Yo Ho Ho

I was, am, a very trusting individual – some would call it gullibility, but I prefer trusting. I tend to assume that other people, whether they be friends, family or even strangers on the train, are basically decent. I’m happy to say that most of the time my innate faith in human nature pays off. I have a long-term habit of lending complete strangers books if I happen to finish reading on a train. Normally with a verbal shrug of “just send it back when you’re finished with it”. And, in the vast majority of cases, they come bouncing back in good health, a bit like that bit in the nursery rhyme with the sheep. Only without the sheep. Or the little tails being dragged behind them. That would be silly - books don’t have tails.

But things don’t always work out like that…

My best friend at school was Lee. I forget exactly what circumstances forged our friendship but I suspect that it was mainly an accident of geography. We moved up to secondary school together and we, along with the half dozen or so other kids from Abbots Langley were suddenly just mates. You don’t question this sort of thing when you’re young, stupid as it looks from all these years away.

My entire world – circa 1980

But Lee and I had shared interests too. We were easily seduced by the stark beauty of the CP/M terminals in the fledgling computer lab and would spend lunchtimes poring over the hobbyist computer mags lusting after the, completely unaffordable, machines they had in the back pages. Of course, we all know what happened next. Within two years, the home computer explosion was in full effect and every eleven year old in the country was waking up on Christmas morning to a box full of Commodore, Sinclair or, if they were very unlucky, Acorn tech.

My weapon of choice was the Sinclair Spectrum but Lee went through a succession of machines which always seemed to spring up out of nowhere. Looking back on things now, I’d wager that at least some of the money to buy said machines was obtained illicitly. Lee always had a slightly dishonest streak, which I knew about and even encouraged, but he was always honest with me – after all, we were mates, we were in this together.

Get me Manic Miner and I’ll let you keep your miserable life…

Anyway, I digress, in a scene which I’m sure was being echoed around the country, it wasn’t long before a network of playground “contacts” worthy of the Corleone family had sprung up. And, due in no small part to having access to a hi-fi featuring separate tape decks, I found myself at the centre of it. High quality copies were easy to produce - even if somewhat painful on the earlobes if you forgot to mute the sound first. Bass down, treble up, volume down was the order of the day.

Things continued in this vein for a while. Birthday money, paper-round wages, lunch money and other cash obtained from occasionally shady sources would be exchanged for the latest and greatest games where they would wend their way back to the hi-fi for further distribution. When copy protection sheets were introduced a couple of years later with Jet Set Willy, they would be cracked by the simple expedient of getting some first years to copy them out by hand in exchange for a copy of Jetpac. Primitive as it may seem now, it worked and it worked well.

Hah! You’re no match for an eleven year
old and a pack of felt-tips.

Time passed. It had very little choice. And my games collection grew, probably more than I did. Games would be bought, copied, traded for something else and generally spread around the school like a particularly nasty strain of cholera. Looking back on it now I probably bought more games than I copied but, as much as I would like to pretend that this was for moral reasons, it was probably only because I had less patience than my peers.

One day, some time in the fifth year I think, Lee came up to me and asked what games I had. Strange question I thought, as he pretty much knew already, but he further explained that one of his younger sister’s friends had just been given a Spectrum and wanted a few games for it. I went home that night and made a list and before long I’d had a C90 thrust into my hands and a list of games wanted.

I made the tape up that evening, handed it over to Lee in the morning and basically thought no more of it.

Until a few days later when a small green thing, who on further examination turned out to be a first year, stopped me in the playground and asked if I was the one who’d copied those games for him. I, putting two and two together, agreed that it probably was. “Great! He said, “I’ve scrounged another fiver out of my parents and was wondering if you could do another one?”

Try spending it now fucker

I was fucking livid. It turns out that Lee had been charging 50p per game and pocketing the money himself. Not only that, but he hadn’t even had the common decency to cut me in on the deal. What little trust I still had in our friendship by this point evaporated - I cornered him later that day, told him what a fucking cunt he was, ripped up the fiver and basically never spoke to him again.

To this day I don’t know what I would have done had Lee told me what he was intending to do. I may very well have gone along with it, but over all I’m just glad I didn’t get that opportunity.

ahchay, April 2004

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