Chapter 8

The Beth

During the 1970s, Sutton’s Beth Avenue estate was built on former farmland as an extension of an existing street. Its innovative housing echoed that of the Radcliffe estate in Liverpool, which was hailed to have been based on a Cornish village, although you needed a fertile imagination to be able to visualise that fully.

In the Beth’s case, the mono-sloping roofs and sparse use of windows gave rise, in the local press, to being dubbed Downtown Morocco. The St Helens Star once declared, ‘There is no truth in the rumour each occupant will be presented with a commemorative fez when they accept their front door key.’

The most obvious difference between the Radcliffe and the Beth, at the time, was someone had used some thought and provided the Beth with more road access and general space than its distant cousin, but still, both estates had earned the sobriquet ‘Legoland’.

Lennie Turner lived on Gerards Lane, on the periphery of the new estate, in a detached house shielded by trees; a railway embankment ran alongside.

Whilst he would often be seen playing football with the younger kids on the Beth, he never sought companionship; it found him. Most of all, he liked his own company. To an outsider, he was a normal lad but a bit of a loner.

His dad, who’d worked at the Pilkington glass factory, used to take him to the Capitol cinema on Duke Street and he loved its majestic interior. They would walk past another picture house on the way but never go in. It looked a grand affair to him, the old Savoy; the added attraction being the wall-mounted chewing gum and chocolate vending machines outside with their selections of Juicy Fruit, Bar Six or Dairy Crunch.  

Occasionally, he was allowed to get something from them, but the chewing gum was forbidden, for as Dad said, “Everyone knows, Lennie, if you swallow chewing gum, it wraps around your innards and slowly strangles you.” The young, innocent lad tried to reason by retorting, “But, Dad, I promise I won’t swallow it.” The kindly reply, “I can’t let you, Lennie, it’s much too dangerous. What would your mother say?”

In 1978, his father died and the Capitol closed, so he had to change his allegiance to the ‘bearer of outside delights’ which, when converted into a multiplex, had been rebranded as the ABC.

It being nearer to home made him wonder why he and Dad had never sampled its previous enchantment, so he’d asked Mum who’d replied, with a sigh, “He refused to go inside because he and the manager had a bit of a disagreement, many years ago. Your father was a proud and stubborn man.”

Leonard had thought about it and then replied, “But he got me chocolate from the machines outside.”

She’d smiled: “Ahh, he’d only sworn never to go inside again but they weren’t inside, were they, Lennie love.” She’d tousled his hair: “Besides, he loved you very much.” 

Apart from his love of the silver screen, Leonard’s hobbies were reading anything whatsoever he could find about the world of spies and writing things down in his notebook; it went everywhere with him. He used to train spot at St Helens main station, but the passing traffic was somewhat limited in terms of excitement, so his mother, then widowed for several years, suggested he try Lime Street Station, in Liverpool. He could go with his trainspotting friends, she’d said, but he went on his own anyway because he couldn’t tell her - his friends were his own invention, made up to stop her worrying.

Lime Street had been interesting but much too busy and crowded for his liking and when he’d wandered around the nearby huge St Johns shopping centre, he’d been befriended by two youths who, shortly after, bundled him into the gent’s toilets, threatened him with a Stanley knife and stole his new acid washed denim jacket. He never went back.

He chose to move on from trains to cars - registration numbers, makes, types and colours. He knew those that belonged on the Beth and those that didn’t and, having recognised its creeping decline, he knew where the suspicious people lived, the ones with visitors who knocked at all hours but never went in. Being a familiar face on the estate, no one took much notice of him.

The brown Talbot Solara wasn’t from the estate. It’d passed him a couple of times and then parked up. He thought the two occupants might be looking for someone and, being a generally helpful sort, he knocked on the passenger window.

He came away from the encounter with the knowledge they weren’t the undercover police officers he’d suspected them to be. No, they were much more important than that. They were agents of MI5. They’d told him in confidence and sworn him to secrecy.

“We’re looking for a Russian spy,” they said.

No, the man they sought didn’t look or sound foreign - what would be the point of sending someone who did? Lennie thought about it and concluded they were right, that would be a big mistake.

Then they said they’d noticed him writing things down, so Lennie explained. They looked impressed and commented it would be very useful if he reported to them anything strange he saw. When he’d shown them several pages in his notebook, they wrote a lot of things on a clipboard then gave him the telephone number of a special answering machine, told him to keep the messages short and asked him what code name he wanted to use. He’d asked if there was a list. They said no, make one up. He gave it a few seconds thought then declared, “Prosper”, the name of a wartime agent in France he was currently reading about. What were their names, he’d asked - Dave and Ken, they answered but he should just leave his messages for ‘Zebra Three’.

“See you around,” they said and left him floating on air. He’d fantasised about this moment for years. It was his dream come true. He’d entered the world of espionage. He was officially a spy.