Realising that something strange was happening, I did as she said.
What’s going on?’ I asked from the phone booth.
‘You ain’t going to believe this, Barry. I’ve got our neighbour over here. I think you’d better come home. She has had people with guns with telescopic sights in her garden. They are following you.’
‘Following me? I’m in a phone box. There’s nobody here.’
‘I don’t mean you,’ she said. ‘I mean Keith.’
So I put the phone down on Kirstine and called Keith on his mobile. I relayed the message that when he pulled into my driveway a white van turned up in the drive of the house opposite and that there were men with guns.
Understandably, the neighbour was petrified because she could see what they were tackled up with. They even knocked on the door and she didn’t know whether to answer it or not. She decided not to, but they said they were police and that she should ring the station to verify their presence.
She did this and the officer who answered the phone said that he knew nothing about it. Well, she was in a panic now and didn’t know what to do. Thankfully, with two men with rifles on the other side of the door and her quivering, her phone rang and it was a return call from the police to say that, contrary to the information previously given to her, they did know about the situation. It was nothing to do with them, said the caller, it was Interpol.
Armed with this information, she opened the door to them and they presented their badges with the reassurance that they were just observing somebody.
In my conversation with Cheeseman I continued.
‘They’re following you.’
‘Not me, mate,’ he replied with typical bravado. ‘You must have been up to no good Barry.’
That’s the way he plays it. So bloody cool.
I met him the next night at the home of Rinaldo, an Italian gentleman who lived in Peterborough and owned a night club of the same name. Cheeseman wanted to buy his property which was on the market for £750,000. That was the last I saw of him for some time.
A couple of months after that I had a phone call, again from the police in London, to ask if I had a phone number at which they could get hold of him, but I could not help them. The officer said there had been a few complaints about Keith and they were searching for his whereabouts. Did I have a previous address for him? All I could tell them was that he had stayed at The Butterfly Hotel, and that I had a mobile phone number for him which was no longer applicable.
Then I had the manager of The Butterfly phone up.
‘You know Keith Cheeseman, don’t you?’
I said I did (only too well, by now).
‘He’s left an unpaid bill of £3,500 here.’
I could not help but laugh. Uncontrollably. Then a finance company (ho-ho) called with an all-too-familiar opening line. ‘Do you know Keith Cheeseman?’ Apparently he hadn’t paid the last five instalments on a car loan.
Keith Cheeseman is the greatest conman I have ever known; possibly the world has ever known. When you were out with him he always had loads of readies and he was the most generous man with tips you could wish to meet. One day at The Dorchester Hotel in London he gave the porter £20 just for taking the bags to his room. A waiter brought an ice bucket and he gave him £20. Then he gave a taxi driver a £20 tip when he took us less than a mile round the corner.
He was such good company that you would have thought butter would not melt in his mouth. Yet in a roll-call of 20th Century villains he would have to be near the top of the league.
If my first job in management was a roller-coaster ride, it could hardly have prepared me better for the long and winding road ahead.
Pilgrims Way, Bedford, was part of a council estate of prefab housing originally designed to last for 10 years, though they must have been made of strong stuff because my father actually lived there for 49 years and 11 months before they finally brought in the bulldozers. For me, it was wonderful to be resident there as the most popular kid in the block, entirely due to our being the only household to possess a proper football. My dad worked as a Post Office engineer for 40 years while mum was employed at a television rental company called Robinsons and also for, as I called it, the ‘knicker’ factory. This was, in fact, a lingerie outlet called Hallwins.
I went to Pearcey Road School from the age of five and it was here that my lifelong obsession with the wonderful game of football began. I got into the school team when I was eight and in those days I used to wait for dad after coming home from school, looking anxiously over our little fence in readiness for him to appear on his way home from work. Football quickly consumed my entire young life. I would say to dad, ‘Will you play football with me?’ almost before he could get to the front door.
There were plenty of fields down at the bottom of the street and it was greatly pleasing that dad encouraged me and all the kids round our estate to kick around with a football. We were the first to have a posh ball with laces and it was amusing at Christmas time and when the kids had birthdays. They would all come round to our house and ask, ‘Can Mr Fry pump our ball up?’ They didn’t know how to lace it up, either, and dad was an expert on that.
I was an only child and it must have been comical for the neighbours to see dad and I emerge from our front door. He was like the Pied Piper. As we walked down the street, bouncing the ball, the other kids would emerge, one by one, and by the time we had reached the fields there were enough bodies for a 12-a-side game. We would use milk bottles or jackets for goalposts and the games were never-ending. Dennis Brisley, who was a bit older, was one of the boys I was friendly with. He just used to love football and played until he was 45. He was a super-fit man. Ken Stocker, another one of the knockabout boys, was in my school team and it’s a coincidence that two of my best pals, he and Dennis, were right wingers. Tommy McGaul was another one of the crowd. He had two brothers and they all used to come down to the green to play.
Dad was trainer for the Post Office side as well as playing for them and whenever the GPO had a game I would take the day off school and go and support him. He was obliged to wear glasses because a bomb in the war had sent him flying, but it was frightening and almost farcical to see him playing in those spectacles. Born in Dover, he had been a navy man. Mum was from Jarrow and there was as much a contrast in their personalities as there was in their geographical roots. Dad was always the serious one, a stalwart of the school of rigorous discipline, whereas mum liked a joke a minute. Both had big families.
There had been no football on television in the days of my early youth and, anyway, we did not possess a television set. But in 1954 Wolves were to be shown on television playing Spartak Moscow in a friendly and I went to the house of a neighbour, Terry Mayhew, whose mother was Irish, to watch it. I was spellbound, mesmerised. Tilly Mayhew later told my mother: ‘I asked Barry if he wanted a drink and he was just oblivious to the question. He just kept staring at the screen.’ I became a mad Wolves fan, so much so that mum knitted me a scarf with all the players’ names on. I’ve still got it all these years later! I was besotted just through watching them on television. Billy Wright was my idol. Not only was he captain, but he was a gentleman and conducted himself correctly. Everything about him was pure magic. I kept a scrapbook on Wolves and a separate one dedicated entirely to Billy Wright. Among the team there was Swinbourne, Clamp, Deeley, Flowers, Delaney, Hancocks, Mullen, Murray and Broadbent. Peter Broadbent was another one of my favourite players. He had such grace about him. Their names were all on my scarf, but when it came to the captain he was given his full name. The stitching says ‘Billy Wright’. I don’t know why I loved him so much because he played in that unexciting position of