Jeffrey Archer: As the Crow Flies

"Never let 'em touch the fruit until they've 'anded over their money," he used to say. "'Ard to bruise a tato, but even 'arder to sell a bunch of grapes that's been picked up and dropped a few times."

By the age of eleven I was collecting the money from the customers and handing them the change they were due. That's when I first learned about palming. Sometimes, after I'd given them back their money, the customers would open the palm of their hand and I would discover that one of the coins I had passed over had suddenly disappeared so I ended up having to give them even more bees and honey . I lost Granpa quite a bit of our weekly profit that way, until he taught me to say, "Tuppence change, Mrs. Smith," then hold up the coins for all to see before handing them over.

By twelve, I had learned how to bargain with the suppliers at Covent Garden while displaying a poker face, later to sell the same produce to the customers back in Whitechapel with a grin that stretched from ear to ear. I also discovered that Granpa used to switch suppliers regularly, "just to be sure no one takes me for granted."

By thirteen, I had become his eyes and ears as I already knew the name of every worthwhile trader of fruit and vegetables in Covent Garden. I quickly sussed out which sellers just piled good fruit on top of bad, which dealers would attempt to hide a bruised apple and which suppliers would always try to short-measure you. Most important of all, back on the pitch I learned which customers didn't pay their debts and so could never be allowed to have their names chalked up on the slate.

I remember that my chest swelled with pride the day Mrs. Smelley, who owned a boardinghouse in the Commercial Road, told me that I was a chip off the old block and that in her opinion one day I might even be as good as my granpa. I celebrated that night by ordering my first pint of beer and lighting up my first Woodbine. I didn't finish either of them.

I'll never forget that Saturday morning when Granpa first let me run the barrow on my own. For five hours he didn't once open his mouth to offer advice or even give an opinion. And when he checked the takings at the end of the day, although we were two shillings and fivepence light from a usual Saturday, he still handed over the sixpenny piece he always gave me at the end of the week.

I knew Granpa wanted me to stay on at school and improve my readin' and writin', but on the last Friday of term in December 1913, I walked out of the gates of Jubilee Street Elementary with my father's blessing. He had always told me that education was a waste of time and he couldn't see the point of it. I agreed with him, even if Posh Porky had won a scholarship to someplace called St. Paul's, which in any case was miles away in Hammersmith. And who wants to go to school in Hammersmith when you can live in the East End?

Mrs. Salmon obviously wanted her to because she told everyone who was held up in the bread queue of her daughter's "interlectual prowess," whatever that meant.

"Stuck-up snob," Granpa used to whisper in my ear. "She's the sort of person who 'as a bowl of fruit in the 'ouse when no one's ill."

I felt much the same way about Posh Porky as Granpa did about Mrs. Salmon. Mr. Salmon was all right, though. You see, he'd once been a costermonger himself, but that was before he married Miss Roach, the baker's daughter.

Every Saturday morning, while I was setting up the barrow, Mr. Salmon used to disappear off to the Whitechapel synagogue, leaving his wife to run the shop. While he was away, she never stopped reminding us at the top of her voice that she wasn't a five by two .

Posh Porky seemed to be torn between going along with her old man to the synagogue and staying put at the shop, where she'd sit by the window and start scoffing cream buns the moment he was out of sight.

"Always a problem, a mixed marriage," Granpa would tell me. It was years before I worked out that he wasn't talking about the cream buns.

The day I left school I told Granpa he could lie in while I went off to Covent Garden to fill up the barrow, but he wouldn't hear of it. When we got to the market, for the first time he allowed me to bargain with the dealers. I quickly found one who agreed to supply me with a dozen apples for threepence as long as I could guarantee the same order every day for the next month. As Granpa Charlie and I always had an apple for breakfast, the arrangement sorted out our own needs and also gave me the chance to sample what we were selling to the customers.

From that moment on, every day was a Saturday and between us we could sometimes manage to put the profits up by as much as fourteen shillings a week.

After that, I was put on a weekly wage of five shillings—a veritable fortune. Four of them I kept locked in a tin box under Granpa's bed until I had saved up my first guinea: a man what's got a guinea got security, Mr. Salmon once told me as he stood outside his shop, thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, displaying a shiny gold watch and chain.

In the evenings, after Granpa had come home for supper and the old man had gone off to the pub I soon became bored just sitting around listening to what my sisters had been up to all day; so I joined the Whitechapel Boys' Club. Table tennis Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, boxing Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I never did get the hang of table tennis, but I became quite a useful bantamweight and once even represented the club against Bethnal Green.

Unlike my old man I didn't go much on pubs, the dogs or cribbage but I still went on supporting West Ham most Saturday afternoons. I even made the occasional trip into the West End of an evening to see the latest music hall star.

When Granpa asked me what I wanted for my fifteenth birthday I replied without a moment's hesitation, "My own barrow," and added that I'd nearly saved enough to get one. He just laughed and told me that his old one was good enough for whenever the time came for me to take over. In any case, he warned me, it's what a rich man calls an asset and, he added for good measure, never invest in something new, especially when there's a war on.

Although Mr. Salmon had already told me that we had declared war against the Germans almost a year before—none of us having heard of Archduke Franz Ferdinand—we only found out how serious it was when a lot of young lads who had worked in the market began to disappear off to "the front" to be replaced by their younger brothers—and sometimes even sisters. On a Saturday morning there were often more lads down the East End dressed in khaki than in civvies.

My only other memory of that period was of Schultz's, the sausage maker—a Saturday night treat for us, especially when he gave us a toothless grin and slipped an extra sausage in free. Lately he had always seemed to start the day with a broken windowpane, and then suddenly one morning the front of his shop was boarded up and we never saw Mr. Schultz again. "Internment," my granpa whispered mysteriously.

My old man occasionally joined us on a Saturday morning, but only to get some cash off Granpa so that he could go to the Black Bull and spend it all with his mate Bert Shorrocks.

Week after week Granpa would fork out a bob, sometimes even a florin, which we both knew he couldn't afford. And what really annoyed me was that he never drank and certainly didn't go a bundle on gambling. That didn't stop my old man pocketing the money, touching his cap and then heading off towards the Black Bull.

This routine went on week after week and might never have changed, until one Saturday morning a toffee-nosed lady who I had noticed standing on the corner for the past week, wearing a long black dress and carrying a parasol, strode over to our barrow, stopped and placed a white feather in Dad's lapel.

I've never seen him go so mad, far worse than the usual Saturday night when he had lost all his money gambling and came home so drunk that we all had to hide under the bed. He raised his clenched fist to the lady but she didn't flinch and even called him "coward" to his face. He screamed back at her some choice words that he usually saved for the rent collector. He then grabbed all her feathers and threw them in the gutter before storming off in the direction of the Black Bull. What's more, he didn't come home at midday, when Sal served us up a dinner of fish and chips. I never complained as I went off to watch West Ham that afternoon, having scoffed his portion of chips. He still wasn't back when I returned that night, and when I woke the next morning his side of the bed hadn't been slept in. When Granpa brought us all home from midday mass there was still no sign of Dad, so I had a second night with the double bed all to myself.