Johnny Swanson - Eleanor Updale [19]
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:
Free yourself from rats …
Free yourself from mice …
Free yourself from spiders …
Free yourself from noisy neighbours …
and
Free yourself from nosy neighbours …
All of which had the answer,
Move house.
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:
I will pay your rent for a year.
Send 15/– PO to cover expenses.
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