that he could follow up on his intentions.

It did not make a difference to the way that Dan was treated. They were fodder at that school. There was never any homework and I do not recall Dan ever bringing even one book home.
In short, he was wasting 7 hours a day being dis-educated, bullied and bored.
Bullying Dan was a red flag to a bull.
He hated bullies and began two years of being an anti-bully. In this way he gathered a half a dozen good friends.
That was the only positive thing that he got from that school.

By the time he turned thirteen he was getting reports from an electronics teacher that "Daniel is simply not interested in electronics" - another case of the teacher teaching at such a low level of expertise that he was gazing out of the window, designing his next CB radio project or mentally writing a program for his Spectrum 48k.
The report was littered with similar comments from teachers. Dan was considered disruptive but when I questioned the teachers in respect of this claim all I received was "Daniel asks too many questions and argues with the staff".
When I asked Dan what this meant he simply said "The teachers at that school know nothing Mum!"

I offered a solution to Dan.
I said "Let's do home schooling for a while and see how we get along?" He gave it a few days thought and finally he agreed that this might be less stressful all around.
I never needed to actually teach Dan anything by then, anyway. He was accustomed to the fact that he already knew far more than me about electronics, cars, computers and physics.

He settled into a natural rhythm of studying as he required to learn. He was heavily focused on programming his computer and was sprawled out on the floor in front of the TV which was the screen for those early home computers.
He had been there all night and was just putting the finishing touches to something he had been working on for days.
I had offered him breakfast but he had waved me away while he concentrated.
I sat quietly at the dining table drinking my first coffee of the day when there was a sharp rap at the door.
It was precisely 9am.

I opened the door to a square bodied and square faced man who announced that he was from the Department of Education and wanted to check that Dan was indeed studying at home.
I put my finger up to my mouth and said "Shhh", gestured him to come in and directed him to a dining room chair from where he could see Dan working on the floor.
Dan was oblivious, totally absorbed in the program.
I silently offered the School inspector a coffee and he declined. He scribbled a few notes and asked me very quietly if this was a normal day for Dan. I said "and night, he never stops!" I gestured to the piles of books and magazines lying higgledy piggledy all around the room. I pointed at the spaghetti junction of electronic experiments winking and blinking with little LEDs (light emitting diodes). I gazed at the man with the sad long suffering look of a mum who can never vacuum properly, because disturbing this stuff was a heinous crime.

Finally Dan punched the air with a "whoop" and rose to his knees.
He had created a rudimentary game which had involved 2,000 lines of code writing.
Accuracy had been paramount, hence the intense concentration.
Dan got up and excitedly told the inspector all about it when he finally sat at the table for his breakfast.
They chatted about all sorts of technical stuff while I got myself washed and dressed in the bathroom.
By the time I got back to them, the inspector was preparing to leave and thanking Dan for a very interesting chat.
I showed him out and a few days later received a charming letter from him saying that he was very satisfied that Dan was indeed working hard on his studies and to let them know if I needed any help in the future.
I was delighted.
Dan's friends would call for him after school or he would stroll up to the school to meet them for after school jinks, which I preferred to know nothing about.
He had a couple of bikes. Six in all.
Our yard was easy to break into and unfortunately he had most of them stolen over the time we lived in that flat.
We were over the top of a paint and wallpaper shop and our access was via a gate at the back of the store.

I had bought a 112ft long ex navy minelayer ship within the first year of our return to Clacton and we sometimes spent time on it. It was moored in an isolated spot at the end of a creek in Thorrington. The mooring was entirely free of costs because the boat was a war hero and had been granted a large chunk of the seawall as it's permanent home after it was decommissioned from the navy.

It had belonged to a good friend, Pete, but it had no engines and during the decommissioning had been stripped of all it's seagoing equipment. It was now a houseboat and Pete wanted to purchase a fully functioning seaworthy vessel that he had seen for sale in Norfolk.
I agreed to buy the minelayer for £5,000 which meant that Pete would have the cash to buy his dream. He intended to bring the new vessel around the coast to moor it alongside the minelayer.
This was a splendid idea we thought.

However, the amount of work that he had to do to get the new boat seaworthy turned out to be very time consuming and Pete worked himself to death.
Literally.
He was only 32 but he died of a heart attack and his poor family was absolutely devastated.

This left me in a terrible pickle.
I had no knowledge of boats and struggled to cope with such a huge vessel by myself.
I asked others for help but all I attracted was people who simply wanted to use the space for partying.
I lived on the boat during the summer months and worked myself silly trying to clean out the bilges.
I developed an ear infection without noticing it and collapsed at a friend's wedding because of it.
At the local hospital I was given anti-biotics and told to rest up, preferably not on the boat.
So, resignedly, I returned to the flat in Clacton.

During a high tide and stormy night a few weeks later, the farmer who owned the fields adjacent to my mooring, untied all the mooring ropes to permit the minelayer to drift out into the middle of the creek and eventually smash into the seawall on the other side.
As the tide withdrew the vessel tilted with it until it lay on it's side in the mud.

Everything that had been inside was dislodged and soaked.
It was a total disaster.
I persuaded my biker mates to come and see if they could help me right the boat but all they seemed to want to do was get drunk and then ride their motorbikes through the farmer's field, wrecking his crop in revenge.

A few days later I arrived at the creek and the boat was missing.

Tony and Rob had stolen it. They had got on board at a high tide and towed it around the creek to St. Osyth where they had placed it in a locked marina.

I felt more than betrayed.
I felt that karma would repay this dirty trick because I certainly could not.
I felt friendless.
I felt ill.