Johnny Swanson (6 page)

‘Can’t you give it some of your vaccine – as soon as it’s ready – even just a little bit?’

‘It’s too late for that, Johnny. You have to take the vaccine before you get sick. But I wish I could give it to all the other babies in the country. I really do.’

Johnny heard a wheezing noise behind him. It was Hutch, hurrying towards the shop, panting, and carrying a cardboard box.

‘Has he got phthisis?’ Johnny whispered to the doctor anxiously.

Dr Langford laughed. ‘No, he’s just out of breath.’ He steadied the bike against a lamppost and walked towards Hutch. ‘Can I give you a hand with that, Mr Hutchinson?’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Hutch puffed, handing the box to the doctor as he fumbled in his pocket for the keys to the shop. ‘It’s the poppies for the Remembrance Day collection. There was a bit of a mix-up, and I had to go and collect them at the station. I got held up.’ He tapped his bad leg. ‘I’m not as fast on my feet as I’d like to be.’

Inside the shop, Hutch hurriedly sorted the newspapers. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny,’ he said. ‘This is going to make you late for school. There’s no way you’ll finish
the round before the bell goes. And people will be furious that their papers are late. Don’t let them take it out on you. It’s all my fault.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said the doctor. ‘No one will be angry with me if I’m delayed getting to the sanatorium. I’ll take Johnny on his round on my bicycle.’

So Johnny hoisted himself onto the crossbar, and the two of them delivered all the papers in record time. The doctor told him more about the sanatorium, and passed on another new word –
haemoptysis
(or spitting up blood). Not many people were out at such an early hour, but those who were waved happily at the old man and the boy. All except Dr Langford’s neighbour, Miss Dangerfield, who always had a sharp contempt for anything out of the ordinary. She was polishing the brass numbers on her garden gate as Johnny and the doctor reached the end of the paper round.

Dr Langford rang the bell on his bike and shouted, ‘Good morning, dear lady. Behold! Your paper!’ as Johnny thrust it into her arms.

That was bad enough for Miss Dangerfield. Anyone might have seen. But it got worse. Johnny and the doctor both stuck out their legs and cheered
as the bike freewheeled down the hill back to the shop. Miss Dangerfield had one word for it: ‘Really!’

Johnny got to school just in time, and in class his mind slipped from images of illness back to his money-making scheme. He thought ahead to what he would do after he had raised enough cash to pay the rent. He would keep going with the adverts until he could afford to buy himself a bicycle.

W
hile Winnie threw herself into looking for extra work, Johnny got down to business. That night, after his mother had gone to bed, he raided the Peace Mug again and wrote out his Stop Your Baby Wetting the Bed advert, following the pattern of the one for the Secret of Instant Height, which was painfully imprinted on his memory. After school the following day, he hurried through his evening paper round and ran to the headquarters of the
Stambleton Echo
, a tall building by the canal. He could hear printing machinery thumping away below him as he climbed the steps up to an entrance marked OFFICE.

Johnny pushed open the heavy double doors, panting for breath, just as the woman in charge of the advertising department was getting ready to leave for the day. He’d already worked out what to say. Auntie Ada was going to help him out again. He had taken great care to make his handwriting look as neat and grown up as possible.

‘Excuse me,’ he puffed, standing on tiptoe to see over the high counter that separated the staff from the visiting public. ‘Excuse me, madam. I’ve been sent with a message. My aunt wants to put an advertisement in your paper.’

‘Which paper?’ said the woman impatiently.

Johnny was mystified. ‘The
Echo,
’ he said.

‘Which
Echo
? The Hampton, the Balgrave, the Stambleton …’

‘Stambleton,’ said Johnny. ‘I didn’t know you did the others too.’

‘Those, and the
Dorford Chronicle
, the
Mardly Trumpet
, the
Nethercross Express
—’ It sounded as if she was ready to go on for a long time.

Johnny interrupted, ‘They’re all written here?’

‘They’re all printed here. And your aunt can advertise in any or all of them.’

Johnny was ecstatic. He had no idea that his adverts might be seen by so many people. ‘Oh, all of them. I’m sure she’d want that.’

He handed his advertisement to the woman. She put on her glasses and started counting the words. Johnny had already done that several times. He knew that
Stop Your Baby Wetting the Bed. Send a postal order for one shilling and a stamped addressed envelope to
Box X
added up to twenty-one words. It would cost him one shilling and sixpence. He had the money in his pocket. He was slightly worried that it might cost more if the box number was in double figures, like the horrible ‘Box 23’.

‘That will be sixteen shillings and ninepence,’ the lady said, as if it weren’t a small fortune.

‘Oh, I thought it would be one and six,’ said Johnny sheepishly. ‘Twenty-one words. It says so in the paper.’

‘That’s for one advert, for one week, in one paper – and without a box number,’ said the lady.

‘Oh, but Auntie says she must have a box,’ Johnny gulped, on the verge of tears. ‘She doesn’t want strangers to know where she lives. She wants you to collect the replies.’

‘I quite understand,’ said the lady, lifting her glasses to peer down at Johnny. ‘A woman can’t be too careful these days. But a box is sixpence a week.’

‘But I’ve only got one and six,’ said Johnny, putting his coins on the counter. ‘And I have to get the advert in. She told me to run here. I don’t know what to do.’ He could feel his eyes starting to sting.

For once, being small and pale worked wonders for Johnny. The woman smiled sympathetically, put
her glasses back on and examined the advert again.

‘Well, you could have twelve words in one newspaper for a shilling,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if we can cut this down.’

She showed Johnny how ‘stamped addressed envelope’ could be abbreviated to ‘SAE’. ‘One shilling postal order’ could be written as ‘1/– PO’. She assured him that everyone would know what that meant. Like the box number, and ‘SAE’, it would count as just one word.

They ended up with:
Stop Your Baby Wetting the Bed. Send 1/– PO & SAE to Box 5
.

‘I shouldn’t really be showing you that,’ said the lady, who was getting ever more friendly. ‘Strictly speaking, I ought to encourage you to write more, so that we can charge extra. The other week someone came in with a little advert like this, and I persuaded him to spell out everything in full and put in the whole address of the paper. It pumped the price right up. I think I even got him to pay for a border round it. But he wasn’t a nice man. He was really rude. I don’t see why I should have to put up with discourtesy.’

Johnny thought back to the Instant Height advert. He hoped the lady was talking about the person who
had tricked him into parting with money for that. ‘Well, my auntie will certainly be very grateful that you have been so helpful to me,’ he said in his best voice. ‘Now I really mustn’t hold you up any longer. Goodbye, madam.’

‘Goodbye,’ said the lady, smiling at his politeness. ‘Tell your aunt she can collect the replies on any weekday during office hours.’

‘She’ll probably send me,’ said Johnny.

He was on his way through the door and the lady was putting on her coat when she added, ‘Oh, how silly of me. I forgot to take your aunt’s name and address.’

Johnny hoped his panic didn’t show as he made up a fictitious address on the spot. Auntie Ada was becoming ever more real. And she had a surname now. It seemed to come to him from nowhere, but afterwards he thought it fitted her rather well. From now on she was Mrs Ada Fortune. She’d have to be married. ‘Miss Fortune’ just didn’t sound right.

A
fter a week, Johnny returned to the newspaper office. He was late again. There was no way he could deliver all the papers and get there much before five o’clock. As before, the lady was in a hurry to leave.

‘I have quite a journey,’ she said. ‘I live in Mardly. The bus goes at twenty past.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Johnny, concealing his delight that she was not a Stambleton resident. He’d been worrying for days that she would realize he’d given a false address. He turned on the charm again. ‘Do forgive me for coming at this hour. My aunt has sent me to collect the replies to her advertisement. It’s Box Five.’

The woman turned to a rack of pigeonholes and took out a large envelope. She peeped inside, then sealed the flap. ‘Take care of it,’ she said. ‘There are a few letters in there. They might have money in them. Mind how you go.’

Johnny couldn’t wait to get away and open the
package. ‘I won’t hold you up any longer, madam,’ he said, nodding politely on his way out. He dashed down to the edge of the canal and hid there until the woman had locked the door and set off for her bus stop. Then he tore open the big envelope. There were four smaller packets inside. Each of them contained a postal order for one shilling and a stamped addressed envelope for Johnny’s reply. Johnny remembered how he had felt, assembling his letter to the people offering the Secret of Instant Height. For a moment he pictured the senders of these letters, desperately hoping for the solution to their babies’ bedwetting, not suspecting that they were being tricked. But then he gathered up the postal orders. Four shillings. It was enough to cover the cost of this first advert, and to fund another, with money to spare to go back in the Peace Mug. He put the image of the anxious parents to the back of his mind, tucked everything back in the big envelope, and stuffed it down his jumper.

Up in his bedroom that night he wrote
Make him sleep in a chair
on four pieces of paper, and put one in each of the stamped addressed envelopes. Next morning, he popped them in the post box outside Hutch’s shop. All day he checked and rechecked that the postal
orders were still in his pocket. After school, when the post office was open, he asked Hutch to cash them on behalf of Auntie Ada. The sound of the four shilling bits jangling together as he ran cheered his journey home through the rain.

Over the next couple of weeks, Johnny had a run of successes with:

Not only were there no complaints, but one woman even sent in for the solution to her spider problem when she had already been tricked over the
mice.
Get into Films
did well. There seemed to be a lot of would-be starlets around. For a shilling Johnny told them to
Go to the cinema
.

It was all very time-consuming. But Johnny had more time on his own now. His mother had found an extra job behind the bar at a run-down pub on the other side of town, and Johnny spent most evenings alone at home, making up adverts and practising Auntie Ada’s flowing handwriting.

There were disappointments. No one seemed to want to know how to scratch itches without leaving unsightly marks
(Wear gloves)
, but there was a huge demand for a way to stop your husband disturbing you with his snoring
(Sleep in a different room)
. That one brought the Peace Mug back to its original level. Hutch seemed to believe that all the postal orders belonged to Auntie Ada. Johnny had told him that she did needlework in her sickbed, and sold it by post.

Some of the people who answered Johnny’s adverts didn’t send postal orders, but paid with unused postage stamps. At first Johnny was annoyed by that because, despite his growing business, he hardly ever sent any letters of his own. Then he had the brainwave of using the stamps for a different kind of scam. He put in an advert saying:

Eight people fell for it. They each received their rent for a year. Unfortunately for them, the year was 1066, and all they got was 3d. in stamps, which Johnny reckoned would have been enough for a fairly handsome property in those far-off days. There was one angry letter of complaint, sent to the box number. At first Johnny was worried. What if the disappointed customer told the newspaper what was going on, and they tried to track down Ada Fortune? Then (since he had plenty of stamps) he hit on the idea of writing back, using some of the language he’d seen in the law reports in the papers. He added in one of the best words Dr Langford had taught him:
haemoptysis
. He thought it sounded important, and he guessed that anyone stupid enough to think that a stranger would pay their rent for a year wouldn’t know that it meant ‘spitting blood’. Johnny used some of his earnings to buy thick paper and envelopes, and in his ever-improving handwriting he concocted a polite but firm letter, from a false address in London, in which he said that his legal advisers, and those of the newspaper, were in agreement (having consulted authorities
on the law of haemoptysis) that there had been no deception, since no year had been specifically mentioned in the advertisement. He generously offered not to charge for the administrative costs that had been incurred in responding to the unjustified complaint. Johnny hoped that the angry man wouldn’t try to contact him again. He didn’t.

But, lucrative though it was, Johnny knew he had been lucky to get away with the rent scam. He understood now that people were much more likely to complain if they had paid a lot of money; and fifteen shillings was too much to ask for anything. It was safer to lure twenty people into parting with a shilling than to trick one into paying a pound. So he got rid of the remaining stamps with a cheap – but successful – offer: